Poetry Saves the Day * Meet Alison Luterman

25 years ago I was introduced to a world of poets who would change everything I thought I knew about poetry – which wasn’t much. I didn’t have a traditional education – grew up in hippy alternative schools in Los Angeles – didn’t read the classics, not even in college.  The poetry I did see was way over my head though; oblique, impossible to understand. It made me feel stupid. The less I understood a poem, the more important it seemed to be. When I moved to Berkeley in 1982 I took a wonderful creative writing class from Cecile Moochneck, and I got turned on to poets like Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Ellen Bass + Mary Oliver. That was just the beginning. Turns out there’s a whole world out there of amazing writers – narrative poets – story telling poets whose poems speak so clearly to the predicament of our lives; the way we mean to love and what we end up doing instead. Poems have become, for me, a way to embrace my life in all its complexity. They’re like tea leaves, or mantras, and they’re full of instruction. I love what my friend, the writer Deena Metzger said when she spoke of poetry as “beauty + ugliness side by side.” If you’ve been in my Wild Writing classes you know that I use poetry to jump start our writing because poets have an opportunity to say the most important things in just a few words. As writers, we can learn so much from this economy of language and what it means to choose a word and run with it. A poet whose work I’ve used a lot in class, and really respect is...

Why You Should Pick Me

Mostly we use poetry to inspire and jump start our Wild Writing classes over here at 27 Powers, but the other day I came across a letter my then 10-year-old Zoe wrote to her friends at school telling them why they should vote for her for student council. It captured everything I love about being a human being; these sometimes feeble, sometimes heroic attempts at love + living. I tell my students that they will get so good at Wild Writing that they can use the back of a cereal box to write from, and write something beautiful. So why not the plea of a 10-year-old girl who wants to run for office? “My name is Zoe Wagner and this is why you should pick me for student council… 1. I am not afraid to talk in front of the whole school. 2. I want to help everybody 3. You can trust me 4. I’ll work hard 5. I’ll make everything right” This is my riff on it in class this week: Why You Should Pick Me 1. I make an awesome cup of coffee 2. I don’t hog the blankets 3. I keep coconut, black sesame snacks in the freezer 4. My mother says I’m very beautiful when I cry 5. I’m learning to make a solid fire 6. I still listen to Joni and Neil 7. Cowboy boots are never the wrong choice 8. Lately I am drawn to difficult conversations 9. I carry my Grandmother’s kerchief 10. My Father left me a pair of his old reading glasses 11. My Mother and I threw two shivas...

Permission Granted

This is a Wild Writing piece inspired by the poem, Permission Granted, by David Allen Sullivan.           Yes, you have permission to refuse the rest of the red velvet cake your Mother wants you to pack up and take with you on your 300-mile drive back home. Yes, you can also refuse to take the brownies that she’s made, even though she tells you with some urgency that you’ll get Alzheimers if you don’t eat sugar. No, she’s not really worried that you’ll get Alzheimers, but yes, she’s super bummed that you’re sticking her with the cake.   It’s 6:30 in the morning and you’re standing in her kitchen in Los Angeles  – the same kitchen you had your whole childhood – the one with the black and yellow tile that sits below a shady grove of eucalyptus trees. This morning she’s wearing the short, black and white polka dotted nightie that you bought her for Christmas. “Sexy,” she’d said, turning toward her 82-year-old boyfriend Ralph when she unwrapped it a few days ago.   When you drive away from her house 30 minutes later, your blond teenage daughters are like sleepy puppies on pillows in the back seat. Mom will be standing at the front door in her short, polka dotted nightie, Ralph towering over her wearing your Dad’s pajamas, both of them waving your car goodbye.   No, you did not take the cake. No, you did not take the brownies. Yes, you got over the fact that your Mother’s boyfriend wears your Father’s pajamas. Yes, they were practically new when your Father...

The Power of Asking

A couple of years ago, right after my Dad died, I fell into this funny mid-life thing where I felt really flat about teaching – felt in fact that I had taught everything I knew how to teach – that I was doing it with my eyes closed and it wasn’t serving me or anyone else. It started when I watched my Dad die a few months earlier. There we were, the whole family, my sisters and brother, my Mom – all of us sitting around Dad’s bed as he took his last breath. And as he did, this huge WHOOOOSH came straight from him to me and it screamed silently LIVE! As in STOP FUCKING AROUND WITH EXCUSES AND REASONS WHY YOU CAN’T DO THIS AND WHY YOU CAN’T DO THAT. It was a HUGE call to myself to wake up to what I was doing and to reflect on the things I’d wanted to do but told myself I couldn’t. So I made a list of some of the things I’d always wanted to pursue. I got back to guitar lessons. I moved into a coaching program, I scooted around the world of commercial ethnography – and that was all great – just the exercise of trying new things was energizing. But what I really wanted to do, if I could do anything, was to travel around the country and study with all of my favorite writing mentors – nobody I actually knew – but people whose books I’d read and taught from for years. Thing was, I didn’t have the time or the money do that....

Advice to Myself

Advice to Myself  – Louise Erdrich Leave the dishes. Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor. Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup. Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins. Don’t even sew on a button. Let the wind have its way, then the earth that invades as dust and then the dead foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch. Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome. Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry who uses whose toothbrush or if anything matches, at all. Except one word to another. Or a thought. Pursue the authentic-decide first what is authentic, then go after it with all your heart. Your heart, that place you don’t even think of cleaning out. That closet stuffed with savage mementos. Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever, or weep over anything at all that breaks. Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life and talk to the dead who drift in though the screened windows, who collect patiently on the tops of food jars and books. Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you...