Sheila Packa—I want to teach people about the power and beauty of poetry. It can reveal and help us deal with change in our life.

Poetry has a reputation for being difficult at times. People avoid it, perhaps because some is sollipsistic or remote. Poetry sometimes is like abstract art that conveys an emotion through color and gesture. It uses figurative language, for example: “Whiskey is a life waiting for somebody to marry it.” It uses one thing to describe something else that is beyond words.

Sometimes poetry can be challenging; it requires the reader to slow down. That’s a good thing. If we do, we will see that poetry can have hidden doors and surprising depth.

As poet laureate, I wanted to highlight the ways that poetry can feed us.

KSR—In an article recently you stated that poetry speaks to the spirit. Can you explain this to us?

Sheila Packa—Poetry employs sound patterns, like music, to create pleasure and surprise. To borrow a word from architecture, it is a “pattern language.” These patterns affect the breath and the breath is spirit. To say it another way, poetry is grounded in the body, but the voice of the poem is breath. It is very intimate. The breath of the writer becomes the breath of the reader.

When it’s good, poetry can break open emotion. Its images transcend language. Its history is in rituals of religion and magic.

KSR—I love, love, love the idea of our local parks and trailheads with plaques inscribed with stanzas from local poets. What can we do as a community to make this happen?

Sheila Packa—Get involved in parks and recreation planning! Write to me and the planning committees. Also, funding is needed.

KSR—You said the best book to reach for after a death in the family is poetry. Why poetry rather than some enlightening non-fiction book?

Sheila Packa—Non-fiction certainly is useful. I mean we all benefit from knowing the stages of grief and how they might manifest. But non-fiction can’t contain grief like reading poetry or writing poetry. Poetry can resurrect a moment, it can recreate the breath, and it can transcend boundaries. Poetry can move you. I mean that in more than one sense. It can touch you and change you.

KSR—I savored “Cloud Birds” recently at UMD, which filled me to the brim with your delectable words and Kathy McTavish’s cello. Why do you think that poetry & music combined creates such powerful, intoxicating emotion?

Sheila Packa—Music loves poetry. The ancient Greeks knew it. Apollo, the Muses. Bob Dylan knows it, we all know it!

As for our work, we don’t try to illustrate each other. I think that is why it works so well.

KSR—If you could only have three items on an abandoned island, what would they be?

Sheila Packa—A magnifying glass, paper and pens.

KSR—There is a great scene from the Woody Allen film, “Interiors,” where one of the actors screams: “What, oh what, does one do without the outlet of some sort of ART!”
Is poetry how you have survived crisis in your life? Explain.

Sheila Packa—Yes Woody Allen is talking about the way that art can transform you. You don’t have to make the art to have the experience of this, it is enough to come away from a piece of art or writing with new understanding.

Poetry has been my life raft. I’ve always been a journal keeper. When you have a regular habit of recording things in your journal, you observe more. Writing is a tool of the mind. It helps you remember your experience. As you write, you discover things you didn’t know you knew; it helps you develop clarity.

But aside from that, poetry helped me leave a bad marriage. I was in my twenties, learning firsthand about domestic violence, and writing kept me sane. It strengthened the inner voice, the best guide for anybody; it helps one to listen deeply to one’s life. I came out when I was in my late twenties, and poetry helped me with that. It helped me get through the death of my parents.

Of course in making poetry, as in any art-making, one finds obstacles in the self. Procrastination, distraction, lack of focus are all things that get in the way. I have found that making changes in my life have helped my poetry.

KSR—The first time I read Robert Bly, his words soaked into my bones and body. I wrote to him gushing how much I adored him; how much I treasured his gift of words and metaphor. Who has moved you in such a way?

Sheila Packa—Many, many writers. I almost always will love some work by a writer, but not all the work. And my favorites change. At first it was Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich (essays and poems) and Audre Lorde: “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “The Transformation of Fear into Language and Action.” I like Walt Whitman, Phyllis Wheatley, W.S. Merwin, Federico Lorca, Louise Gluck, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Joy Harjo, Robert Hass, Jane Kenyon, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Yannis Ritsos. I also love experimental fiction. Italo Calvino, and philosophical fiction, Clarice Lispector. I love the writing of Latin and South America. I’ve been reading the work of an Argentinan poet Alejandra Pizarnik and a book called, The History of Violets by a poet from Uruguay, Marosa DiGiorgio.

KSR—What has poetry given you? What have you given poetry?

Sheila Packa—Sometimes a poem line or a phrase will amaze me with its beauty. Poetry offers brevity. It helps me be concise. It is distilled. Poetry does give me glimpses of the sublime.

I don’t know about the second question. I bring my life and imagination to it and hope that I can participate in the dialogue of poets.

My new book, Echo & Lightning, is about love and change. I became very interested in stories about intersections with the divine: Greek mythology (Leda and the Swan and Orpheus and Eurydyce) and Biblical stories of women, Mary, Mary Magdalene, Lot’s Wife. I started to wonder about ecstatic experience. What kind of change happened to these women? What did it feel like?

KSR—Poets were once known to be aloof and elevated above others, but I feel poetry should be accessible to everyone, everywhere. How can we introduce verse into the world for one who is afraid of it?

Sheila Packa—I advise people to read poetry regularly. Subscribe to a daily poem like Poetry Daily, Verse Daily or Writer’s Almanac. Find poems that you love. What you like to read is key to what you like to write. Browse the poetry section in bookstores. Buy a book of poetry every month. Start a writing group. Write poems. Use poetry in your celebrations. Read a poem before every feast. Write a poem for every wedding and funeral and graduation.

~I cannot unhook fast enough
Unbuckle, unzip, peel down
Can not strip darkness
away from us
Can not enter the drowning river
Deep enough
Or your darkening irises
Pressing knee insisting mouth
Or hands against my body—The Mother Tongue

KSR—Sheila, you bring the reader into places they’ve been before, or help them remember, perhaps, what they’ve forgotten. In your book “The Mother Tongue,” what or whom inspired this passionate segment aptly called “Torrent?”

Sheila Packa—This poem is about the desire or urgency to surpass boundaries, to achieve union. Poetry is writing that casts more than one shadow, as Mary Oliver says. It’s about lovers but also about barriers between us and the world.

This is one poem from the section of erotic poems called “Torrent” in the Mother Tongue. They are set in a book about growing up, and mother/daughter connections, and making a life. I liked that, to put the erotic inside the everyday experience. That is how it is in real life.

Cecelia Lieder, of Northern Prints Gallery, had invited me to write poems for a visual art exhibit, Erotic Justice. That phrase is from Hildegard of Bingen, an early Christian mystic. So I began writing, intrigued by Hildegard of Bingen’s startling juxtaposition of words. How is justice erotic?

I began writing ekphrastic poems (a type of poem written in response art) for a collection of erotic photographs in a postcard book, titled Drawing the Line. Each postcard portrayed aspects of sexual experience and also invited viewers to think about where personally to draw the line about what is comfortable and what is too far. So I wrote poems as an exploration. Poet and activist Audre Lorde said the erotic is a source of power for women. It’s true.

Erotic Justice, to me, is a relationship that is balanced in power, one that has give and take, and is committed to mutual respect. Erotic Justice is not exploitation, manipulation, control, or power games but the desire that love and intimacy will sustain and inspire you to make the world a better place.

KSR—Finish this sentence:    What people don’t know about me is….

Sheila Packa—I have had a career as a mental health social worker. I’ve taught Freshman Composition at Lake Superior College and many, many writing workshops.

I use figurative language and metaphor. I describe one thing by talking about something else.

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