Linda Strever
POETRY . FICTION . NONFICTION
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Shopping with Nana

9/8/2013

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PictureMy brother and I in our winter attire
I grew up in a small town in central Connecticut, where fields of nursery seedlings, herds of grazing dairy cows, and acres of net-covered tobacco plants defined the landscape. When I was a little girl, my family shopped for everything from hardware to housewares to clothing at Oberg's Store. I remember trying on a pair of red Mary Janes and prancing across the wooden floor to show them off. But my most exciting shopping excursions were the ones that happened when my grandmother came to visit. She'd take me by bus all the way to Hartford to visit G. Fox & Co., a huge department store and place of wonder. I rode my first escalator and elevator there, and I was entranced when a clerk rang up a sale and sent the sales slip and cash through a vacuum tube to some mysterious destination with a whoosh. In the Toy Department on the 11th floor there was a stuffed giraffe too tall to fit in my house. These shopping trips happened once or twice a year, when Nana would buy me an outfit for Easter or a special hat and coat for winter. One spring we boarded the bus home with a big white rectangular box and a flowered hatbox, containing my bright green coat, with its fashionable three-quarter-length sleeves, and my glorious white organdy hat, with its filmy brim and gossamer rose. I'm the age she was then. I hope I said thank you. 

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Heroic Stories

9/1/2013

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PictureMy grandparents, 1917
With my new book coming out, Against My Dreams, I've been thinking about my grandmother a lot, because the poems in the collection are written in her voice.

As I was preparing to go to press, I had a revelation that came in the form of a question: What if the heroic stories we grew up with, the ones we learned in school, the ones that provided the underpinnings of history, were stories of people like my grandmother?

She grew up in a poor family on a small mountain farm, emigrated from her homeland as a young woman, was widowed in the Great Depression and raised two children on her own, spent her whole life working as a domestic servant, never owned anything except some clothes. 
What if her story and the stories of people like her defined heroism, rather than the stories of generals and diplomats, presidents and industrialists, inventors and explorers? How would American society be different if lives like hers were honored and celebrated? What values would emerge? How would we see each other?

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Selling Art: Why I Am a Poet (part 2)

8/25/2013

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I chose the title of this two-part blog post to pay homage to one of my all-time favorite poems, "Why I Am Not a Painter," by Frank O'Hara, in which he describes creating a series of poems he called Oranges during the same weeks his friend Mike Goldberg worked on a painting called Sardines. I love O'Hara's humor, his humility, his keen observation of himself and everything around him.

In 1983 I was working as a graphic artist at the University of Connecticut, where I designed publicity and educational materials for an exhibition entitled Art with the Touch of  Poet at the William Benton Museum of Art on campus.

Prior to his tragic death in 1966 at the age of 40, Frank O'Hara was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art and a central figure in what is known as the New York School. The exhibition at the Benton brought together the work of 33 of O'Hara's artist friends, while an exhibit of his writing ran concurrently at the campus library, along with accompanying films, talks, and readings by writers in O'Hara's circle. In order to produce the pieces for the Benton, I had to make photographic facsimiles of some of O'Hara's handwritten poems. I can still picture the pale pencil scribbles and cross-outs on the yellowed, flimsy paper I handled day after day. I was a budding poet at the time and holding O'Hara's original work was thrilling.

When I wrote Part 1 of this blog entry about my friend Susan Christian selling her painting after my words had caught someone's eye, I thought about co-creation, about serendipity. 

I emailed Susan to tell her my Frank O'Hara story and share his poem.

She emailed back a simple reply: "I knew Mike Goldberg."
Picture
Susan Christian
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Selling Art: Why I Am a Poet (part 1)

8/17/2013

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Picture
Susan Christian with some of her work
Photo by Joanne Lee




Stay tuned for part 2 
of this blog post, 
coming soon!

I'm a member of a feedback group that includes both writers and visual artists. We don't critique; instead we respond with our experiences of each other's work. This feedback method is not only great fun, it also provides useful and refreshing insights about what a given piece of writing or art expresses to each of us. During one session we were viewing paintings by Susan Christian at her downtown Olympia studio; each of us drew and/or wrote a little blurb and pinned it to the wall next to the related painting. One of Susan's pieces was a long canvas painted deep purple with a vibrant core of red in the center. I wrote my response and pinned it to the wall. Some weeks later Susan removed the paintings, intending to hang new work. But she hadn't yet removed all of the blurbs, when a woman visited the studio and happened to read the little piece I'd written. She immediately asked Susan, "Where is this painting? I want to buy it." And she did!!

What I had written became this poem:

On Seeing Susan’s Painting 
in Memory of Her Uterus

 
I want to glimpse this kind of red
in everything, a core that births
blood, that sobs pulsing, burning

cries. The throb & heat of days 
contracted, expanded, so I’ll 
always know in thick, violet night 

that when I wake I will wake. 
A center so vibrant I hold it 
like a kiss, lingering & juicy— 

the blossom of flesh meeting 
flesh, opening like lips, like mouth, 
to taste the tongue of living.

 
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Doing Things I Don't Know How to Do

8/12/2013

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PicturePhoto by Barry Troutman
Photo by Barry Troutman

It started last Thanksgiving when I began an art quilt requiring skills beyond mine. The square I'd cut for the background had been sitting on the table for days, eyeing me warily, while I stalked the perfect image in my mind as if I were a predator after its prey. Finally there was nothing else to do but pick up a pair of scissors. I didn't think about it, just let my hands do their bravest work, and I watched as the picture I'd imagined began to appear. Since that November afternoon I've done many things I didn't know how to do: prepared a manuscript for publication, collaborated with designer Debi Bodett to create this website and marketing materials for my book, leapt into social media, learned a million things about the publishing industry, rebirthed my life in ways I couldn't have seen nine months ago. Oh, and that quilt is nearly finished.   
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Morning Conversations

8/2/2013

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In front of my house stands a great cedar. We've lived together for nearly twenty-five years. Most mornings we converse in a silent kind of speech. My hands against its trunk, I read its slow, deep pulse. And its shaggy bark feels the spread of my fingers, the breadth of my palms, the warmth of my skin. Face to face, we come to know each other. We talk about things for which there are no words, only the touch of hand and bark, the beat of blood and sap, the lifting of fronds and hair in wind.

Barry Troutman
Photo by Barry Troutman
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Linda Strever
Olympia, WA
linda@lindastrever.com

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