Lemon Balm and Persona Poems

I love lemon balm. It smells wonderful, tastes great, and is just a fun plant to have around. It’s calming, helps with menstruation (guys and gals benefit from that one!), helps with upset stomach, and is just a general all-around good herb. I haven’t tried this recipe, though it sounds delicious. Take 20 sprigs of fresh lemon balm and pour 1 quart of boiling water over it, then add 4 tablespoons of honey, 10 whole cloves, and juice from half a lemon. Let steep ten minutes, strain, and serve. For stomach cramping or nerves that result in heart palpitations, mix dried lemon balm leaves, like a teaspoon to 6-8 leaves, with a cup of boiling water, steep covered for ten minutes, and strain.

So how to grow this wonderful her. It’s another member of the mint family, two feet tall, and makes flowers late in the summer that you can deadhead if you like. It basically grows anywhere and under any conditions and may become a noxious weed if left to its own devices. So basically plant and grow. It likes sun, but is shade-tolerant also, especially in dry climates. It prefers a well-drained clay soil or a sandy loam with a consistently moist soil, so water regularly, but don’t overwater, so the soil doesn’t dry out between waterings. It can be grown easily indoors or in containers.

For more information on the uses and history of lemon balm, try http://www.umm.edu/altmed/articles/lemon-balm-000261.htm. It’s got a list of a ton of resources too. As with all herbs, take care to make sure there are no reports of drug interactions. For example, women on the pill should not take St. Johns Wort as it may interfere with the effectiveness of birth control. I’m not an expert so please do your own research specific to your unique and individual needs.

On to poetry. While on vacation, I spent a lot of time with Ai, namely her book titled “Vice.” It’s an anthology of her work from previous books. Lovely, brutal stuff. Ai uses persona quite a bit in her work and to hauntingly lovely outcomes. So how do we use persona effectively in poetry?

I have no freaking clue.

While doing the Portable MFA, one of the assignments was to write persona poems, like Ai, but I’m finding it desperately difficult. So here I am trying to muddle my way through it. http://www.villagewriter.com/index.php?page_id=35 has some insights into persona poems.

“A persona poem is a poem written in the first person, in which a writer imagines she is an animal, an object, a famous person - anyone she is not.”

Sounds simple enough. Persona comes from the Greek word for mask, meaning that in a poem like this, the author “dons a mask and writes from another person's point of view.” Some questions this website says to ask are:

* What is its world like?
* What might it see?
* What might it hear?
* What might it do? (Or a person do to it?)
* What does it know?
* What might it feel or think?

Other considerations are sense of place, mining the physical world for sensory aspects to work as a backdrop for the poem, and diction since the way people talk says volumes about who they are, where they come from, education and class, all that stuff and can also give the poem authenticity by showing that you know how a person like this talks, thinks, moves, etc. Lastly, choose a moment when something is happening, something important. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, but it does need to be a moment of change. That’s what a climax is after all, a moment when a character comes away from something critically changed.

And here’s a place to start your persona poem, with the line, “I remember.”

So-Cal, Cilantro, Ai-yiy-yiy

Oh California dreamin… leavin, on a jet plane… go to California, go to California… okay enough DJ shit. :) The trip was great and we are home in one piece. I lugged my laptop across the country only to use it to check directions to the Barnes and Noble and if S6 went to the coast. (It does.) So we home and holy family and people! I can make conversation for about two hours, I discovered, before I run out of shit to say and start majorly wishing there was a cow to slap around. I spend roughly eighty percent of my time either alone or in the presence of livestock or dogs so being cornered into conversation, and conversation about something besides the pros and cons of grassfed beef say, I run out of shit to say. It’s like the t-shirt says, I’m not a quiet person so if I’m not saying anything it’s because we’re not talking horses. Beautiful country north San Diego though, Escondido and the hills too. We got to hike a little and that was probably my favorite part of the trip, that and the Mexican food in Old Town. I can highly recommend that. The Wild Animal Park and Balboa Park and Coronado were cool too, but driving and getting out and walking, seeing the real California, was even cooler. Touristy stuff has never really been my thing.

In honor of the wonderful food and extremely hard working people who served it to us, today’s herb is cilantro. It’s a classic herb used in Mexican cooking, extremely flavorful and essential to any salsa.

Cilantro is a member of the parsley family and the leaves of this two foot high are used for cooking. It’s an annual unless you leave the flower heads, then it will reseed itself and regrow the following year. Start the seeds directly in pots as transplanting disturbs the roots and causes early bolting. (News to me.) They can also be started indoors six weeks before planting outdoors, I’m assuming either in peet pots or directly in a pot. I’ve had luck with using a peet pot, but the plants last year were very fine and kind of weak so might not want to listen to me. If sown directly and started in rows instead of containers, the plants need nine to twelve inches of space and they grow well in a pH range of 6.5 and 7.5. (So much for my throw manure on and go theory.) Cilantro likes a soil that drains well, can take full sun or some shade mix, doesn’t like to be overwatered, and will grow indoors under lights as well. It takes about six weeks to get a saleable plant.

Amazingly, though I got little else done, I read and wrote a goodly sample of poetry on vacation. Mostly I read Ai and started Wislawa Szymborska. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-bio.html Here’s a YouTube of some Ai poems, lovely reading and hearing.

Ai uses narrators and persona in her work, brutality and femininity running side by side in a no-holds-barred narrative that’s as beautiful as it is unflinching.

So it’s back to reality today, at my desk early and work tonight. It’s been raining almost since we left so will have to see if the cows are floating or if we need to inflate the ark.

Welcome home  :-p

Taco Tuesday

Working a double today so it's short and sweet again on the blogosphere. I was always interested in Ai while in college, but I never read much of her, mostly because the library didn't carry her work more than me not taking time for it. While cruising the New York Times poetry section, I stumbled on her obit page. Seems a little odd to include it since I've barely read her work and there's lots of other poets to cover. But I've always been drawn to the brutality in her work that manages to stay beautiful at the same time. Maybe this will finally get me to pick up a copy.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=80637