In feeding we are fed,
In meeting we are met,
In every act of willingness
to come forth empty to the touch point,
we are filled
The fountain rises bubbling
from the awe-struck rock,
The flames burst out
from the friction’s spark,
The inspiration rushes
suddenly and steadily
into the open space
prepared by humbleness
for great paths of wind
sweeping into the deepest chambers,
touching the quick,
igniting swift
life fire within.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 20, 2014
In retrospect
it all seems so familiar —
the heady feeling of approaching mastery,
the sense of having found a solid answer
and the immediate response
of some overwhelming inundation —
a storm in my internal weather,
an interpersonal nor’easter,
or some flash flood to carry off
all my pat conclusions,
forcing me to let myself be washed through,
re-oriented, stripped of all pretensions,
surrendering, as ever,
to the larger wisdom
to clarify my sense
and make me new.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 19, 2014
Afterwards, we drove up through
the scattered, shattered landscape,
houses like detritus flung against the fences
of suburban grids,
the actual people
clinging for survival
to the few pursuits that patch
their massive loneliness,
and maybe they don’t even know
the tide has gone out on their sustenance . . .
We thought about city repair,
and the work seemed so massive —
to create a structure
that belongs to us
and not the advertisers and investors.
But we have begun:
In this day we worked together
moving earth, transplanting hope
(represented here by many strawberries),
making connections which, with care
will spread in a great mat
and bear its fruit where everyone can share.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 18, 2014
What does your heart want?
This one thing you can answer
without words, without posture,
without a sense of needing to be right
What your heart wants now
is how you’ll know
what to do. No definitions of yourself,
based on observations or conjectures
or the self-filtered opinions of your fellows,
have any clue
What does your heart want?
When asked, your heart will answer
in the impulse of a movement,
in the wisdom of the moment
and you’ll know yourself
by following its truth.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 17, 2014
I noticed that almost a year ago I said I would write something about the process I was involved in — illustrating my third book, Revolution.
Having successfully illustrated Capture Rapture (my second book), I was eager to take a break and find a collaborator for the next one. I approached Shannon Noel, a painter who also does faux walls — wonderful scenes that draw you into landscapes of the imagination. While she ended up not having time to do the illustrations for me, she sold me on the idea of giving the illustrations a story arc of their own, which would illustrate the progression of the poems more than each poem itself. This was very useful because of the nature of the poems in Revolution, many of which didn’t lend themselves to literal illustration. Also, in our talks, she keyed me in to some concepts that are basic to artists but weren’t to me — the idea of making thumbnail sketches for all the pictures, the selection of a palette of colors, the composition of a piece based on light and dark, how to create luminescence in a picture, how to study pictures to learn how to do all these things.
For Revolution, I chose the metaphor of how living things overcome manufactured structures. My set was a wall and a corner of pavement below it, and the sky above it. My characters were the things that grew up in the space over time. My medium was watercolor, cut, torn, and collaged. Here are some of the pictures:
So far in each of my three illustrating projects, I have started out feeling very daunted. Then I’ve gotten some hope and made some progress, then lurched to a stop, then overcome the hurdles and forged onward. In the end I’m satisfied with my work.
Oh, I have been fooled
so many times,
so nearly constantly —
Cowed by an unnamed fog
to fail to move
(lest in moving I should fail),
to fail to see
(lest I see something that would wake me
to the need to move)
But now I will name the fog
and feel the fear roll off
in great waves,
billowing and blowing and dispersing
And I will stand
in new-created day.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 15, 2014
In this vision,
the antelopes are tuned
into existence,
huge waves of them
rolling in and out of
atmospheric haze,
keenly aware of their
sharp pounding against the ground
in the rolling rhythm of multitude
and the strong smell of each other
and the heat and dust
and the surging imperative importance
of life, this now
in which they run.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 14, 2014
In my not quite dreaming state
I felt like another person,
someone who was sleeping on my other side,
someone who had another stairway,
chocolate colored, smooth like pudding,
that she could climb
to another story.
The draft on my back
that kept me awake
also made me feel alive —
small bursts of excitement
at possibilities of places to fly,
people to be,
buzzing through my shifting sense of self . . .
My daily window of belief —
How small it is!
How infinite the plane
in which my life can play!
©Wendy Mulhern
January 14, 2014
To Edward
Come here again
and enter
this inner pool of me,
which, when you touch,
comes real
and I can go there, too —
Quench myself deeply,
Immerse myself
in what will glow afterwards
on my whole skin
and in the deep breaths I take,
an unnamed satisfaction
that fills up the entire void
amazingly —
that huge chasm
with one drop.
©Wendy Mulhern
January 12, 2013
On December 18 of 2013, I published my fourth and fifth poetry books. I don’t really recommend publishing two books on the same day; it’s a little like having your birthday on Christmas. The two books threaten to eclipse each other. It happened that way because I was trying to get them both out before Christmas. and they took paths of differing speeds through the proofing process.
Journeying is my first unillustrated book. I was excited about it because it has four times as many poems as my illustrated books, and it’s thick enough for my name and the title to appear on the spine. It had different proofing issues because the black and white printing process called for a different font for the poems, which I had to test out.
Cuddle Your Curmudgeons is my fourth illustrated book. I had been hoping to find a collaborator to do the artwork — thought I had one lined up, early summer. But when that didn’t work out I was back to considering illustrating it on my own, a prospect that turned out to have substantial procrastinative forces lined up against it. I did thumbnails for the poems that I could, but I was having trouble getting the vision for how I would execute the pictures. The publication of Journeying was, in a way, a very constructive form of procrastination from those illustrations.
I think I got a boost from talking to a new acquaintance, an artist, about possible collaboration on another project. (Funny how far just a little encouragement can go.) I used the added impetus of the month of November, in which many writers engage in National Novel Writing Month (something I’ve done three times) to get busy on the illustrations. And I pretty much got them finished by the end of November. Then there was the process of creating the print-ready pdfs, and the proofing. So the two books ended up gliding to press at the same time.
The other way in which I begin to approach prolific is that I now have over 900 poems on my blog. I expect to roll past the 1000 mark in the next three months or so. Meanwhile, my goal for the year is to do everything I can to increase the audience for my poems. To that end, I’m working on pulling together this website, doing more speaking engagements, and trying to get the word out about my books. Any help towards any of that is greatly appreciated!