Week Three: Road Trip
One of Twyla's latest books of poetry, Potato Soup won the 2004 Nebraska Book Award for poetry; check out as well, images from the last time Twyla read at Peru State. And one of my first blog entries on Around Peru featured a few shots of Twyla's reading at the Lyceum in Brownville.I hope to bring Twyla to campus this fall, 2009, and will talk with her tomorrow when Twyla and Tom, her talented husband, join me for a bike ride to Brownville and back to Peru.
A native of Nebraska, as are nearly all the poets in this collection, Twyla is a very musical poet, so her work fits in wonderfully with the emphasis on sound and rhythm in the two chapters you read for this week's work.
And she is a wonderful poet to emulate. Note as you read her poems, the attention to daily details, from potato peels to her backyard, that special and familiar place that she counts on "to lift me somehow far/ far away."
She relies on the common place, and, as Cocteau might argue, polishes it.
As with the other poets, Twyla's verse draws on her personal experience, from growing up in a small town to her husband (Tom) and his love of wood: "Burl and pattern and knot."
Note, too, the familiar names she mentions as her teachers, those who inspire her: Don Welch, Ted Kooser, Roger Welsh, and her first poetry teacher, Bill Kloefkorn:
"My first writing experience was in Kloefkorn's class, so how can you go wrong there? "
Indeed, all the authors mentioned, with the exception of Roger Welsch--we will look at his prose, perhaps, later in the term when we turn to Creative Non-Fiction--appear in our award- winning anthology.
And for those who worry about writing, recall that Twyla did not start writing until she hit 35.
The inspiration for your work should, as the text articulates well and as the assignments seek to reinforce, come from what you know best, your lived experience and those significant objects and people around you now and locked in your memory. As Twyla points out, "What made me what I am is the experience of the farm" (189), to which she returns in a great deal of her work, whether talking about planting trees or making soup.
Of equal importance to writing is reading. As she responds to Shelly's question about what inspires her, Twyla remarks "I read. I tell young people you need to read and, unfortunately, kids don't spend much time reading" (193).
We spend a good deal of time talking about other poems in our class because reading will make you better writers; thus this week, we talk about e. e. cummings, Twyla Hansen, and Dylan Thomas, among others.
Like all the poets in this collection, Twyla has a favorite place at which she writes:
"I find it difficult to write unless I'm sitting in this chair" (194).
Again, you must experiment until the right place presents itself, that comfortable spot that triggers your imagination and that transports you "far away."
Here Twyla does not talk a great deal about her journal, for the question never comes up; however, Twyla keeps extensive journals that inspire her, sometimes years later. Nothing gets wasted. She will turn years later to a journal, seeking at times one image or a couple sentences, a rich comparison that she recalls jotting down.
You can take inspiration from Twyla's work, to be sure.
Read the poems and underline images and sounds that appeal to you. Talk about them on the discussion thread devoted to her work, that of Brummels, Dylan Thomas's poem, "Fern Hill," and other poems.
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