Library Lecture Series: MarjoriMe Kowalski Cole See more about the lecture series and upcoming speakers here. "A Long and Lustrous Winter: Writing Poetry in Northern Alaska" About the speaker: Marjorie Kowalski Cole’s first novel, Correcting the Landscape, received the 2004 Bellwether Award and was published by HarperCollins in 2006. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals including The Chattahoochee Review, Grain, Antigonish Review, Passages North, Alaska Quarterly Review, Seattle Review, Prism International and many others. Her poetry has received awards from Explorations, Glimmer Train, the 2007 Strokestown, Ireland, Poetry Festival, and The Ester Republic. Essays on travel and other topics have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Commonweal, National Catholic Reporter, Poets and Writers, and the 2008 anthology, Crosscurrents North: Alaskans on the Environment. Born in Boston in 1953, she has lived in northern Alaska since 1966, has worked at a lumber yard, as a printer, an instructor at UAF, and a reference librarian. She has taught writers’ workshops and several poetry classes for Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. Cole has been active in the Fairbanks Arts Association and the Northern Alaska Environmental Center, and was president for five years of the Catholic group, Call to Action Alaska. She is married to Pat Lambert and has two sons, Henry Cole and Desmond Cole.
(prepared comments for the John Trigg Ester Library lecture series) A Long and Lustrous Winter: Writing Poetry in Northern Alaska I am so glad to be here and to be talking with you about something so endlessly interesting as poetry, in the context of my contradictory feelings about my home—where the winters are yes, difficult: long and dark and cold. The title of this talk comes from the movie, “Groundhog Day.” Weatherman Phil Connors played by Bill Murray goes to Punxatawney, PA to interview the groundhog Punxatawney Phil and gets caught in an endless re-run of that one day; every morning it’s February 2, and only he is aware of the dreadful repetition. He goes through a range of all too human responses to his confinement: denial, self-indulgence, arrogance (he even says, I am a God), alienation not only from his fellow creatures but from nature itself—a critical point—and the determination to use the endless stream of February 2’s to figure out how to get even with every jerk in town and how to get the pretty girl into bed. Then, somehow, by the last day, he takes the attention off the inherent silliness of the groundhog tradition and reverses course completely. He’s given dozens of perfunctory, cynical 2-minute wrap-ups for the TV camera, but his last one surprises everyone:
Lustrous was the word I was looking for this winter, as the leaves turned. The word signals not only the extraordinary range of natural lighting effects we Alaskans live with during winter, but also—at risk of sounding sentimental—the pleasures of hearth and home when you live in a small-sized town where people are forced to spend a little more time together, forced maybe to help each other out of a jam or two, over the months of our snowy season. Yes, we also suffer from cabin fever and sometimes use this time to have group frenzies over banned books, or taxes. But that is not what I’m talking about today. Last winter I had a major surgery in Seattle on December 11 and the suture got infected two weeks later, so I had an open wound in my trunk that needed twice daily dressing, by me, already a bundle of nerves with a cancer diagnosis. On December 28 we came home to Fairbanks. The high temperature for the next two weeks was forty below, with ice fog, and according to the probably busted thermometer at Fred Meyer it went down to minus 62. Back in Seattle the doctors and nurses had kept saying, oh, you want to get home, you’ll do so much better at home. But I spent my young childhood in Seattle in a house just half a block up from the shore of Lake Washington, and 3 minutes walk to University Hospital. So From the hospital window last December I’d look at Portage Bay of Lake Union, and it looked like home to me. I didn’t mind being there for surgery if I had to be anywhere. But when I got back to Fairbanks on December 28, still in shock, I stared at the gray day out of my home-office window and thought “what am I doing here?” Well, if you want to live in Fairbanks, for some reason, winter comes with the territory. That extended stretch of bitter cold is a critical part of the natural cycle. Perhaps like many of you, I like living here because of the size of the phone book. And all that it implies, of course. No traffic jams. The boreal forest stretching out my front door all the way to the foothills of the Brooks Range. I like doing things in the snow, the change of seasons, the golden Septembers, the long sunrises and sunsets, the subtle changes in the color of daylight, the smell of dirt in April, the extravagance of daylight in June and July, the out and out friendly feeling you get when so many people know each other. But oh, the difficulty of staying on an even keel when winter comes down like a wolf on the fold; the sinking feeling if you forget to take it one day at a time and think instead, “six months of this? Six more months?” But let me tell you something really important, and what turns out to be the real subject of my talk. Because of our long and lustrous winters, this is a fine place in which to be a poet. In which to learn poetry. This is an exquisite laboratory for poets, one of the last in the country in which a writer can descend into the spell of wonder and contemplation and subordination to natural rhythms, which our human hearts so desperately need. Who are some of America’s great poets? Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson, Robert Frost, Mary Oliver, John Haines among others. But just read almost any fine poet, from any country, look at the source of images, of contemplative moments. These are people who sink deep into the imperatives of the natural world. Or maybe they take modern civilization and test it against the imperatives of the natural world, a universe which admittedly is our own—is part of our daily life—and yet in a city, particularly, seems to be harder and harder to access, hard to even notice much of the time. At the Bread Loaf writers’ conference last year, my workshop leader said: “nature and I have nothing to do with each other. I’d just as soon not deal with it.” He was sort of going for the easy laugh, when he said that; and I didn’t care, because here in Alaska there are lots of really good nature writers and I didn’t go to Bread Loaf to find more. I needed help with the plot of my novel, not with describing how it feels to live among birch trees. And yet. Imagine that: to speak of nature as separate and unnecessary. My complaint with Ken Burns’ recent special on the National Parks comes from the same place: the movie presents the parks as the best of nature, a treasure-box where Americans can go to rediscover nature and be restored to our natural superior selves. Nonsense. Nature is accessible outside your front door. Not just in Alaska, but in Iowa, in Manhattan, in national forests, wildlife refuges, city parks, greenbelts, front and back yards. The restorative thing about nature is having it available in your daily diet. Because you and I are part of nature. Or, you may have to seek it out through such strenuous effort as a long hike or bike ride, but that too needn’t be a once-each-year experience. I had to have another surgery in Seattle on March 2. On a day before, I took a walk along the shore of Lake Washington. Two mallard ducks were paddling near the dock where we strolled and they were dipping into little cul-de-sacs on the shore, as if they were exploring this tempting quiet water for a nesting site. They reminded me of the children’s book “Make Way for Ducklings”: they were two young home buyers, looking for the best place to raise a family. Suddenly they turned into wild creatures; they beat their wings against the water and rose up and shot out of there, crossing the main channel of the lake. They were not panicked by a boat, nor by us, but by the shape that passed over us just as they cleared the dock, a big shape like a stealth bomber right behind them. It was a bald eagle. The eagle flew to the top of a tree on the shore, settled down and surveyed his wilderness. This drama took place a few minutes’ walk from a temple of modern science and technology. It’s a parallel universe. Here in Alaska, that natural world is far more in our daily lives. It doesn’t feel like a parallel universe, it is the universe. We are fortunate that way. What does this provide the writers and poets among us? Poets start as readers, observers, and daydreamers. They look sharply at things, they focus so hard they seem lost, they wander, following some barely discernible connections that seem to have something to do with language and truthtelling and pursuit of beauty, and they rejoin the human community by writing poems. It often is a religious thing to do—it required enormous faith from our great poets, hours of contemplation, subordination to the requirements of poetry. Even the freewheelin’ Walt Whitman respected those disciplines. I do not mean to set one group of human beings above another, or make one group exclusive to another. Everything I’ve just said about poets in my opinion applies as well not only to sincere religious mystics, like, say Thomas Merton, or any number of priests and pastors, but to scientists. I see scientists in my mind’s eye getting that glazed intense look when they think about hopping sand grains or the freezing temperature of squirrel’s blood in midwinter, and losing all patience for ordinary conversation. I’ve seen carpenters behave this way. A lot of carpenters are real loners. Jesus wasn’t the only one. They get all quiet, they don’t share their calculations with anyone. They just wander around and you think, when is something going to happen? Well, it’s already happening. An important internal world is forming around the project at hand. Having introduced the subject of discipline and hard work, Let me leave it for a moment, because we are also talking about following your bliss. A cliché I use with love and delight. Change it, if you like, to following your unique talent, your inclination, your passion. I’d like share one poem from my new collection, a poem about September which is called, “Siesta,” and is about giving in to the day, in this case accepting the personal freedom to include a nap in the natural rhythm of daily life. In September in Alaska there’s a big and sincere effort to get ready for winter but sometimes when listening to all the chain saws in the neighborhood, even though I know everyone’s out there working hard, building that woodpile, getting in the cranberries and butchering the moose and putting foam sealers around the doors, I also think to myself: oh come on, who are you guys kidding? Who are you trying to impress? Like Walt Whitman, I carry a need to loaf and invite my soul, to keep myself somehow, available for other things than chores and hard work: it’s hard to explain, and I know it might come across as a disdain for work, but it is not that at all. I have lived with this ambivalence all my life. It’s called woolgathering, it’s called moving at your own pace, and it’s also part of being a writer. One committee in your head says, Today we pick a gallon of cranberries and then put the garden to bed. Or, says a much softer voice, should we fiddle with a poem, instead? Living in Alaska is both highly conducive to writing poetry and highly scornful of the woolgathering that poetry, always an unpaid activity, requires. Especially when you no longer aspire to the punchy driving rhythms of Robert Service but you want to say something new, something that comes out of the silence of the land itself, and the sometimes delicate quality of the light. Push too hard and the exquisite something vanishes before you. This poem is called “Siesta” and first appeared in “The Seattle Review.” SIESTA September in Alaska; warm afternoons yet I’ve come inside to pull off my shirt, An upended bowl of sky sheds radiance At the top of my road in Ester we have been treated to another example of September’s golden surprises. An early snowfall left two inches of wet snow at the higher elevations, along the sides of the domes and ridges. From my road we look across to Ester Dome, and a friend and I stopped and gaped at the saddle of the Dome last week, where stripes of golden birch leaves and green stripes of pale aspen that hadn’t yet turned glowed on the snowy hillside. The palette seems to become limited as winter approaches, and yet it is on fire. With snow all around, giving back some of the light and the color, it was truly like staring at an artwork. This was a brilliant pattern, caught at just the right second in the afternoon. A long, lustrous winter in Northern Alaska brings many such surprises. As a writer I just run like the dickens away from any kind of statement like “Alaskans are a special breed.” Near as I can figure, we’re just like everyone else. I see no unique heroic qualities that other people in other communities do not also have. But if there is anything unique about us, maybe Michael Feldman said it well enough when he was up here several years ago: “you’re among people who like to be among people who don’t particularly like to be among people.” We like the size of our phone book. And, what that means is, of course, that we do have access to the natural world. Including the cycles of light and dark. My cousin was up here recently for the first time in twenty years, from her home in San Diego, and she was not trying to flatter us or anything, just speaking from her heart, when she said, “it seems to me that Alaskans are more in touch with nature than people in other states. You guys haven’t lost the knowledge that we can’t control nature.” Implication: we haven’t lost it YET. And I said to her, “Maybe you’re right.” A long time ago in Alaska, women were keepers of the lamp. A small dish of oil to keep a few activities going in the hut after the sun had set, or maybe out on the coast any time of day when the sun might not rise during winter. A small dish of oil, and a wick, provided heat and light. Any future anthology on Alaskans and their relationship to light should, I think, include some discussion of the Inuit lamp. I can’t and won’t speak for my Inuit neighbors; I am from a different culture and I have not studied that one enough. But I can tell you, that kind of accommodation to the natural cycle of things is part of our history. Part of all our history. Instead of conquering darkness, an oil lamp—messy, smelly, weak as some might call it—speaks to the darkness and helps to make our human activities possible, on a different scale—it’s light not for plowing the fields or doing brain surgery, but for talking and reading, storytelling and music. It helped make certain things possible, not others. Flying into Fairbanks at night I am chagrined at the lights spread over the Tanana Valley, like a would be Seattle beneath us. I’m even more dismayed to fly into Sea-Tac Airport on a clear night, over a blanket of lights from Vancouver, B.C., all the way down to Olympia. Now my husband might have occasion to wonder why, if I love darkness so much, don’t I turn off the lights when I leave a room. All I can do is repeat like the woman in T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, “that is not what I meant. Not what I meant, at all.” It feels healthy to me to have these contradictory feelings—to celebrate, while we still have it—the natural luster of a winter season in northern Alaska. We are not nocturnal animals. We need light. Prometheus gave us fire, and fire gives us heat and light. Then we discovered the cold light of fluorescent bulbs. Later still the economical but oddly nonflickering LEDs in our new sets of Christmas bulbs. We can vanquish darkness. We think. We can conquer darkness. We think. My cousin says no, she said, Alaskans seem to be the only ones who have not completely forgotten that we can’t conquer nature. And I said, well maybe, but that wisdom is the first thing to be jettisoned, when the temptations of modern civilized living present themselves. I gaze much of the day at a brilliant flat screen of light. And I wonder if we have reached an excess of light, and if it tends to rob us of discernment, and makes us fear a perceived lack of distinguishing marks in the winter sky. Not that I want my dentist to douse the lights before he drills my teeth, not that I don’t appreciate a clean well lighted place. Like I said, these are contradictory feelings, but I know that they come to me from a deep appreciation for nature—and that makes me happy. Makes me know that I am blessed. When the first snow is late, then it gets really dark. The ground absorbs any lingering light in the sky. But after it snows, there is often natural luster available to us on the darkest days. I get up at two or three a.m. sometimes just to stare at my back yard under a full moon. A writer in The New York Times a couple years back compared fluorescent to incandescent light. “Fluorescent light’s greatest setback in conquering the home might be its own great success with having conquered the workplace and other commercial spheres. People’s associations with it are not only not good, they’re actively bad. Anyone who has ever sat under flat fluorescent light in an office cubicle, a waiting room, a government bureau, a cheap restaurant or a dirty motel understands this. You equate fluorescent light with your boss, license renewal, indigestion and divorce. Not… an incandescent evening.” Boy do I know what he means. The same thing has even happened in churches. Bring on the lights, pack the community in here, no more darkened side chapels where sinners can consult their troubled souls. No more candles for a dime to beg a saint for a favor. You could call an oil lamp damned inefficient, smelly, inconvenient, weak, but you could call the light it offers, tender. Just as the light that appears and then disappears, on a short winter day, has about it a quality of tenderness. The darkness, too, can be tender. As if to say, don’t look at yourselves too hard. Let this be a day on which you find comfort in your soul, in your interior resources, and with your friends. Winter’s unreliable natural light invites us to be with another, share one source of heat, one lamp. It invites us to turn our eyes to the one source of natural light—maybe the moon, the snow, the stars—and see what we see, given that natural light. What do we see? That’s a poet’s challenge in the winter. Baron Wormser is a former poet laureate of Maine and the author of a memoir, “The Road Washes Out in Spring, A Poet’s Memoir of Living off the Grid.” I read a section of this book once in “Orion” magazine and it set up such a conflict of feelings inside me, it was like falling in love: I want that experience! Wait a minute, I could have it—I do have it. I live here, in Alaska. Let me read you the bit from the book that pulled my own inner contradictions about winter time right onto center stage. Then I will close with one poem of my own. Baron Wormser writes about one of the first winter nights he spent in his new cabin. “I remember the evening of the first day in which we moved into our house in the woods. It started to get dark, and I thought—it is getting dark. That seems simple-minded, but what I felt was vividly complex. Night’s coming was so profound, so transfixing, so soft yet indelible that I was startled and lulled in the same awed moment. I remember very clearly feeling how, second by tiny second, it was getting darker, how the dark was creeping in, how it was inexorable and delicate, how night “fell”—a great slow curtain—how darkness “grew”—something organic yet rooted in the eneffable…When the inside of the house seemed too dark to move around in, we lit the lamps. It was an intuitive moment because, over time, we got very used to darkness…I looked at the house from the outside as I was coming back from the woodshed or outhouse, there was a soft glow inside it. Many a time that glow stopped me in my tracks, it was so beautiful. All around was forested darkness, but the house alone shone gently.” Two years ago we skied to to Stiles Creek Cabin, off Chena Hot Springs Road on January 4. The rugged trip took us through an entire cycle of daylight. In the early afternoon the sun, a yellow ball, sat on top of a ridge; it did not rise above the ridge. I stared directly at it, pulled off my muffler, and felt not one iota of heat. It seemed as if it did not change the temperature of the day. We skied on and didn’t realize until we reached the cabin, where my skinny young son, waited, trying to warm up over one candle, that it had gotten dark. Things could have been getting a little dangerous, if something went wrong. The Coleman lantern inside the cabin was broken. We made an early evening of it, and went to bed. It was a difficult but beautiful two days. We were not at the weather’s mercy but we did not vanquish the darkness. I’ll close with a last poem, another story of a winter day. COMING UP ON SOLSTICE For one month a thin dry crust of snow I thought I knew softness We walked from this view into the woods that, too, was gone. Inside my backpack | ||||
| ||||
 | | | | |
| | |
