The One You Feed - Ellen Bass: Ellen Bass on the Power of Poetry in Your Life

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

Please Support The Show with a DonationEllen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her work has won award after award and rightly so - there's something so powerful, beautiful, true and often times darkly funny in her work. She says that writing poetry - as well as reading it - is an inquiry more than a description. Isn't that an interesting perspective to consider?  In this episode, you'll hear her read some of her work, share her insights and experiences in life, talk about the process of writing poetry and offer some ideas that perhaps you had not considered before - especially in the way she does. Regardless of whether or not you think of yourself as a lover of poetry, you'll be touched by this episode.She is the author of Like a Beggar, The Human Line, Mules of Love, and The Courage to HealSponsorswww.audible.com/oneyoufeed or text oneyoufeed 500-500 to get a free book  www.casper.com/oneyoufeed and get $50 toward select mattresses promo code: oneyoufeed  In This Interview, Ellen Bass and I Discuss...The Wolf ParableHer book, Like a BeggarThat poetry is an inquiry more than a descriptionDiscovering something about oneself when writing and reading poetryHer poem, RelaxTasting lifeThinking about how you are "right now"The role of finding similarities in disparate things when using metaphorThe oneness of the worldWorking hard in the chair to be a poetHow no one would expect a person to pick up a saxophone and immediately be able to play and the same is true for writing poetryHer poem, Asking Directions in ParisUsing God in her poetryHer poem, If You KnewHow because of mortality, one day, we as individuals are going to lose everythingThat poetry helps us to see deeply into the beauty of things that are right in front of usIntroducing poetry to others as you would a novelThe important role of humorPoets she mentioned:Marie HoweJericho BrownNatalie Diaz Please Support The Show with a Donation See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I just love humor and tragedy real close together. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure?

And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ellen Bass, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, Like a Beggar, was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry

Prize, the Publisher's Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award. Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails. She currently teaches in the low-residency MFA writing program at Pacific University. Good Wolf, in addition to just listening to this show. One is that you can support us on Patreon, and that will allow you to get additional bonus content, as well as a mini episode from me each month. You can do that by going to OneYouFeed.net slash support. And the other thing that you can do is join our Facebook group where we have discussions about the episodes and other ways that people feed their Good Wolf and deal with challenges in life. And that is at OneYouFeed.net slash Facebook.

And here's the interview with Ellen Bass. Hi, Ellen. Welcome to the show. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I'm thrilled to have you on. You are a poet of some renown. And I first think I heard one of your poems from Jack Kornfield, and I thought it was lovely. And I've since, you know, read a bunch of your stuff and continue to think it's lovely is maybe not the right word, but it's, it's very powerful. And so we're going to have you do a little reading of some of that poetry so listeners can hear in a moment. But let's start like we normally do with the parable.

There's a grandmother who's talking with her granddaughter and she says, and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second. She says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do? It's a wonderful parable. And certainly in my life, I'm going to be feeding that good wolf. But I was thinking about it in the days leading up to this interview, and I was thinking how in poetry, we really invite in both wolves. And there isn't an exclusion of one part of our experience. I was thinking about Rilke, who was writing a letter to his wife, this is back in 1907, in 1907 talking about the debt that writers owed to Baudelaire. And Rilke wrote, even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, truly exists and shares the truth

of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything. A single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. Wow. Well, we probably wouldn't go quite as far as Rilke. I'm not sure that a single refusal will cast us out. Let's hope not. Let's hope there's a little bit more wiggle room.

But I do think about that a lot, how in poetry we really want to invite in all aspects of human experience. Not, of course, so that we become immoral people. I was thinking about it last night in terms of the way that a lot of Buddhist meditation teachers teach us, that rather than trying to transcend our lesser impulse feelings or deny them or push them away,, we try and look at them with curiosity. And we don't just say, well, you know, that's great that I'm a greedy person. I'll just go along and be that way. But we also don't try and deny those feelings. And instead instead we have a kind of curiosity toward them. And that's what poetry does, I think, is be curious toward all aspects of the human experience and to try and really investigate them. Yep, I agree. And I think it's such a, I mean, the parable is one of those things that commonly

people mention, you know, we don't want to starve the bad wolf. And that's one of the things I kind of like about the parable is it doesn't mention doing anything to the bad wolf. You know, it just talks about like, let's give a little bit more attention to the good wolf. And I do think also that art is a little bit, you know, the creative process is a little bit different maybe than how we treat the people around us. Or, you know, so there's, I think the parable only goes so far, I would say. Yes, I think that, you know, certainly if I think about the process of writing, you know, the willingness to dedicate oneself and stay with it even when it's not going as well as you'd like,

and, you know, kind of feed your faith in continuing sitting down. I call it the tush and share method of poetry writing. You know, there we certainly, in terms of practice, have to feed that good wolf because the not-so-good wolf is often whispering things into our ear that are discouraging, saying, this is never going to be a good poem, so you might as well just give up right now, all those kinds of things. Yes, the bad wolf is not a very hard worker, usually. He shows up that way for an awful lot of people, I think. And it's interesting you were talking about that, because another thing I've heard you say is that for you, a poem is as much

about discovery of yourself and what you're talking about and your issues as it is you getting down on paper what you think. I mean, you talk about, you say a good poem is one that you discover a lot of things about yourself as you go through it, and a great poem is one that the reader does also. Absolutely. If you already know what you're going to say, for the most part, you could write an essay, and that might be a really good thing to do. We need those essays in which people talk about their convictions and their understandings. They educate us and they challenge us, they delight us. But in a poem, if you are too knowing, if you already know what you're going to say, then you don't have a chance to discover

anything. And pretty much every writer who's talked about writing has talked about this concept of surprise or discovery. And that's the real thrill of the writing, is finding out something that you didn't know when you began. And I think that's what makes poetry interesting to the reader. And if you read a lot of poetry, as I do, of developing writers who aren't that far along in the process, very often the poem begins with a thought and it ends in some way with the same thought. So even if it's expressed very beautifully,

it hasn't traveled anywhere. It hasn't taken the writer or the reader someplace that they didn't expect to go. And that's what we're always hoping for. Very interesting. So why don't we start by having you read a poem. I've asked you to read a poem called Relax. I'd be glad to. Relax. Bad things are going to happen. Your tomatoes will grow a fungus and your cat will get run over. Someone will leave

the bag with the ice cream melting in the car and throw your blue cashmere sweater in the dryer. Your husband will sleep with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling out of her blouse. Or your wife will remember she's a lesbian and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat, the one you never really liked, will contract a disease that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth every four hours.

Your parents will die. No matter how many vitamins you take, how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys, your hair, and your memory. If your daughter doesn't plug her heart into every live socket she passes, you'll come home to find your son has emptied the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb, and called the used appliance store for a pickup. The Buddha tells the story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down.

But there's also a tiger below, and two mice, one white, one black, scurry out and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point, she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice. She looks up, down at the mice. Then she eats the strawberry. So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen. You'll get fat.

Flip on the bathroom tiles in a foreign hotel and crack your hip. You'll be lonely. Oh, taste how sweet and tart the red juice is. How the tiny seeds crunch between your teeth. I just love that poem. I mean, there are so many things about it. I love the fact that I think it normalizes human experience. We talk on this show so often about how, particularly in the West, we have this expectation of things going well, of being happy,

of everything being good. And then when they don't, we think there's something wrong with us. And I love that that poem sort of normalizes, like, it's going to happen to all of you. And then I also love the part about the strawberry and the idea that in the midst of whatever is happening to us, there can be a place of peace or joy or appreciation or that life is right there with us. We don't have to wait until the bad things are gone to be alive. Yeah, and we better not. Because there's just so many of them. My oldest friend, we're friends since when I was four and he was five, is a psychologist in Philadelphia and also has been quadriplegic for over 30 years. And so he's a pretty wise guy and a wise guy as well. to him during periods when things are very hard in my life or I'm in pain, he'll always say, how are you right now, right this minute? And usually, right that moment, especially talking to him and feeling all that love that he can send even through the telephone line, I'm

not so bad, and maybe even okay. And he says, well, okay, this is, you know, right now. Right now is pretty good, isn't it, you know? And so, yes, that moment. This is a poem, really, that I don't know if it's my good wolf, but it's my smartest wolf, wrote. Your wise wolf. My wise wolf, yeah. My sort of everyday wolf needs to be reminded of this all the time. Sometimes I can hardly believe I even had a long enough period of wisdom to write this poem. I think we're all that way to a certain extent.

Certainly, that's a big part of why I do what I do with this show is exactly that, is to remind myself of these deeper, greater truths that tend to slide out of sight in day-to-day life if we're not careful. That's wonderful. Yes, exactly. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Oh, yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No, Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. There's another thing I wanted to talk about as far, a little bit about the craft of poetry, but sort of takes us somewhere deeper than that. And you talk about metaphor. You know, one of the things that you're really good at is metaphor. I think it's one of the things that people praise in your poetry is spiritual. Our society has become very sophisticated in its ability to discriminate.

We can discern differences more and more finely. In metaphor, you are doing what might be the opposite. You're looking for what is similar in disparate things. Yes. I came to that realization somewhere along the line, thinking a lot about metaphor. Successful metaphors don't necessarily come to me easily, but thinking in metaphor does.

And even if I'm just in a discussion with somebody, I'm often saying, well, it's like, or if I'm in an argument, well, it's like. And I realize that it comes out trying to convince people of something or trying to be understood. I think it's a, and I realize that it comes out trying to convince people of something or trying to be understood. I think it's a deep need to be understood. But yes, I think that as I thought about metaphor more and more, I began to really see it in the way that I described there, that it is a kind of miniature version of looking at the oneness of the world. Right.

That everything, this concept that we're understanding from many angles more and more, I think, that everything is connected is something that we do in a small version in each metaphor. Interestingly, I came across something not long ago where Aristotle said that to make good metaphor is holy labor. Isn't that wonderful? Yeah, that is. That's great. Yeah, I think, I don't know that I'm that good at metaphor, but I certainly appreciate it. The other thing I saw you say briefly was that your approach to finding the right metaphor is just to write as many of them as you can think about and hope that the good one comes out of it. So there's definitely a, like you said, even though you may have a natural affinity to it, you're still really working through finding the right one. It's not like the perfect one comes immediately.

And I think that's just back to the working hard in the chair to be a poet. I think it's always good to remind people that the creative process like that, it isn't like, you know, these things come out fully formed that brilliantly, like you're working on them and you're laboring away to make the poems as good as they can be. Yes, I think sometimes because we all have language and we all speak and we all, you know, most people who are reading, well, everyone who's reading poetry is literate or else they couldn't read it. So we can read, we can write. There's sometimes an idea that you just get inspired and write your poem.

And although I'm sure it's been known to happen, and I've gotten a couple of those along the way, we wouldn't think that about the saxophone, for example, no one would expect to pick up a saxophone and be able to control their breath and the sound that the saxophone makes immediately. But because we're so familiar with words, sometimes people think that it's going to come more easily than it does. And I teach a lot, and one of the indicators that a student is really progressing to me is when they come into class somewhat distraught and say something along the lines of, this is really hard, and they're encouraged by how hard it is. And I always then say, oh, this is great. You're really getting it now. You're really, now you have an understanding of what it is. You're beginning to have an understanding of what it is that you're trying to learn how to do.

And then they always have a lot more progress after that. So I want to talk about a poem of yours. Maybe just read a couple lines of it, and then we're going to have you do some more reading in a little bit. But there's a poem of yours called Asking Directions in Paris, and I love this because most of the poem, you're describing that you're in Paris and you're asking a woman for directions, and she is giving you them in French very quickly, and you don't really have any idea what she's saying. You think you know French, and you get there, and you're not. And so she's giving you these directions, and you don't we can talk about it. You say, and as you thank her profusely and set off full of groundless hope, you think this must be how it is with destiny, God explaining and explaining

what you must do. And all you can make out is a few unconnected phrases, a word or two, a wave, in what you pray is the right direction. And I think that's just a beautiful way of describing what a lot of us, particularly with spirituality, are doing. If we're not certain, you know, if we don't have a faith of which we're incredibly certain, but we are, let's say, interested or involved or, you know, we need something. That's a lot what it feels like to me, making out a few words, a word or two here, hoping you're going the right direction, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. Yes, indeed. Indeed. And this isn't really exactly what you're asking, but it does have to do with this section. So I'll just share it. I don't have a belief in any kind of

conventional or even somewhat unconventional God, except, you know, for kind of the amazement of the universe and all its many aspects, which is a kind of experience of awe, for sure. But, you know, I don't really believe that God talks to me or that I can talk to God. But I felt at a certain point in my writing that why shouldn't I be able to use the word God? Because it's such a familiar concept to us, and it means so many, many things to us. And I thought to myself, well, I don't have to have a belief in God in order to claim that word as part of my vocabulary. And it was incredibly liberating. I started to be able to say all kinds of things that I wouldn't have known how to say otherwise. Yeah, I agree. I was trying to find a quote. I must not have it right, but I feel like Joseph Campbell said something

like, you know, God is a metaphor for that which, you know, transcends everything, or, you know, that which we can't talk about. And I really like that, because I think that really widens it up to a place that is workable for me. Yeah, you mentioned in an interview I saw somewhere that you're a student of Pema Chodron's work. You mentioned one of my favorite books of all time, which is When Things Fall Apart. Yes, I'm about the worst meditator maybe in the Western Hemisphere. I'm 70 years old and I started trying to metaphor when I was in my early 20s. And I probably can't name the number of times I said,

this time is really it. This time I'm really going to stick with it. And so far I have never been able to sustain a practice in which I sit on a cushion or a chair. But I do read a lot. And I've come to accept that my trying to practice just through the day and my reading and taking what I read seriously and really trying to put it into my day is another kind of practice, and that's evidently the kind I'm going to have. So, yeah, I appreciate Pema Chodron so much, and I also have come very belatedly to Thich Nhat Hanh. And I just love them. They feel like two sides of the same coin to me.

You know, this is a kind of unfair characterization, but, you know, Pema Chodron is always saying, you know, you have to, when something's hard, you lean into it, and you examine it, and you explore it, and you don't try to, you know to run away from it in any way. And Thich Nhat Hanh seems to always be saying, you have all the conditions for happiness. You know, just breathe in and smile.

It's like, oh, wow, could I use a dose of that? So they're a wonderful pair. I don't know if you've seen it. There's a movie out very recently about him called, I think it's called Walk With Me. And it's like a feature film that is done. It's just filmed gorgeously. I highly recommend it. And there is a scene in there that I'll just, for you and the listeners, where, you know,

he talks with a little girl about her dog who passed away. And it is one of the sweetest, most touching things I've ever seen. Like if I need like, you know, you talk about like, loving kindness practice, where your idea is to sort of warm your heart up and then directed it lots of different people. That one always works for me when I think of it just the way he does it. So that movie is great. It's very, I would say it's slow paced. It's very meditative, but it's filmed beautifully. And there's lots of, you know, lots of him and it's really good. Oh, that's wonderful.

That's just wonderful. Yeah. I love how slowly he talks too. Yes. Yep. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer.

And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman.

And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's have you do another poem for us, if you would, called If You Knew. If you knew. What if you knew you'd be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm, brush your fingertips along the lifeline's crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport,

when the car in front of me doesn't signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won't say thank you, I don't remember they're going to die. A friend told me she'd been with her aunt. They'd just had lunch, and the waiter, a young gay man with plum-black eyes, joked as he served the coffee. It's her aunt's powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block, and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk.

How close does the dragon's fume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are? Soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time. That is so beautiful. Thank you. I don't even have anything to add to to it it's just it's just so beautiful i appreciate that and now i'm not sure where to go next that's difficult to uh that's difficult to uh follow up with anything but yeah it's just it reminds me of that phrase, you know, be kind to everyone, because we don't know what

they're going through. But it takes it even to like this further level, like, I don't even have to know what they're going for through, right? I just have to know, like, they could, you know, they could be gone at any point. You have another poem related to this sense of appreciating what's in front of us, although it's kind of inverse of that. It's called Lost Dog. And it's a poem about your dog who went lost for a period of time. And then you come home and you find the dog, and I'll just read this a little bit.

You say, Every time I look at him, the wide head resting on my outstretched paws, joy does another lap around the racetrack of my heart. Even in sleep, when I turn over to ease my bad hip, I'm suffused with contentment. If I could lose him like this every day, I'd be the happiest woman alive. It's so great. I mean, it, because it's so true of us that, you know, you suddenly think you might lose something and you realize how much it matters to you. But it is so hard, even knowing that,

it is so hard to do that day to day, to get that sense of urgency. Yes, for most of us it's just about impossible, and I think that's a big motivation for me in writing poems, is to, in some way, in many ways, help me to pay attention. You know, many people have talked about attention as being a form of prayer. And in writing a poem, it's an opportunity appreciation for people, animals, you know, everything that is dear to us. I mean, not, you know, even a stone, anything that we're remembering or thinking about.

And the older I get, the more I feel mortality. And so, you know, eventually, of course, we're going to lose, as individuals, we're going to lose everything. And I think poetry, for me, is a way to stop and appreciate it, each thing. Yeah, I think that's what poetry, as a reader of poetry, helps me to do, is it helps me to appreciate things more. It helps me adjust my lenses, so to speak, so that they're a little bit more attuned to the beauty of life that's right in front of us in the ordinary. It just, as I, as I read, you know, good poems do that. They, they take something that looks very ordinary at first and bring it up in a way, and then that

sort of mindset or ability, then I find I can pivot it to other things. I don't have to have the words. It's just that it's a way of looking, a way of thinking. It's going deeply into what's right in front of us, which is, again, another word as you use kind of for attention. But it's almost a particular kind of attention. For me, it's an appreciative attention. Yes. Yes. Even if it's a painful thing, or, you know, thinking about the wolves, you know, even if it's a painful thing or a place where, you know, we feel that we've failed or let ourselves or somebody else down, still, there is that paying attention to it and giving it its due, not letting it just, you know, just not letting it slip away.

Yep, yep. There's a lot of that. And I'm glad that you talk about the reading of poetry as well, because I think that it is the other aspect. And I'm sure for every poet, what brings you to poetry is the reading of poetry. You know, you love poetry, and so you want to make your own. And I have the same experience in reading as I do in writing. I heard you mention before that a gift people can give each other is to introduce them to poetry that they would love. You talk about how easy it is to find novels and books that we might write,

but how hard it is with poetry. Do you have a couple contemporary poets you might recommend? Yes, I surely do. More than a couple. I know, I'm putting you on the spot there for a quick answer, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive, but just, you know. What comes into mind just at the moment? Marie Howe's poetry, she's just come out with a new book called Magdalene that is extraordinary, looking at the experience of contemporary women, but somewhat through the lens of Mary Magdalene.

And she's an extraordinary poet, I think one of our most extraordinary contemporary poets. Her book, What the Living Do, is her best-known book, and I can't say enough good about it. So maybe listeners, if you're not familiar, you might really want to look at her poetry. I love Jericho Brown's poetry. He has a couple of books out that are excellent, excellent. I love a more new poet, new-ish, who only has one book out so far, but I think there's another one coming out really soon, is Natalie Diaz, who is a Mojave American, and her book is When My Brother Was an Aztec, and deals with many things, but one of them, her brother's mental illness, and oh gosh, so many poets I could name.

Well, that's a good start for us. That'll certainly give us something to do. It could, yeah. Good. I'll put links in the show notes for listeners. If you want to find any of the books by those poets, I will definitely make sure they are linked in the show notes. I think the last thing, Ellen, I'd like to do is just talk briefly about something that you've said, and I think it shows up in your work over and over.

And you talk about the importance of humor. I think, you know, I often say I think humor is an unappreciated virtue. You know, I put it up there with the virtues. And you talk about how there's room for humor, even in the most serious situations. And some of your poetry, even right in the midst of like pretty heavy, intense things, it's funny at the same time. And, and I always, you know, listeners of the show have probably heard me say this to a few guests, when I can laugh and cry within like a very short amount of time of each other, like if they're both kind of right there on the same page. I always think that's sort of a virtuoso act of art. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that.

Yes, I just love humor and tragedy real close together. Well, that's me too. I mean, I... Yeah, you know, I think the kind of humor that is in my poems, I don't try and be funny. I mean, I love it when it is funny, and there's a great joy in making people laugh. I mean, nothing, you know, so much fun in giving a reading as having people just crack up and, you know, kind of cracking up with them. But I don't try and make jokes. You know, I don't set out to be funny. And I think that's the kind of humor that I really do like is that the just in a way being able to see the humor in a situation.

And, of course, I'm a fan of dark humor. How could I not be? It's interesting because I'm getting a new book of poetry together now. And I gave it to my wife to look at, and she said, Wow, Ellen, you know, these poems are very serious, and, you know, there's just not as much humor in them. And I said, really? You know, because it seemed to me that there really still was a lot in there, so maybe there's not as much as ever, but then I started to say, well, how about this one? And how about this one? This was really funny.

People always laugh. And it was true. But I think that there also, there is a lot of pain in them. Yeah. But I think the humor is in there, too. Maybe the proportion is a little bit different. I think the humor is in there, too. Maybe the proportion is a little bit different.

But I have a kind of, I've come to realize a kind of quirky sense of humor. And I think it's an asset in my poem because the way I see things is through that. You know, I do see the humor in things, even when it's just a terrible situation. I do see the humor in things, even when it's just a terrible situation. I do see the humor in it, and I love including that in the poems when it comes, and it feels natural and right for the poem. Yeah, I think, like I said, I think humor is a virtue, and I think being able to find humor in difficult things is, you know, not only a virtue, but one of, you know, if you could pick your coping skills off a list, right, it should be in the top five, I think, of the best skills you could have. If you want to be A, sensitive about life and care about life and not walk around petulantly wounded, humor is a pretty good way to help. I love you putting it as a virtue. That's quite

wonderful. Yeah, that's the way I see it anyway. Well, Ellen, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Loved your poems. I thank you for reading for us. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much. Okay, Bye. Bye. helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor? What's in the museum of failure?

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