Comics, newsreels, retrospectives

A comic in a blog can have a filmic quality–you scroll down through image after image, with screen light shining behind them. This week I’m delighted to show you Chris Gavaler’s comic “Rhapsomantic” based on my poem “Rhapsodomancy,” a poem from my forthcoming book Mycocosmic. (Text-only version here, in ASP Review). He and I consulted on the images sometimes, which he created after comparing my words to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot images. There were moments I’d say yes, this is perfect, and others when an image had the wrong vibe and I’d suggest it went with a different Major Arcana card instead. I love the results.

Scrolling in my memory through 2024? Much more mixed. This is a retrospective time of year, according to the newspapers, and for me full of echoes and dissonances. In 2024 I watched, from afar, as a litany of disasters unfolded: massacre in Gaza, catastrophic storms and fires, a terrible election. Sitting in this burnt-orange study, however, gazing out at House Mountain through a tangle of power lines, I’m okay–and the gap between my experiences and others’ feels a little surreal. I had health struggles this year, spring and summer were especially rough, but I’ve landed in a better place. Some of my poems and essays were published in journals and books I admire greatly; a Poetry Daily feature, and warm response to it from readers, was a highlight. I taught my heart out, but I just read through the year’s course evaluations and they were appreciative. My own kids’ lives are better than this time last year–they too have struggles but also good brains, big hearts, and resources. You’re only ever as happy as your unhappiest child, Chris says, an insight that rings in me true as a bell.

As I peer into 2025, I continue to spy good auspices for fortunate me–a big winter-spring workload but a book on the way and a calendar of events firming up. I work hard but I’m also lucky and really feeling that right now.

Of course, lots of others are looking back on 2024 too, in myriad posts and articles, and I’m tracking their reflections with interest. As far as editors looping back: Cold Mountain Review just published a retrospective issue that includes a poem I published with them in 2014, “Asexual Reproduction.” In 2012, a pipe burst in a wall when we were away and flooded our house, displacing us for six months. The repairs were endless. When they seemed done, I got sick and we discovered mold in the ducts. Turns out I’ve been fascinated with fungi for a while, although I was definitely experiencing the dark side then!

Around new year’s, as usual, I’ll publish a post here on 2024 in reading, but here’s a preview from “Ambling Along the Aqueduct,” Aqueduct Press’ blog. I noticed in the process that I haven’t read most of the poetry books on other people’s best-of lists, although I mean to. Perhaps after the 2025 summer solstice, when I step through another calendar page into sabbatical?

The continuity of past and future is also vividly present to me in another way. I’ve mentioned starting EMDR, during which you remember old traumas and use eye movements, as in REM sleep, to refile them in your brain so you can finally close the drawer. (Supposedly. But good research shows that it tends to work.) I find it has a newsreel quality, watching and reflecting on long-ago scenes, beginning to see them differently. In a session last week, I thought about how my father’s anger lingers in my body; I focused on him yelling as he mixed those 5:30 martinis, noticing painful tension in my back, shoulders, head and throat and trying to release it.

I’m loosening my panicked grip on 2024, and about time.