The World Has Need of You | Ellen Bass
everything here seems to need us . . . —Rilke
 
I can hardly imagine it
as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient
prayer of my arms swinging
in counterpoint to my feet.
Here I am, suspended
between the sidewalk and twilight,
the sky dimming so fast it seems alive.
What if you felt the invisible
tug between you and everything?
A boy on a bicycle rides by,
his white shirt open, flaring
behind him like wings.
It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much
and too little. Does the breeze need us?
The cliffs? The gulls?
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
the ocean doesn’t care.
But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth,
the earth, ever so slightly, fell
toward the apple as well.
 
  
 
I am writing this as our first “winter” storm rolls toward Denver. I wanted this colder weather, complained all summer and into fall about the too-high temperatures. Yesterday the high was 80 degrees. Today’s predicted high is 39.
 
This sudden drop in temperature reminds me of my current life, how I operate on a consistent plain until something unexpected interrupts my plans and I have to quickly adapt. Unexpected annoyances and unexpected losses, and everything in-between, have tested my ability to adapt the past several months.

There are times in my life when I’ve been near-breaking before I adapted. I fear I’ve recently also flat-out failed at adaptation.
 
A good example of this is this last issue of Tiger’s Eye. I have spent far too long getting it out into the world. Not out of laziness or inability; it has been a combination of events and personal set-backs. Now it is finally with our printer for the final proof, and should be ordered by the end of the month. I can live with a Christmas release. Our readers who mailed poetry so very long ago, are most likely wary they’ll ever see their work in print.
 
My lack of adaptation is in part a grieving. I have lost my best friend to a move neither of us anticipated. I have lost my own thread as a writer. And the work of supporting other poets became a weight I didn’t want to lift. I admit this, because the journal is finished, beautiful and nearly ready to mail to our readers. I admit it as you deserve to know that I was swimming upstream for a very long time, treading water, and I feel I’ve finally grabbed a Styrofoam ring and am paddling downstream once again. I have rejoined the living, breathing world of poetry.
 
Unexpectedly, my wandering in the desert of ennui has brought new people into my life, ones who understood because they too have been broken and changed by either health scares or job losses or unexpected life changes. A new friend, who I met in the most serendipitous way, makes jewelry. I have watched this woman create the most unusual and desirable pieces. That she refuses to do Etsy or eBay or any “E” commerce thrills me. She won’t get a PayPal account and she won’t accept credit cards. I absolutely love her attitude.
 
That attitude is also my own. We fought off the desire to make our press bigger, and we have continued printing what we want to print. Sometimes the reasons weren’t apparent to our readers, maybe we were too eclectic, a sweet sonnet next to a rangy rant. Thank God JoAn knew how to pair the poems, creating a seamless read for anyone who reads the journal from front to back. She suffered over which poems belonged next to each other, as if it was Match.com and she had to be sure they’d live happily ever after. They usually did . . .
 
The reality of this life, from prokaryotes to warm-blooded lumbering humans, is that nothing is static, we are in constant motion. Those of us with the ability to reason are making decisions and judgments continually. Just when we believe we’ve got it figured out, whoosh! Our work is always affected by these unexpected changes, and some of us continue writing and publishing and some of us go underground. There is no shame in going underground. But hopefully we come back up for air.
 
The other day my husband was driving and my mind was poetically wandering, a different name for daydreaming . . . and to our right was my dream car, a new Range Rover. But instead of the usual thought, I’ll never have one of those babies, I was washed in dread and aversion. The car was on the back of a flatbed truck, and it was nearly folded in half. I have been in accidents, I have had to give up cars due to their being beyond repair, but this was so jarring I kept looking away. I knew, just knew, that someone had just died in that car. I thought of their spouse or whoever answered the phone or the door . . . how they had plans for dinner or had tickets to see Dr. Strange that night. Maybe they had children in the car with them. I had to stop even considering that possibility, as I had passed my ability to see the entire picture without getting ill.
 
We are overwhelmed frequently. The tumultuous election, 20 months leading up to it, and now the hope or fear being announced on every radio and television station, every internet blog. We are a nation of beings overwhelmed by social media and speed. Those of us in big cities know the price paid for participation is high. If you hesitate, if you speed up too much to cut someone off, if you’re tweeting instead of driving, you can be folded into your car.

You can be folded into your own life.
 
As poets, as writers, we attempt to capture moments, we hope to stall a feeling or an image, that catch in the throat when someone tells us they don’t have time for us, that red sand spire in the desert that shouldn’t be able to sit atop a smaller rock without toppling. We are reporters of a different sort. If we have mastered our craft, we can offer an opinion within a question. Never, never should we become didactic by implying or outright saying, This is the way it is. We can speak for the collective, be a universal spokesperson only if we do so with particularity.
 
My apologies for the late tiger, and for any slow or lack of response on my part. The transition to part-time publishing has been painful. To those of you who know JoAn and I, and Mary Jo, you know we have high standards and have only wished to serve our poets. In the months and years ahead I hope to continue that tradition, printing our Infinities series and an occasional chapbook. But yes, the speed of life had affected my own vision, giving me a major hurtle to jump, and finally a renewed commitment to you, our poet.
 
We cannot tell what lies ahead, or what our lives will look like next week or next year, but we must offer our best work, our kindest words and our staunchest support to the small circle of people who populate our lives. And if we are very lucky, we may even influence others beyond our sphere with our words. In the middle of the chaos of our lives, the uncertainties, the losses, there is a certain joy in knowing other poets and readers are out there anxious for the news only we can deliver.

And that the world has need of each of us.

​Each of us.

I try to apply colors like words that shape poems, like notes that shape music.  Joan Miró


The half-box French easel stands in the corner of my office, drawing pad flipped to a stark white page. Waiting for gesso. Waiting for a charcoal pencil or paint. Waiting for me to show up. No different than the writer's white page I have faced most of my adult life. 

We talk about the new year being "new," when in reality we bring our story forward embracing only an idea of newness; rebirth is not a winter activity, it normally belongs to the spring. 

And yet . . . 

Two new granddaughters. 

And yet . . . 
 
Out my window more snow and melting ice, rivulets of cold water that will freeze into thin sheets tonight. Into this bleak landscape, a riot of color, houses, trees and gardens. Joan Miró’s painting, “The Farm.” In a second painting, "The Farmer's Wife" holds one cat by a leg, another cat staring back at us, a triangle needing identification in the corner. Joan Miró, the French Surrealist painter, attempts to break through my wintry mood. Instead of poetry, I crave visual images, life that waits under the scrim of ice--I seek the passion that melts ice.

Joan Miró was a quiet man, prolific and consistent in his output. Unlike Pollack or Picasso, he was not possessed by alcohol or women, but by his art. No one's opinion was more important than his personal vision. His paintings are often considered childlike, primary-colored and flat on the canvas. Constellations, 23 gouaches, introduced the concept of a series of paintings to America. Miró was a working artist able to continually ask not only what his individual pieces meant, but what it meant to be completely open to possibility in a world that wished to define him.

A blank page or canvas means nothing if we don't fill it in. Fill it with experimentation or vision, but fill it in or we are not creators, we are dreamers. The poem not written, the painting not painted, are the ideas of creation. The idea is always more expansive than what we are capable of, and that frightens us. Once we put in the time and effort, once we honor how difficult the medium is to control, then we can claim to be poets or artists. Not before.

This winter is less about mastery, and more about mystery. The way I approach art is the way I approached writing poetry: show me how, give me the tools, then I will do it my way. There is nothing thrilling about copying anyone, poet or artist. We may do so in order to learn the craft, to understand what it feels like, but once we know, we must express what is original in us.

This winter, as I face the end of our poetry journal, as my best friend and co-partner in Tiger's Eye Press has moved, is less accessible, it is not easy to see vibrant colors or to appreciate the quiet that winter exemplifies. I have loved this quiet all of my life, but this season, it speaks less of dormancy and more of poignant endings. 

Joan Miró appeared just under the ice that poetry had become. He took me to his studio, showed me brushes and turpentine-stained wood. He brought out incomplete sculptures and paintings. I could not tell if he disliked them or if they stalled in place for lack of time. We didn't say much, both of us given to bouts of silence. It was enough though, his imaginative leaps became threads of light that might lead to poetic lines, and even newly-sketched lines. I was shown that it doesn't matter what medium I'm working with, as long as I have the courage to begin . . . and the courage to complete. 
​

"The Escape Ladder," one of 23 gouaches, The Constellations.

24 little hours.

One day we are living peacefully, the next our world has changed.

The news is filled with havoc, we cannot escape the barrage of negative information unless we unplug and live off the grid. Although I find that tempting, I am too interested in what is happening to stop watching Morning Joe five times a week. 

It seemed reasonable when I started this habit, the discussions more humane that other news shows, and I did want to learn more about the presidential candidates. 

But then Paris. 

And then San Bernardino. 

I literally spent days watching, horrified and unable to turn away. 

How do we process this collective loss? The usual escape mechanisms no longer work. It has taken me weeks to come out of a melancholy fog. Even now I feel different, as if there was a before and an after. The after has left me more somber.

Now Christmas is almost here. It doesn't seem real this year, almost like a play we are putting on so as not to acknowledge how fragile the world seems. But then I am reminded that 99% of humankind is decent. Most people are not violent. Most people are compassionate. 

Tonight my grandson told me I would be eaten by a dolphin and broken, but then he would pull me out and fix me. It was just what I needed to hear, I would be broken and then I would be fixed. The wisdom of a two-year old.

In times of stress, of war, of loss, poetry has been the elixir that spoke to us and for us. If we can attempt to speak of the unspeakable, we take part in the slow process of healing. Sometimes the unintentional poem is the very best writing we'll ever do. Our guard is down, we are raw, and the words fall out and onto the page. 

There is nothing inside me
that won’t be cured by
grieving; but I have given
myself orders to
carry you to my death.

These are lines from my most recent poem. They are personal, but universal in that all of us know what it is to grieve, to want to stop grieving, and then to finally acknowledge that some losses are inevitably permanent. We carry our losses differently, but those of us who call ourselves poets, have a fantastic container for our grief.

What I wish for all of you this holiday season is first and foremost peace.

But then I wish you something less ethereal: sharpened pencils and TUL pens, legal pads and yellow highlighters. The latest Poet's Market and a subscription to World Literature Today. I wish you these mundane items, because I know you will use them to write beautiful things, to make people stop momentarily to watch a flock of geese skating on a frozen lake, or to hear, maybe for the first time, a woodpecker in the trees overhead. Because your words will become a catalyst for hope.

What a difference a day makes. What a difference a poem makes.

Colette

When we started discussing the possibility of no longer publishing the journal, the realization that we had been at this for 15 years seemed incomprehensible. 

Our friend Edith told me that together JoAn and I had created our own planet, that Tiger's Eye was an energetic entity. When you're in something, you miss that, you are just too busy to see the bigger picture. Stepping back, I can see Edith's point. It does feel a little like having a child. There was an idea and then there was a tiger.

The tiger has always been real to us. We tried calling him "she," but he insisted he was male. You don't argue with a tiger. When we're late getting an issue out, as we are now, the tiger can be found in the corner of the room unsheathing his nails and growling loudly.

Today I am guessing the tiger is saddened by our decision to stop publishing the journal. We too are dealing with a sea change, a major loss. Small press journals are tender things, sometimes lasting one issue. Some last a few more, others turn themselves into larger publications. Our publication remained small, we never pushed into a larger market, we never pushed the tiger to be something it wasn't.

What the tiger was, was a bridge. A bridge between friends. A bridge between silence and voice. A bridge for poets to walk over into a world of acceptances and books. That is what we hoped for in the beginning, and that is unbelievably what we achieved. 

To all of our poets, and in our minds and hearts you are OUR poets, we would like to say thank you for fifteen years of amazing poetry, of imaginative leaps, of true friendships. We know of no other realm where people are accepted for themselves, where ideas and thoughts, no matter how varied, are respected. The world of poetry gives voice and stature to the most timid among us. It creates community where there was none.

JoAn and Jo and myself are still here, still publishing, just not our beloved journal. We aren't saying goodbye, but asking you to stay close, to let us know what you're writing, where you're published. The tiger is still pacing back and forth, and we will follow him into the next phase of Tiger's Eye Press. We hope you'll follow too.

Colette