Summer Offerings :: Winter Garden Healing Arts
In this newsletter:
Greetings & Reflections
Summer Discount
Poetry by Elise Cowen
I send you heartfelt greetings from the depths of summer. It's an odd time and place to be alive. I sincerely hope that each of you are weathering these turbulent days as best you can. I have been grateful to receive an emotional boost from witnessing the solidarity of my neighbors organizing against ICE raids here in Pasadena and beyond; as well as from some new creative projects, and from each of you who have come to spend an hour or so with me at the office. It becomes so clear in times like this that we can only rely on each other for support. I aim to be a support for each of you. If you have also been hit hard by circumstances recently, please know that I'm always happy to offer sliding scale work when needed. Just ask.
Summer Discount
Summer is a slow time for many of us. Having relocated so recently, it's been especially tough on my practice this year. In an effort to stir up a little business, and extend support where it is needed, I am temporarily increasing my Self-Care Package discount from the usual 15% to 25% off for in-office appointments. A set of four prepaid sessions is now the same price as three normal sessions. There is no discount code. Just click the add-on option for Self-Care Package when you make your appointment, or let me know you'd like to pay for a series when you see me.
Terms: the deal runs through the end of August, but sessions can be scheduled out further. Your first session needs to be booked before the end of August, and needs to actually happen before the end of September. If you book within that time frame but need to reschedule beyond September, the price reverts to the usual 15% off. Remaining prepaid sessions can be scheduled at your convenience and do not expire, subject to my availability.
Schedule your next session here.
This photo is from last fall, during a few days spent in Yosemite National Park. Shot with a Pentax LX on Kodak Tri-X 400 film.
Poetry by Elise Cowen
My partner gifted me this excellent book a number of years back, Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments. Cowen is an underappreciated and largely unknown writer associated with the Beat poets, though her style reads more like a mid-century Emily Dickinson than it does anything written by her peers. In fact, it's difficult to maintain a high opinion of really any of her close contemporaries while reading through editor Tony Triglio's introduction. Cowen is an obscure poet, but more accurately she is an obscured poet—obscured by misogyny, by sanism, by sabotage, and by neglect: the famous friend and former lover who didn't take her writing seriously; the possessive friend who kept her lone surviving notebook from public view for decades; the narrow, controlling parents, whose discomfort with Cowen as a writer, bohemian, and bisexual led them to destroy her notebooks in the immediate aftermath of her ambiguous death-by-suicide-or-accident at age 28.
I have conflicted feelings reading this work, because we inevitably read Cowen through the haze of other people's decisions. Her agency is obliterated in so many ways: first by the pressures and constraints that kept her from publishing during her life, later by those who destroyed or kept her work hidden after her death, and finally by the ultimate act of full, naked disclosure in publishing the annotated but lightly edited full notebook. To be sure, Poems and Fragments is an act of deep, thoughtful appreciation and care, but it is also an act that inevitably cannot respect the author's discretion regarding whether, what, and how to publish. This lack of agency marks creative work more generally, but feels especially acute in this case. Whether and in what ways the former acts of erasure justify the latter act of disclosure is the tightrope we walk across these pages.
Cowen's writing contains a deep well of clarity, not to say simplicity or obviousness. Her economy with words seems to exist not for its own sake, but as if to save up on elegant flourishes, bouts of play, and morbid indulgences. The Dickinson influence is hard to miss, but she speaks with her own voice. It is a voice in search of itself, playing with affect and style, but always returning to a kind of mischievous interiority, and a rarified, refracted circumspection.
[P is for pot shard]
P is for pot shard
What has cut so deep since the breaking of that vessel
Wind over the clouds under the clouds
Bitter drips
Through my window through the neighbor's window
I see hints of a forest
Sit down...
Why does a chicken cross the road
To get to Love
Who was that woman I saw you with last night
That was no woman that was my judgment
[I don't want to make your poem]
I don't want to make your poem out of dead
jonquils & stored crocus bulbs that may never bloom
again but the shocks of memories that will live again.
[Every spare minute]
Every spare minute we make rubber tires that
drivel, drivel, lump lie on the Salt flats,
under automobiles over the black line roads of
Colorado at midnight, under old trucks lopsiding
down Kearny St. narrows, support swimmers in
the East River, crush oranges on the highway,
mash old bones of Third Avenue voyagers
[I, You are my eyes]
I,
You are my eyes
Where are your jewels
Fate pusher?
Fork in the plate
Ashes in the can
Papers on the table
Head on the hand
Two weeks of the month]
Two weeks of the month
I'm half mad & half free
Two weeks of the month
I'm half drown in me
With care,
Wilson