Friday, June 26, 2015

June 2015

FEATURED POET: Matthew Brouwer is a performance poet and teaching artist residing in Bellingham, WA. His work bridges the worlds of spoken word and literary poetry to create a style that can be both evocative and subtle, enlivening and profound. He has performed throughout the US and been featured in regional literary, performance, and visual arts showcases such as Cirque, Phrasings, and Strands.  Matthew leads workshops and retreats for teens and adults, coordinates the Whatcom Juvenile Justice Creative Writing Project, and has facilitated Kintsugi: a writing circle for people suffering chronic medical conditions. In April he released his first full collection of poems, Stories We Must Tell, which details his lengthy journey of descent and recovery after a backpacking injury in 2009 slowly stripped him of the ability to walk. More on Matthew at www.matthewbrouwerpoet.com


Back Home, Week Five

Three times now
I have seen the Trickster

The latest in broad daylight
ears propped
padding down my lane

Now I am sure it must be a sign

What he wants
I don’t know
or maybe I do

Five months
unable to walk right
and now this wheelchair
beside my bed

Childhood room where I lay
refugee camp of all my things

Dad snoring in the room above
Mom tossing

Sleep doesn’t seem to help
a thousand prayers neither

Dreams still come
but these days
I play catch and release

Doctors think I’m nuts
parents, too

And what good am I to friends
except a burden to their minds?

Everything gets stripped
and beneath a single question

Who am I?

Without my scribbling hands
without my scrambling legs

Just a mind
rising in the night
full of words


And then the Moon

scratched me on the arm with its white hand
and I took hold the rope that hung
from its luminescence
and swung out over gardens
and fields

and lakes and hillsides
and forests
and the birds who were sleeping in them

Over newlyweds and divorces
and children in their animal pajamas
and the grandpas who could no longer
rise to lift them
And the horses in their barns
and the girls who every afternoon
forgot their loneliness to ride them

Over townships and cities
and playgrounds and water fountains
and empty parking lots and churches
and places where the dead collect
beneath the grass and stones

After the dream I was still in bed
when I was visited by foxes
and they rubbed against my arms
with their silken tails
until I too smelled like a creature
of the foliage

And I knew from them my life was the one thing
I could not have
unless I did not try to hold it

But there I sat
as if before a hundred miles of mountains
aching to be crossed
and the compass I had been given
I’d not yet learned to read

But that in the crossing I would learn to read it
and when I came to the river at the edge
that becomes a mouth

WRITE YOUR POEM
What is the relationship of your poem to silence?  Notice that Matthew's video's offer the viewer an entirely different experience.  

It makes you wonder about the brogue of Dylan Thomas and if he read the poem for his father when he wrote the refrain, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light"

The spoken word has as much impact on the poem as the choice to use elements of prose over musical forms.

Why do you make the choices?  There's no right or wrong answer.  Write your poem.  Ask yourself why you write with or without form.  For a spoken word or a silent study.  When you are done thinking write it first on paper and then lean over the river next to your house and write it with your finger on the surface of the water.  Watch your poem flow with the Tao to another sea of words down river.