Excerpt from a Conversation with Cecelia Hagen
What inspires you to write poems? What feeds your creativity?
Language is endlessly fascinating to me. I love to play with it, to wonder about it. My brother is a linguist, and although I never studied language in the way that he has, I think we share an innate sense of wonder at words. So reading, and just hearing people talking to each other, can spark my mind into forming some phrase that then serves as the basis for a poem.
I love music and the natural world, as well, and both are huge sources of ideas and inspiration, but without words I wouldn't have a way to apprehend what my senses take in. I'd be like my dog, maybe, happy and excited by what was before me, but not contemplating any daffodils after the fact, lying on my couch "in pensive mood," as Wordsworth says.
What has helped you to grow as a writer?
Time has really helped me grow. I'm a slow learner in some ways, a person with a perennial "beginner's mind." I keep getting sent back to square one—like what happens in Chutes and Ladders—but I just get up and start over, hoping for a different outcome. And it is different, every time I slide down, every time I climb up, it's always different. I see that as growth, being able to see and maybe even enjoy the difference.
Burnished
I think of your lips, of a door
made of glass, a glass poured full
of yearning. Learning from you,
animals wander beyond known pastures,
sample new grass, flicking
long tails. The horse
chestnut, year after year, lights candles,
loosens flowers like feathers,
sprouts burrs, then releases
its hard knocks as a send-off
to the generous months of warmth.
Warming your hands in my hair,
you weigh luck like a locket,
tending it to a shine you rub
your thumbs along, burnishing.
Halfway, twilight, in the middle—
how many ways can you not say
what I know you know?
No amount of common sense
could have inserted itself
between you and my desire for you,
a green shoot of intuition and will.
Reason and ease did not enter the picture,
yet now they sit at the table with us
for meal after simple meal
as the years accrue. I watch you
accepting your fate. You think
you've made a choice. You raise
the glass to your lips, as I do, surprised
while I continue to bloom toward you.
Cecelia Hagen
Cecelia Hagen
(OR) I grew up in Norfolk, VA, studied writing and dance at Connecticut College and received my MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. My poems have appeared in Seattle Review, Web del Sol, Prairie Schooner, Poet & Critic, and Caffeine Destiny. In 2000, Portland's 26 Books Press published my chapbook, Fringe Living. I was the Fiction Editor of the Northwest Review for five years. Currently, I teach memoir writers and coordinate a monthly reading series for the Lane Literary Guild.
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