‘when it’s all over
we shall not see the light,
neither sky, nor bitter ocean
but the thin, pure moment
of creation’
Category: Promos
An Interview with Birdy Odell
First and foremost, what inspired you to write Cemetery Music?
When I begin a collection of work, I’m not entirely sure which direction it will take. In fact when I drew the little birds that illustrate the poems I did it separately. It wasn’t until later on that I began to attach words to the images. I wasn’t sure they would resonate with people. In fact, I very nearly didn’t submit this collection for that reason.
I’ve always been at odds with the notion of dying. It seems, on one hand, a lovely reprieve, and on the other a spectre that hovers over me each day threatening my happiness. It’s not that I set out to write about death, it’s what bubbles up as I sift through piles of cut up words. I think of it as a form of therapy.
Why found words?
My process is organic. Intuitive. I am not a writer who studies various forms of poetry and follows a prescribed set of rules. Writing poetry is, for me, an expression of emotional thought, a way to put unnamed feeling into words. Using found words allows me to go into a completely relaxed headspace. I let the words come forward. I may find a phrase that I like and that will be the jumping off point. Sometimes it comes easily and other times it will take days to complete one poem. If I overthink it, I get nothing. The words sound too contrived. Working without forcing my agenda onto the words provides a more organic experience. It’s like a treasure hunt. And I am thrilled when I find something that just fits.
Birds are a recurring (and oh so beautiful!) image throughout this collection–is there a particular significance to them?
I think I find in them a beautiful sadness and I’m drawn to that. They may be charming little chatterboxes or thoughtful predators. But I don’t know that they ever seem entirely comfortable. We find beauty in a seagull soaring overhead. But its own experience is an endless quest for food. I am thrilled when the geese fly off in the fall and love to hear the hush, hush, of their wings in between calls. I take joy in such a peaceful moment but for them it is the beginning of a perilous and exhausting journey. A chickadee huddled in on itself in the dead of winter says so much to me. As does the first sight of a robin in the spring.
When I was 10 years old I found a great horned owl beside our house when I went to get the garden hose. It scared me to death as a child but as an adult, I think how lucky I was to have seen that. And not long ago my husband and I were driving in the country. A snowy owl was perched on a post. It took flight but low to the ground and just in front of the car all the way down the snow covered gravel road. Like a guardian leading us home.
Did you struggle at all, writing about a topic as difficult as death?
I think I was born into the middle of an existential crisis. I’ve thought about death for as long as I can remember. So in some respects it’s been a constant companion. Death, while difficult, isn’t as hard for me as loss. That’s much worse. I think most of us would say the same. We don’t fear our own demise as much as that of those we stand to lose.
The first funeral I attended was that of a family friend who had been beaten to death. It was sad. For sure. But it was his existence that really wounded me. It was tragic.
I find writing about death kind of lovely in a way. I love the poignancy, the nostalgia and the peacefulness of a cemetery walk. There is a strange comfort there. And yet knowing we are all going to die is still terrifying to me. It is an absolute paradox. An unsolvable riddle. One I continue to pick at through poetry.
What was your process in writing this book? Did you create the pieces individually and notice these through-lines or set out with this final product in mind?
I had been writing fiction for awhile in an attempt to be a novelist. But one day I just made the conscious decision that anything I wrote from now on would be only for me. I wanted to simply enjoy the process. That’s it. Once I gave myself permission to do that it was amazing how productive I suddenly became. So with this book the birds came first. Every day I’d just paint a little bird. In the meantime I was working on found poetry with vintage photos, which is my first love really, and then one day I pulled out a picture of one of the birds and added the words, “between the beating of heavy wings, the weary heart smiled” and that was it. The words dictated the image. I most often find the words first and then the image they depict. The process itself is tremendously cathartic. It’s a mood. I try to explain it but most often if the writing is going well I feel as if I’m just the messenger. And as I completed more and more of the poems I realized that I was writing about death. I hesitated about the imagery but by then it had a mind of its own.
Do you have a favourite piece(s) from this collection?
I love so many but I think the one that sort of sums it all up is this,
‘I am but
A place in time
Echoing the sun’
It is the circle of life, days come and go, seasons change. Babies are born, people die. But in echoing the sun I am able to find joy while I am here.
Were there any pieces you decided not to include in the final version? Or pieces you added later in the process?
Yes, a few, mostly for formatting and page count. Here are two.
above the tiny garden
perfumed lavender
little streams, very blue
all wet with tears
as it began to rain
—
the old man was weeping
watching birds hop from
branch to branch
he felt pity for them
like any ordinary day
among the cherry trees
Who would you most recommend Cemetery Music to?
I think that anyone who has suffered a loss will identify with the poems in this book. But because the images are lighthearted it isn’t limited to those who grieve. The poignancy of a small moment captured in very few words is something we can all relate to. I write in vignettes on purpose. I prefer a few words that make me think or resonate with me. And even though there is a melancholy tone to the book it is still a book of comfort and sweetness.
What have been your favourite and least favourite parts of the publication process?
This year from start to finish has been a learning curve. Having my first chapbook published has been thrilling at times and at others I’ve been ready to close the blinds and hide. But all in all I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. Having an editor/publisher who understands both sides of the process has been a gift. And when my proof copy came in the mail I felt like I’d crossed an imaginary finish line.
I have actually enjoyed the whole process. The only part I find difficult is tooting my own horn. But I’m learning.
Do you have any advice for those who might want to follow in your footsteps?
I would say write what you want. Don’t try to imitate anyone else’s voice. Start small. There are so many lit mags that are happy to support new writers. It’s fun to see your work out there and feels great to have publishing credits to add to your submissions. Never give up. And be grateful.
What project(s) are you working on going forward?
I’m feeling the need to work on something about shame. This ties into my childhood themes and will still be in the found word style. At the moment I’m working on artwork again. When the time is right the words will come. In the meantime I have other manuscripts out there in the world of submissions and art to make for an upcoming show.
Besides the amazing work you’ve created here, what’s your favourite piece you’ve ever created? How about your favourite by someone else?
That’s a tough one but I love a short story I wrote called ‘The Gardener’, (you can find it on Commaful) in fact there are a few I adore, ‘Goodnight Alice’ is another one. ( Imagine Alice in Wonderland on her 90th birthday.) Each piece I create is my favourite in the moment.
I feel like my favourite poem about death is appropriate here. It’s by Christina Rossetti.
From the Antique (1852)
The wind shall lull us yet,
The flowers shall spring above us:
And those who hate forget,
And those forget who love us.
The pulse of hope shall cease,
Of joy and of regretting:
We twain shall sleep in peace,
Forgotten and forgetting.
For us no sun shall rise,
No wind rejoice, nor river,
Where we with fast-closed eyes
Shall sleep and sleep forever.
Review of Cemetery Music by Birdy Odell
Review by Marie A Bailey
Cemetery Music by Birdy Odell has sad notes dealing as it does with death, loss, and grief, but Odell’s artwork—including whimsical little birds with silly hats and
balloons—lifts the music of her chosen words, encouraging this reader at least to
sometimes find delight, perhaps even joy, in this chapbook. Odell’s renderings of softly drawn birds and flora are paired with found words pasted to the drawings as like a scrapbook, a meditation on sad but inevitable events, the fact that you cannot have Life without Death.
Death stormed into my life when I was rather young, with the loss of a three-year-old cousin, and has continued to wreak havoc ever since, increasing his presence exponentially as I entered my sixties, forcing me to accept.
Odell gives voice to my uneasy reconciliation with Death: “she believed in what remained.” Five simple words that can have different meanings depending on its context. In Cemetery Music, the meaning of “she believed in what remained,” is soothing, reassuring, a notation that much remains after Death has visited, much remains to believe in, to embrace.
Death or its aftermath may be “a still moment [which] showed neither peace nor sorrow,” but Odell encourages us to “be happy with familiar objects” such as “small, bright beads” and “wooded hills” and “wallflowers.” The found words snips of single words, couplings or phrases—are placed on the pages like a breadcrumb trail, navigating the reader “near the graves” where “nothing was left but little stolen hearts.”
Anyone who has spent time in a cemetery, particularly ones where the dead have lain for centuries, will read Odell’s poems as those epitaphs etched into granite, sandstone, or marble, some so worn by time and weather that words seem “rubbed with the balm of love.”
As I approach the prospect of more deaths in my life, more times of mourning and grief, I’ll want to have Birdy Odell’s Cemetery Music by my side. While her poems speak of loss and the pain of being left behind, she reminds us that “life was [and is] still beautiful and breathing.”
Author Statement: Cemetery Music by Birdy Odell
For as long as I can remember, I have contemplated death. Even as a child, I tried to make sense of it and observed the feelings and rituals associated with the passing of loved ones with a kind of peculiar curiosity. My younger self developed a sense of acceptance in these observations and I found it comforting. Death seemed ‘normal’, sad but not frightening.
As I got older I began to think of funerals as an ordeal and nothing to do with the person who had died at all but simply a public display of grief. It annoyed me.
I wasn’t sad when my maternal grandmother died. She had never been afraid to die herself, so I was ok with it. At her funeral, there was a little old lady in the back row who sang every hymn in a high warbling voice that lent a much-needed sense of comic relief to the occasion. I enjoyed the contrast. Grief was a state of mind alleviated by joy.
I began writing poetry to sort through my feelings at a very early age as well. It has been my way of putting my feelings somewhere outside of my body where they could be looked at as a separate entity. And yet I have never written poetry to examine personal losses. Death is still more of a riddle to be solved than an expression of grief.
In Cemetery Music I chose to pair poems about death with lighthearted images in attempt to illustrate the contrast I have so often felt. But in looking through my work later on I realized that there was still a lingering sadness. I felt that what my work was really conveying was the poignancy of memory and the mixture of happiness and sadness that resides there.
To me, death is both a comfort and a terror and always will be.
Birdy Odell
Review of Gravity by Lynne Schmidt
Review by Daniel Warner
Gravity is stars falling from the ceiling. Gravity is two bodies in orbit, constantly repelling and colliding regardless of intent, regardless of time. Gravity is what you deserve and what you desire reacting and retreating due to forces beyond your control.
Reading this chapbook you will feel the pull of gravity through each page flip to the end, which is a new beginning. Bright stars in the dim dark will light your way until they fall off the plaster ceiling. A speaker will wear a dress of blood, fingers will function as razor blades, cars will collide with memory, and despite best intentions, the wrong person’s hands will pull across years straight through to a “little lamb heart.” Gravity documents the push-and-pull anguish of an off-and-on relationship through a set of images that evolve as the relationship moves from a reality to a memory.
Schmidt chronicles many memories throughout the collection and returns to the image of a car crash in particular, beginning with one involving her best friend in “Striking Pavement” and eventually embodying the relationship into the image in “Breathing Patterns.” Cars later even become a place of safety in “No” and “The Impermanence of Stars.”
The speaker of the poems moves from self-deprecation in earlier poems in the form of statements like “I’m easy to replace” and “I needed you like hours/need minutes” to a place of self-empowerment in “I Wish I Had Listened” with, after years of returning to a smoldering relationship, the Plath-y declaration “You, boy/are not good enough for me.”
There is the vast night full of real stars, and there are stars we recreate in our own rooms over and over until the adhesive no longer sticks. “We hung our universe above our heads,” Schmidt admits, either not knowing of her relationship’s inevitable fall or fully aware of it but choosing blissful disbelief over cynicism. And this is the triumph of Gravity, the way it reveals that paradoxical humanness of returning to the things that harm us: as planets spin; as love fluxes and flows; as humans, we map our old ways onto the current way of things.
Lynne Schmidt’s chapbook broods on and chronicles the wistfulness of how we haunt ourselves with the familiar, even if it is painful. It shows how there is love even in the hateful memories—and how we hold to hate like a hand on a heart the moment before a crash. Schmidt starts with a “fuck you” to the past and ends with a yes to the “Now”.
Thank you to Daniel Warner for reviewing Gravity! Interested in reviewing our titles here on the N&S site or for your blog or other site? Join our launch team!
An Interview with Lynne Schmidt
First and foremost, what inspired you to write Gravity?
A lot of things. I had a lot of feelings surrounding this particular relationship that weren’t quite going away. The dynamic I wrote about here had so many layers to it, the relationship (or lack thereof) itself, who I was at the start to who I am now, the feelings….all of it. Weeks before I’d assembled this collection, I lost my dog to an aggressive cancer, and then found out the subject of this collection was engaged. It was a different kind of loss…
Gravity wasn’t meant to be a collection, but I put everything together and sent it to him a week or so before he got married. I think some small part of me was hopeful my writing would be powerful enough to summon him to my door, and I’d find him saying he’d missed me.
But this is real life, not a rom-com. So my dog stayed dead, he got a wife, and I got a book.
Did you struggle at all, writing about such emotionally-charged events?
Yes—I worried the words weren’t right, or that they didn’t give justice to the experience and the feelings. Editing was harder, I think. Some of these poems I’d written years ago but as I put them together in this collection, I realized pieces were missing to help the flow of the story. Leos was a hard one to write because I wanted to encompass how hard it is to lose something you’ve worked so hard for—the banality of a relationship, the everyday boring goal of setting your toothbrush beside someone’s. It was doubly hard because here I am x-amount of years later, in a healthier and happier relationship with another person, and still stuck in the past.
How about Gravity’s subject—does he about it? If so, do you know what his reaction was?
He knows. He said he’s buying a copy.
When this collection was longlisted, I’d reached out to let him know and ask if I should pull it. He said it’s my writing and he was proud and happy for me. And let’s be real, he’s a Leo, so having an entire collection about him? Please, he loved it.
What was your process in writing this book? Did you write the poems individually and notice these through-lines or set out with this final product in mind?
The poems were written individually. I’d go through phases where I missed him (especially when I was single, or found out he was engaged) and needed an outlet. Parts of me are still having a hard time letting go. When we met, I was such a mess, and so was he. I thought we could work together and heal each other.
And well, it worked, just not in the way I had expected or hoped.
He was married last year. About a week before his wedding, I put everything I’d ever written about him together, named the collection GRAVITY, and sent it to him as a “hahah” kind of thing.
I didn’t expect to put it on submission…And here we are.
Do you have a favourite piece(s) from this collection?
Leos is a favorite, for sure, The Impermanence of Stars, and To Make You Love Me.
Were there any pieces you decided not to include in the final version?
Yes and no. There was one that was handwritten that I wasn’t able to find in the time to resubmit. I’m sure I’ll write more poems about him in the future—I mean, good material is good material, right?
Can you tell us more about the cover?
Yes! My friend Reid Maxim is an incredibly talented artist. He does photography, paintings, pretty much name it and if it can be pretty he can do it. I’d seen some of the work he’d done with galaxies and spray paint and watercolors. I knew I wanted something space-based (how could I not with the name Gravity), and because stargazing had played such an integral role in the dynamic that was written about (see Aries/Leo interactions). So I asked Reid and he put this together. The hardest part for us was picking the font and then the placement of it. We met up at Applebee’s and had a few Adios Motherfuckers and BAM.
We had our cover.
Who would you most recommend Gravity to?
Anyone who has had that love. The kind where when you see the other person, it’s as though the stars have burst and glitter is raining on them. Even if you know they’re flawed, and even if you know this is never going to work out, you’re grateful for this moment, this breath, this kiss.
This collection is for the people who wear their hearts on their sleeves.
What have been your favourite and least favourite parts of the publication process?
Time management, haha. On a daily basis, I am juggling work, an internship, and graduate school. So being picked to be published was a dream come true, but then adding that into the mix AND adding a move at the end of September. Please don’t get me wrong, I am so so honored and grateful and feeling all the feels. Timing was the hardest part. I’m so sleepy.
Do you have any advice for those who might want to follow in your footsteps?
Yes—don’t give up on your work. I have had so many people cheering me on, telling me not to give up. If it wasn’t for them, I probably would have by now. But publications, collections, full out novels—they take time and a ton of effort. Keep going, and it’s okay to take breaks when you need them.
What project(s) are you working on going forward?
Right now I have a forthcoming collection from Thirty West Publishing called On Becoming A Role Model, which is slated for Spring 2020. It revolves a lot around my family, my trauma, and figuring out how to be the kind of adult my niece can look up to.
Outside of that, I have a memoir, The Right to Live: A Memoir of Abortion, that I’ve been working on for the last few years about my experiencing with an unexpected and unwanted pregnancy, the religious shame and guilt that nearly drove me to end my life, the abortion that saved it, and reinventing myself as a snowboarding instructor.
And some young adult novels that I’m working on editing. I can’t wait until January when I’m done with school and can focus a bit more on writing and snowboarding.
Besides the amazing work you’ve created here, what’s your favourite poem you’ve ever written? How about your favourite by someone else?
My favorite poem I’ve ever written was probably Aftermath which appeared in Volume 2 of Frost Meadow Review. I wrote it following the death of my dog and best friend, Baxter. It was the first thing I’d written in a long while, and from there I couldn’t stop. Gravity followed shortly after, so it’s strange how this all has worked out.
My favorite poem written by someone else is probably Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus—I have the words, “And I Eat Men Like Air” tattooed on my collar bone.
“Striking Pavement,” an excerpt from Gravity by Lynne Schmidt
Striking Pavement
He holds my heart the way school children hold rocks.
His arm cocked at any time,
Ready to release.
And though I say he holds this like a rock,
My heart is something more of hand blown glass.
So I know when he lets go,
The world will shatter.
Gravity will pull me down with so much force,
It will set an anchor,
And I will shatter like a windshield in a car accident,
Like the one that killed my best friend.
My heart broke then.
I put it together with masking tape that’s not strong enough to hold posters on painted walls.
I put it together with super glue that washes off hands.
I put it together with duct tape,
With beer bottles,
With putty to fill in the cracks.
I have broken my glass heart so many times,
That maybe this time,
When he throws it and it strikes pavement,
It won’t shatter,
It will explode.
from Gravity
Author Statement: Gravity by Lynne Schmidt
Dear Reader,
When I was in the process of coming back together after a traumatic relationship, I met someone. For a moment, it was like everything in the universe had come together for this second – for time to stop, our eyes to lock, and then everything went back into motion.
For a long while, I believed in magic because of him. I believed in Taylor Swift songs. I believed above all things that he was like super glue and could fix me, even as he told me all the reasons I wasn’t right for him. He was the gravity keeping me on the earth, causing me to look forward to whatever is going to happen tomorrow. My hands would sweat any time I heard his voice because he was this mythical unicorn that I could never catch. I knew the entire time we would never end up together. But that didn’t mean my heart listened.
This collection was put together because at the end of the relationship, and even now, there was so much left unsaid and my heart wasn’t done talking. The words needed somewhere to go and they wound up here.
So, Dear Reader, this collection is for you – for anyone who has had their heart broken, healed, broken again, only to find that you were the one capable of reassembling yourself.
Please, remember what you’re worth, what you deserve, and never settle for anything less.
All my love,
Lynne