Introducing Chanel Brenner, poet extraordinaire

I met Chanel last May at a poetry workshop led by Richard Jones. I was immediately taken by the poem she wrote during the workshop and that we have something in common - we each have lost a son. Chanel's grief for six and a half-year-old Riley who died from the rare disease Arteriovenous malformations (AVM)* is still new. And her beautiful poetry shares that grief with her readers. Here is Chanel's story, reminiscent of friends of mine who left after my son died.

My Friend From Another Life

            She sits across from me, wearing a purple sundress, her dark hair relaxed around her face.

“You look really great,” she says, her voice thick with surprise, her eyes approving as they scan me from head to coral painted toenails. It’s not what she’s said, but what she’s left out, “compared to a year ago,” the last time we had lunch together at this restaurant, shortly after Riley died.

She scooted away after that, one email at a time. First, “If you ever need to talk, call me,” then radio silence for two months. Then lunch plans initiated by me and canceled by her. One after another, with each excuse making less sense.  Then, an email from me asking how she was doing, because I hadn’t seen her in so long. “I’ve never been happier. My life has never been better,” she replied. I couldn’t help filling in the blanks… since your son died and you are not in my life. Then, the kicker email. The one where she asked if I was lighter these days. I couldn’t respond. How could I tell her that I didn’t want to be lighter? That without the weight of grief, I’d be nothing, and so would Riley—how could I say I wear my dead son proudly like a pregnant belly? I want to ask her if she’d be lighter without her daughter.

         “You look great too,” I say, “I like your dress.”

         “It’s old,” she says, “So, I don’t feel good in it.”

         We trade awkward pauses and polite questions. I’m distracted by the bugs that accompany the creek-side view. Two land in my tea, one in my water. She notices and comments there are none in hers, says I manifest them. I think about trying to manifest them in my house. I wonder if she thinks I manifested my son’s AVM, his brain hemorrhage and his death. I wonder where the line gets drawn in this whole manifestation thing. I wonder why we are having lunch. Closure or starting over? Her guilt or my curiosity? Nostalgia for a time when two women became friends over pre-school chauffeuring because it was easy? A time when conversation flowed lightly. A time when both our children were alive and we had that in common.

***

I also want to share one of her lovely poems. It won first place at the first annual Write Place At the Write Time poetry contest, judged by one of my poetry teachers, Ellen Bass.

July 28th, 2012

It’s Riley’s second birthday,
without us.
He would have been
eight.
Instead of dead.
Instead of chalk dust.
Instead of oysterless chips of pearls.
Instead of a giant,
insatiable pit.
Instead of a collage of photos
and cutout red crayoned hearts.
Instead of our tears.
Instead of a vanilla birthday cake
bejeweled with his name.
Instead of a ghost,
haunted by us.
Instead of frozen
at six and a half.
Instead of this fucking poem.

Chanel's bio

Chanel Brenner is a writer living in Los Angeles with her husband and their five-year-old son. She is the winner of the First Annual Write Place At the Write Time poetry contest, judged by Ellen Bass, for her poem, “July 28^th,  2012.” Her work has been published in Cultural Weekly, Foliate Oak, Forge, Memoirs Ink, Sanskrit, The Coachella Review, The Poetry Juice Bar and The Write Place At the Write Time. She also won a nationwide contest for her poem “What Would Wislawa Szymborska Do?” and, as a result, it was displayed at the James Whitcomb Riley museum in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Chanel studies with the poet Jack Grapes and is a member of his L.A. Poets & Writers Collective. She has written a collection of poems and essays about the death of her six-year-old son, Riley, called The Christmas Boy Will Not Disappear.  It was written during the first two years of grief. Her hope is that her writing will help others heal and realize they are not alone in their pain.

*AVMs are defects of the circulatory system that are generally believed to arise during embryonic or fetal development or soon after birth. Although AVMs can develop in many different sites, those located in the brain or spinal cord can have especially widespread effects on the body. 

Learning to write poetry the mechanical way

I learned two techniques for generating poetry material at an all day workshop on Saturday with Jack Grapes and Richard Jones. Both techniques were to ensure that we as writers had no reason to experience writer’s block. And, in both cases the techniques are entirely mechanical.

Inverted Pyramid

Jack Grapes, who teaches method writing in Los Angeles, (http://jackgrapes.com/grapes_approach.php) presented the inverted pyramid method. He told us to write down several unrelated sentences or thoughts – the keyword here is unrelated. However, he told us what kind of sentences to write. And if you can visualize an inverted pyramid these sentences would go into the upper wider part. We wrote: two or three images, a couple of pieces of dialogue, a flowery description, a memory or two, a couple of deep thought about ourselves until we had five to eight in total in random order.

The next step was to take these entirely unrelated sentences and form them into a cohesive poem so that by the time we came to the tip of the pyramid at the bottom it would look like we had intended it to come out that way all along.

Of course this is exactly the opposite way I form a poem. I usually start with what I know I’m going to write about and build on that until I get to the end. That looks like a pyramid right side up. The inverted way made me feel like I would write a poem by pulling something miraculously out of the air, so needless to say my first attempt on Saturday wasn’t very good. I will try again, though, because I heard several beautifully finished, deep-feeling poems at the end of that workshop.

Inventory

I found Richard Jones’s technique much more doable. (Richard is a writing professor at De Paul University in Chicago http://www.amazon.com/Blessing-New-Selected-Poems/dp/1556591438.) He had us write a list (inventory) of things that reside at a place we are familiar with. I wrote a list of all the things that sit on the low dresser next to my side of the bed. And as I wrote I could feel poems coming from each one of them. (I wrote one a long time ago: "A Stone Called Son.") 

I read my list to the group and Richard noted that I could create a year's worth of new poems right from that page. Richard did not intend for us to create a list poem per se (although one of the people did as she wrote down her list), but to have material for writing several poems – one for each of the items on that list. And, that’s what we proceeded to do. I started with a short poem about a little dark blue vase.

Then the fun part began. Richard told us to use several lines from the poem we had just written to create a triolet. Next he asked us write a haiku from that same material. And for our last assignment of the afternoon, he had us write another short poem about another item on our list. Amazing! We wrote four poems as a result of one technique in an hour and a half.

Here are my two inventory poems – though rough, I definitely have something to work with. Sorry, my inverted pyramid products are not ready for the light of day yet.

Blue Vase

The small glass vase on my dresser

is a shade of deep blue.

It stands about five inches high,

the bulbous base, narrowing as

the neck swirls around and around

until it reaches the flared top.

Paul brought it home for me

on his first holiday break

from New York’s New School

He knew what I liked in those days:

the color blue, art glass, and gifts from him.

I miss all of that

now that he is gone.

The Small Gray Stone

I picked up the small gray stone

from the path at Dachau.

I needed it to

always remind me

of what went on there

in those years right after

I was born.

So many people want to forget.

I can’t let that happen.