Writing poetry “ignites profound emotions” in Tucson poet Pamela Uschuk. “It moves me to an ecstatic state, to passion, whether it be outrage or desire, longing, grief or transcendence.” She is an ardent social-justice and wilderness advocate, creating vibrant metaphors in her work that draw analogies between personal and universal struggles. “I don’t set out writing about human rights or environmental issues. Injustice insinuates itself into my conscience. There is no immediate cure, no quick fix, but to remain silent aids and abets the injustice. Deeply rooted in the natural, wild world, my imagery is a springboard to our inequitable and violent human world.”
Pamela has published eight books of poetry, her work appearing in over 300 journals and anthologies. She has won many prestigious poetry awards, fellowships, and grants. She is also editor-in-chief of the well regarded arts journal Cutthroat, which receives thousands of poems each submission period.
For Pamela the creation of poetry is a calling. “A poem usually starts with an insistent line in a key I cannot ignore. Often that line stems from an emotion, perhaps being moved by someone’s personal trial or falling in love with a yellow warbler hanging upside down from a cottonwood leaf, or sitting beside a river and listening to its poetry. Sometimes a poem comes from reading a news story about something I care deeply about. Genocide, tyranny and human-rights abuses have often been spurs for my poetic response. To craft outrage or grief, suffering, injustice or love into powerful art is my challenge, but when I succeed it takes me to another dimension or level of being.”
Pamela taught creative writing for many years and continues to teach classes via Zoom on poetry, lyric memoir and other subjects that interest her. She finds the relationship between student and teacher to be symbiotic. “Teaching is a fertile learning garden. I learn something every time I teach, whether it be about the human condition or about craft or about history. I am also a perennial student; my curiosity leads me down many strange and wondrous tunnels.”
Pamela is most comfortable in the natural world. “Animals, birds, trees, flowers, forests, deserts, the land itself, inform me and my poetry. I think I am inseparable from the wild world which inhabits my psyche always. I’m an avid hiker, birder, wild-animal advocate, communer with trees and plants. I would not thrive without my intimate interconnection with the natural, wild world. That doesn’t mean I'm not a social being. I love my friends, but my friends are also most often found living in the wild.”
She writes best in the early morning. “Before sunrise, in that liminal state between dreams and duties, work to be done. It is here the veil thins, and I can access other states of consciousness and being. That is where my best work comes from.” The surrounding natural world of Arizona is a constant inspiration for her. “I love all the wildlife that we coexist with here — javelinas, coyotes, rattlesnakes, zebra-tailed lizards, scorpions, and a wealth of birds. I can’t imagine not living with the wild, natural world. I am a gardener and have planted loads of native plants and trees in our acre of back yard that attract an abundance of animals.”
Recently Pamela has been working on a new collection, tentatively titled A Field Guide to Migratory Words. “I am writing more prose poems, as well as mixing lyric prose and poetry. I love the challenge of creating new metaphors, creating imagery that puts the reader emotionally, intellectually and physically in the poem.” Her poem “The Ratcheting” deftly combines natural elements with personal struggle. She adds, “It is gratifying to finely craft any poem, which is at once a love letter and a cri de coeur from the soul. The act of creation is essential to my mental and emotional wellbeing. Writing poetry pulls me into long, complicated internal journeys that resonate in the outer world.”
More: pamelauschuk.com
The full moon eats the screams of magpies,
dawn-colored jays ratcheting away
atop soggy lawn furniture even though the moon’s developed
new facial cracks and has lost more mass
on its way to total disappearance in another million years. Still
I am grateful to see its bright
white appetite as it flies invisible as the handkerchief
of my grandma’s ghost while sunrise claims this world.
Yesterday I thought I was going blind, fragile
retina blown apart or aqueous humor
squeezed by a fatal tumor from my eyeball’s global field.
Etched somewhere inside my sight,
a phantom yellow bulb or spectral solar
paramecium shimmied through my cornea.
Neither sleep nor eye drops erased the indelible proof
of melanoma, of fear’s nickel-plated
electricity murdering what I envision.
Why do I always feel I deserve disaster?
After a battery of tests, stinging
drops, finger pokes, laser white
lights digging at the back of my eyes,
the doctor says everything is fine.
The floater still burns and leaps
just out of range. I’ll carry it through
the afternoon’s bureaucracy, the endless
back to school meetings, but I would rather be that magpie
yelling at the uncooperative sky or a jay
braying against the full
Dee Cohen is a Prescott poet and photographer. deecohen@cox.net.
