About

WELCOME
I’m Miriam Sagan, poet and writer. I founded and now run the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. Most recent books are MAP OF THE LOST (UNM Press) and TANKA FROM THE EDGE (MET Press). I’m working on site specific poetry installations.

You can reach me at msagan1035 at aol.com.

TO CONTRIBUTE
On Miriam’s Well I’m looking for guest bloggers, published poets to interview, and projects to cover. The blog focuses on poetry–particularly of Santa Fe and of the Southwest–but I’m also covering land art, painting, travel, and serendipitous ideas.
I welcome your comments and suggestions!
a day or two.

Look at the categories list and send me something that fits. I really look forward to your work.
Miriam’s Well publishes previously published work as well as unpublished, and does not consider that it has acquired any rights to your work that is posted.

FAQs

1. What is the meaning of the name Miriam’s Well?
It comes from Midrash, or Biblical commentary. When the Israelites were wandering in the wilderness, a well of water appeared each evening wherever they made camp. It was associated with the prophetess Miriam, and disappeared with her death. It was an endless source of refreshment.
Of course, my name is also Miriam!

2. What is the mission of the blog?
Basically to publish poetry (mine and yours) and to follow the creative process where it leads. The focus is on writing and art from Santa Fe–but I also welcome work from beyond. I’m blogging about my forays into land art and about various travels, often in search of inspiration.

3. Why Baba Yaga and Patti Smith as two themes?
Well, they are my heroines. Baba Yaga is a scary Slavic witch–but admirable for her compact “green” house on chicken legs. Patti Smith isn’t the only great rock and roller to emerge from my home state of New Jersey, but she was a beacon for many writers of my generation.

4. Who are the contributors? And how can I get interviewed?
I’m entering my fortieth year as a small press publisher (started with an underground magazine in high school) where I published my friends. I still do–particularly as many are very accomplished and well known writers (or about to be!). The blog publishes a lot of student work, and a lot of work contributed by those just passing by. I publish much of what is submitted. Please send me
something!
To get interviewed–if you are a poet with a book, drop me a note.

5. Has all this blogging cut into your writing time?
Weirdly not. I’m writing poems at my usual rate and working on numerous projects–books and text installations. I recently reviewed the blog and in about 10 months worth there was only one prose entry that wanted to be a poem.The blog seems to give me more energy than it takes…then again, maybe I’ve just cut down on housework. Things do look a little dusty.

A YEAR OF BLOGGING
Here are my thoughts about the first year of blogging:
I’ve now been blogging for a year, and I’ve certainly been enjoying it. It has allowed me to follow out many creative threads–and within a community. When I started I originally if privately defined the blog as a place for my own work and that of my community. I thought of community loosely–including people I saw frequently, students, old friends, family, and lines of connections that would include people like my step cousin’s friends. Of course the internet extended this even further, but it is a definition that works for me.
I like all the usual things–audience, comments, connections, serendipity. I’ve particularly liked interviewing poets and now artists and having a forum for book reviews that less formal than the columns I produced for so many years in newspapers and magazines. Blogging my trips and retreats has been very rewarding–I so want you to see what I saw, taste what I tasted.
Secretly, I think I started the blog “in case something happened.” But what? A brilliant poetic idea, a personal disaster, the collapse of civilization, or access to some great recipes? The blog is a kind of holding tank, although I don’t yet know everything it is holding.
My only frustration, if it can even be called that, is that I feel I’m missing some use of the blog. And what else is out there? Are there couples or households blogging together? I don’t mean a team of three editors–I mean something like three people running an organic farm who don’t necessarily get along all the time. I’m still looking for the intimate, the funky, the bywater…and the collaborative.
What is a secret made public? Or even just the private exposed? Gossip? Wisdom?
I look forward to more.

Miriam Sagan working at The Land/An Art Site. Photograph by Hope Atterbury.

INTERVEW WITH MIRIAM SAGAN
***Finding Beauty in the Search
The Literary Aesthetic of Miriam Sagan

by Jeffrey Laing • SantaFe.com

May 6, 2009

Santa Fe People

Having been an avid reader and unabashed fan of her poetry for the past twenty-five years, I had the pleasure of speaking with Miriam Sagan about her recent work. From her earliest poetry, such as the haiku of Eyebrows of Geese and Talking You Down (a Pinchpenny chapbook), Miriam has created emotionally engaging, witty, and articulate work that searches for beauty in contrasts and physical place. However, Miriam has taken on many professional hats since I first met her in Santa Fe in 1983, including novelist, memoirist, reviewer, essayist, teacher, and editor. The problem with interviewing Miriam was choosing where to begin.

After catching up on the life paths of husband Richard (office manager of the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute) and daughter Isabel (undergraduate at UNM), I asked Miriam if she were truly a Renaissance woman or if one of her occupations was primary: “Poetry is the natural thing [for me]. I think like a poet. However, sometimes there comes a self-realization that something needs narrative to complete it, something which I can’t shut up about. Prose is always a conscious choice.” Though “poetry is central and is my primary commitment in language, my well spring,” Miriam finds no difficulty moving freely between poetry and prose since “they are separate skill sets and mind sets.” Furthermore, Miriam perceives “poetry as a gift” and “prose as fitting my middle aged personality of being bossy, organized, and outer-directed. I like to make things happen that I am fond of. Whenever I take one of those personality tests the response is ‘You’d make a good general’.”

In discussing the many labels critics have attached to her writing, the only category Miriam has consciously tried to embrace has been “woman writer”: “I [became a teenager] in 1966 when feminism [was in ascendency]. I tried to liberate myself. Actually, the idea was to wedge myself out of suburbia.” When I mentioned her latest residencies in National Parks and her nature poetry, Miriam qualified the term “nature”: “I’m a Johnny-come-lately to nature writing, though I was a botany major for a semester at university and I have always loved flora. I agree that I am more a ‘romantic’ since I don’t understand nature for its own sake; I understand it in relation to civilization.” Life and art coalesce as forms of investigation for Miriam: “Seeking is our life and it is poetry. They are the same thing.”

It was winter, night, cold
Driving back towards La Madera
Yes, we all saw them
Bobbing in the open field
Green balls of fire
As if carried but of course there was never
Anyone there at all
Between the shoulder of the road and the arroyo.

(from “Witch Lights”)

Remembering a twenty year old discussion of poetry with Miriam about “What a poem is,” I asked her if she still defined poetry as “something with line breaks”: “I still agree with the statement since poetry is about breathing. The poet breathes and the line also catches its breath.” She also cited her first mentor, Harvard’s Robert Fitzgerald, who delineated the difference between prose and poetry: “Prose is transparent. You look through it to meaning. Poetry is opaque. It has a surface in which meaning and language are integrated.” Miriam also finds local writer and writing teacher Natalie Goldberg an inspiration because her tenet that states that “writing follows the mind” is very liberating: “There is no writer’s block ever.” Miriam also finds that Goldberg’s process-oriented approach “good for a poet with its many associations, leaps and jumps.”

Miriam has had the opportunity to work in artist colonies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Marfa. All have provided her with the gift of time and “helped me forge my identity” by meeting a variety of creative and inspiring people: “It (MacDowell residency) helped give me the courage to be a writer.” Her recent residencies at Everglades National Park and the Petrified Forest have been “very quiet and remote and very intense, more about relating to nature than to people.”

The process of poetry for Miriam is metaphor. Finding language itself metaphorical, Miriam finds metaphor “dynamic and thrilling in that we are not completed and that things are like one another. I think comparing a human, say, to a cherry tree is an upgrade.” Miriam Sagan’s poetic voice lives in the subjunctive mood in a state of becoming and invention rather than in a world of fact and certainty: “[In writing, one] travels but never arrives.”

If the Mother Ditch would fill
A silver river
It would be summer
Evening, the stars, a lit window
Sitting on the porch watching the street
In the endless
In the always

(from “Acequia Madre”)

Miriam’s celebration of metaphor and enthusiasm for language is one of the key attributes in making her a superior teacher: “I will see things as simultaneous and be seized by the desire to have other people see it [this moment of beauty].” She is also quite clear on her belief in the currently somewhat unfashionable belief in the moral center of teaching. In response to my question about what would constitute the perfect student, Miriam mentioned that she wants students who wish to be in school and who are open to the world. However, she also added the following personal note “Any student who engenders your affection [is the perfect student].”

Miriam founded, administers, and teaches in the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. It is a growing, highly subscribed program that had six creative writing certificates awarded in the first nine months of the program’s inception. She lauds SFCC President Dr. Sheila Ortego, a published novelist “who has a natural love, support, and understanding” of creative writing; Margaret Peters, Chairperson of English & Speech; and Dr. Bruno Bornet, Dean of Liberal Arts and Core Studies, for their “marvelous and incredible support.” Miriam is also the faculty advisor of the Santa Fe Literary Review that is published by the college and is open to submissions from the public. (For the complete information about the SFLR and its submission guidelines, please check the Santa Fe Community College website.)

As for her own published work, Miriam Sagan is as prolific as ever. The elegiac poems of Map of the Lost (UNM Press, 2008) and her comic essays in Gossip (Tres Chicas Books, 2007) are only her latest works. Lost is about “traveling, the hidden urban spaces, what used to be there, and how memory cuts through present time” while Gossip is about “love, Jersey girls, fake “how-to” advice columns, just totally fun stuff.”

It’s Baca Street! We’re back
In the neighborhood where my daughter
Immediately becomes lost.
“I don’t get straight streets,” she says.
My money’s good here. I buy two cups of foamy chai
And look in her face, turning from girl to woman
And want to construct
My map of the lost.

(from “Take a Left at My Mailbox”)

I ended my interview with Miriam in the way that I usually do; I asked her if she had anything else to say to the world that I did not ask her. After a time, she revealed that “While I found motherhood creatively stimulating, I find the lack of motherhood has also changed me. It’s great. There’s nothing like it. I’ve returned to that sixteen-year old sense of self, and I’ve found that in middle age that I was and am very fond of that old self. And I’m very close to it now in my experience.” Miriam sums up her epiphany as follows: “I’ve been released back into a larger world.”

Santa Feans better be on their guard. With an empty nest and a wider world in which to engage her active and energetic artistic sensibilities, Miriam Sagan has the time and the tapestry to create more of her achingly beautiful, insightful, and witty writings. I look forward with great anticipation to those vital seekings from one of Santa Fe’s major literary figures.