Ellen Bass: Ellen Bass on the Power of Poetry in Your Life

and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ellen Bass, a chancellor

of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, Like a Beggar, was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize, the Publisher's Triangle Award, the Milt Kessler Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award. Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salina's Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California Jails. She currently teaches in the Low Residency m f A writing program at Pacific University. Hi Friends, there's a couple of other ways to feed your good

wolf in addition to just listening to this show. One is that you can support us on Patreon and that will allow you to get additional bonus content at as well as a mini episode for me each month. You can do that by going to one you Feed dot Net Slash Support. And the other thing that you can do is join our Facebook group where we have discussions about the episodes and other ways that people feed their good wolf and deal with challenges in life. And that

is it One you Feed dot Net Slash Facebook. And here's the interview with Ellen Bass. Hi Ellen, welcome to the show. Oh thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here. I'm thrilled to have you on. You are a poet of some renown and I first think I heard one of your poems from Jack Cornfield

and I thought it was lovely. And i've sense, you know, read a bunch of your stuff and continue to think it's lovely is maybe not the right word, but it's it's very powerful, and so we're going to have you do a little reading of some of that poetry, so listeners can here in a moment. But let's start like we normally do, with the parable. There's grandmother's talking with her granddaughter and she says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

It's a wonderful parable, and um certainly in my life to be feeding that good wolf. But I was thinking about it in the days leading up to this interview, and I was thinking how in poetry we really invite in both wolves, and there isn't a an exclusion of one part of our experience. I was thinking about la

who was writing a letter to his wife. This is back in seven talking about the debt that writers owed to Boude Laire and Rilka wrote, even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, truly exists and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists. Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything. A single refusal and he has cast out of the

state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through. Well, we probably wouldn't go quite as far as la I'm not sure that a single refusal will cast us out, that's all. There's a little bit more wiggle room. But I do think out that a lot. How in poetry we really want to invite in all aspects of human experience,

not of course, so that we become immoral. People are thinking about it last night in terms of the way that a lot of Buddhist meditation teachers teach us that rather than trying to transcend are lesser impulse feelings or deny them or push them away. Instead we try and look at them with curiosity, and we don't just say, well, you know, that's that's great, that I'm a greedy person I'll just go along and be that way. But we also don't try and deny those feelings, and instead we

we have a kind of curiosity towards them. And that's what poetry does, I think, is speak curious towards all aspects of the human experience and to try and really investigate them. Yep, I agree, and I think it's such a I mean, the parable is one of those things that commonly people mention, you know, we don't want to

starve the bad wolf. And that's one of the things I kind of like about the parable is it doesn't mention doing anything to the bad wolf, you know, it just talks about like, let's give a little bit more attention to the good wolf. And I do think also that art is a little bit you know, the creative process is a little bit different maybe than how we treat the people around us or you know, so there's I think the parable only goes so far. I would say, yes,

I think that, um. You know, certainly, if I think about the process of writing, you know, the willingness to dedicate oneself and stay with it even when it's not going as well as you'd like, and you know, kind of feed your faith and continuing sitting down. I call

it the tush and share method of poetry writing. You know there, we certainly in terms of practice, have to feed that good wolf, because the not so good wolf is often whispering things into our ear that are discouraging, saying this is never going to be a good poem, so you might as well just give up right now, all those kinds of things. Yes, the bad wolf is not a very hard worker. Usually he shows up that

way for an awful lot of people, I think. And it's interesting you were talking about that because another thing I've heard you say is that for you, a poem is as much about discovery of yourself and what you're talking about and your issues as it is um you getting down on paper what you think. I mean you talk about, you say, a good poem is one that you discover a lot of things about yourself as you go through it, and poem is one that the reader

does also. Absolutely, if you already know what you're going to say for the most part, you could write an essay and that might be a really good thing to do. We need those essays in which people uh talk about their convictions and their understandings. Um, they educate us, and they challenge us, they delight us. But in a poem, if you are too knowing, if you already know what you're going to say, then you don't have a chance

to discover anything. And pretty much every writer who's talked about writing has talked about this concept um of surprise or discovery. And that's the real thrill of the writing, is finding out something that you didn't know when you began. And I think that's what makes poetry interesting to the reader. And if you, if you read a lot of poetry, as I do of developing writers who aren't that far along in the process, very often the poem begins with a thought and it ends in some way with the

same thought. So even if it's expressed very beautifully, it hasn't traveled anywhere. It hasn't taken the writer or the reader someplace that they didn't expect to go. And that's what we're always hoping for. Very interesting. So why don't we start by having you read a poem. I've I've asked you to read a poem called Relax. I'd be glad to relax. Bad things are going to happen. Your tomatoes will grow a fungus, and your cat will get

run over. Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream melting in the car and throw your blue Chasmere sweater in the dryer. Your husband will sleep with a girl your daughter's age, her breath filling out of her blouse, where wife will remember she's a lesbian and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat, the one you never really liked, will contract a disease that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth every four hours.

Your parents will die. No matter how many vitamins you take, how much pilates, you'll lose your keys, your hair, and your memory. If your daughter doesn't plug her heart into every live stocket she passes, you'll come home to find your son has emptied the refrigerator, dragged it to the curb, and called the used appliance store for a pickup drug money. The Booty tells the story of a woman chased by

a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down, But there's also a tiger below and two my one white, one black, carry out and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point she notices a wild strawberry growing from a credit. She looks up down at the nice then she eats the strawberry. So here's the view. The breeze, the pulse in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat, flip on the bathroom tiles in a foreign hotel, and

crack your hips. You'll be a lonely Oh taste, how sweet and tart the red juice is, how the tiny seeds crunched between your teeth. I just love that poem. I mean, there are so many things about it. I love the fact that I think it normalizes human experience. We talk on this show so often about how, particularly the West, we have this expectation of things going well, of being happy, of everything being good, and then when

they don't, we think there's something wrong with us. And I love that that poem sort of normalizes, like it's going to happen to all of you. And then I also love the part about the strawberry and the idea that in the midst of whatever is happening to us, there can be a place of peace or joy or appreciation, or that life is right there with us. We don't have to wait until the bad things are gone to be alive. Yeah, and we better not because there's just

so many of them. My oldest friend, UM, we're friends since when I was four and he was five. Um is a psychologist in Philadelphia and also has been quadriplegic for over thirty years. And uh so he's a pretty wise guy. And UM and a wise guy as well.

And when I talked to him during periods when things are very hard in my life or I'm in pain, UM, he'll always say a how are you right now, right this minute, and usually right that moment, especially talking to him and feeling all that love that that he can send, even through the telephone line, I'm not so bad and maybe even okay, and he says, well, okay, this is you know, right now, right now. It's pretty good, isn't it,

you know? And so yes that moment. This is a poem really that I don't know if it's my good wolf, but it's my smartest wolf wrote and my wife wolf. Yeah, my my sort of every day wolf needs to be reminded of this all the time. Um. Sometimes I can hardly believe I even had a long enough period of

wisdom to write this period this poem. I think we're all that way to a to a certain extent, certainly, that's a big part of why I do what I do with this show is is exactly that is to remind myself of these deeper, greater truths that tend to slide out of sight in day to day life if we're not careful. That's wonderful. Yes, exactly. There's another thing I wanted to talk about as far a little bit about the craft of poetry, but sort of takes us

somewhere deeper than that. And you talk about metaphor. You know, one of the things that you're really good at his metaphor. I think it's one of the things that people praise in your poetry is meta for But you said something I thought was was fascinating. You said, metaphor is an aspect of poetry that is spiritual. Our society has become very sophisticated in its ability to discriminate. We can discern differences more and more finely. In metaphor, you are doing

what might be the opposite. You're looking for what is similar in disparate things. Yes, I came to that realization somewhere along the line, thinking a lot about metaphors. Successful metaphors don't necessarily come to me easily, but thinking in metaphor does. And even if I'm just in a discussion with somebody, I'm often saying, well, it's like and and or, or if I'm in an argument, well it's like and. I realized that it comes out trying to convince people

of something or trying to be understood. I think it's a deep need to be understood. But yes, I think that as I thought about metaphor more and more, I began to really see it in the way that I described there, that it is a kind of um miniature version of looking at the oneness of the world, that everything this concept that we're understanding from many angles. More and more I think, um that everything is connected is something that we do in a in a small version,

in each metaphor. Interestingly, I came across something not long ago where Aristotle said that to make good metaphor is holy labor. Isn't that wonderful? Yeah? That is that's great. Yeah, I think I don't know that I'm that good at metaphor, but I certainly appreciate it. The other thing I saw you you say briefly was that, Um, your approach to finding the right metaphor is just to write as many of them as you can think about and hope that

you know the good one comes out of it. So there's definitely a like you said, even though you may have a natural affinity to it, you're still really working through finding the right one. That it's not like the perfect one comes immediately. And I think that's just back to the working hard in the chair to be a poet.

I think it's it's always good to remind people that the creative process like that, it isn't like you know, these things come out fully formed, that brilliantly like you're you're working on them and you're you're labor in a way to make the poems as good as they can be. Yes, I think sometimes because we all have language, and we all speak, and we all uh, you know, most people who are reading, well, everyone who's reading poetry is literate or else they couldn't read it. So we can read,

we can write. There's sometimes an idea that you just get inspired and write your poem. And although I'm sure it's been known to happen, and I've gotten a couple of those along the way. We wouldn't think that about the saxophone. For example, No one would expect to pick up the saxophone and be able to control their breath and the sounds that the saxophone makes immediately. But because we're so familiar with words, sometimes people think that it's

going to come more easily than it does. And I teach a lot, and one of the indicators that a student is really progressing to me is when they come into class somewhat distraught and say something along the lines of this is really hard, and they're scuraged by how hard it is. And I always then say, oh, this is great, you're really getting it now, You're really now now you have an understanding of what it is a beginning to have an understanding of what it is that

you're trying to learn how to do. And then they always have a lot more progress after that. So I want to talk about a poem of yours. Maybe just read a couple lines of it, and then um, we're gonna have you do some more reading a little bit.

But there's a poem of yours um called asking Directions in Paris, And I love this because most of the poem you're describing that you're in Paris and you're asking a woman for directions and she is giving you them in French very quickly, and you don't really have any idea what she's saying. You know, you think you know French, and you get there and you're not, and so she's giving you these directions and you don't really know anything

about them. And then you say, I'll just read the last part of the poem and we can talk about it, you say, and as you thank her profusely and set off full of groundless hope, you think this must be how it is with destiny, God explaining and explaining what you must do. And all you can make out is a few unconnected phrases, a word or two, a wave in what you pray is the right direction. And I think that's just a beautiful way of describing what a

lot of us, particularly with spirituality, are are doing. We're if we're not certain, you know, if we don't have a faith of of which we're incredibly certain, but we are, let's say, interested, or involved, or you know, we need something. That's a lot what it feels like to me making out a few words order to hear hoping you're going the right direction, etcetera, etcetera. Yes, yes, indeed, indeed, and um, this isn't really exactly what you're asking, but it does

have to do with this section, so I'll just share it. Um, I don't have a I don't have a belief in any kind of conventional or even somewhat unconventional God, except you know, for know, the amazement of the universe and in all its many aspects, which is a kind of experience of awe for sure. But you know, I don't really believe that God talks to me or that I can talk to God. But I felt at a certain point in my writing that why shouldn't I be able

to use the word God? Because it's such a familiar concept to us, and it means so many many things to us. And I thought to myself, well, I don't have to have a belief in God in order to claim that word as part of my vocabulary. And it was incredibly liberating. I started to be able to say all kinds of things that I wouldn't have known how to say otherwise. Yeah, I agree, I was trying to

find a quote. I must not have it right, But I feel like Joseph Campbell said something like, you know, God is a metaphor for that which you know transcends everything, or you know that which we can't talk about. And I really like that because I think that really widens it up to a place that is workable for me. Yeah, you mentioned in an interview I saw somewhere that you're a student of, you know, Pemachodren's work. You mentioned, Um, you know one of my favorite books of all time,

which is When Things Fall Apart. Yes, I'm adapt the worst meditator maybe in the Western hemisphere. I'm seventy years old, and I started trying to metaphor when I was trying a metaphor that's really good. I started trying to meditate when I was in my early twenties, and um, I probably can't name the number of times I said, this time is really it? This time, I'm really gonna stick with it. And so far I have never been able to sustain a practice in which I sit on a

cushion or a chair. But I do read a lot, and I've come to accept that. Um My trying to practice just through the day and my reading and taking what I read seriously and really trying to put it into into my day is another kind of practice, and that's evidently the kind I'm going to have. So yeah, I am, I am. I appreciate Kim of children so much and and I also have come very belatedly to Tick knack Han and Uh, I just love them. They

feel like two sides of the same coin to me. Um, you know that this is a kind of unfair characteristic characterization, but you know, children is always saying, you know, you have to when when something card, you lean into it and you examine it and you flore it and you don't try to, you know, run away from it in any way. And Tick not hotness. It seems to always be saying, um, you have all the conditions for happiness, you know, just breathing and smile. It's like, oh wow,

could I use the dose of that. So um, they're they're a wonderful pair. I don't know if you've seen it. There's a movie out very recently about him called I think it's called Walk with Me, and it's like a feature film that is done. It's just filmed gorgeously. I highly recommend it. And there is a scene in there that I'll just for you and the listeners where you know, he talks with a little girl about her dog who passed away, and it is one of the sweetest, most

touching things I've ever seen. Like if I need like, uh, you know, you talk about like um loving kindness practice where you're ideas to sort of warm your heart up and then directed it lots of different people, that one always works for me when I think of it, just the way he does it. So that movie is great. It's it's very I would say it's slow paced, it's very meditative, but it's filmed beautifully, and there's lots of you know, lots of him and it's really good. Oh

that's wonderful. That's just wonderful. Yeah. I love how slowly he talks to Yes, Yes, let's have you do another poem for us. If you would um called, if you you, if you knew what, if you knew, you'd be the last to touch someone. If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theater, tearing them, giving back the ragged stubbs, you might take care to touch that palm fresh your

fingertips along the lifeline's crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, When the car in front of me doesn't signal, When the clerk at the pharmacy won't say thank you, I don't remember. They're going to die. A friend told me she'd been with her aunt. They just had lunch, and the waiter, a young gay man with plumb black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, dis her aunt's peldered cheek. When they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped

dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragons fume have to come? How why just the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are in honey, stung and swollen, reckless and against time? That is so beautiful. Thank you. I don't even have any anything to add to it. It's just it's just so beautiful. I appreciate that. And now I'm not sure where to go next. That's difficult

to uh, that's difficult to follow up with anything. But yeah, it's just it reminds me of that phrase, you know, be kind to everyone because we don't know what they're going through. Um, but it takes it even to like this further level, Like I don't even have to know what they're going for through, right, I just have to know like they could you know, they could be gone

at any point. You have another poem related to um, this sense of appreciating what's in front of us um, although it's kind of inverse to that, and it's called lost Dog and it's a it's a poem about your dog who went lost for um a period of time, and you know, then you come home and you find the dog. And I'll just read this a little bit. You say, every time I look at him, the wide head resting on my outstretched pause, joy does another lap

around the racetrack of my heart. Even in sleep, when I turn over to ease my bad hip, I'm suffused with contentment. If I could lose in like this every day, I'd be the happiest woman alive. That's so great. I mean it because it's so true of us that, you know, we you suddenly think you might lose something, and you you realize how much it matters to you. But it is so hard, even knowing that, it is so hard to do that day to day, to get that sense

of urgency. Yes, for most of us, it's just about impossible. And I think I think that A big motivation for me in writing poems is too in some way, in many ways, help me to pay attention. You know, many people have talked about attention as being a form of prayer, and in writing a poem, it's a it's an opportunity to try to really pay attention. And in that paying attention, there's an inevitable appreciation for people, animals, you know, everything that is dear to us, I mean not you know,

even even the stone. Anything that we're looking at, we're remembering, we're thinking about um. And the older I get, the more I feel mortality and so you know, eventually, of course we're gonna lose as individuals, we're gonna lose everything um. And I think poetry for me is a way to stop and appreciate, appreciate it each thing. Yeah. I think that's what poetry, as a reader of poetry helps me to do, is it. It helps me to appreciate things more.

It helps me adjust my lenses, so to speak, so that they're a little bit more attuned to the beauty of life that's right in front of us in the ordinary. It just as I as I read, you know, good poems do that they take something that looks very ordinary at first, and and bring it up in a way and then that sort of mindset or ability, then I find I can pivot it to other things. I don't have to have the words. It's just that it's a

way of looking, a way of thinking. It's it's a it's going deeply into what's right in front of us, which is again another word as you use kind of for attention, um, but it's almost a particular kind of attention. It's uh, it's in a for me, it's an appreciative attention. Yes, Yes, even even if it's a painful thing um or you know,

thinking about the wolves. You know, even if it's a painful thing or a place where uh, you know, we feel that we've failed or let ourselves or somebody else down, still there is that paying attention to it and giving it. It's do um, not learning it, just you know, just not learning it slip away. Ye. There's a lot of a lot of that. And I'm glad that you talk about the reading of poetry as well, because I think

that it is the other aspect. And I'm sure for every poet what brings you to poetry is the reading of poetry. You know you love poetry, and so you want to you want to make your own. UM. And I have the same experience in in reading as I do in writing. I heard you mentioned before that gift people can give each other is to introduce them to poetry that they would love. You talk about how easy it is to find novels and books that we might write, but how hard it is with poetry. Do you have

a couple of contemporary poets you might recommend? Yeah, I surely do, UM more than the couple. I know. I'm putting you on the spot there for a quick answer, but this isn't meant to be exhaustive, but just you know, find just at the moment, UM, Marie how um poetry. UM. She's just come out within a new book called Magdalene that is extraordinary UM, looking at the experience of contemporary women,

but somewhat through the lens of Mary Magdalen. And if she's an extraordinary poet, I think one of our most extraordinary contemporary poets her. Her book What the Living Do is her best known book, and it's a just UM. I can't say enough good about it. So maybe listeners, if you're if you're not familiar, you might really want to look at her poetry. I love Jericho Brown's poetry. Um, he has a couple of those stout that are excellent, excellent.

I love more new poet new Ish, who only has one book out so far, but I think there's another one coming out really soon. Is that Natalie Diaz Um who um is uh mojave Native American and her book is UM When My Brother was an as tech and deals with many things, but one of them her brother's mental illness. And um, oh gosh, so many poets I could name. Well, that's a that's a good start for us. That will certainly give us something to do. But yeah, good.

I'll put links in the show notes for listeners if you want to find any of the books by those poets, I will definitely make sure they're linked in the show notes. Um. I think the last thing Ellen I'd like to do is just talk briefly about something that you've said and I think it shows up in your work over and over, and you talk about, um, the importance of humor. I think, you know, I often say I think humor is an unappreciated virtue. Um. You know, I'd put it up there

with the virtues. And and you talk about how there's room for humor even in the most serious situations, and some of your poetry even right in the midst of like pretty heavy, intense things, it's funny at the same time. And and I always, you know, listener to the show, I've probably heard me say this to a few guests. When I can laugh and cry within like a very short amount of time of each other, like if they're both kind of right there on the same page, I

always think that's sort of a virtuoso act of art. Oh, thank you, I appreciate that. Yes, I just love humor and tragedy real close together. Well that's me too, I mean, I uh, I you know, um, I think the kind of humor that is in my poem, I don't try and be funny. I mean, I love it when it is funny, and I there's a great joy and making people laugh. I mean, it's nothing you know, so much fun in giving a reading as having people just crack up and you know, kind of cracking up with them. Um.

But I don't try and make jokes, you know. I don't set out to be funny. And I think that's the kind of humor that I really do like is that the just in a way being able to be the humor in in a situation. And of course I'm a fan of dark humor. Um, how could I not be. Um. It's interesting because I'm getting a new a new book of poetry together now and I gave it to my wife to look at and she said, wow, Ellen, you know, these poems are very serious and um, you know, there's

just not as much humor in them. And I said, really, you know, because it seemed to me that there really still was a lot in there, so maybe there's not as much as ever. But then I started to say, well, how about this one and how about this? Yeah, this is really funny. People always laugh and uh, and it was true. But I think that there that they're also there is a lot of um, a lot of pain in them, but I think the humor is in there too.

Maybe the proportions a little bit different, But I have a kind of I've come to realize the kind of quirky sense of humor, and I think it's an asset in in my poem because the way I see things is so that, let you know, I do even even when it's just a terrible situation. I do see the humor in it, and and I love including that in the poems when it comes and it and it feels

natural and right for the poem. Yeah. I think, like I said, I think humors of virtue, and I think being able to find humor in difficult things is, you know, not only a virtue but one of you know, if you could pick your coping skills off a list, right, it's it should be in the top five I think of of the best skills you could have if you want to if you want to be a sensitive about life and care about life and not walk around petually wounded, humor is a pretty good way to help. I love

you putting it as a virtue. That's quite wonderful. Yeah, that's the way I see it anyway. Well, Ellen, thank you so much for taking the time to come on. Loved your poems. I thank you for reading for us, and um, yeah, it just it was a it was a pleasure. Thank you that. Okay, If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation

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