Writing the Life Poetic

The Writing Life: To Thine Own Self Be True

By Sage Cohen

Ren was a massage practitioner in my home treating my dog Hamachi for back pain. He had paw prints tattooed around his wrists and Pat Benatar’s name running up the inside of his forearm. The first time he came to my house, I found myself singing for the rest of the day in my most macho rocker girl swagger: “You can cry tough baby, it’s alright; You can let me down easy, but not tonight.”

Ren’s second visit inspired, “Before I put another notch in my lipstick case, you better make sure you put me in my place.” “Fire and Ice,” of course, was simply inevitable.

On his third visit, I asked Ren: “How has it impacted your life to have Pat Benatar’s name on your body?”

He was sitting on the floor with Hamachi in his lap. She was upside down, spread eagle, licking his wrists. He was working on softening the fascia of her belly that connects to the spine. He lit up.

“Pat Benatar is my talisman,” Ren explained. “Her name on my arm is a daily reminder of who I am and how I want to live. I go into people’s homes, and they see her name on my arm, and they are reminded of whom they are and how they want to live. It gets us talking about what matters to us.”

I am intrigued by this idea of taking the name or idea or embodiment of someone or something else literally into your skin. Living alongside your life, these words perhaps provide a kind of parallel perception; a harmony playing counterpart to the main melody of your form and function––an aspiration or value to which you have assigned yourself, against which the beating of your own heart aligns or collides.

I have never been certain enough about the longevity of any word, phrase, or belief to tattoo it onto my body. However, I did wear a necklace pendant for maybe three years straight that said, “To thine own self be true.” I liked to think of that necklace having powers akin to Wonder Woman’s groovy metal bracelets: deflecting all that might steer me off the course of my greatest good. And I am absolutely convinced that those words worked!

Today, magnetized to the calendar above my desk are two SARK cards that my dear friend Pam sent me. One reads “Breathe” and the other, “All your dreams are already coming true.” Beside this, a framed piece of art that my mother gave me maybe twenty years ago that has been held close in every home since: “The act of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” ––David Hare. Again: none of these are imprinted on my skin, but all are a part of my daily visual cues as I look up to consider deadlines and seek poems from that vast, diaphanous place above my head where they materialize.

Words can be like arrows, directing your attention in certain directions. And they can be like steering wheels, literally influencing the choices you make and actions you take. I encourage you to think (and feel) carefully about the words you keep close: on your body, where you sleep, work, and live. Sooner or later, the words you see will become a part of your framework of belief.

If “Pat Benatar” are the two words you need to keep in sight to remind you of your true North, then by all means become one with the legendary rocker. Whatever it is you believe or you’d like to believe, experiment with letting words be the current that can keep your circuits juiced with your own truth.

The Writing Life: Keeping Your Wilderness Alive

By Sage Cohen

"Solitude is the sense of space as nourishing. What usually happens with solitude is that people equate it with loneliness, which frightens them . . . There is a way in which we treat our relationships almost like a colonial expedition: we want to colonize the space, all the territory in between, until there is no wilderness left. Most couples who have deadened in each other's presence have colonized their space this way. They have domesticated each other beyond recognition." -- John O'Donohue

On a Saturday morning, Jon dropped me off at yoga class at ten A.M. and kept right on driving with the dogs to Forest Park where they galloped six muddy miles of trail together in the deep womb of urban wilderness. I had dressed for the walk home, and was warm and relaxed as I headed out from class into the mild gloom of a March afternoon. Digging around in my purse to no avail, it struck me that we had used my keys in the car, and that the car-and keys-were with Jon; I'd be locked out until he got home. Jon didn't have his phone with him, and I had no idea when he would be home.

With destination erased from my trajectory, I felt like a balloon cut free, floating purposeless and weightless down Clinton Street. I remembered seeing a café on my way to class and walked east another three blocks to Broder, a Scandinavian café. The café was long and narrow, about the size of a train car, and had been polished with care to a modern minimalist sheen.

The patrons had clearly emerged from a Portland other than the one I inhabit: one of high-style, where darkly framed, dramatic eyegear and strangely proportioned clothes in shades of black and brown slung over heroin-chic bony bodies. The waiters and chefs were waify, underweight young men smattered with tattoos and too-tight black pants with a slick of aloofness greasing down the errant eagerness beneath their cool façades. In my sloppy stretch pants, bunched-down wool socks, fleece jacket, and unwashed hair flopping around in a loose clip, I was blissfully out of place. In an urban environment, not looking the part is as close to invisible as you get, and I love being invisible.

I took a seat at the bar, retrieved a small pile of index cards and a pen from my purse, and started writing. Card after card, the ideas kept coming through me, through the pen. A practice established over the course of twenty years, my body needed only assume the position to turn on its free writing tap. As I wrote, a glorious mug of fragrant decaf coffee arrived with a smart glass jar of sugar cubes and a silver carafe of half and half. Then came the large, frothy orange juice. And then three aebleskivers, quarter-size Danish pancakes dusted in powdered sugar and circled in dollops of lingonberry jam, maple syrup, and lemon curd. Compliments of the chef. I had fallen through the rabbit hold to a Swedish heaven.

As I wrote, my baked scramble with wild mushrooms and caramelized onions materialized on the counter steaming in its square, cast-iron baking dish, aligned with a square white plate with a perfectly spiced potato pancake accompanied by a fan of triangular slices of walnut bread. I tasted, marveled, and wrote some more. And as I did, I was transported to the life and times of Sage of yesteryear. This Sage had free time. With little income and minimal expenses, she lived for the indulgence of her weekend café breakfasts. With no car but plenty of notebooks and one divine poetry book at a time, she'd ride the streetcar and listen and look and feel and write and weep. This old Sage was spontaneous. Not yet the precariously over-committed and over-scheduled adult she would grow up to be, this young woman had room for surprises.

For a brief hour of homelessness and exquisite food, I returned to this lost wilderness of my early twenties: the Sage of open spaces. I carried her home like a pressed flower-fragile and old and new. In a flash of lucidity, I could see how I had colonized myself into my own prison of responsibility and purpose and civic duty as year after year I cut back the rich, fertile thrill of my precious solitude to cultivate a more groomed and professional version of myself. When really all I wanted was something big and impossible and gloriously alive to get lost in.

Poetry does not survive the suburbs we make of our minds. It withers in the cage of constant accomplishment. Poetry needs the wilderness of solitude to call itself up out of the verdant ashes. It needs the darkness and the light to recognize its wholeness. How have you colonized your creativity and domesticated that wildflower of your imagination that once billowed in the wind? How will you recover your lost wilderness? No matter what work you do, what relationship you have, or how busy you are, inch-by-inch it can be done. You can have your suburbs and your wilderness. Your poetry depends on it.

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Sage Cohen is the author of Writing the Life Poetic: An Invitation to Read and Write Poetry (Writer's Digest Books, March 2009) and the poetry collection Like the Heart, the World. She writes three monthly columns about the craft and business of writing and serves as poetry editor for VoiceCatcher 4. Co-curator of a reading series at Barnes & Noble, Sage teaches the online class Poetry for the People. She has won first place in the Ghost Road Press Poetry Contest and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sage's son Theo is the poem that has rewritten her. Learn more at sagesaidso.com and writingthelifepoetic.com.