LeeAnn Pickrell: California Poets Part 8, Three Poems
January 8th, 2025
California Poets: Part VIII
LeeAnn Pickrell
Three Poems
This is not
This is not a poem about
the solar eclipse I missed
how smog shrouds the city below while here
where we walk the grass brushes my calves
how we left the din of the restaurant
for the stillness of downtown streets at night
how in the bay of this city
there is an island where poems
so many poems
are etched in walls of stone
or at the play The Far Country
how I wish I cried as easily as my friend does
How I wonder if I’ve let scar tissue fill the cracks
that could have opened my heart
like the cherry tree this spring
late April and still struggling to bloom
Note: The Far Country is a play about the arduous journey undertaken by Chinese immigrants following the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Upon arrival they were interred at Angel Island, often for extended periods of time.
Potluck
During a potluck in a Berkeley backyard,
we each drew a card from a deck of power animals.
Mine was the hawk: focus, finding priorities.
We went in a circle, taking turns, passing along wishes,
in the voice of our power animal.
I wondered, what would they do if I squawked?
The host, an elephant, spoke of building an inclusive
community where everyone is welcome.
Another woman, a dolphin, said sometimes I have to be quiet
even when I know I’m right.
But I love to be right and tell you about it.
Only in Berkeley on a Friday night. But I did, for a moment,
set aside the cynicism I carry through the world.
And I flew high above the backyard table,
above the city between bay and hills,
and all I could see was the yellow light of candles flickering,
surrounded by the shadows of people everywhere.
Fly high, I said, in order to see.
Poetry Reading
In my memory of that gray evening
I’m alone, sounds smothered by
the fog descending over
downtown’s skyscrapers.
I climb the steep streets
in a jean jacket
that offers no warmth.
I have never felt so cold.
I am twenty-seven,
have just moved from Texas
for a new life in California.
And there I am in San Francisco,
climbing toward a church
where poets read their poetry
where there are so many people
crowded inside I stand pressed
with my back against the wall,
amazed I have found a place
where poems are prayers.
Interview
February 23rd, 2025
California Poets Interview Series:
LeeAnn Pickrell, Poet, Editor, Writer
interviewed by David Garyan
DG: Is there a time during the day where you do your best writing—morning, afternoon, evening, or night?
LAP: Generally morning, although I don’t have a set routine. I find with poetry that I have to be open to the moment when the poetry comes; it doesn’t come on demand, although there are certainly things I can do to support my writing on a daily basis—submissions, marketing stuff for my upcoming book—that keeps me in the neighborhood of writing.
DG: Punctuation is a big part of your writing, especially in verse. Some poets eschew it completely while others use it merely out of grammatical necessity. For you, however, punctuation is a stylistic choice. Can you speak more about the topic and how your writing is shaped by these choices?
LAP: I’ve been an editor for thirty years now so punctuation is a huge part of my life. My love affair with punctuation did actually begin with my tenth-grade English class. I had a wonderful teacher. The first “punctuation poem” that I wrote was “Semicolon.” I love the semicolon, and people misuse it all the time. It was several years before I thought of creating a chapbook of poems about punctuation, poems that both looked like the mark of punctuation and commented on its literal and metaphorical representation in the world.
I do write poems without punctuation. I think punctuation should serve the poem, just as each word should. Punctuation is part of language, of writing; to me, it’s as integral, so sometimes a poem doesn’t need the structure of punctuation but more room to move across the page, to sit in space without constraints.
DG: Gathering the Pieces of Days: A Year in Poetry is scheduled to be published by Unsolicited Press in these next months. The premise is interesting—one poem for each week for a total of fifty-two. What inspired the project and how difficult was it to stay consistent?
LAP: I was sitting at the dining room table on January 1, 2018, and I decided I would write a page a day, but it had to be about the previous day. I wanted to write more so I gave myself a project, but I wasn’t thinking of it as a book then. At the end of the week, I would take those seven day-pages and create another page, using text that called out to me. At some point, I decided I would write a poem for each week of the year based on that material. I didn’t start writing until the next year, in 2019, when I wrote a poem for each week. It took me a few years to work on that and then I had this book.
DG: Unsolicited Press has also picked up Tsunami, scheduled for next year. Could you give a sneak-peak into the project?
LAP: Tsunami is creative nonfiction. It’s a book of vignettes about my experience in Thailand during the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake and Tsunami.
DG: In addition to poetry, you’ve also written fiction and non-fiction. Do you think poetry should tell more stories and would you like to see more musicality in the prose you read today?
LAP: I am drawn to narrative poetry, even if it’s just a thread of story, but I also like poetry that doesn’t tell a story, that focuses on images and sounds, a single moment in time. It happens that some of my favorite novels are written by poets. I love Michael Ondaatje, Seamus Heaney, Margaret Atwood. Even though he doesn’t write poetry Haruki Murakami writes like a poet.
DG: Editing is also in your repertoire and it’s something you enjoy doing. It’s often the case that attentiveness to the work of others often makes us see things we hadn’t noticed about own work before. Would you say that’s held true for you?
LAP: Definitely. When I first started in publishing, I was in computer book publishing, so I didn’t find much inspiration there, but when I began freelancing, I gradually moved out of the computer book world and into the world of Jung and depth psychology. I’ve worked on Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche since 2007, first as a copyeditor and since 2012 as managing editor, and we’ve published some wonderful work. We aren’t a research journal; we publish personal essays, case studies, review articles, book reviews, some poetry, and sometimes I get so caught up in the work that I’ll forget I’m supposed to be editing it.
I’ve also been part of poetry group for twenty years and that has probably had the biggest influence on my poetry.
DG: The assumption would be that as an editor you revise your own work pretty heavily. Is it the case that you go through many drafts for most poems or are you more meticulous about what initially goes on the page?
LAP: I can fiddle with poems for years. Sometimes I hurry too much but when I let work marinate for a while then I can see the poem more clearly. That said, my poetry group sees all my poetry, so I value their feedback. I really think it’s very hard to edit yourself. Even editors need editors. My partner reads most everything I write and he’s a wonderful editor too. I’m too close to the work sometimes. A professor in grad school once said you have to kill your darlings. It’s hard for me to see the darlings that need to die, or rather be set aside for another poem.
DG: You have also recorded some of the poems you’ve written. Did you do many takes before being satisfied with the reading or did the first readings seem most natural to you?
LAP: The two poems on my website are the first two poems I’ve ever recorded. I did several takes and practiced before recording too. I needed to know the poem inside before I could record it and not trip over my words.
DG: What do you love about working in the East Bay and what are your favorite literary establishments?
LAP: I love the East Bay. I’ve lived here since 1991 when I moved from Texas to attend Mills College. I love the community, the whole East Bay vibe. Unfortunately some of those fabulous literary establishments have closed—Cody’s Books, Black Oak Books, Shakespeare & Company. Moe’s Books is still going. There are other great bookstores too: East Bay Books, previously Deisel, burned, but recently reopened in a new storefront. Pegasus and Pendragon are wonderful as are Mrs. Dalloway’s and Walden Pond. You can find lots of little bookstores like Spectator Books that are perfect for browsing.
I do have readings coming up with the Marin Poetry Center and at Book Passage in Corte Madera. They both do so much for poets and writers in the Bay Area. There are other readings in the works.
DG: What are you reading or working on at the moment?
LAP: I’ve been so focused on my upcoming book that I haven’t been doing much new writing, though I do have the beginnings of another collection. Once I get Gathering the Pieces of Days launched, I’ll have more space for working on that.
I just finished reading Dorianne Laux’s latest collection Life on Earth and the novel The Wildes by Louis Bayard about Oscar Wilde’s family. Next up is James by Percival Everett and another Unsolicited Press author Robyn Leigh Lear’s Ekphrasis as Divination. I like to have a book of poetry and a book prose going at the same time. I read poetry in the morning and prose in the evening.
Author Bio:
LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet, editor, and managing editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche. Her work has appeared in a variety of online and print journals, including One Art, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Loud Coffee Press, Atlanta Review, West Marin Review, Eclectica, where she was a Spotlight Poet, and the anthologies Coffee Poems and A Gathering of Finches. Her chapbook Punctuated was published in 2024 by Bottlecap Press, and her books Gathering the Pieces of Days and Tsunami are forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. She lives in Richmond, California, with her partner and two fabulous cats, and has an MFA from Mills College.
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