Frances Ruhlen McConnel & Nancy Ware
Frances: My interest in renga came out of my interest in Haiku, particularly Basho’s haiku and renga. I loved the idea of poets traveling together and carrying on a conversation in poetry. I had collaborated with poets before, but only with students, joining in on collaborative assignments I’d given them. When I thought of writing a renga with a poet friend, I immediately thought of Nancy, as her poems are concise, lyrical, Zen-influenced, and speak beautifully and magically of nature. The year before, in 2005, we had done a roadtrip together to Mendocino to a friend’s annual 60th birthday party. It had been a lovely trip and I had written a couple of haibun about it. But that seemed a rather lonely enterprise and not reflective of my experience of the journey.
Nancy: It started with my mentor, collaborator, friend introducing me to the renga form, its conventions and history. And with an opportunity to go to an oasis in Palm Desert. We drove from Claremont to the site, past electricity generating windmills, to the refurbished inn. The check-in area was cool, low-keyed with information on the healing waters and alignment in a beneficial energy vortex. We could see the historic hot springs pool with its ramp for those in wheelchairs. On a week day with few other guests, the retreat was inviting. We took the waters after finding a zen style room. We had a massage, drove around a bit on the streets with no name while listening to U2. Found dinner, saw stars, had a night swim. Took no cell phone calls.
Frances: There are good web-sites about renga and renku. One is http://renku.home.att.net/ ; http://www.ahapoetry.com/renga.htm is also an excellent one.
Nancy: Then after our return, we began the renga conversation mostly via e-mail. Fran and I traded the haiku back and forth with a hook for the other's voice. Sometimes an echo, sometimes an abrupt shift to a memory from childhood, but mostly images from the trip. We met a few times to rearrange the sequence. After deciding to make a booklet for poets and friends, Fran set two types to distinguish our voices. I found paper for the cover and pages. Fran printed it out and we stitched the cover on together.
Frances: Our renga differs from the traditional kind in several ways. For one thing, it has a narrative line—a story of our journey. Partly I think this is because it was composed after the journey (though both of us kept mental notes and images we wanted to write about). As we tried to put our different parts together, we fixed on a chronological telling of the trip. Also, we have not divided the parts in the traditional way—with one poet’s lines following the other’s in a symmetrical order. At some point we made a conscious decision to play with the structure and sometimes surprising new directions came out of this interface. Also, since Nancy lives in Pasadena and I live in Claremont, we worked mostly via e mail. Writing first drafts, we just tossed them back and forth in the traditional way, but when assembling the whole, especially after we decided to make a booklet out of it, we had to start thinking more intensely about it as a story, rather than just an accumulation of moments. Thus part of our process involved trying out different orders and combinations of lines, testing them out on each other, and then negotiating the final version. Nancy says that ultimately I physically put the whole thing together, but I don’t remember it that way. It seems to me it was always an equal and joint pleasure.
Frances’s lines are in italics.
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Words in the Desert
Desert Hot Springs, California
Windfarms
spinning Mojave air.
Fall Santa Anas:
brown mountain slopes, blackened greasebush
await the wet moon.
~
we travel along grey highways
remembering the colors of maps,
weighing out each word
one like sand, another smooth
as a stone you might skip
~
what is the Lapp word for the snow
they leap into after saunas?
turquoise ripples
one Navajo word for both blue and green:
pool, pine, grass, sky
~
call these dragonflies flirts,
all but touching us.
hot water steeps
minerals from stone
silk on parched skin
~
The aquifer split by a faultline:
half volcanic hot, half glacial cold.
Ying-yang springs underground
in our hands
tall glasses of champagne.
~
muslin gowns, tea, scones, clotted cream,
at Bath pitted Roman stone
holds healing waters
where pale faces shimmer,
the cloud-blurred moon
~
patients, pilgrims, travelers seek
renewal after the day's dust.
old story
waste land, baptism,
come new again.
~
treading pool water, a bee
you bail out with a leaf
churning now in a puddle--
one lap, he’s gone
two and so’s the puddle!
~
Einstein discovered the one
true constant is light.
Deep throat of a trumpet flower
quivers, then falls,
hummingbird flies off.
~
northeast: indigo calm, southwest:
shimmer of far vapor trails
At dusk
a black-chinned sparrow
oasis pool.
~
shadows fall: candelabra
cactus across a trailer
no matter the sun’s blaze,
earth turns her back—headlights rule,
pavement’s dark smolder
~
on western streets with spanish
names we find satay and pad thai
words once awkward
on our tongues--
mouths still tingle awake
~
stars not as bright
nor as many as we hoped for.
Sauna rocks sputter
drips depend
on the wooden ladle.
~
barefoot on concrete tile
ahead, your white terry robe
glowing
in the empty lounge
oranges
~
you press your hand
against the glass door
who is there to hear
our footsteps?
we slip through luminous night.
~
the masseuse tells life-stories
I parse my body aches.
where she presses down
old scenes bubble up--
Bach in counterpoint
~
pulse points, meridians
energy fields of the body
our landscapes
take new forms
hands, haunches, bones in soft flesh.
~
flood-lit palm trunks rear up
hiss of wind in fronds
the pool’s jade bed
through lace curtains,
snore of the AC
~
Milky Way taking shape
where does that road lead?
Jacksonville Beach
somewhere soft thunder
sand fleas jump my calves
~
momma’s white cap lifts and falls—
small, smaller. surf's crash and hiss
caving sand under toes
back on the beach
this child wailing
~
toes clamped, arms rigid
my mother at a distance
on a board above the pool,
resisting the dive,
not letting go
~
birds' toes clench the branch
morning glories fold inward
Do aquifers have tides,
stir with the moonrise,
dream of spring rains?
~
rock ticking down a steep slope
in distant Esperanza Canyon
darkening sand
abandoned church
by a desolate inland sea
~
let sleeping stones
lie still in the desert night.
noise of the motorway
dawn light
on rock field below blue mountain.
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Nancy Ware got her BA at Scripps College with a Literature Major, her MA from the Claremont Graduate School, also in English, and her PH.D from Claremont Graduate University in Education. She teaches in the English Department and in the Interdisciplinary General Education Program at California Polytechnic State U in Pomona. She lived in Claremont for many years, but has lived in Pasadena since 2004. She and Frances Ruhlen McConnel created and published a small chapbook of “Words in the Desert.”
Frances Ruhlen McConnel is polishing a new manuscript of poems called Falling is the Same as Rising. She and Lucia Galloway, another Claremont poet, co-chair the steering committee for the Claremont Library Reading Series sponsored by the Friends of the Claremont Library, of which she is a Board member. She teaches a fascinating writing class, mostly of memoir, at Pilgrim Place, a Claremont retirement community for religious professionals of various sorts and denominations. Fascinating because of the students and their experience.