With Love from Ireland 🇮🇪 & Remembering Marty
Also--Upcoming Zoom Classes with Dorianne Laux, Jane Hirshfield, and a new very special guest poet...
Dear Friend,
Greetings from Doolin, Ireland. I have been traveling this May, mostly at a writing retreat from Writing the Land, working with several Irish poets. The timing of this trip was strange, given I left after right our poetry community lost one of the sweetest (and most talented) poets I know, Marty (Martha) Silano, on May 5 after an 18-month battle with ALS.
Marty was a dear friend of mine. I met her in 2001 at Seattle’s Poets for Peace reading. Since her death, I’ve found myself unable to write poems—even though I can hear her in my mind telling me, You need to write that poem! It was a phrase we often said to each other, whenever one of us shared something like, “The castle on the top of the cliffs looked like a discarded chess piece,” “Our neighbors want to trim our hedge during nesting season!” or “I’m at the airport and O’Hare autocorrected to o hate!”
The first day at this retreat, poet Grace Wells brought us to a sacred Irish land to write—Poulnabrone Dolmen, sometimes translated as the “Hole of Sorrows” (Poll na mBrón). I sat on limestone, listening to a cuckoo calling from the distance (yes, they have cuckoos here), in an ancient landscape full of stories and birdsong. I thought of Marty—of how brief our lives are, the temporariness of this all, how much she loved the natural world. For the first time since her death, I began to write. The draft was rough, clumsy, I would even say—not good—but it was a draft and I had words on the page. I ended the poem with: The cuckoo continues / counting moments. I am empty / of everything I once held.
That night, Marty came to me in a dream. She was laughing and dancing and said, “I only need a thimble of wine now.” She added, “Write me into your poems.” It felt as if the place had opened me, the dream too. I woke up and wrote a draft of a poem that I continue to work on. Since then, I’ve been writing again. . .
So that’s where I am—writing, thinking of home and Marty and the beauty around me. Marty’s absence from this world has been so deeply felt by many. It’s hard to make sense of a world that so often takes the best souls too soon—but here we are. She was endlessly generous—with her love, her praise, her joy, her fierce care for the environment, and the way she continually lifted other poets, myself included. She will be missed.
Also, if you don’t know Marty or if you do and want to hear her voice again, you can listen to this wonderful interview by Jessica Gigot, PhD where they talk about meditation, Marty’s creative process, her teachers, as well as her thoughts on poetry, ALS, napping and more, for Jess’s podcast: Her Deepest Ecologies.
And if you'd like to honor Marty’s memory, please consider a gift to the Poetry Foundation the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, or the ALS Association.
Things I Love This Month:
Nettie the Doolin Donkey 🫏
I walk by this little guy on the way into town. He comes to his name or turns his head if he’s drowsy. But sometimes he’s just standing there, eyes closed. Which made me google “Do donkeys sleep standing up?” Yes, as a matter of fact, they do… P.S. Did you read that in an Irish accent because as I wrote it, I heard it in my head that way.
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🌟Two Sylvias Weekly Muse & Poetry Zoom Series (3 upcoming classes!)
It’s down to the wire, but not too late to sign up to write poems with Dorianne Laux this Friday, May 30 at 10 am PST—and then spend an evening with Jane Hirshfield in July. (Want to know a secret? We just found out Ellen Bass will be joining us for a special Zoom class in September!—she just said yes!)
How to attend all three Zoom classes, plus weekly prompts and every Zoom class through 2026? Sign up for the year here!
The cost—just $198 for everything—Zoom classes, The Weekly Muse in your inbox every Sunday morning, plus a private & nurturing online community (You can also make monthly payments if that’s easier for you.)
Sign up for Dorianne’s class through Two Sylvias Weekly Muse Substack here: https://twosylviaspress.substack.com/subscribe (Links to both classes are in your Welcome Letter that you receive immediately!)
Sign up by May 29 to get Dorianne’s class and everything that follows… All classes are recorded so you can watch later (and no “watch-by-this-date” stuff…they are yours to watch again and again.) 💕 Future Zoom classes also included: Traci Brimhall, Jane Wong, Melissa Studdard and me—plus, more to be added!
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🌟 This Poem by Martha Silano
Here’s a poem by Marty from her very first book, What the Truth Tastes Like. You can really hear her sense of humor in this one, as well as her playfulness with life and with language.
Also—
Marty’s book, Terminal Surreal, which she worked on in many ways until her passing, comes out on what would have been her 64th birthday (September 2) this year from the University of Chicago Press. You can preorder a copy here.
Wishing you all love, light, and poetry.
Hold each other close,
xo Kells
Happy to report, I recently encountered Marty’s poems. Can’t remember how but I went from poem to poem. Can’t wait to hear the interview you posted. I’m a severely chronically ill & disabled poet and her writing entered me in an embodied way.
Enjoy being with Lis, Ryan and the others.