Deborah Bogen

Back in the Bad Old Days when I worked as a paralegal in a window-less office in a large Southern Califonia Law Firm's darkly a/c'd building I used to have to keep track of my time carefully and on paper. I mean really keep track. We were supposed to account for every minute of work everyday - in 6 minute increments. Right away you see the problem. No one can be productive all day long - but it did work as the stick that made you try since it was tied to the carrot - a bonus.

Those days are long-gone but there's a residual stain on my soul - the "what did I get done today?" query that often accounts - in my case at least - for a sense of dissatisfaction with the self. Why don't I do more? And that question is tied closely with why am I not a better person? No, you say. It doesn't work that way for you? Well, I'm glad, but for lots of us countable accomplishments have a lot, too much I would argue, with our evaluation of whether any one day was well-spent.

For a writer, for any artist, this can be especially bothersome since you often get the good stuff when you least expect it - and certainly not when you are counting your productivity in discrete units. It's tricky - yes? You can't always will the thing to happen, but neither can you wait for the book to write itself. It's like balancing on a bongo board (you can google that) - you have to keep your knees bent, your center of gravity low and if you're smart, you stay relaxed and awake. Here's to a day like that - let's wish each other luck. Read More 

So this morning I'm being good - I'm taking a Pump class. That's one of those classes where a perfectly toned (much younger) woman takes you through a set of weight training exercises and says encouraging things like "I know you can do this..." and "come on, tighten your abs and lift that leg higher." Part of me is with the program - I'm old - I have to stay on top of the muscle thing. Left to it's own devices muscle tone simply fades away. But part of me is thinking about a work out pal named Marie who is also there for our little torture session. I owe Marie. When no one else was interested she read a draft of "Witch" and told me to keep on keeping on.

There we are, Marie and me, trying to keep our spirits and our triceps up and suddenly my mind leaves the room. I' m elsewhere and elsewhere is the second book, "The Hounds of God." Why am I there and - more to the point why is Marie there - Marie at age 17. In the book she's not (of course) from Pittsburgh. This Marie is French. She's like my friend Marie but young, Parisian, and falling for one of my characters - the one who I thought might become a priest. A whole plot point unfolds in about 6 minutes and I am doing none of the work (well, I am lifting the damn weights) but it's Edric and Marie who are telling me the story. They are suddenly alive and insistent and actually - they're right. She belongs in the book.

Where does this stuff come from? I thought I had all the characters worked out - and certainly most of the twists and turns the story needs. But Marie and the tale itself are hard to ignore - so once again it's going to be different that I had planned.

Does this happen to you?  Read More 

It was complicated. Isn’t it always? I know the daughter (Lynn Emanuel) of the painter (Akiba Emanuel) and I enjoy and admire her poetry. Beyond that I have envied her background because Lynn comes from a family of artists. She’s intense, accomplished and often identified as postmodern. If you know her work you know her images occupy the page with authority and the readers’ minds with staying power.

But when I read Lynn’s book, Then Suddenly, I was most taken by the poems at the center of the book, the poems about her father, Akiba. He died while she was writing Then Suddenly and the poems about his death split the book right down the spine. The forceful emotion those poems are built on – especially in a poet who is so keenly intelligent, so intellectual – provide a powerful base for the rest of the book. They give dimension and force to the postmodern imagery that has so often been called out when writers discuss her work. Because the poems are artful, filled with tour jetes’ and flashes of brilliance that stay with you, I started thinking about art and image against the background of actual life and loss. I wanted to explore what art can and cannot do, and of course, I wanted to know more about Lynn’s dad. Her father, her fellow artist. I decided I should see his work.

It’s not that easy to see Akiba Emanuel’s work. It’s not hanging in my local museum. Emanuel was an artist who did not quite become famous; he lived on the edge of fame. He knew famous artists, he sometimes worked with them and even posed for Matisse. He was in shows with many of them and he lived in New York where he was a contemporary of Rothko et al.

But the art world is cut-throat competitive – there’s actual money at stake. People who are most interested in you are usually those who think you can help them. Akiba was ardent about his work, but he probably didn’t qualify as help to other artists. Looking at his painting and reading about him, he seems fully occupied, compelled by both modern life and Jewish history to paint. At any rate, this man began to fascinate me – a puzzle, an enigma. An artist.

Luckily along the way Lynn and I became actual friends. Because that happened I got to see some of Akiba’s paintings in the flesh (the paint.) And they astonished me. Fable-like and furious, angular and gorgeously composed, more than a little disturbing Akiba’s paintings gripped me when I saw them and stayed with me when they were out of sight.

There’s too much variety in Akiba’s work, too much development and range for me to describe it adequately here, but fortunately there is a catalogue of his paintings that you can still get on Amazon (Akiba Emanuel 1912- 1993) – and I did. I got the book.

Right away I noticed that I could not put it down, and yet I could not keep looking at all his paintings. Many of them bother me. And not a little, but a lot. The night train poems I wrote responses to are among the ones that troubled me most. This series of paintings clearly reference the holocaust, but they do it with an abstract edge that creates an illusion of “no emotion.” There are trains, body parts, winter, and mechanical connections that terrify the imaginative. There are cold clocks, colder snow and the occasional distant moon, but mostly there is the hugely disfiguring heartlessness of the events he is portraying. Not the ghastly and horrific nature of the efficient murders the holocaust accomplished, but the mechanical meanness of machines and of people “just doing their jobs” and of others for whom “the jobs” provided an outlet for latent sociopathic impulses.

akibanighttransportiAkiba achieved this effect by using cranky lines, strange color manipulations, and almost no other editorial comment. He uses kindergarten hues, primary colors with a couple pastels thrown in. Looking at the bright yellows and reds you might think there’s something jolly, or at least jaunty, going on. The result is that these paintings of trains taking Jews and Gypsies to slaughter wake some memory you have in the back of your brain of a toy train set. A toy train set? No, your psyche wants to scream. This has nothing to do with me. But there it is, your half-remembered Christmas present somehow complicit with genocide.

I began my journey into Akiba’s art by looking at the catalogue for short periods of time. It hurt. I built up slowly to where I could spend significant time with some of the less painful paintings (some are simply gorgeous works but even they hold information about his inner thoughts.) I started to feel as if I knew Akiba – I mean, I found myself calling him Akiba. I could feel him trying to reconcile his life in New York or in Denver as a safe artistic Jew, while the disaster that was World War II in Europe played out in his head, as it had in his family. And I had to write about those poems. I had to grapple with Akiba’s demons because they are also mine. And they are also yours.

Consider this: each morning I turn on the computer and try to head safely to Facebook, because the headlines are, well, the headlines. Today “Sochi forces hunt for potential suicide bombers” while “ice storms plague homeless families.” Closer to home a 4 year old girl is shot by her 6 year old brother. This is all happening while I decide if the snow is so bad that the icy streets make a car trip unwise – but my car trip has nothing to do with potential terrorist attacks or gang fights or freezing to death in a storm. My trip is to a local art store so I can buy supplies for a class I’m taking at the local Art Center. This is the crazy world we are all living in – the world of the lucky and the unlucky.

Akiba found himself on the lucky side of the planet, but the grief from the other side bled into his, was also his. He had to paint it. He had to find a way to incorporate it into the western world where his family had taken refuge. – and he did. He found a way to do that. It works. Look at his Night Transport paintings. You are both intrigued and unhappy, aren’t you?

It’s a gift to be drawn this deeply into the art of another person. I have Charles Simic to thank for pointing me in this direction. In his 1992 book “Dimestore Alchemy: the art of Joseph Cornell” Simic makes prose poems in response to Cornell images, and in doing so he increases the magic of both Cornell’s boxes and prose poetry exponentially. Simic’s book is one I re-read regularly. I think about art that, instead of producing criticism and classwork, creates more art. What a good idea.  Read More 

It is a coincidence, I know, that "home" and "om" rhyme, but I like to ignore that fact and take a deep breath of Pittsburgh -- of this particular house, this street, this desk, this window, this view. I like to relax into another long work event called "writing a novel" while going about the daily work of laundry and phone calls and dental appointments. There's no way I can make the writing go quickly (though I hope to make it go well) and there's no way to make it less scary, but there is this good place called home in which to do the work.

Stories do a lot to stitch the world together. When I started "Witch" I just took off writing and hoped the story and the characters knew what they were doing. It was energizing and exhausting at the same time, living for weeks in a strange dream world that created itself daily (and nightly) in my mind. The characters grew like real people, becoming more concrete, more determined, more willful until eventually I often found myself taking dictation from someone I was pretty sure I had made up.

So here I go again into the narrow crowded stinky streets of 13th century Paris where somehow men were able to conceive of great cathedrals to both inspire and control an illiterate populace. How did they manage the heights, the arches, the story-laden sculpture and the glorious stained glass? And at what costs were those spires driven into the sky? How many bones are in those foundations?

I hope you are off to a summer of good work, gardens and writing and music and the like. May our paths cross. And may you be well. Read More 

... for me they are not so much an escape from anything as an escape into my deeper truths, half-thought thoughts, almost-insights. Does that make sense?

Like so many writers I was struck early by the truth telling mania, by a need to uncover what has been swept beneath the carpet. It’s a writer’s thing, I think, to hope that what has not been fully articulated might find its way into the world.

For me that first happened in a poetry workshop. Poems are famously elliptical. They gave me a slanted way to approach things, things that had been moldering beneath the floor boards, early trauma -- early broken joy and the years of a strange forgetting that followed. I was still a functional adult, not so damaged that I could not love my kids or work a job or make music or find the love of my life, but there were things that wanted out, that wanted to breathe. Poetry opened the window. I lived and worked there for a couple decades and I am constantly grateful for all the terrific poets I met, and read, and for the good presses who put my words in print. It was wonderful to find other minds like mine, minds that wanted to look behind the curtains.

But one summer I quite suddenly started writing prose. And not just any old prose. I was writing a story. It was not elliptical, not slanted. It was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end and I had two students in mind when I started. One was a bright rambunctious wholly-engaged boy named Billy, the other his quieter classmate, Jacob. Jacob the thinker. Jacob the survivor. Jacob, the boy who had experienced things that were beyond his understanding.

The story was busy building itself in my brain. It wanted to take place far away, in the 13th century England. I’ve been an amateur medievalist for a long time and the story loved using all the things I’d learned about the early middle ages to tell a tale that two very 21st century boys had inspired.

I wrote The Witch of Leper Cove in Boulder, Colorado where my husband and I had rented a house for the summer. Boulder’s gorgeous. It has great hiking and running trails, lots of music and so much blue sky that there’s always a reason to be outdoors. But that summer I was usually indoors. I was set up at the kitchen table of our rental (I’d left my research books at home because when those are around I read instead of write) with my laptop and the beginnings of a story that brought its own impetus – a strong sense that the time was here.

The writing itself was frantic, fun, scary and constant. I wrote most days from 9 to 3 and for some reason the words never stopped. When I did take breaks I was likely to find my characters waiting for me along the running path to tell me I’d messed up the plot, that I needed to change it because they would never do things the way I was writing them. Sometimes they told me a new character was coming, sometimes they told me the story would change soon. Always they told me not to worry. There was a story. I listened to those comments and went right back to work. And each night I’d read that day’s writing to my patient husband who, I was delighted to realize, was enjoying it.

At night I slept, sort of, meaning I dreamed the book, the story unfolding so strongly that I wondered once if I might be going nuts. But it was not insanity – just a full-time writing flood. I wrote and wrote – and then I wrote some more and when it was over the summer was gone.

The result of that summer is The Witch of Leper Cove. It’s a story about disruption, family loss, and what comes after, not just the dislocation and distress but eventually the fun of new adventures, good fortune and maybe even love. It’s about facing your fears to right a wrong perpetrated by a large power, even when you don’t have magical powers or a team of dragons at your beck and call. It’s definitely about trusting yourself and finding allies and working with them to rescue an innocent when that opportunity comes your way. It’s about being human — which of course, we all are. I hope you will give it a try and let me know what you think. Read More 

Face it. You too have wanted fame. It's nearly, or perhaps even clearly impossible to participate in the public life of poetry and not want some. Some recognition. A few awards. Praise and Place. I want that too. It just comes with the territory.

But if you're smart (you're smart, yes?) that desire is tempered by all the good sense in your head - mostly knowing that no matter how much recognition a poet gets it rarely feels like enough - and I could tell you a story that makes that clear. But this year I think I've gotten an even better handle on the whole fame issue.

Fame, it turns out, is not about the famous one, not something he or she gets. When fame is happening in the right way the gift is to the rest of us who get to find about something or someone who is worth knowing about - someone we may have missed but for the glittery attention fame focuses on the poet and the work.

This came to me when I found out Yona Harvey's book, Hemming the Water, had won the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize (or award or whatever they call it.) Why is that so fabulous? Not because it will do something for Yona, definitely not because it will change the inner world of Yona Harvey. I know her and she is too real and clear-headed for that to happen. But the prize means more readers will find out about her masterful musical book. That's what will happen - what fame should do. Fame is for those of us who don't know yet about some splendid new work.

If you don't own the book - just log off this and order it. Hemming the Water. Do it now - she's that good. Read More 

"I'm writing in Paris" certainly sounds good. That was part of the plan But here I am in one of the world's greatest cities and between the churches, the museums, the food, the parks, the people on the street - I can't seem to write a thing. There's too much to experience and wonder at.

But haven't most of my best-laid plans come undone? And hasn't that usually worked out well? "Trust the process and keep a notebook handy" are perhaps the wisest words for writers. For this one anyway.

In my dream world all the cities have Metros where people can scowl at each other as they fly from place to place so that geography loses its death-grip on art and culture and we can all hear each other read...often. So, let me sign off with one more bit about trusting process:

Me: "Funny, I seem to be working on poems."
Jim: "Yes, that usually happens when you decide to quit writing poetry altogether."

May your day be full my friends. A bientot!  Read More 

When I first heard Judy Collins sing 'who knows where the time goes' I liked it - I just didn't get it. I was maybe 19 and there was no such thing as time. There were days - occasionally weeks and very occasionally deadlines. But mostly there was now.

That started changing when I got pregnant. I wanted the baby so much. I wanted it now. It seemed absurd to me that I had to wait - just like everyone else -- the whole 9 months to have my heart's desire. I dreamed the baby, ate for the baby and grew intimate with the baby as mothers do who feel the first motion, the later kicks, the even later very dramatic somersaults. The heartbeat - I never tired of that and I learned something about time. It can involve waiting.

The early years with kids seem slow (will we never be beyond night time feedings, diapers, playground trips?) then fast (who is this more-than-half-grown person impersonating my daughter?) I had two and then when I married Jim we each got two more. We laugh now but sometimes then we cried, or paced or worried.

Then 16 years ago today (happy birthday Zoe!) we got the call announcing our grandson. He was not the first grandchild, but he is the one who got me thinking about this today. These days time is a long slippery ribbon stretching from new year to new year. As soon as we put away Christmas we start to think about the summer and it comes - even this year - quickly.

So - I confess - Jim and I begin to think about the last years, and although we do hope for years we no longer assume "years." And since that is a fact we are doing those things people say they will do "when they are old." Because I know that sometimes time involves Not Waiting we leave next week for a month in Paris - a whole month even though the dollar/euro exchange rates takes us a little beyond crazy. I am afraid to mention it at times as it seems so self-indulgent when many friends are working hard to keep jobs they find frustrating - but this is our time to do this. I want to forget about marketing and PR and books and spend a lot of time walking and seeing. Seeing is one thing old age gives us. Better seeing and better listening. In my case even better appreciating. More from the streets of Paris then...be well.  Read More 

Today it will not be that cold. I could even imagine we are on the cusp of Spring were it not for the clever predictors. They are the weather guys who seem to get it right more often than not these days. They say that when I see the first snowflakes tomorrow I can expect them to keep coming till there's almost 10 inches of that chilly white stuff I crave so much at Xmas time. But it's not Xmas any more. It's March. We should be marching into warm time. It's almost daylight savings time, for heaven's sake. I want warm.

I also want ease. I want shirts with no jackets. Or even jackets with no gloves or hats or scarves. I want to get out my sandals knowing it's still too early to wear them but not too early to anticipate. I want promise.

Also birds. Also smells. Also the annoying sound of grass cutters and the icey man manning his station up at the park. I'll never be able to get myself to swallow the blue dye on his "blueberry" iceys, but I like having him there anyway. He's one more "hello"as we pass the park gates and go through the fountain area on our way to walking the reservoir.

I want the reservoir crowded again so I can greet my neighbors - most of whom seem to be in some stage of health-recovery. They want to get thin, or fix their backs or lower their blood pressure. I'm right there with them - I want health too. I want to be able to run the reservoir for at least one more year with Steve Earle and Richard Thompson in my headphones pushing me along. I want to see Jane walking with Patrick, and Peter walking dutifully uphill even though Susan seems to have the dogs in Kansas. I want to see Matt the dog walker with his wild bouquet and my next door neighbor Camille heading out in her lime green running shorts. I want to see Ellen cruising along on Gerald buzzing the Tazza D'oro and Jim sitting with his cronies sipping their brew while Amy hoists a big box of something to her shoulder and brings it in - I mean I want to be out on the streets of Pittsburgh so I'm holding on. I am barely just holding on. How about you?
 Read More 

Once again I am not at the AWP - a convention (let's be frank) in Seattle where tens of thousands of writers have occupied the downtown hotels, the sidewalks and of course the watering holes. During the next few days there will be some dandy readings, some moving memorials ( I too miss you Kurt Smith) and lots of reunions with writer-pals from far-away places.

For those who are psychologically better equipped than I am to handle mega-crowds there will no doubt be truly great things to hear and even see (watch out for Stanley Plumly's hair if he's still coming...it's a glorious sight.) For newer younger writers there will be the thrill of just being there. Being there for real. A real writer. With the other real writers and the editors of major magazines who may, if you happen to show up at the right time, actually take a shine to you and ask you to send them some work (thank you kind David Hamilton.)

There will also be tons of money spent on hotels and food and drink and taxis. There will surely be the strong stink of neurosis when you find yourself packed into an elevator with 35 other writerly hopefuls and 5 tired-of-it senior types who had to come to this thing for one PR reason or another. That smell can stay with you awhile, but you have to balance it against a stellar reading by someone like Anne Carson who can conduct a thousand poets in two parts - perfectly - whenever she likes.

So - the AWP is a mixed bag and my last trip was when "Let Me Open You a Swan" came out. Dana Curtis, editor at Elixir Press, had published it and she was paying for a table in the book room. Michelle Mitchell-Foust, the fine poet who had chosen the MS was coming too. I felt I should go because a better, kinder and more aesthetically smart editor than Dana is hard to find and both she and Michelle are terrific poets. Not being an academic I bought my own ticket and signed on for a hotel bill that blew my budget. But it must have been worth it - right?

What is it about those convention hotels that drains the joy from even a happy occasion? Is it the scale of the rooms or the tawdry carpets and drapes and moveable walls that are supposed to communicate elegance but bow painfully to functionality. And then there's the constant buzz of the worker bees managing the event who make you realize the AWP is not a collection of writers and educators, but a business - a very big business - that has a business-like preoccupation with overhead and the countless rules that are generated in any bureaucratic institution. It's an environment that I find difficult - I mean physically it's a place you want to get away from. But where to go?

Well, after the fun of hellos and the sight of my very own book on Elixir's table and the somewhat daunting sight of thousands and thousands of other books ( I mean, how many of us had spent years closeted in small spaces producing this art?) and the overwhelming opportunity (dare I say mandate?) to swell my suitcase with a significant number of these other books, I started to roam the halls, waving, passing people I might know, seeing friends from my own town and seeing the famous who I'd met at writers' conferences who were kind enough to appear to know me and who had places to be and things to do. There were lots of "pedagogical" sessions - but I don't teach and many of the ones I had attended in the past seemed like vehicles to convince university administrators to pay for a plane ticket.

So in a cowardly fashion I found the least crowded elevator and hustled on back to my very expensive room (that did have a nifty view of the Flat Irons) and called home to tell Jim - well, to make it sound like I was having more fun than I was having.

I hope all of you there now are having fun. The reunions can be sweet and some readings are meteoric. But the best thing I did in Denver was to take my uke over to the sort of walking mall not too far from hotel district so I could sit on a corner and sing. People came by and gave me puzzled looks but some folks listened to a tune and two fellows tapped their feet. Best was the little girl who sang along although she did not really have the words. She sang with me in Denver and made me glad.  Read More