The One You Feed - Ellen Bass on the Power of Poetry

Episode Date: July 7, 2020

Ellen Bass is a poet, non-fiction author, and teacher. She is the author of many collections and books including Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Ellen’s poems also appear frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She’s been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, and The New Letters Prize. Ellen also teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University. Her newest collection of poetry is entitled Indigo. This is Ellen’s second time as a guest on the show.In this episode, Ellen and Eric discuss the power of poetry – how it can change us and deepen our experience of and attention to the world around us. Ellen reads some of her incredibly beautiful poetry and as a result, we are indeed changed.Spiritual Habits Group Program – Find Solid Ground In Shaky Times: Join Eric in this virtual, live group program to learn powerful Spiritual Habits to help you access your own deep wisdom and calm steadiness – even when the world feels upside down. Click here to learn more and sign up. Enrollment is open now through Sunday, July 19th, 2020Need help with completing your goals in 2020? The One You Feed Transformation Program can help you accomplish your goals this year.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Ellen Bass and I Discuss the Power of Poetry and…Her new book of poetry, IndigoHow gratitude and love help her combat fearHer practice as a poet is to take suffering and make artThe poem that took her 12 years to writeThat worthwhile things are hard to do – even for expertsWanting to be changed after writing or reading a poemHer poem, Taking My Old Dog Out To Pee Before BedHer poem, EnoughWhat she thinks about when she hears someone else read her poetry as well as how poetry is to be read and heard “out loud”Her poem, The Long RecoveryTrying not to resist the life we have and instead, hurl ourself more deeply into itGreat poets and their poetry teach us to observe the world more closely and see it as sacred and beautifulHer poem, Any Common DesolationEllen Bass Links:ellenbass.comTwitterInstagramFacebookAshford University: Their online bachelor’s and master’s degrees allow you to learn on a convenient and flexible schedule. There’s no fee to apply and no standardized testing to enroll. Go to ashford.edu/wolf Athletic Greens: The all in one daily drink to get daily nutritional needs, support better health and peak performance. Visit www.athleticgreens.com/feed to get 20 free daily travel packs with your first purchase. Daily Harvest: Delivers absolutely delicious organic, carefully sourced, chef-created fruit and veggie smoothies, soups, overnight oats, bowls, and more. To get $25 off your first box go to www.dailyharvest.com and enter promo code FEEDIf you enjoyed this conversation with Ellen Bass on the power of poetry, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Ellen Bass (2018 Interview)Marilyn NelsonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many of you know my story, but what you might not know is that spiritual principles saved my life 25 years ago when I was addicted to heroin. And they still help me connect more deeply to my life today. Learning how to put spiritual principles into daily practice has been literally life-saving and life-giving for me. Today, these spiritual habits are the things I turn to when I feel overwhelmed, or when I want to make decisions from the deeper, wiser part of myself, rather than the reactive or distracted me. They fuel me when I feel depleted and I need a way to recharge. Spiritual habits combine the science of behavior change with the wisdom of spiritual principles to help us feel calmer, more at ease, and more fulfilled. Spiritual habits have enriched not only my life, but also the lives of the clients I've worked with in the

Spiritual Habits Program. Normally, this work is done with private clients in a one-on-one setting, but I've decided to again offer a group version of this program. The benefit being twofold. First, you get to connect with others and create a supportive community as we dive into this content together. And secondly, I can offer it to you at a much lower price point. Enrollment is open now through July 19th. To learn more and sign up, go to group.spiritualhabits.net. It comes down to this. When we learn how to take action on and apply spiritual principles to the moments in our daily lives, the way we live and experience our lives radically changes. I hope you'll give yourself this gift and join me for this special edition of the Spiritual Habits Group Program. Again, that's group.spiritualhabits.net or click on the link in the show notes. Poetry is out loud. I mean, we put it on a page so that it can move around more easily. 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 reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead.

The Really Know 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 poet, nonfiction author, and teacher. She's the author of many collections and books, including Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Ellen's poems also appear frequently in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. She's been awarded three Pushcart Prizes, the Lambda Literary Award, the Pablo Neruda Prize, and the New Letters Prize, and also teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. Her newest collection is entitled Indigo here in a moment. But before we do that, we'll start like we always do with a

parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandmother and he 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. I really think that's a wonderful parable. And the things that I'm relating to, especially right now, is the fear one. Because although we certainly have enough greed and hatred in the world as well, that we are looking at the terrible brutality and murder and injustice. And, you know, all of us, I think, who care at all are really trying to take stock of our own lives and see how we can work for the values that are for kindness and compassion and justice and love. So this seems like a perfect time for that parable. And personally,

This seems like a perfect time for that parable. And personally, what I really relate to is the polarity of fear and love and fear and gratitude. It's been a few months now that we've all been in this state never before encountered by any of us in our lifetime, including those of us who have lived a pretty long time. And I'm noticing that gratitude is one of the things that most allows me to manage fear. And love is maybe a close second where they're holding hands. So I'm really noticing that it doesn't help so much to say to myself, well, you know, you don't need to be so afraid. But when I can refocus and get my food trough, you know, over toward the gratitude realm and the love realm, it's been helping me a lot. Pretty much, I think, every evening, I feel low-level but noticeable anxiety. And I feel really fortunate because during the day, I don't really feel it. I wake up, and we're lucky we live in Santa Cruz. And if we get up early enough, we can take a walk down by the ocean. And my gratitude for that, that's a real my cup runneth over. And I'm, you know, very busy

during the day, the opportunities to share poetry and teach and hear poetry, read poetry are so great now. And so I'm very busy, but there's that evening time where that fear starts to vibrate a little. And that thing that helps me the most is feeding that other wolf. Yeah, I think that's a great place to start talking about gratitude and all the wonderful things that so many of us have in our lives. I want to start here with the first poem in the book. It's called Sous Chef. And I'm going to have you read some full poems later, but we're going to pick a couple lines out of some early poems. And I love this poem because you're describing basically cutting up vegetables and you're giving them a lot of attention, which we know paying full attention to what we're doing is another

antidote for the emotion and thoughts that tend to run away with us being really present. And I love that the idea of the sous chef is that someone else is telling you sort of what to do. And you've got a couple lines in here that really resonated with me as I thought about spiritual practice. And I'll just read a couple of the lines that jumped out to me. Tell me what to do. I'm free of will. Let me escape my own insistence. And I still have opinions, but I don't believe in them. And I just love those three lines, particularly, let me escape my own insistence. You know, how much better does life go for us when we stop insisting that things be a certain way? Indeed, you know, I'm a pretty strong-willed person. So I'm speaking from personal

experience there. I love that phrase, free of will, which comes actually from a Bonnie Raitt song. And the part of, I still have opinions, but I don't believe in them. This is, I think, pretty funny. Our second George Bush president actually said that line, and I had it on my refrigerator for years. It was clipped out of the newspaper because, of course, the newspaper was showing him as a kind of, you know, idiot for saying something like that. But I just always kept saying, you know, this is one place where Bush and I exactly agree. And I don't think he meant it the way I mean it. But we did. Who knows? But yes, I can't stop myself from generating opinions. I read and listen to Pema Chodron a fair amount. And she's always talking about things like when you walk down the street,

you're just constantly, you know, you pass a person on the street, you know nothing about them, but you immediately have a feeling of being drawn toward them, or being repelled from them, or neutrality. And, youality. They were just forming opinions all the time. And I am a very opinionated person. I come from an opinionated family, but I have learned not to invest too heavily in those opinions and to notice them, but not always feel that I need to root for them and try and make them as vociferous as possible. Makes me think of something my Zen teacher said to me recently, I just turned 50 in the last couple of weeks. And he said, you know, when I turned 40, I stopped caring what other people thought of me. And then when I turned 50, I

stopped caring what I thought of myself. And I just thought turned 50, I stopped caring what I thought of myself. And I just thought that was, I thought that was a really, it just brings up that idea. But yeah, yeah, that line about insistence, I feel like it makes me feel like I heard Adyashanti, the spiritual teacher, once say something about that, like that, you know, we've got to let go of our insisting all the time. That really stood out to me in that poem, and I loved that idea. Moving on to another poem that brings up a theme that's pretty common in spiritual traditions is it's a poem called Reincarnation. And I'll touch the first line, which I think makes me laugh every time I read it, and then I'll jump into the part that talks to me.

Who would believe in reincarnation if she thought she would return as an oyster? Eagles and wolves are popular. I love that. But then you go on to say, humbly, the oyster persists in filtering seawater and fashioning the daily irritations into luster. And I love that idea of the grist for the mill. It's the how do we take these things that seem like they're a problem to us and turn them into luster, into the pearl. And I'm kind of curious how you look at doing that in your own life. I think that's my practice as a poet, to take suffering and to make art. Making a poem gives me a way to grapple with my experiences, to come to terms with them, to explore them, and to try to go deeper into them rather than to

resist them, all of which are the things that the spiritual teachers talk to us about. And I find that in a poem, all of those things are what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to understand something that I didn't understand before. I'm trying to be more present, trying to be more deeply rooted into my life, whatever that is. And sometimes it's being more deeply rooted in something celebratory and wonderful. There are some odes in here, there are some um, some praise poems, and also some elegies and poems that grapple with loss and suffering and pain and fear and worry and all those other emotions. So when I'm making a poem, even if the poem is about something painful, when I'm working on the poem, actually, Jane Hirshfield talks about this. She calls it the secret joy of writing poems, that there's a joy that we don't talk that much about that we

feel when we're making a poem, when we're making art, no matter what the subject is. There's a Zen idea, right, that says, you know, first idea, best idea, right? You know, there's musicians that are like, get it in the first take, right? And then you get somebody like Leonard Cohen, who's like, well, I wrote 150 verses to get to the four you've got here. Do you lean to one of those sides more than other? I lean to the Leonard Cohen side. There's one poem in here called Failure, ironically, called Failure, ironically, that took me 12 years of versions to write. And I wasn't working on it constantly over those 12 years, God forbid. But I did make my first try at it, talking about this experience I'd had when I was a young girl. And I couldn't get the poem to work. And a few years later, I tried it again a few years later again. But when I say try, I mean, like, really, you know,

I worked on it for a few months each time. And then I just say, No, it's not there. And sometimes when I'm teaching, I like to go back and show my students some of the process so that they can have a more realistic idea about why it's so hard for them. And I tell them it's hard because it's hard. You know, it's not hard for you. It's hard. It's hard for not every single writer or poet, but the vast majority are on the Leonard Cohen side way more. And then after that many years, I was able to find a way into the poem and out of the poem, which I hadn't been able to find before, and to discover what the poem was really about. I had a hint that it was in the failure category, but sometimes I sort of think to myself, well, I just had to have more failures before I could manage this poem.

Yeah, boy, you brought up a few different things in my mind there. The first that I think is so important is what you said there about that it's hard. We've got a coaching client that I'm working with, and we were talking about imposter syndrome. And she said something that was really interesting. And she said that they did an imposter syndrome workshop at her university and then they played bingo like every time you heard a phrase that you thought in your head you wrote it down the person who won was the person that everybody looks up to they all think like this guy is you know he's it and he won imposter syndrome bingo because he had all those things.

And it made me think about like, I've talked to enough wonderful artists and poets and writers like yourself who all say, yeah, I've done it before, but I still sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and it's hard. And I think that that's so important for people who are working on anything in life that's valuable, whether it's art or anything else. It's hard. If it's worth doing, it's hard. A lot of us interpret the fact that it's hard to mean we're not good at it. We're not meant to do it. We can't do it. Versus realizing like that's the way it is for most everybody. And it's the people who manage to grapple with the hard consistently enough

that leads to something. It's very true. And because poetry is the art form that I know best, I can speak most knowledgeably about that, but I'm sure that it's true across the board. But in poetry, you have to really have a high tolerance for failure. You really have to have a certain kind of crazy personality where you think it's worth it to, you know, hammer away at a one-page poem on and off for 12 years because you care about investigating that experience and you want to find out what it's all about and you want to make art out of it. You know, there's so many other things that people can do with their lives that are more obviously rewarding. I mean, I'm sure to be a master gardener or a great surfer, you also have to work really hard. But I think that you see beauty and delight quicker in the process. You don't have

to be working at it for decades in order to plant a garden and have the joy of that garden growing. But boy, a mediocre poem just is mediocre. Whereas, you know, a garden that's just not really perfect is still a wonderful garden. So it's not for everybody to have that much failure. You know, it takes me, you know, to write 40 or 50 poems takes me six, seven, eight years. And if you think about how many words that is, when you think of all the white space, and that I write all the time, proportionately, it's hard. Yeah, yeah. Well, my girlfriend and I were talking about this before we started the episode, and she loves poetry. And she was saying that poetry is so amazing because it can conjure up this huge world and these really big emotions out of very few words.

And I think that's speaking to what you're saying. Why it's so hard is you've got, it's very constrained. It's not a lot of words that yet still has to cause this big thing to happen. It has a very, very high bar because the bar is really that when you write a poem, you want to be changed. You want to be a different person at the end of writing that poem than you were before. And you hope that that will be true for the reader as well. So of course, you know, we don't like get a personality transplant, but we want in some, perhaps small, but very real way, and sometimes a big way, we want to be different after we write that poem. And we want to have discovered something that we didn't know before. And we want to be changed.

We want to be enriched, enlarged. So those few words, they have to do some heavy lifting. 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 gonna 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. God 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. So let's have a poem. This one is called Taking My Old Dog Out to Pee Before Bed. And I love this poem for a whole lot of reasons. But one is I'm a deep lover of dogs. So I've had the privilege of going through several dogs through their entire lifespan. And there's something beautiful about that. Taking my old dog out to pee before bed. Zeke's hips are too ground down to lift a leg. So he just stands there. We both just stand

looking into the darkness. The moon silvers his thinning fur. Orion strides across the heavens, his own dog trotting at his heel. And a great live oak reaches over from the neighbor's yard, dense black limbs silhouetted against a paler sky. Single, voluptuous remnant of forests. Can a tree be lonely? Zeke tips up his muzzle, scent streaming through 200 million olfactory cells as he reads the illuminated manuscript of night. Raccoons prowling down the street, who's in heat or just out for a stroll. Handsome still, he reminds me of an aging movie star with his striking white eyebrows and square jaw. He always had an urbane elegance, a gentleman who could carry off satin lapels and a silver-tipped

cane. Tonight an ambulance wails. Someone not so far away is frightened in pain trying to live or trying to die and then it's quiet again no birds no wind we don't speak we just wait alive together until one of us turns back to the door and the other follows it's so beautiful so Thank you. And unlike in the poem, we do have a bird. Here are crows. Yep. Yep. Yeah. We've got some excited crows here in the yard. Coming in loud and clear. Yeah. Crows are remarkable creatures. My girlfriend and I just started reading the book called The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman. It's all about, you know, basically,

you know, for a long time, we basically thought birds were dumb, you know, like bird brain. But boy, they are not. It's stunning some of the things birds can do, crows in particular. We just started, but it's a lot of fun so far already. Oh, that's a good recommendation. I'm going to read it. Yeah, lots of people really love that book. So we shall see. I'm going to read just the first part of another poem of yours. And then we can kind of just discuss it a little bit. It's a poem called Enough. And it's a fairly long poem. So I'm just reading the first paragraph or two. But there's a part of it that I just had to get into this conversation. So enough. No, it will never be enough. Never enough wind clamoring in the trees,

sun and shadow handling each leaf. Never enough clang of my neighbor hammering the iron nails, relenting wood, sound waves, lapping over roofs. never enough bees purposeful at the throats of lilies. How could we be replete with the flesh of ripe tomatoes, the crushed scent of their leaves? It would take many births to be done with the thatness of that. And I just, I love that last line in particular, it would take many births to be done with the thatness of that. Reminds me of a phrase I hear in Zen often, thusness. Oh, that's a great phrase. Do you like hearing other people read your poems? Or are you like, oh my goodness, you've got the emphasis wrong on that?

got the emphasis wrong on that. No, I think it's wonderful because poetry is more popular than it's ever been in my lifetime. And it's still not like movies or, you know, TV or, you know, football. So hearing someone else read my poem, the first thing that I'm thinking about is, you know, they care enough about this poem that they even want to read it. So that's like you're way ahead of the game just starting right there. And then it's interesting to me, you know, how does someone else receive it? I've been reading a book recently by a man named Verlin Klinkenborg, and it's called Several Short Sentences About Writing. And he says that it's important to know what you mean to say, but it's crucial to know what you have said. And so when I hear somebody read my poem, I'm more aware of what I've actually said, not what I mean to say, but what I've said. So that's special, too. That's like a little peek into what is the poem doing out in the world?

Because sometimes the poem does things that weren't what I was thinking about. That's the poem doing it, not me and what I was thinking or what I meant or why I cared about it, but what is it doing when it's out on its own? So that's very interesting to me, because it's something I made. So that makes me think of, I've often heard from people that when you read a poem, that it's really helpful to read it out loud, that there's something about hearing it. Oh, yeah, it's all about that. Hearing the words and the sound of them. When your mouth

makes the sound, the sound is different out in the world than it is inside your head. Do you read poetry that way? Of course. Absolutely. Yeah. Poetry is out loud. I mean, we put it on a page so that it can move around more easily, but it really wants to be out loud. As the writer, you can't tell what you have. This is true for prose writers too. You can't tell what you've got there until you read it out loud. Grace Paley used to call it the speedy eye and the slow ear. When we read just with our eyes, there's a way in which we can just grasp, you know, in kind of grouping. We don't really hear it word by word and syllable by syllable. And when you read it out loud, you hear what you didn't hear before. And so when I'm writing a poem, I'm always reading it out loud

through all the drafts. And when I read poetry, I'm often reading it out loud. And if I've read the poem silently to myself a number of times and then read it out loud, it's always shocking to me how I hear things that I hadn't heard before. Even though I might think I'm sounding it in my head. The wonderful poet Frank Gaspar calls that part of the word in your mouth, he calls it the mouthfeel. What would you like to read another one for us? Sure, I'd love to. How about we do The Long Recovery?

Good. The Long Recovery. When she would come home from the strawberry fields, I'd empty the dirt from the cuffs of her jeans, scrub the mud ground into her the knees. It made me want to tongue the sweat of her throat, taste salt in the dusty crevices. No, no, I say now to my dumb sex that like a dog can't understand. I know I'm less than a speck on the planet, the planet less than a speck, and so on. Is it sacred or insane that I matter so much to myself, that she matters so much to me? What use is my turning her again and again toward the sun? I'm old enough to know there's nothing we love without incurring the debt of grief. The maple leaves just edged with crimson, the bright yellow breast of the warbler, its sweet, sweet, sweetie cry. Her hand as she lifts a cup, riddled with veins, ruched, the loose skin almost transparent, almost familiar as my own. How can I hurl myself

deeper into this life? Why do I think there's something better I could be doing? I miss her. I miss her. I believe in her animal scent. I believe stars burn in the blank day sky. I believe the earth rushes through space, though I can't feel the slightest breeze. That's so lovely. The line in there, is it sacred or insane that I matter so much to myself, that she matters so much to me, is such, I just love that because it's both. Yeah. Right? I mean, I think it really is both. I had a pretty deep spiritual experience not too long ago.

And the main thing that I came back from that with, the only thing I could really say was it's like it felt in the midst of it that everything was so utterly insignificant and so utterly sacred at the same time. Those things were both true in the same moment. And I just felt that so deeply. And when up everything I'm trying to do in spiritual practice, is how can I hurl myself deeper into this life? You know, that makes me think of Dogen's phrase, enlightenment is intimacy with all things. That's beautiful, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. it's really hard, but it helps to know that it's what we're trying to do. Yep. And I even almost sometimes find that really difficult moments are hard, you know, to hurl ourself deeper into, but I almost feel that like, for me, when it's really difficult, I can kind of lean in. It's almost just the more prosaic, just sort of

blah moments that I find it so much harder to hurl myself into, you know, and, and I found quarantine to be interesting, because it's like, well, there's nothing happening. I'm not going anywhere. I've been grateful to be a Zen student during this, you know, I start to go, well, there's just nothing happening. And then I go, wait, hang on a second that what would my if I if I said that to my Zen teacher, what would I get? Right? I would get everything is happening right now. Pay attention, you know, and, and I love that, you know, the next line you say is, why do I think there's something better I could be doing? You know, boy, is that the curse of a lot of life? There's something better I could be doing. I don't know what it is, but something.

I think that's really insightful what you're saying about the blah moments or even the neutral moments or even the sort of mildly nice moments. You know, sometimes I'll be well taking a walk along the ocean. I mean, that's glorious. And will I be there? Am I in my body? Do I feel my feet walking? Am I looking at the ocean? A lot of the times, I'm embarrassed to say how many of the times I'm thinking about something else. Oh, did I remember to put that on my calendar? You know, oh, I have to do this. Oh, you know, I should kind of think about what I'm going to say to so and so. I mean, all kinds of things when, you know, I could be looking at the whole Pacific Ocean out there laid out just for me, so to speak, and I'm not even really appreciating it. Thank you. 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. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition, 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. The beautiful thing about a poem like the one we just heard is it reminds us in a way, and it stirs in us, at least in me, in a way that saying

like, these moments are really special. You should pay more attention. Like I can say that and I can understand that intellectually, but when a piece of art comes along like this, it gives it a different lens. It brings it more to life. I think the thing about poetry that I love is that good poets, great poets, and I think you're one, observe the world so closely, and they teach me how to do it. It teaches me how to look more deeply. There's something in the way that a poet sees the world, the way the poet basically zooms in on something very ordinary and causes it to become sacred and beautiful that teaches me a little bit about how to do it. And that's one of the most important things to me that poetry can do that again, a spiritual teaching can tell me to do. But poetry sometimes teaches me how in a way that I can't articulate.

poetry sometimes teaches me how in a way that I can't articulate. I was talking recently about an article that I read a while back, and it talks about metaphor and metaphorical language, which, you know, even when a poem doesn't have an actual metaphor in it. It's still metaphorical language. And they did some brain imaging. And when you read something that is a metaphor, the part of your brain that responds to the texture of touch lights up. And when you read something that gives you the idea of that, but isn't a metaphor or in metaphorical language, that part of your brain does not. That way in which it reaches us, it reaches us through, I know how to say this word, the parietal operculum is the part of brain that, I love that sound. I hope I can put that in the poem. So it is literally affecting us the way physical touch affects us.

Whereas the idea of it just goes into our thinker, whatever the thinking is. Yeah, fascinating. Totally. And of course, in a poem, too, we're trying to say something without making it reductionistic, without reducing it to some kind of slogan or, you know, cliche or soundbite or something like that. You know, we're trying to actually say something that is not really sayable, but we're trying to get it into words without losing its complexity. You said that you will spend, I know this was an extreme,

but 12 years on a poem. I know they don't all take that long. How do you know, or do you even know when you've got it right? i'll just say this and then actually you talk i was reading a book a far side book the cartoons and he was showing in that book some early sketches he had and how they turned into cartoons and he in a couple times was like and here's where i polished this one too much i can see now that like i should have left it alone. So I guess my question is, how do you have a sense of like, okay, we can go backward. And that is really very wonderful. So you don't ever have to worry about going too far and over polishing. As long as you save all your drafts, you can go back to the last time when it still had a pulse and then see if that actually was the right place and you went too far.

Sometimes I just know. I mean, sometimes there's just something you can almost feel the click where it clicks into place and you just know that's it, you've got it. And sometimes I know I haven't got it. My wife is a very insightful reader and her criticism is really valuable to me. And I'd never show her early drafts because she's not a teacher. She doesn't look and see what the potential in that poem is. She looks, it's like what Klinkenberg was saying. She sees what is actually there, not what I might hope to have be there. So, but it, that further along, and I showed her a poem one time and she kind of hesitated.

She looked up at me and she said, I don't feel changed. And we just both burst out laughing because, you know, I didn't feel changed either, but I was kind of hoping that maybe there was more there than I thought. So sometimes, sometimes I know that the poem is not working. I think more often I'm in a kind of middle range and I'm thinking maybe it's coming along, but I'm fortunate to have a couple of friends

who I, poet friends, and a couple of poet friends and one friend who isn't a poet, but who is a very devoted reader of poetry. And she will give me some feedback and then a couple other poet friends will give me some feedback. And that's very helpful to me. Not that I always will do exactly what they say, but hearing what they say is a kind of a sounding board. And sometimes they're just exactly right on and I can just do what they say and there it is. But that helps me a lot. And sometimes it takes me quite a while to see. In this book, there's a couple of poems that right at the 11th hour,

I lopped off about three quarters of the poem. And it took me years to see that. And I always thought, oh, I don't know, I kind of like something about this poem, but I don't know, I don't think it's quite right. And then once it shed everything it didn't need, I actually felt very good about it. I know that there are poets who are more able to make those assessments without any outside reflection from others. And I think that would be wonderful to have that barometer exactly that way. But I do rely some on help. But knowing what to do, this is what I tell my students when they're getting a lot of different kinds of feedback. I tell them that knowing what to do with the feedback you get is an art in itself, because you just do what people say, unless they're my student, and then they should just do what I say.

If the feedback's coming from you, we can see each other and the room you're in is just filled with books and there's books stacked on your desk. And it's always so distracting to me to be talking to anybody with a bunch of books in the background because I'm like, what's that book? Wonder what those books are. I know what everything is. Two walls are floor to ceiling books and there's still not enough room. books. And there's still not enough room. Right before the pandemic, I was about to go through, and I'm sure you have too, I really like this term a lot, death preparation. And I'm not really preparing for it on a, you know, deep level, but on just the clutter level, my mother would always go through

things in her house and, you know, get rid of papers and stuff that she, and she'd say, you know, I don't want to leave all this mess for my children. And so I feel like, uh, I have so much stuff in here that I have to start now because otherwise I'll, I'll just leave too big a mess. Yeah. I saw President Obama did a live stream yesterday. I wanted to see what he had to say about everything that was happening. And I mostly followed him, but he was in front of a bookshelf. And again, I found it distracting. Like, what's back there?

Like, I got to know. I was curious, too. Yeah. So why don't we wrap up by having you read one more poem for us? And I think that we should go with, I think it's the poem that closes the book, isn't it? Any Common Desolation? Yes. So we'll use the, it's the last poem in the book, and we'll use it as a way to wrap us up here.

Sure. the book and we'll use it as a way to wrap us up here. Sure. Any common desolation can be enough to make you look up at the yellow leaves of the apple tree, the few that survived the rains and frost, shot with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep orange gold against a blue so sheer a single bird would rip it like silk. You may have to break your heart, but it isn't nothing to know even one moment alive. The sound of an oar in an oar lock or a ruminant animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger. The ruby neon of the liquor store sign. Warm socks. The ruby neon of the liquor store sign. Warm socks.

You remember your mother. Her precision a ceremony. As she gathered the white cotton, slipped it over your toes, drew up the heel, turned the cuff. A breath can uncoil as you walk across your own muddy yard. The big dipper pouring night down over you, and everything you dread, all you can't bear, dissolves, and like a needle slipped into your vein, that sudden rush of the world. That's so beautiful.

It brings so many different things together. I love how it brings together the things that are difficult in the world and just the overpowering beauty of it sometimes. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ellen, for agreeing to come back on. It's been a pleasure to have you back on. The book is called Indigo by Ellen Bass. I'd highly recommend it to everybody. We'll have links in the show notes. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk with you. Oh, my pleasure. It's just wonderful to talk with you, Eric. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits.

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