Mary Pierce Brosmer

Poetry (writing and reading and teaching ) as a Practice of Wholeness

2012-02-15T20:07:00.001-05:00

Poem Philia: Poetry Experiments & Immersion Community, Winter-Spring 2012

Notes for Weaving Around Lecture-Discussion Class #2

Mary Pierce Brosmer

“The pattern that connects is the pattern that corrects.” Gregory Bateson (see “A Theory ofAlcoholism,” “Mind and Nature,” “Steps to an Ecology of Mind.”

Poem

from Gk. poema "thing made or created, fiction, poetical work," from poein "to make or compose" (see poet).

System the whole creation, the universe," from L.L. systema "an arrangement, system," from Gk. systema "organized whole, body," from syn- "together" + root of histanai "cause to stand" from PIE base *sta- "to stand" (see stet). Meaning "set of correlated principles, facts, ideas, etc." first recorded 1630s. Meaning "animal body as an organized whole, sum of the vital processes in an organism"

ORGAN (Lat. organum, instrument): A group or branch performing specialized functions as part of a larger organization

ORGANISM: A system regarded as analogous to a living body

ORGANIC (Lat. organicus, of an implement): Having properties associated with living organisms

ORGANIZE (Lat organizare, organum, instrument): To manage or arrange systematically for united or harmonious action

ORGANIZATION: Something comprising elements with varied functions that contribute to the whole and to collective functions; A number of persons or groups having specific responsibilities and united for a particular purpose.

Pattern "the original; the archetype; that which is to be copied; an exemplar" [Johnson], from O.Fr. patron, from M.L. patronus (see patron). Extended sense of "decorative design" first recorded 1580s, from earlier sense of a "patron" as a model to be imitated. The difference in form and sense between patron and pattern wasn't firm till 1700s.

Creating New Patterns

“In the end, as I see it, there are only two possibilities for a human life. Either you strive to move beyond where you already are or else you continue to do what you have already done. Unless you have a vision that reaches beyond everything your life has been about so far, what is more than likely to happen is more of what's already happened. Why? Because the structures of human consciousness are habit patterns. That's not a negative thing—it's how the universe is created. Habits are formed at the level of matter, at the level of biology, and also in consciousness and culture. We are habits. And so unless there is a powerful energy and focused intention to break out of our habit-patterns and create new ones, it's more than likely that what will happen in the future will be similar to what's happened in the past. It takes an enormous degree of focused concentration, a big vision, and a deep commitment in order to break through the established habits and create new ones. But that's what conscious evolution is all about.”

Andrew Cohen

- - - - - - - - -

An understanding that poetry is embedded in the very deepest impulse of both Nature and Culture to connect is my context for both the reading of and writing of poems. “Gathering around poems” to borrow scripture scholar, Walter Brueggeman’s, phrase is meant to be generative, to lend vitality (pleasure, joy, insight, leaps of evolution, energy, etc.) to those gathered, “the beloved community,” if you will.

“The correction” Bateson refers to is the healing of the disruption to wholeness caused by disconnection and all its offspring ( war, exploitation of nature, addiction, despair, shame, abuse……) Un-natural suffering, I call it, different from natural cycles of loss and gain, birth and death.

FORM, is in this framework, is a collection of patterns: elements repeated often enough to become part of a tradition, a cultural lineage. Even verse which is “freer from” more apparent and or traditional form Has Form.

There is a continuum of “from most closed and rigid” forms to “most open and plastic forms.

The artistic practice of poetry, like that of life, seems to me expressed in questions such as:

how is that we live within the forms we receive “given forms” ?

what is ours to make within those forms?

what is ours to make by breaking those forms? adapting them?

inventing “new forms?

(One of the great disruptive “sins” in my view is the delusion that our making any of kind “has never been seen before” is “pure originality” “purity of genius.” Sprung from the head of Zeus, rather than birthed through and into history and matter. The arrogant posture that no one who came before, or who co-exists with us, has anything to teach us.)

The danger of forms / patterns of any kind is fundamentalist attachment to them.

The inversion of means and ends:

forms are meant as containers in which we can access and express the inaccessible: spirit, love, justice, beauty, order, freedom, and, all too often,

become ENDS in themselves, “commodities” upon which we build our careers and despoil others’ careers. In the grip of this delusion of ego we are willing to kill to defend the superiority of OUR form.

(One of the very best things I have ever read about how “means” become “ends” (and the consequences thereof) is an essay by Helen Luke, the esteemed Jungian teacher/analyst in her collected essays Way of Woman. About perhaps that most egregious example of things becoming an end in themselves: MONEY, it is called “The Feminine Principle of Exchange.” Did you know the goddess of the Roman mint was named “Moneta?”

My theory on how the (evil) inversion occurs is that there is a tragic flaw in how we teach and learn forms and systems of all kinds: poetic, political, financial, medical, etc. That flaw is actually a hole in the fabric: the holy grail, of “with”

cont-text com-munity the constant, consistent, con-tainer in which we SEE, KNOW AND LEARN where and why things are, and how they came to be that way and toward what ends. This radical, (to the root) archetypal, depth education and leadership is all but extinct in the speed of rushing toward the product or goal (perfect poems, great art, a just society, a healed family, a healthy nonprofit foundation, a productive business, measurable outcomes, etc.)) a goal which eludes us over and over again because the flaw has become embedded in our very brain structures.* The “how” of our learning to write poetry together embodied in this

class is a practice of creating, as Andrew Cohen suggests is possible, new brain habits.

(*See the Alphabet and the Goddess by Neurologist, Leonard Shlain)

----------

My favorite books on and about poetry and formal poetry:

Perrine, Laurence, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry

Deutsch, Babette, Poetry Handbook, a Dictionary of Terms

Skelton, Robin, The Shapes of our Singing: A Comprehensive Guide to Verse Forms and Metres From Around the World.

Ali, Afha Shahdid, Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English

Finch, Annie, (ed.) A Formal Feeling Comes: Poems in Form by Contemporary Women

You can’t go wrong with www.poetryfoundation.org

Welcome to poetry class

2012-01-31T10:10:00.002-05:00

Jan 30, 2012

Dear Poem Philia Friends,

In a poem I made in about 1983 or 1984, I discover some of the qualities of presence and conversation I hope for in our time together.

Integrity

(for Sharon and Kathy)

(integrity: an unimpaired condition, solidness, firm

adherence to a code of moral or artistic values)

Unimpaired

we come to the evening:

three women in the paling day

porch-sitting

framed by pots of geraniums

and children circling

the house in ardent play.

Unimpaired

we come to the talking:

there are no coy jokes

no artful presences

our presence is our art

the solid stuff of shared lives

words without shadows.

Unimpaired

we come to the listening:

men have called this gossip

but we shred nothing

instead, we mend,

as women do,

with fine stitches.

Unimpaired

we come to the touching:

fondle the rough nap

the silken mysteries of

the lives we unravel,

weaving on the large humming

loom of talk

NEW LIVES

un-im-paired women

repairing the

tears.

MPB

(self-published manuscript "With Fine Stitches")

In that period of my life, a series of sudden and clustered losses had rendered me feeling speechless and powerless. In poetry-writing I found a tool for beginning to heal my brain. I know that sounds silly, but the very pattern possibilities of poetry, less present in prose, began to help me “arrange the pieces that came my way” (Virginia Woolf)

in art and in the life I was making outside art.

I want that for each of you: the release, the joy, the fun, the repair in a ravaged world, and I know that the WE we will make will effect this, not what I will to happen.

To prepare for our time together:

1. Read or re-read pp. 62-82 in my book, Women Writing for (a) Change: a Guide for Creative Transformation. You can purchase it at Joseph-Beth, on Amazon as a Kindle or ipad download. Choose one of the exercises at the end of chapter five (page 68) and prepare a prose piece in response to it. Length: in the range of 200-300 words. Don’t fret over it. Your reading it and listening to others’ pieces will serve to introduce us and begin to create our “large humming loom of talk.”

*If you don’t have the book yet, and time is too short, e-mail me and I’ll send you the chapters in draft form. I will have some copies of the book for sale Thurs night too.

For the First night of Class:

1. Arrive by 6:15 to register and get settled; we’ll be on the second floor. I’ll have hot water for tea in the kitchen.

2. Bring whatever writing tools you enjoy using: journal, laptop, tablet.

3. If you have not paid online, bring a check for tuition in the full amount, or 1/3 of the amount, as I am offering the option of three payments for this class

Allow me to close with words from the late poet, Sam Hamill:

the poem cannot, finally,

be explained nor/defined. The true gift

/poetry bestows begins

and ends

with humility/before the task"

Sustaining Conscious Feminine Connection, December 28-30, 2011

2011-12-07T12:06:00.000-05:00

SCFC

Below is from an application I received for this month's leadership conference. Read more about it HERE.

Olivia Linn

SCFC

This is easy because I have been

writing this dream since I was nine.

Piecing together from

tired young crisp yellow heaven

pages

a desire so overwhelming:

I want to feel the air shiver

with the good and kind words we would speak

to each other like poems,

that would fall from our lips so easily.

Bodies would meet bodies and souls

meet souls with

quiet understanding.

There would still be aching but it would be

less,

we would help it be less.

We would help each other—what a novel concept.

We would help to lessen the sorrow and

grow our dreams

like scared little seeds that need a

thousand voices of encouragement.

We wouldn't think in terms of winning and losing but in

loving enough.

This is what I hope to give—

my youthful self effervescing dreams for

something bigger than me or

any of us. My burning self that knows

poetry like a savior.

My wildly impassioned self that fights and loves

with the same parts.

This self has so much to learn.

As a girl I did not seem to need much guidance

or as if I were in danger of losing my voice.

Later this bravery became slippery and elusive:

without such careful encouragement

I might have lost it.

I want to learn how to be careful

with girls losing, finding, re-finding fire.

Want to learn treasuring words with equal gratitude and

having real emotions without

losing myself in them

or discounting theirs.

I am afraid of being in charge of

making that kind of space.

I am afraid of setting boundaries,

of yelling when I have to,

because there is a
harsher side to this that demands protection.

I want to learn how to make a space where

every single self you are is okay,

where good intentions are valued,

acceptance and kindness are natural and easy and

truth exists in such abundance

it is hard to hold it all.

I'm afraid I won't be able to hold it all.

But this is also partly Why:

because it is so beautifully possible for me,

now,

to be unafraid to say what I'm afraid of.

Because I have known such kind consciousness,

because I feel at home in the kind of space I

dream of making and

if I have the capacity,

I also have the responsibility

to the work

older, stronger women have

struggled for.

I am truth-breathing testimony

to the power of this place. Loving it and

wanting it

so much makes it my work too.

The burning dreamer I am is seeking

a tender and powerful community:

I will labor alongside older,

stronger women,

I will make mistake after mistake,

I will work to fashion out of my

poetry and passion

something useful

because this is

too important

not

to work for.

SCFC

2011-12-03T22:00:00.001-05:00

Below is from an application I received for this month's leadership conference. Read more about it HERE.

Olivia Linn

SCFC

This is easy because I have been

writing this dream since I was nine.

Piecing together from

tired young crisp yellow heaven

pages

a desire so overwhelming:

I want to feel the air shiver

with the good and kind words we would speak

to each other like poems,

that would fall from our lips so easily.

Bodies would meet bodies and souls

meet souls with

quiet understanding.

There would still be aching but it would be

less,

we would help it be less.

We would help each other—what a novel concept.

We would help to lessen the sorrow and

grow our dreams

like scared little seeds that need a

thousand voices of encouragement.

We wouldn't think in terms of winning and losing but in

loving enough.

This is what I hope to give—

my youthful self effervescing dreams for

something bigger than me or

any of us. My burning self that knows

poetry like a savior.

My wildly impassioned self that fights and loves

with the same parts.

This self has so much to learn.

As a girl I did not seem to need much guidance

or as if I were in danger of losing my voice.

Later this bravery became slippery and elusive:

without such careful encouragement

I might have lost it.

I want to learn how to be careful

with girls losing, finding, re-finding fire.

Want to learn treasuring words with equal gratitude and

having real emotions without

losing myself in them

or discounting theirs.

I am afraid of being in charge of

making that kind of space.

I am afraid of setting boundaries,

of yelling when I have to,

because there is a
harsher side to this that demands protection.

I want to learn how to make a space where

every single self you are is okay,

where good intentions are valued,

acceptance and kindness are natural and easy and

truth exists in such abundance

it is hard to hold it all.

I'm afraid I won't be able to hold it all.

But this is also partly Why:

because it is so beautifully possible for me,

now,

to be unafraid to say what I'm afraid of.

Because I have known such kind consciousness,

because I feel at home in the kind of space I

dream of making and

if I have the capacity,

I also have the responsibility

to the work

older, stronger women have

struggled for.

I am truth-breathing testimony

to the power of this place. Loving it and

wanting it

so much makes it my work too.

The burning dreamer I am is seeking

a tender and powerful community:

I will labor alongside older,

stronger women,

I will make mistake after mistake,

I will work to fashion out of my

poetry and passion

something useful

because this is

too important

not

to work for.

Write to Deal/ Write to Heal #6

2011-11-21T08:08:00.001-05:00

Write to Deal/ Write to Heal
November, 2011 column

From pink ribbons to yellow ribbons.... does December have a ribbon color?
Oh, yeah..... red, with some gold and silver thrown in.

I have a Veterans Writing for (a) Change folder on my computer and another in my file cabinet. I have a picture in my mind of a circle of people: veterans of our too many wars and veterans of trying to hold families together because of our too many wars.

Veterans who have gathered to commit the heroic act of writing their stories, gathered to commit the even more heroic act of listening to others' stories when those stories are different from theirs.

In my vision we commit to one another to go beyond ribbons--and medals--and whose loss is greater than any one else's loss. Beyond "support our troops" and other slogans which delude us into thinking we know anything about "our troops" or about that person ahead of us on the Norwood Lateral with the yellow ribbon pasted to her suv, or that one in the beater sporting War is terrorism with a bigger budget on what's left of his bumper.

Maxine Hong Kingston

In my vision both these drivers and diverse others commit to stay at attention, to pay attention because attention heals. I love AA Founder Bill Wilson's saying "individual repair is a social effort." I love the forty years I've spent witnessing individuals heal slowly, from the inside out, within a the social effort that is a conscious, held-sacred writing community. I regret that my father had no such place to remember what he did and what was done to him in the hell that was the air war over WWII Germany, where he flew 37 missions at the controls of a B-24, where casualty rates were well over 90%, high enough that a kid without a high school education could be field-promoted to Captain and pilot. I regret that we forget that to remember is to re-member which is to say, restore the members lost to violence.

Forrest Brandt

If you want a couple of big picture resources about writing with veterans here is a link to Bill Moyers interviewing Maxine Hong Kingston about her writing workshop for veterans and this one about the Warriors Project. On the other hand local is better, so veteran, writer and teacher of writing Forrest Brandt has given me permission to include his e-mail address if you are looking for someone who has the chops to write with warriors and others.

Allow me to end with a poem I wrote about the quality of attention I'm talking about, a quality of attention eroded by hype and branding and all the ways our culture brings "awareness" to what really needs attention.

Watching the Dead on Television While Eating Supper
October 2006
for Tom

It is difficult to get the news from poems,
yet each day men die horribly from lack of
what is found there.
William Carlos Williams

You lay down your fork and come to attention.

Someone not paying attention would miss it,

but I attend to your
no-fail attention, so frail
in the realm of what can be done.

Each evening the line of faces grows longer.

My attention falters and I mutter
sweet Jesus, only 19…
that one could be a grandfather…
impatient for it to be over.

You lay down your fork,
food cools
time deepens
October is closing.

We are closing in on four years
of a war to bring freedom to Iraq.

Bodies stacked in Baghdad morgues
and loaded in secret onto troop planes
are free of souls, the only mission accomplished.

Each evening the line of faces grows longer.

Impatient for it to be over,
I remember other missions:
wars to end all wars
ones to stop the spread of communism
the one in Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden,
protect women from the Taliban.

What would my father think
of his war, the one to thwart fascism
if he could see our president on television.

Our president's attention falters,
he says he never said
stay the course.
he does pay attention
to critics
to the need for a new direction
in Iraq, that his mission is now,
and always has been
freedom

Each evening the line of faces grows longer.

We eat fall foods: soups and stews,
ripe pears, an apple cake,
Soon Thanksgiving recipes will appear
in newspapers.

Each evening the line of faces grows…

I see your mission, my love,
how it is now and always
has been, attention.

Each day men
and women
die horribly for lack
of what is found there.

Write to Deal/ Write to Heal

2011-09-30T09:05:00.002-04:00

Write to Deal/ Write to Heal

October, 2011 column

Article 25

By the time you read this column you will have seen a proliferation of Pink: ribbons, t-shirts, coffee mugs, jewelry and more. This morning I saw five signs advertising "Race for the Cure." You'd have to live in a cave, as they say, to not know that October is breast cancer awareness month.

What you might not know is that beneath the surface of the vast improvement that is breast cancer coming out of the closet, are the Breast Cancer Wars. Really. Sadly, and I'm going to say, Inevitably. And I'm going to say why: something I have named awareness without consciousness.

An important thread in the fabric of my columns is the necessity of connection, of not, for example, de-linking breadth from depth, growth from tending what has grown, theory from practice, work from meaning. Another face of the culture of disconnection is that of not coupling awareness and activism on behalf of a cause with tools for witnessing (i.e. being conscious of) what systems theorists call the unintended consequences of the growth in awareness. By now you know that I believe that a powerful and under-utilized tool for "hearing from the whole system" is writing in a community, made safe for all manner of truth by conscious design and facilitation.

Local blogger and breast cancer survivor, Katie Hall (uneasypink.com) responded to my request for insight into how awareness of breast cancer is affecting mortality from the disease. She writes:

Sadly, the number of US women who die has changed little. According to the CDC, in 1991, 43,583 women died of breast cancer. (http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00026281.htm). The most recent numbers available are from 2007 - 40,598 US deaths from breast cancer. (http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/breast/statistics/). All these millions of dollars and no cure.

You hear people talk about improved five year survival rates, but there is a lot of thought about that being mostly a function of better detection. In other words, if you carry those rates out to 10 years, they might not be much improved.

And, you may rightly ask, why the "wars?" My theory? We "attack" problems and injustices with a fury and in that fury we do not listen to anything or anyone who gets in the way of our battle plans. In other words, especially in a culture in love with "branding" and "celebrity experts," the means: marketing, fundraising, program creation, research and data collection take on a life of their own and the purpose is lost in the fray. To wit, "pink warriors" argue with "pinkwashing critics," those who tout mammograms for women of all ages (Save the Ta-Ta's) silence those who point out that research doesn't show that early-in-life mammograms result in improvement in rates of mortality.

GEESH. You know this set-up has other faces: more focus on poverty and programs to eradicate it = more poverty. I mentioned in last month's column how increased attention on student outcomes as measured by testing has resulted in better test-takers, and in cheating by educators in some school systems.

If you are interested in experiencing ---not a Cure---but a cease-fire in the culture wars, in this case, the breast cancer culture wars, come help Katie Ford Hall as she experiments with an alternative. On Saturday, October 15, Katie is creating a space for anyone affected by breast cancer (women and men, family members and those diagnosed) to write and share their authentic narratives, their multiple, diverse, and even contradictory accounts of how their lives are different as a result of this disease.

How would the cause you care about be different if you had the courage to sit with your "enemies" and they had the courage to sit with you and write, then speak the truth contained in the stories of what you see, feel and believe because of who you are, where you stand, and have stood in the world?

This writing and sharing authentic narratives interrupts the unintended consequences of wrapping ourselves in the righteousness of our slogans and our brands, and the careers and identities we have fashioned out of our own and other's suffering.

See uneasypink.com to register for 'Sherpa Network: Traversing Breast Cancer Mountain, Nurturing Voice, Finding Spirit, a day of exploring the many layers of healing available when people gather in a conscious setting to write and share their stories.

Here is an exercise if you want to try this at home:

1. Write a “big list” of words which point to the ordinary markers of your life. Write the “real stuff” applesauce, fireflies, “I’m home, Mom,”movie night, etc.

2. Write a list of words which came into your life with cancer.

3. How do you feel after making the lists? Write a five or ten minute reflection on what got stirred up for you.

Poetry Friday

2011-09-23T11:41:00.002-04:00

An agenda from the second poetry class. The next section will begin on Nov 3 and you can register here.

Poem Philia Part I: Poetry Immersion Class #2 September 8, 2011

6:30 Opening the Circle/ Gathering our community

"That which is most personal is most universal." Carl G. Jung

MRS. KRIKORIAN
By Sharon Olds

She saved me. When I arrived in sixth grade,
a known criminal, the new teacher
asked me to stay after school the first day, she said
I've heard about you. She was a tall woman,
with a deep crevice between her breasts,
and a large, calm nose. She said,
This is a special library pass.
As soon as you finish your hour's work--
that hour's work that took ten minutes
and then the devil glanced into the room
and found me empty, a house standing open--
you can go to the library. Every hour
I'd zip through the work, and slip out of
my seat as if out of God's side and sail
down to the library, down through the empty
powerful halls, flash my pass
and stroll over to the dictionary
to look up the most interesting word
I knew, spank, dipping two fingers
into the jar of library paste to
suck that tart mucilage as I
came to the page with the cocker spaniel's
silks curling up like the fine steam of the body.
After spank, and breast, I'd move on
to Abe Lincoln and Helen Keller,
safe in their goodness till the bell, thanks
to Mrs. Krikorian, amiable giantess
with the kind eyes. When she asked me to write
a play, and direct it, and it was a flop,
and I hid in the coat-closet, she brought me a candy-cane
as you lay a peppermint on the tongue, and the worm
will come up out of the bowel to get it.
And so I was emptied of Lucifer
and filled with school glue and eros and
Amelia Earhart, saved by Mrs. Krikorian.
And who had saved Mrs. Krikorian?
When the Turks came across Armenia,
who slid her into the belly of a quilt, who
locked her in a chest, who mailed her to America?
And that one, who saved her, and that one--
who saved her, to save the one
who saved Mrs. Krikorian, who was
standing there on the sill of sixth grade, a
wide-hipped angel, smokey hair
standing up lightly all around her head?
I end up owing my soul to so many,
to the Armenian nation, one more soul someone
jammed behind a stove, drove
deep into a crack in a wall,
shoved under a bed. I would wake
up, in the morning, under my bed--not
knowing how I had got there--and lie
in the dusk, the dustballs beside my face
round and ashen, shining slightly
with the eerie comfort of what is neither good nor evil.

6:45 More context:

GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN TODAY’s CLASS:

Crosstalk: Large-group conversation open to all, facilitated by the teacher, without using the talking stone.

Fastwrite: Writing fast enough to stay a step ahead of the inner critic or editor.

Read-around: Sharing a piece of writing in the large circle, beginning with a volunteer who then passes the talking stone to his/her right or left. Each person has a portion of time in which to read. Passing is an honorable option. Confidentiality is expected. A chime will be rung between each reader as a way to honor that person’s words and clear the space for the next reader.

Readbacks: during read-arounds listeners write words and phrases which move them in some way. Space in the Circle is opened at the end of Read-around, and these words are read aloud in no special order (like polyphonic music, interweaving of words).

Soul Cards: At the end of each class, 3x5 cards will be passed to each person. Take a few quiet minutes to write some words to the community about how the evening felt to you. E.g., What did you feel, notice, learn, appreciate? Any gifts? Any challenges, suggestions, questions for the group? The cards will go in a designated basket (each class has their own basket) and are available to be read as a way of keeping in touch with the tone and feel of the class. The Soul Cards are a way to handle both light and shadow in a non-threatening way, and to make sure that negative feelings are not buried or shamed. From time to time, we will read the cards aloud before class. Your comments can remain anonymous, or you may choose to sign your name or initials.

Feedback: The intentional request for a response to writing from small group members. Usually most helpful if it is specific, not general. It helps the listeners to have copies of the writing that will be shared if that is possible. See detailed handout for different kinds of feedback

7:00   Read-Around of Homework: one poem you found on last week's poetry buffet, on websites or in books, (not restricted to, but possibly in relationship to
(a) the tenth year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks OR
(b) Loss of other kinds (c) teaching, learning, back-to-school

7:30 Small group time: practice listening deeply to one another as each person in the group reads something they wrote (story or poem or journal entry) (each person gets ten minutes to read, receive readbacks, and hear some of what others felt because of their words: connections)

8:10 Writing Time: Write a story from your life about saving, or being saved.   about school. or about a disaster that marked your life forever in some way. Remember that the personal details are what make the story universal.

8:30 Return to Large Circle
Cross talk about "Flinn on the Bus" and the "NYC Lawyer-poet article", poetry meet-up? Announcements.
Things to write and read between now and next class September 8.

9:00 Closing the Circle

Between classes

1. Feel free to take home the poetry you found on the buffet. Bring it back next week and return it to the buffet table for others to discover.

2. Please take some time to browse in this smorgasbord:
www.poetryfoundation.org/
and this one: www.writersalmanac.publicradio.org

3. Try to read one poem per day and try to schedule time to write at least ten minutes a day.

Bring to next class
a fresh piece of writing by you: a story, or letter or poem. It could come out of the fast-writing you did tonight (a school memory, story of a disaster that marked your life, or it might come from other sources such as the fall equinox which will happen the day after our next class.

September 23, 5:05 A.M. EDT

Poetry Friday

2011-09-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

Here is the poem and writing prompt that opened my Poetry Immersion class at Women Writing for (a) Change a few weeks ago. The immersion class is halfway complete, but please consider joining the Poetry Experiments class beginning in November. Click HERE for more details.

Summer Solstice

BY STACIE CASSARINO

I wanted to see where beauty comes from
without you in the world, hauling my heart
across sixty acres of northeast meadow,
my pockets filling with flowers.
Then I remembered,
it’s you I miss in the brightness
and body of every living name:
rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.
You are the green wonder of June,
root and quasar, the thirst for salt.
When I finally understand that people fail
at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,
the paper wings of the dragonfly
aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?
If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much
I want to know: what you believe
can never be removed from us,
what you dreamed on Walnut Street
in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,
learning pleasure on your own.
Tell me our story: are we impetuous,
are we kind to each other, do we surrender
to what the mind cannot think past?
Where is the evidence I will learn
to be good at loving?
The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond
for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.
There are violet hills,
there is the covenant of duskbirds.
The moon comes over the mountain
like a big peach, and I want to tell you
what I couldn’t say the night we rushed
North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers
and the way you go into yourself,
calling my half-name like a secret.
I stand between taproot and treespire.
Here is the compass rose
to help me live through this.
Here are twelve ways of knowing
what blooms even in the blindness
of such longing. Yellow oxeye,
viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms
pleading do not forget me.
We hunger for eloquence.
We measure the isopleths.
I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.
The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.
Fireflies turn on their electric wills:
an effulgence. Let me come back
whole, let me remember how to touch you
before it is too late.

Writing: Choose a line or phrase from the poem, and let it lead you into a short piece of prose in which you describe how you are now, and what brought you to this blog post, today. Set a timer and write without stopping for ten minutes.

Twenty Years

2011-09-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

Except from Women Writing for (a) Change: A Guide for Creative Transformation.

Beginnings: In the Names of My Mother and My Father

When I am asked to tell the story of Women Writing for (a) Change I begin at different points, depending on who's asking and on my energy for telling. The least vulnerable and most prosaic version of the story begins:
On September 5, 1991, fifteen women gathered in a rented space in a holistic health center. Fifteen women responded to my offer to be the teacher of women who wanted to "Write for a Change," women who wanted to be open to whatever changes would occur int their lives as a result of taking themselves seriously as writers.

But this beginning, like most beginnings, was not the beginning. WWf(a)C began in my family's yellow kitchen, in the Roman Catholic Church of my 1950s childhood, in the schools I attended, and in the schools in which I taught. In each of these places I encountered what I now think of as the paradox of silence and voice, the crucible in which WWf(a)C was created. (1)

Happy 20th Birthday to Women Writing for (a) Change!

(1) Brosmer, MP. Women Writing for (a) Change, A Guide to Creative Transformation. (2009). Notre Dame: Sorin Books. pg 26.

POEM: Ordination of Deacons

2011-09-01T06:30:00.000-04:00

Ordination of Deacons
Christ Church Cathedral

for Bridget Tierney

The preacher preaches Luke
preaching Jesus, preaching the
one about the wise man--
man who builds
his house on solid rock.

In my pew I drift behind the veil
scripture pulls over my attention,
until the preacherʼs sidenote:
Todayʼs ordinands number twelve!

Twelve--new testament number
used by my former church
to prevent ordination of women.

Todayʼs twelve is a Newer Testament:
six women, six men receiving
holy orders, the power to preach the word!

The preacher exhorts the twelve
Let your words come from
the solid rock of your heart.
Only then will they become flesh,
only then will they bear fruit in the world.

In my pew, I take the preacherʼs
meaning but reject
Lukeʼs rock for a riper symbol:
pomegranate I halved this morning,
slicing through red rind
to expose solid, but giving
flesh and petals of jeweled seeds
unfurling from the center.

In my distant pew,
I feel my heart,
that seedy pomegranate,
open to joy, to self-acceptance
so full my throat pulses with
a silent Magnificat.

My soul mangnifies the God who ordained me
to this life I live with words,

words from the seedy-center, flesh-exposed
heart of an ordinary woman: oh see how they bear fruit!

Mary Pierce Brosmer

The Holy Grail of Organizational Wholeness

2011-08-19T21:20:00.002-04:00

Organizational Operating Systems: OOS

The Holy Grail of Organizational Wholeness
January 5, 2011

Monograph on why organizations don't work and what to do about it.

In a recent article in the "New York Review of Books" Bill McKibben wrote: "The technology we need most badly is the technology of community - the knowledge about how to cooperate to get things done. Our sense of community is in disrepair.

1. WHY

I am taking it as a given that something in your organization isn't working or you wouldn't be reading this. Let me begin with a given that could become a gift if we bring a quality of non-defensive attention to it: business, medical, educational, political, religious and other organizations are failing. Despite wave after wave of reform, re-engineering, regulation, policy tweaking, employee handbook revisions, diversity training, no cure has been found for what ails the body politic, body medical, body educational, body business. Nor will a cure be found, no miracles, no ten-step, sure-fire recipe, regulatory process. Nada.

In this short paper, I will, however, describe a process for beginning to heal our bodies organizational, those which have enough energy to muster toward healing. Life in dead-and-don't-admit-it systems (I call them zombie systems) has so exhausted the people trying to work in them that many are themselves in end-stage cynicism. Too wounded to muster the energy to care about anything beyond making it to the end of the day, the end of their careers, these mortally wounded were likely those who once cared deeply, brought significant gifts into their workplaces, only to experience themselves as (choose your metaphor)

pawns on a chess board,
cogs in a machine,
canaries in coal mines,
low-man on the mountain---with you-know-what rolling downhill.

My diagnosis is thus: despite all the ink that has been spilled, conferences attended, systems-community gurus sat at the feet of, organizations (which are collection of "organs" i.e. living instruments for expression) are still operating as if they were machines, engineered for maximum and uniform output.

Delusional that---and getting worse as breakdown quickens and the default mode of doing more of the same (only faster) takes hold.

2. WHAT
The healing of this illness: the missing link, the holy grail?
OOS® Organizational Operating system

I know some of you are recoiling at the techno sound of this, but here's the thing: new-paradigm naming is uncomfortable. (If you're old enough, you'll remember how we wrestled with the awkward-sounding "chairperson" "fire-fighter.") Having banished emotional, spiritual, intuitive, feminine, reflective, artistic, soulful qualities from public life we are trying to re-integrate them. OOS® is a name which reflects our technical knowledge that coherent systems have an underlying language which allows constituent parts to talk with one another. Moreover, the term allows an organization to put its mark on the name. One group I'm working with has adapted it as BN/OS: Better Neighborhood Operating System.

My personal naming is HG/OS: Holy Grail Operating System because in fact, not in fantasy, the missing link we so desperately need in public life is the container (cup) in which we can create wholeness instead of the downright violence we do to one another and our souls in the workplace.

(Andrew Harvey talks about meditation and prayer as "sacred technologies" practiced to help "burn through ego" toward a more compassionate way of being in our lives. I like that marriage of "sacred" and "technology.")

Another way to help you think about the OOS I'm prescribing is available for a mere nine-minute investment of your time in a short film called "How To Give A Fishing Lesson." Maria Pacheco, agricultural biologist, invokes the formula "If you give someone a fish you feed him for a day. If you teach someone to fish, you feed her for a lifetime." At the end of the film, after she has spoken about what how she had to take out layers and layers of her "official story," in order to participate in the transformation of "the fishing system," these words appear on the screen:

"Might the answers lie in how we are when we are fishing together?"

"THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT"!!!!

An organization needs a set of system-wide, coherent practices (OOS®) for realizing its mission and vision, and for turning its energy toward health, rather than chronic malaise.

Engineers will tell you that you have to have a way to focus, amplify and direct energy if you want to avoid systems breakdown. I will tell you that it's incredibly sad, and seemingly inevitable to see good people, with good intentions, breaking down relationally in all too-familiar ways: factions, abuse of power, exploitation, mistrust, dishonesty, game-playing, and addiction to workplace drama. (Not to mention profit loss, litigiousness, increased physical illness among workers, industrial and hospital accidents, pervasive depression.)

3. HOW
The first element of How is WHO: every person on a team, or in a department, regardless of position or status, is a fully enfranchised (listened to, taken seriously) participant in a regular (weekly at least), intentionally-designed container (gathering) manifesting these qualities:

Face-to-Face / Heart-to-Heart (can be blended with virtual gatherings)
Agreements of (and ongoing practice learning)
Confidentiality
No "holding forth" No "debate"
No leveraging of position for personal gain
No use of circle content in evaluation or promotion
Clear focus on the purpose of the gathering
Skilled facilitators who have the capacity to hold the space for others while expressing their own points of view.

Preparation: careful creation of an agenda with:

a. Opening poem, not an "inspirational reading" but a real poem (see bibliography for places to begin to find poems)
b. QUICK check-in to a prompt such as:

comment on a line from the poem

what are you bringing to the meeting?

what do you want to leave at the door?

(no long complicated stories)

c. Writing together: leader learns to craft prompts which will elicit valuable insights and information about the work we share:

What is a story from your work life this week that wants hearing?

Since we launched the new protocol, what has been working/what needs work from your point of view?

What do you want or need help with?

What help can you offer to someone else?

Other? (always include "other" as a prompt.)

d. Read-around: each person invited and encouraged to read their words, or an excerpt.

Passing is allowed, but "talking about" what you wrote is not.

No interruptions, comments, discussion during read-around

Write down lines or phrases as each person reads.

e. Processing the read-around

read aloud in no particular order the readback lines

leader facilitates discussion of what was heard

f. Linking: the information, insights and stories are held as "team capital" while members review and initiate projects, assign tasks, establish deadlines, create new products, refine services, resolve conflicts etc.

g. Review: ask each person to write a summary of what they experienced at the meeting on 3/5 notecards anonymously or not. Type these up and send them out to the group within 24 hours.

h. Closing with intention: one word check-out, appreciation.

4. WHY WRITING?

Human beings know ourselves and create ourselves through language.

However, we are more guarded and political when we "just talk."

A group that writes regularly together can learn that multiple truths and points of view are valuable as opposed to a group reduced to group-think

More truths = fewer rumors.

A regular place to be heard reduces complaining and chronic negativity.

Writing in the way I describe links both left and right hemispheres: while writing is a left brain process, fast-writing delves into more non-rational material and helps us "know what we didn't know we knew."

Conversation and debate privilege those with the most power in a group.

This OOS® enfranchises the entire circle.

5. CAVEATS AND OTHER THINGS

This work requires designated, compensated leadership, someone whose trust and service is that of creating, facilitating and tending the health of "how we fish together." Call that person a chief cultural officer, and have him / her exercise ongoing adaptations of, and training in the OOS®.

Creating health in dysfunctional systems is a process.

Moving into a new paradigm is risky, and care should be taken to go slowly and with compassion, but not to give in to resistance and the many forms it takes by giving up

Those who are most reactive to transparent, life-giving practices are

(1) those who have been rewarded for mastering the art of the game, the deal, the drama of office politics.

(2) those who have been wounded by the old ways and thus cling to them as people will remain attached to their abusers.

Positional leaders must participate, must share, must be transparent.
This increases rather than decreases their authority to make decisions required by their job descriptions, and helps rather than hinders their capacity to evaluate, promote, and let go of staff members.

Be compassionate to resistance, but don't let it hijack you back to "rules, regulations and measurements: as the only languages in the system. Competition as the only skill-set, even though lip-service is given to collaboration.

Remember that everyone is afraid; everyone is vulnerable, and that fear and vulnerability can be transformed to courage and compassion and energy

There has to be a container for the transformation to occur.

Narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths are incapable of using organizational healing tools. They will, in fact, step in to bend the tools to their egoic ends.

Therefore, OOS leadership has to be fierce as well as compassionate, holding the safety of the container for the group until the bad actors leave on their own, or are invited to leave.

Don't play around with a bunch of new tools. People are tired of gimmick du jour, and jargon du jour. Create a depth-oriented, language- and truth- based set of practices and refine and teach them and adapt them throughout your organization.

This is called creating a culture, and it goes a long way toward healing the malaise of divisive, over-stretched work life as we know it.

Let me end with a paraphrase from feminist spiritual teacher, Vicki Noble, who wrote, " When agriculture became agribusiness, life-giving qualities were lost and work became the tedium it is for most people today--cut off from any ultimate meaning." (emphases mine).

Bibliography with comments:
I have written in much more depth about the how's why's and who's of the OOS® in the third section of my book. The book is set up to guide you through transformational practices of writing in conscious community for organizational healing.

Women Writing for (a) Change: A Guide for Creative Transformation. Notre Dame University : Sorin Press, 2009

For poems :
Teaching with Fire: Poetry that Sustains The Courage to Teach is a wonderful collection. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003

One-Handed Basket Weaving: Poems on the Theme of Work. Versions by Coleman Barks. Athen, Georgia: Maypop, 1991.

Good Poems, Garrison Keillor, (ed) New York: Viking Press, 2002.

Other:

"How To Give a Fishing Lesson" http://www.soulbiographies.com/films/how-to-give-a-fishing-lesson/

Dialogues with a Modern Mystic, Andrew Harvey and Mark Matousek. Wheaton, Il: Theosophical Publishing House, 1994. Powerful insights and images of the "stunted, morbid depressiveness camouflaging itself as "empirical truth" and "illusion less accuracy" and "how the very extensiveness of the West's sickness can be used as a road to health."

Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth, Art and Tarot, San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1983.

Found Poem -- From "The Help"

2011-08-15T16:12:00.000-04:00

Centennial Barn

2011-08-06T08:27:00.003-04:00

On truthS

2011-08-05T09:31:00.000-04:00

It's morning again, and I'm ruminating--again--on my perennial question, how would the world be different if everyone had a place to say what s/he sees from where she/ stands in the world?

Really---wouldn't that---coupled of necessity with listening to what multiple others see from where they're standing---go a long way toward dismantling the illusion that THE TRUTH is available to any one person or nation or religion? And imagine what THAT would dismantle, only imperialism, exploitation, holy war, domestic violence, terrorism---all that messy, expensive stuff we say we just don't know how to stop.

There's a belief out there that the Age of Narcissism is upon us because we've fostered everyone to want to "tell their story". Not a bit of it. There is precious little fostering, rather a whole boatload of fomenting, with "creators" of reality, tell-all, talk, and cable news shows manipulating stories into dramas, soap-opera-ish plots in which the underlying question is always: who's the winner? ( The answer to that being who's taking the most money to the bank.)

I Have Two Orchids

2011-08-03T10:29:00.000-04:00

POEM: I Have Two Orchids: February, 2010

February, 2010

I have two orchids in a chill window.
Their backs to the snow, they proffer
fuschia heads on fragile spines,
curving toward this room where I sit,
chill and not so gracefully curving
toward the work of blooming.

On Leadership

2011-07-31T21:26:00.000-04:00

On Leadership Keynote Address School for Creative and Performing Arts
Cincinnati, OH
May, 2007
by Mary Pierce Brosmer

Close your eyes for a few seconds: whom do you see when I say "leader?" The success, ambition, ego, profit driven win-at-all-costs, rack up grades and activities to put in your resume, compete dog-eat-dog in every arena to have a career in theater, visual arts, make a name, become a household name, celebrity, get in the best schools, shock if necessary, build a comedy career or visual arts or poetry career from shock and vulgarity-anything to be a "player" permeates our sense of leader---and I say look where it's got us---

Making Peace with My Pieces

2011-07-29T09:21:00.000-04:00

Let me list some of them, those piecemeal pieces:

First generation Italian mother, warm, who taught me strength on behalf of others, weakness on behalf of self

Scotts-Welsh father literate, self-centered but generous, family patriarch with a weakness for alcohol and rage

introversion: I get my energy from being alone
extroversion: I make sense of things by putting words outside myself

Oldest sibling of three, only daughter

Pious Catholic girl turned skeptical agnostic, ripening into spiritually grounded, postdenominational feminist

Teacher: my true calling
Writer: my loom, my love

WENG News-Talk Radio

2011-07-27T13:16:00.003-04:00

As a writer who conducts writing workshops, I find your book refreshing, innovative and necessary in the mission to empower women. ~ Diana Donlon, Publisher, Women's OutLook

Listen to Mary with Diana on WENG News-Talk Radio's "All About Women" featuring Women in Business and Innovative Ideas. Wednesday, August 17 at 11:00 AM.

You can hear the show at 1530 AM, 107.5 FM or online at www.wengradio.com.

Summer and Fall Schedule

2011-07-19T21:23:00.000-04:00

The next few months are going to be busy and rich with variety and depth. For example...

Drumming and healing, a palliative care conference, rethinking neighborhoods, art and activism, Poetry Immersion and Exploration at Women Writing for (a) Change and MUCH more!

Upcoming events are listed on THIS page.

Hope to see you at one (or more!).

Father's Day: Remembering What Was Given

2011-06-18T19:06:00.000-04:00

I'm a believer in saying whose shoulders we're standing on and not pretending to be genius-sprung. As a writer and lover of language, I stand directly on the shoulders of my father, Earl Keith Pierce.

Dad with my son, Colin Brosmer, watching, ca. 1976

When I was born Dad purchased a set of the classics for me, inscribing each volume with my name: Mary Lucille Pierce, in his beautiful, looping, left-handed script.. When my father wasn’t working, or gardening, or hunting, or fishing, he was in the living room, in his recliner, reading. No matter what swirled around him in our tiny house: horse-play, television shows, phone and next-room conversations, Dad was gone to books. He died in his sleep February ,1990, pushed back in his recliner, a novel on his chest.

I always knew, without having it preached at me, that school, books, a good education were the highest value. Dad left school his Junior year at Nelsonville High School to join FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, for months into years being the only source of a paycheck for his mother and siblings, despite the fact that he was the “baby” of six living. I do not know why my father did not return to school after the Depression, after testing his way into the Army Air Corps, into flight school

reserved then—as now-- mostly for the college-educated. Perhaps he took the same dim view of the G.I. Bill as he did of V.A. loans, feeling condescended to by the white-collar bureaucrat dispensers of such monies. I do not know, but I do know that he inscribed in my heart these words, education is something they can never take away from you. My father was one of the best-educated, most critical-thinking men I ever knew, and one of the rare men of his class and generation who believed that higher education was as critical for girls and it was for boys.

My father intervened directly in my education only twice; the first time to inform my first-grade teacher that I was left-handed, and that he wouldn’t like to hear of any attempts to change that. The second time was when I came home crying that my eighth grade teacher, our school principal, had accused me of cheating, by “letting” Johnny Gottfried copy off my paper. When Dad heard that Sister did not believe my denial, he went back to St. Joseph’s --seven years after his first visit. When I asked him--timorously-- what had happened in this battle of the titanic forces of authority in my young life, he said, I told her: my daughter doesn’t lie. Oh, how I loved him for knowing me as a lover of truth.

My father gave me the love of language and the determination to resist those who attempt to silence the expression of others. My life with him created me (for better and for worse--as I also inherited his prickliness about being condescended to by my "betters") as a practitioner of the healing power--not of "The Word"-- but of Everyone's Words, Well-Heard.

When Mothers' Voices Matter: what a world it will be

2011-04-20T15:04:00.000-04:00

The widows of Iraq want the violence to stop, but their voices are not part of the conversation.

I was only half-listening, fixing supper on a quiet Sunday night, so the reporter's words bypassed my brain, and went straight to my heart, birthplace of what I believe.

Looking up from chopping onions, I saw, in close-up, the face of a widowed mother of five. Bereft of promised pension following her policeman-husband's murder, she was nonetheless smiling. Her veil framed an old-before-her-time, gap-toothed face, but she was smiling, smiling because someone had asked what she wanted. She glowed with heartbreaking hope: "for my children to escape the violence, for my children to be happy." The tears which sprang to my eyes and dropped hopelessly onto the cutting board were not, I assure you, from the onions I was chopping.

I believe, as fiercely as I believe anything, that –no, I’m not going to say if women ruled the world but something far more subtle and powerful: if women’s voices speaking the truths of our lives were fully heard and our stories valued, we’d all have a fighting chance in a planetary survival game looking grimmer and grimmer by the decade.

My father liked to repeat an old joke from the fifties, I make all the important decisions around here. You know, the ones about the bomb, and the state of the economy, while my wife decides the small things, how we’re going to spend the money I make, what we’re going to eat, and where the kids will go to school.

Even as a little girl I felt the irony under the irony because I heard the women in the kitchen, my mother and her good friends, Billy and Marge, Dot,Betty and Esther, and indeed it was the women who decided and carried out what really mattered: food for wakes and weddings, casseroles for shut-ins and the grieving; whether a child’s fever warranted a trip to the doctor, and who had a car to drive her there; what were chances of a lay-off, and whose garden had a surplus of tomatoes for canning.

I believe that if it mattered at all what women wanted, we'd have sunny schools and affordable health care instead of state-of-the-art sports facilities torn down and taken to the landfill before they're even paid for. We've have clean air and a safe food supply instead of the latest military gadgets. We'd have-- as the old labor anthem describes it--what really matters: we'd have bread, and we've have roses too.

International SWAN Day Keynote: Support Women Artists Now.

2011-03-30T13:10:00.000-04:00

SWAN Day Key Notes March 26, 2011

http://www.womenarts.org/swan/

You gotta sing like you don't need the money

Love like you'll never get hurt

Dance like nobody's watchin'

It's gotta come from the heart if you want it to work.

Written by Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh

Performed by Kathy Mattea on "Willow in the Wind"

I was an early and avid singer, belting Merman and swinging Ella , anywhere I thought no one could hear me, bike riding mostly and wandering in the woods. But oddly enough the first place I moved my voice outside of myself and made contact with the world was in the Roman Catholic Church---literally in the little parish church in which I was raised. Next door, in the school, I was already a designated a non-artist, having earned, at that tender age, "D's" on my report card in art, which meant visual art---drawing--- and mine was admittedly awful.

However, because I was known to have had piano lessons, I was chosen to play the organ when the music nun returned to the motherhouse for the summer. Because we had no choir in the summer either, I was the choir and the organist. High in the handsomely- carved loft, invisible to the few Mass-goers scattered below, I was fearless. I opened my mouth and my voice flew out of me like a freed bird, carrying my soul into the whole, shadowy resonant body of the church.

My girl’s voice, suppressed in all other places, drifted up to the wedding cake ceiling and fell to the marble floors, bounced off the confessionals, and trespassed into the sanctuary itself, where the only women’s voices I had ever heard were those of brides murmuring vows, or members of the Altar and Rosary Society whispering, as they dusted and polished.

Whether I had a “good voice” or not was somehow, incredibly, not an issue. The old people who attended these masses told my mother,” it’s like listening to an angel". But they were kind—and hard of hearing.

I look back, and remembering what modulations came later, I marvel at the memory of the full, right feel of my voice welcomed into space. The bright, animal aliveness of breath, tongue, teeth, words: round here, thinning-to-a-tremble there.

It was joy, unself-conscious pleasure, perhaps my only, certainly my purest memory of it.

I asked myself on the occasion of this SWAN DAY: What are the Key Notes my voice might hit were I to open my throat and allow out what I've learned in half a lifetime of artandcommunity making? I have the two words together to emphasize that both are inextricably linked in the DNA of Women Writing for (a) Change: we are about the art of writing and the practices of community, the practices of writing and the art of community TOGETHER, no priority given to either. Writing in Community, Writing as Community, Writing to Create authentic community ( cum-munnus = with gifts).

I'd like to ask you to humor me by agreeing to a shared definition of ART for the length of this conversation: pressing out what is inside yourself and contacting the world.

( paraphrase of Don Hanlon Johnson in "Healers on Healing" p. 132)

Key Note #1:

Women and girls make art ever and always ---for better and for worse---within the very structures that were created to suppress and diminish us.

The consequences have not only been devastating for women and girls, but for the full expression of the gifts of men and boys, and for all of our cousin species destroyed in ever increasing numbers because of how "making" is defined and done in our culture.

I was struck by the language of our Afghani foster grandson, Atiqullah, when he said his friend, Zuhall, was "making a party" to say goodbye to her friends before she returned to Kabul.

Not Having a party, throwing a party, but making a party. I'm more accustomed to hearing: making trouble, making a mess, making mischief, making money, making out like bandits----or their contemporary cousins: Wall Street Manipulators, and.... don't get me started.....

If you say with a straight face in patriarchy that you're making art, you're at risk for what I call The Cringe Questions:

Make any money at it?

Are you published?

Are you a "fine artist" or just an artist"

How many cd's do you have?

What galleries sell your work?

International Swan Day is founded on this Non-Cringe question:

What might the world be like if women's art and perspectives were fully integrated into all our lives?

I need to take a side road of sorts here and note that the meanings of the word, "art" didn't, until the 16th century begin to refer to " creative arts" such as painting or sculpture music or literature.

The word was about:

skill

craft

manner of fitting together

joining

(www.etymologyonline.com)

This etymology is instructive. I see clues for how women, might, if we have the courage, vision, and stamina---- help restore sanity to a world suffering what I perceive as the end-game consequences of an ancient genocide:

the murder of the feminine.

This genocide followed the usual pattern: first the murders in this case of the ultimate makers-of-life: women.

The violence is grievous, unspeakable, and "scaled up" that it is internalized by its survivors as shame, (as in" there must be something horribly wrong with me ---us---that "they" treat us this way) in other words cell-level conditioning to our inferiority, "less-than-ness."

Next comes the predictable denial and erasure of the genocide. A Monstrous Lie, which becomes Truth because it is inscribed and taught for thousands of years in "our" history" and what is considered "real" or "great" art, , "pure science" "natural law" "inspired by god texts" father, son, holy ghost, no mother, no daughter.

We make lives and art in a world limping along on one leg ---seriously IMPAIRED because civilizations as we know them are built on denial, and on an unnatural unlinking of nature and culture, feminine and masculine, individual and communal. These devastating de-linkings gave unnatural birth to others against which we are making art:

performing and participating

art and craft

"fine art" and--- what? crude art? folk art? naive art?

product and the process

the "artist" and "the audience"

the necessary unconsciousness into which artists must fall to create

unconsciousness in our everyday lives and relationships

"necessary chaos" and "destructive chaos"

making a living and making art

the business of art and the art of business

art and life

artists and "non-artists"

artists and "critics"

teaching art and making or doing art

Key Note #2

In a poem I made in the summer of 1983 or 4, I can see glimmers that I was knowing ahead of myself some of the "answers" to the questions I continue to have about art, life, women and the connection among them during what I observe to be the end-game of "the big delusion that anything survivable can be made out of X chromosomes only....

As a preface to the poem: at this moment in our personal histories, two friends and I had become "un-paired" against our wills. All three in our mid-late thirties, left by husbands in the throes of midlife crises. We were still shell-shocked, but to use a definition of art-making from Virginia Woolf which is one of my favorites: " arranging the pieces " that had come our way.

Integrity

(for Sharon and Kathy)

(integrity: an unimpaired condition, solidness, firm

adherence to a code of moral or artistic values)

Unimpaired

we come to the evening:

three women in the paling day

porch-sitting

framed by pots of geraniums

and children circling

the house in ardent play.

Unimpaired

we come to the talking:

there are no coy jokes

no artful presences

our presence is our art

the solid stuff of shared lives

words without shadows.

Unimpaired

we come to the listening:

men have called this gossip

but we shred nothing

instead, we mend,

as women do,

with fine stitches.

Unimpaired

we come to the touching:

fondle the rough nap

the silken mysteries of

the lives we unravel,

weaving on the large humming

loom of talk

NEW LIVES

un-im-paired women

repairing the

tears.

MPB

(unpublished manuscript "With Fine Stitches")

Key Note #3

I no longer believe, as I did when I wrote that poem all those years ago that my work is repairing the tears. In fact, I am pretty solid in my belief that it's wasted effort. My energy is invested creating a whole new cloth---out of the scraps.

It's the difference, and a critical one, between revolutionary and evolutionary.

Audre Lorde was right for my money when she wrote "The master's tools can never dismantle the master's house." I'll grant the need to master the master's tools, some of which are very useful as we women and girls---artists by the old definition of linkers / connectors/ dare I say healers go about building the new structures as the old ones are collapsing.

But there is the danger as the old saying goes that when you learn to use a hammer---everything is a nail---that's revolutionary art-making and activism-- If we live long enough, we look back to see we've built more buildings in which only the "special voices" get heard. We've created more of what suppressed the feminine in the first place!

We have to be able to use the master's tools but too many use only the hammer, or revert to the hammer with a vengeance when they want to get money or attention.

Here's my working list of The Master's Tools which we over-use, or use unconsciously at our peril:

generating "buzz"

trading on celebrity,

using "sexy" soundbyte language and misogynist imagery "for a good cause"

"feel your boobies" "skinny bitch"

ruthless competition with other artists and women's groups for money for "good causes"

putting production and performance above t quality of relationships (process)

carrying the necessary chaos of artistic invention into the drama-queen messiness and lack of mutuality in personal and organizational relationships

believing in the short term solutions:

if my career takes off, I can open the door for other women, so I'll do what I have to do to get there....

if our band can get the money to travel to (fill in the blank with latest traumatized country) we'll uplift the women and girls by our concerts.

Nada.

I'll quote no less an odd personage than Karl Marx to say "contradictions within a movement bring down the movement...."

Let's be frank: while it's yet another sin against the feminine to require that women be PERFECT---how many of us have been betrayed, thrown under the bus, stolen from, or otherwise mistreated by the women with whom we thought and believed we were making art? change? common cause?

Key Note #4

None of this is happening because we are evil people---it's because --- we've been developing "awareness" without developing consciousness.

For example, aware that we need to support women artists and a thousand other life-changing causes now, we have been so busy standing up for them that we haven't sat down to ask wisdom questions.

Systems flow experts tell us that healthy systems require diversity and interconnectedness. We've been in a thrilling forty year epoch of creating diverse women's arts initiatives and events, without creating containers to see what we're making.......what if it's more of the same old? same old?

I have wisdom-seeking questions:

What containers can we make to birth the new while in the death throes of the old?

What tools will help us build these containers?

How will we compensate these "artists of the necessary womb" in a world which still equates the deep feminine with "free" as in unimportant, dismissible, invisible----even as the rent comes due?

When will every community of so-called change or activist artists align their means with their ends?

When will women artists and arts groups have a conductor of quality of relationships equal in status to with the conductor of the material?

How, when, who will re-design the ways we measure the value and worth of art?

When will we sit together with the seriousness of the opportunity we have now to make a whole new world as opposed to running around trying to manage the collapse ? or keep up with the next "big thing"?

How can we access and practice the wisdom to discern when we are making eco-art vs. ego art? By which I mean, "expressing myself" w/o the partnership of " being part of making spaces for others not- me to express themselves?

If not women artists of life and matter, who will transform us from a culture of consumers (getting mine) to a culture of investors (creating ours)?

Key Notes #5

Some rules I'd make for the rocky and exciting road ahead, if I were the Mother:

1. Don't take on more than you can do well --by which I mean more than you can do consciously and with attention to the quality of relationships among the doers.

2. Because making art is about accessing the unconscious that deep, powerful, ecstatic and wonderful interior and giving birth to it, ALWAY have a conscious container in which to birth it: an orderly and ethical life and surroundings, a midwife (conscious group, or therapist, holder-healer) to whom you commit, whom you compensate---and not just run to when you're in a crisis.....

3. Don't think it's ok to make more messes because you're an "artist" or great visionary / thinker / change agent...... You play right into the hands of those who like things just the unequal way they are thank you very much when you act like a goddamn flake, diva, a tantrumming two-year-old, a blow-it-off adolescent.

4. Always have a conscious exchange of energy, there's way too much invisible mother work going on. Money is energy, currency---current, and those who are doing the behind the scenes work, the invisible and unglamorous mother work MUST be supported and honored and paid and equal to those with the "gifts" the culture honors.

5. Don't bring up ANY idea or project with the attitude that "SOMEONE"

SHOULD do.

The economist Bernard Lietear in his essay, "Beyond Greed and Scarcity" has documented that only in matrifocal cultures, cultures which value Feminine

and show that by the proliferation of (art) forms dedicated to the Great Mother

(cathedrals for example) have we had glimpses of cultures based on abundance and generosity (as opposed to scarcity and hoarding).

I say, Wow! and ---with absolute respect for individual men, the masculine and its gifts: It is not your time to lead; nor is it the time of Women and Girls molded into honorary men or boys by the awareness without consciousness programs the culture created for them (ever wonder about why "mean girls" and eating disorders and other girl scourges increased as a result of Girls, Inc, of title 9.......)

We are giving birth to our images (not monolithic or politically correct) but diverse AND interconnected.....

Key Note #6

I will end with Grace Notes, gifted to us by the artist, Mary Oliver, in her poem, "The Swan"

And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?

And have you changed your life?

Facebook "Found" Poem

2011-03-09T08:28:00.000-05:00

by Mikey D. and Ms. Mary B.

Dear Michael,

Thank you for friending me.

Your face is familiar, but I can't place

...... curious.

Were you in the class I spoke to

last month at UC Clermont?

No, Mary

I wasn't, but I was

a student of yours

a lifetime ago

Milford, class of 89.

Yes, a lifetime.

I left in '92...

I hope I was a decent teacher

for you.

High School was my Vietnam

walking in to your class room was sanctuary.

Decent doesn't even begin to describe ...

My Husband and I live in Batavia

We have no children but we have

2 great poodle/bischon mixes,

Henri and Ziggy .

I don't mean to cut this short,

Ms. Mary ,

but it's our off day and

it's my turn to make breakfast.

I look forward to your reply.

As my Grandmother Honey would say

"I got a big bright shiny spot for you in my heart!"

Michael,

Your Vietnam metaphor breaks my heart.

That my classroom was sanctuary brings tears.

Teaching is such a moment-by-moment process,

with so much responsibility for so many lives.

I know I have made my share of mistakes,

bad judgments in the flux of things,

so I'm grateful beyond words

that my heart's intention reached you:

yes, to create spaces for transforming hate into love.

I'm still at it...

I'm happy that you have a husband

and your children, Henri and Ziggy.

I continue to write, and teach,

re-married 19 years ago,

have a grown son and two grandsons.

I hope I am their Grandma Honey.

Thank you for holding a place in your

heart for me. I return the favor.

Ms. Mary

Join Blog Talk Radio with Mary today!

2011-03-08T08:29:00.000-05:00

Feminine Leadership & the Organizational Holy Grail

Feminine Mojo

Call-in Number: (347) 989-1293

Upcoming Show: 3/8/2011 2:00 PM

Host Name:	Feminine Mojo
Show Name:	Feminine Leadership & the Organizational Holy Grail
Length:	1 hr 30 min
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Description: h:123589 s:1602589	Join Jamie in conversation with Mary Pierce Brosmer, a teacher, poet, social entrepreneur and the author of Women Writing for (a) Change. She is the Founder of the Women Writing for (a) Change nonprofit organization. In this show, we'll explore "Conscious Feminine Leadership" and "The Holy Grail of Organizations". What are the unexpressed values in most organizations? What is the 'holy grail' that most organizations are missing? What's LOVE got to do with it? Why hasn't the typical 'add women and stir' approach hasn't created the need transformation? And how can we 'be the change' by embodying and bringing the Conscious Feminine into the mix? Join us for what's sure to be a dynamic and inspired conversation.

Failing Teachers

2011-02-19T14:34:00.000-05:00

I was one in 1970: a failing, floundering, overwhelmed first-year teacher. It went down hard, my daily failures in three, ninety-minute "modules" of Language Arts with sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in a small Catholic elementary school. Very hard, as I was one of the ones who really WANTED to teach, as opposed to choosing from among the few options women like me could see for themselves in those days: teacher, nurse, or nun.

But I was as emotionally and professionally prepared to descend from the heights of English Major talk in rarefied college classrooms to the hard ground of teaching forty children in each class to love to read and write, as I would have been to take up an extreme sport without conditioning!

Right up front, I want to confess:

this is going to be a confessional poem.

Instead of digressing as I'm tempted

to do, temptation existing in a complicated

sequential relationship with sin itself

as I partially recall from my catechism

(You see, I'm already digressing

to avoid confessing)

Let me just admit it:

my first year of teaching

I slapped an eleven-year-old child

full across the face,

slapped an eleven-year-old child

while forty sixth-graders

in a hot classroom

at St. Philip the Apostle School

watched.

Not to worry, tongue-cluckers,

penance-prescribers,

my victim has worked

his vengeance on me

for decades now

squirming up in his maroon sweater,

baggy at the shoulders,

his blonde hair plastered

in bowl-cut bangs to his pale forehead,

his freckles the only cheerful

thing about him.

Everytime I speak about

what I've come to learn about teaching,

about classroom as community,

I see Robert Rose's face

still red with my handprint

after twenty years,

and my face colors

as though he'd slapped me.

II.

Oddly enough, that's what it felt like

as though he slapped me,

day after day, watching me where I

stood under the crucifix

in that hot classroom

watching me,

and resisting, worse, scorning,

every word, every gesture,

every idea I created to teach,

to somehow reach him.

I don't even remember what it felt like-

the slapping-

it was over so fast,

it was as if my hand belonged to someone

else, as if I'd just watched a woman,

little more than a child herself,

slap a child

in a crowded classroom

in the foreign-to-me land

of inflicted cruelties.

But I remember, as if it happened

seconds ago in the most familiar

room o my life,

that Robert Rose just sat there.

He resisted by not resisting,

he didn't move, d idn't speak.

Then the oily smirk

of his victory over me

spread over his face,

and I stood there,

nailed to the spot

by forty pairs of eyes,

crucified, tasting

shame like the bitterest gall.

III.

Years later, I understand enough

about power and its abuses, to wonder

what had brought Robert Rose to the place

where his only response to life

was no response.

I'll admit, however, that I still don't

understand enough about why

silence and resistance and,

above all, smirking

provoke my fury.

I don't understand why

I am, by nature or habit,

the dark storm

swirling across cold, white,

resistant surfaces.

Why I want to, and often do

fly in the faces

of pallid, wan, passive people?

Is it because I know

it is too dangerous to take them into my arms

that I take up arms against the armored,

the thick-shelled,

the shellacked,

the cynic,

the supercilious?

I cannot take them into my arms;

I know their coldness burns.

I've lost limbs,

parts I need,

through long,

sometimes even brief

exposure

to the frozen.

IV.

God save me from the sullen,

the dead-eyed, the brittle-smiled child,

who, taught to hate,

taught me to hate him,

who taught to fear,

taught me to fear him.

His freckles spread across

my dreams like disease,

I pray for him--

God save him

from teachers like me.

I slunk away from that job at St. Philip's on the final day of school filled with shame. I was happy to move to a new city, a new job (one with high-schoolers whom I felt better equipped to teach as my teaching certificate indicated me to be.....). I promised myself that I'd give myself one more chance, this year would prove to me whether I was worthy or not to accompany young people with more wisdom and patience than I had shown in my rookie year.

The learning curve has been long, and continues still. Patience with the unmoveable, uncomprehending and unfeeling is still not my strongest suit, for my compassion is tinged with passion that can be fierce and fiery---and, unfortunately, lightning fast to express itself.......

Nonetheless, I found myself worthy to continue the initiation, the trials by daily fire that teaching was, and I suspect is still, unless there is more support and mentoring than there was in my day---which I seriously doubt.

Here is an interesting postscript to my Slapping Robert Rose story.

Years later I was in Columbus to meet with college friends. We were at brunch in one of the large hotels, when our waitress looked at me and said, "Are you Miss Pierce?"

I allowed as how I had been she, and was still, though under the nom de guer of Mrs. Brosmer now.

"You were my sixth grade teacher at St. Philip's."

Gulp.

"I loved your Language Arts class so much that I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I am in my second year of graduate work at OSU, working on a Ph.D. in English."

Gulp.