Practice Makes. January 2025

Happy Aquarius season and a peaceful new year to all of you carrying the world’s waters in your cup, pouring feathers and forests from your overflowing vase. In these first few weeks of the new year, the word that’s kept coming to mind is fragile, whether my attention is landing on wildfires, on ceasefires, on the frost riming the tender green leaves in my yard. Everything—including my attention itself—seems especially tenuous, delicate, vulnerable.
 
If you’re in the same spot, feeling more like an eggshell than the slab of granite you long to be, I hope you can also sense the bird or snake or tortoise or platypus held safely inside you, the lovely creature that needs us to be easily broken in order to emerge.
 
xo
JP ‪

This past fall, I was invited to write a short piece for an expanded edition of Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times, an anthology edited by Joyce Chen and Donna Bellew, forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Like the other contributors, I was asked to choose a favorite poem and write an accompanying reflection on it, through which I would share essential advice and practical know-how that could help young women, femmes, and gender expansive folks “imagine deeply, create bravely, and find the confidence to build a meaningful life in this uncertain and chaotic world.” Sure. Easy peasy.
 
The editors had sent me a sample of the other authors and their essays. The contributors list included a lot of founders and directors, executives and presidents, and the examples I read clearly offered wisdom on how to navigate professional crossroads, how to move through the doubts and dilemmas that one might encounter, especially if you live in a body that dominant culture doesn’t look at and say, “Oh yes, you’re an obvious leader.” And so I wracked my brain for poems that could inspire, could activate, could rouse and uplift.
 
But truly, there was only one poem that declared itself to me, over and over, no matter how many books on my shelves I scoured. Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” rattled around in my brain, as it always does, and I had the same internal struggle I always do, wondering why I have to be so darn melancholy all the time, why the best advice I can offer to a young person is about how to navigate loss. Even when the editors wrote back, saying that the rights to the poem might be difficult to secure, I couldn’t think of any other advice I wanted to give, except what I’d learned from grief. Fortunately, the editors found a way to secure the rights, and last month I began writing my reflection, which begins: “I used to feel ghoulish for thinking that life is one long, continuous state of loss.” (Used to? Hah! Obviously, I still feel ghoulish. I am an uncertain ghoul in an uncertain time.)
 
Like Bishop, I go on to list my many losses, and then I offer what I learned by memorizing and reciting “One Art” to myself and in public, many times over many years. To find out what I gleaned from that poem, you’ll have to read the anthology (or, you know, invite me out for tea or tapas). But I’ll share here what I learned from writing about what I learned from the poem. I learned that, maybe, it’s not so bad that in my creative work, my attention always turns back to loss and grief. I don’t know if Elizabeth Bishop ever worried about being ghoulish, about not being upbeat enough. But if her best known poem is about “the art of losing,” why should I think I have to be more chipper than this ancestor whose work I admire so much?
 
There is plenty to grieve in this world—if not in our personal spheres, then certainly in climate crisis and colonial projects and systemic violence. And attending to that grief is necessary: for mental health, for learning what it is that we love, for choosing individual and communal actions that are rooted in the clarity and creativity that comes from truly knowing what we have already lost. If my inclination is to keep coming back to loss in my writing, it might be because there are so few other places I’ve found to hold and cultivate grief, to keep it warm and wet and nourished, to let it blossom into whatever fruit or flower might come from its sobering seed. Writing about grief is the most practical know-how I have—as useful and sensible as knowing what you’re growing in your garden—and I hope that for all of us in this uncertain, impermanent world, it gets easier to tend to that seed in its dark chamber and to imagine what will spring up one day, into the light.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever gone into a new year with a resolution in mind. It always seemed like a surefire way to set myself up for disappointment, making decisions rooted in shame, and oddly legislative besides: “Whereas I have gained ten pounds and watched over 1000 hours of TV in the last year, I hereby resolve to eat no sugar, go to the gym three days a week, and dedicate all my leisure time to reading books, learning languages, and keeping a gratitude journal.” I wouldn’t knock anyone else’s choice to use the turning of the calendar to make a resolution that feels important to them, but it just never appealed to me.
 
In the last few years, though, I have taken to the practice of devoting some time around the winter solstice to reflecting on the past year and setting some intentions for the year ahead. Is the difference between intention and resolution semantics? Maybe, but I’m a poet, and making meaning of the difference between one word and another is pretty much my bread and butter.
 
Along with the meaning of intention that’s commonly used—a direction that we’re stretching or moving toward—intention also has a specific use in medicine, to describe the healing process of a wound, either by the edges of the wound meeting each other or by new tissue forming across the span of the wound. (The former is known as first intention, the latter as second intention. Pop either or both into a search engine to discover lots of other evocative language about wounds, such as proud flesh and clotting cascade, and at least one image that you’ll wish you’d never seen.)  
 
And so, when I sit in the dark days of December and mull over intentions for the coming months, I’m often, yes, trying to discern what I want to keep orienting myself toward when life inevitably drags me in a thousand other directions. But I’m also noting what feels injured or broken within me or around me, and how I might mend it, through contact or creation.
 
In 2024, my intention was to bring my creative work “behind the scenes,” to write and otherwise create for myself alone. I hadn’t truly done that for two decades or more, and I’d begun to feel curious and a little wary about why I’ve devoted so much of my life to making for an audience. So, last year, I opted not to send out new work for publication. I didn’t apply for grants or residencies or the other opportunities for recognition and funding that I’d usually grasp after. For several months, I even took breaks from this newsletter, itself a form of being public that I’d begun to question.
 
In that year of a more solitary creative practice, I learned plenty about my ego, about how much I’m driven by concepts of productivity and perfectionism that I purport not to espouse, about the extent to which publishing and performing are bound up with my desire to be in the spotlight, to be found worthy of attention, to be loved. And at the same time, I also came to the realization that the social aspect of creativity is part of what makes it feel so delightful and energizing for me, that I miss the connection and community that can come with making my creations public.    
 
So, I recently returned to sending and applying and otherwise getting back into a more public, presentational mode. It had been so long since I’d sent out writing that I couldn’t remember the file name of my trusty spreadsheet, the one where I’ve kept a running log of all my submissions since 2008. (Is it called something obvious, like “poetrysubmissions.xls”? Why yes, it is. Did it still take me 15 full minutes of searching to find it? You bet.) When I finally found that document, and scrolled through it, it struck me how much of it was, though reaching toward an audience, still a record of a pretty solitary creative practice. And that led me to one of my intentions for the coming year, the place that feels in need of mending.
 
In 2025, I’d like to usher in more creative collaboration. I’ll have a new book out in a few months, and that seems like an opportune way to collaborate, through setting up readings and conversations with other authors and artists I admire and draw inspiration from. But I’d also like to teach alongside other folks more—something that I’ve only done a handful of times but have always enjoyed—and to work alongside other folks on shared projects. In grad school, some twenty years ago now, I had a friend who I sometimes co-wrote poems with. More often, we’d issue each other ridiculous challenges, swapping end-rhymes that the other must use to compose a sonnet, or giving each other titles or artwork or other prompts that the other had to use as the basis for their next piece of writing. I loved the energy of that process, which felt less about producing “good” writing and more about playing, encouraging, exchanging gifts.
 
If you’re reading this newsletter, you probably have a sense of my interests and eccentricities, so if you, too, are feeling the collaborative spirit and think our practices might complement each other, drop me a line! And if I know you outside of this little newsletter community, don’t be surprised if I reach out with an oddball invitation to exchange some creative provocations in the year ahead. In the meantime, I’ll be here dreaming up collaborative projects—I write, you play music! I offer a forest bathing ritual, you introduce folks to nature journaling! I make screen-prints, you do interpretive dance!—and being resolute about not transforming my intentions into resolutions, not worrying too much about turning all these delightful notions into grand plans.

On Saturday, March 1, 2:15pm PT, I’ll be reading at the Salem Poetry Festival on the campus of Willamette University in Oregon. I’ll also be part of a reading that evening with other authors and editors from Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry.
 
On Wednesday, March 12, 7pm PT, I’ll be co-hosting the first Incite: Queer Writers Read event in the new Literary Arts space at 716 SE Grand Ave, Portland. More details soon on our lineup for this reading that, as always, will be followed by a community discussion.
 

As I ready my book for publication in May, I’ve also been helping, in small ways, to ready other folks’ books, too. I’ve had the pleasure of blurbing several poetry collections that are coming out in the next few months, including Dawn Angelicca Barcelona’s Roundtrip, due out from Finishing Line Press on March 14 (and available for pre-order now!). I met Dawn a few years back in a class I taught on assembling poetry manuscripts, and so it was especially heartening to see that she’d found a home for her book. Here’s what I wrote about it:

• The poems of Roundtrip are tethered to many places–New Jersey, the Philippines, South Korea, California–and reveal how one body can hold multiple “hearts // each beating in a different time zone.” In this collection, Dawn Angelicca Barcelona explores how locating “home” becomes complicated for diasporic people, especially for people who have inherited a history of colonization and imperialism. Roundtrip hungers for familiarity–for family–and recognizes that one way to find it is through tending to our wounds, both the ones that were inflicted upon us and the ones we were complicit in creating.

And if you don’t trust my two cents, you can also check out the glowing praise from the other folks who provided blurbs, including Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey.
 
I’m still in the early stages of lining up events to introduce my own book to the world, but the first of these welcome parties will be on Saturday, May 10, 3pm PT, when I’ll be reading with Rivka Clifton and David Seung at UpUp Books, 1211 SE Stark St, Portland.
 
And way out on Tuesday, September 9, 5:30pm PT, I’ll be the guest speaker at the Central Oregon Writers Guild meeting, which is free, open to the public, and offered both in person at the Downtown Bend Library and via Zoom. I’ll be talking about “Finding the Freedom in Form” (aka, what I’m always talking about), and there will be a couple of opportunities during the talk for everyone to experiment with some unusual formal constraints.
 
I’ll be following that talk with an in-person workshop, “Contents Under Pressure: Using Constraints to Stretch Your creativity,” on Saturday, September 13, 1pm PT at the Downtown Bend Library. We’ll play with what I think of as “extreme” constraints inspired by everything from music to math, from dictionaries to daily walks, and invent some of our own constraints to try out after the workshop ends. Registration for the workshop will be available soon on the Central Oregon Writers Guild website.
 

If you’ve got an opportunity you’d like me to include in a future newsletter, please let me know.