The Rehearsal Hall of the SupernaturalTurning the Inward Outward As A Poet
Elizabeth Kirschner
Teaching, reading, is like hauling buckets out of the deep well of being until there is water, water everywhere and plenty of drops to drink. Making a poem involves a gorgeous engorging. Reading or teaching means drawing upon that wealth. One cannot be miserly, cannot pocket the shining coins of language that will enrich others. When teaching, it is my practice to write before entering the classroom, to dwell in what I call the rehearsal hall of the supernatural. I must practice my practice before I can help students craft their own practice. Like Buddhist meditation, it is a formal practice, a training not only of the mind, but of the body, heart, the universal human spirit and it takes a lifetime to master it.
As a ballet dancer, I learned to turn out, not in—an acquired skill. We must school ourselves before schooling others, return again and again to the barre, or the written word, to practice the elementary moves until the entirety of who we are is poetry in motion.
From here to there. From inside out. It can be done. Long ride, deep seat, loose reins or some facsimile of that phrase by Charles Wright guides me in my own journeys and, always, I bird my way to get there. It’s all hunch and hint of instinct. If the way into the heart of the harbor of a poem is a travail of a tale, then the bearing forth of it into the common world may also involve long labor. There is no promise that the poem will not be stillborn. Nor is the promise of longevity, of aligning with the bejeweled stars of poems created by those we call immortal. At best we hope for a moment of illumination either in our students or audiences.
When I read or teach, I physically ground myself in my feet, in my breath. My long inhalations, which draw poems into me become long exhalations—the words hit space and either thrive or die. When they do land, soundly, in students or audiences, I can hear it like a soft “ah.” Amen to the awe of that “ah.” May our own poems or the poems we teach be keys that unlock the treasure in others, treasure that might otherwise remain deeply hidden. The hand the hoe tilling even the most barren of soils till the rows become lines, the lines a field, the field the embodiment of a poem and always, always the promise of harvest even in the cruelest of seasons, in Dickens’ best of times and worst of times and the ever apocalyptic now.
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Elizabeth Kirschner has published three books of poetry,
Twenty Colors,
Postal Routes and
Slow Risen Among the Smoke Trees all by Carnegie-Mellon University Press. Her chapbook,
The Red Dragon, was published by Permafrost, and
My Life as a Doll was published by
Autumn House Press.
In addition, she has a CD released by Albany Records wherein her own poetry, not a translation, has been set to Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe. Now titled
The Dichterliebe in Four Seasons, it premiered in Vienna in the fall of 2005, followed by an American debut in Boston featuring soprano Jean Danton accompanied by pianist Thomas Stumpf. She has collaborated with many composers and taught at Boston College for over a decade. Kirschner also studied ballet with Boston Ballet. She now lives in a house on the water at Sea Cabins Retreat in Kittery Point, ME.
Find out more about Elizabeth by visiting her website:
www.elizabethkirschner.com 
