Schwartz

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Patricia Schwartz

West Virginia childhood

”With all the vividness and clarity of a Brownie home movie, these vignettes of a West Virginia girlhood are a mnemonic triumph. Young Patty confronts all the terrors that 1950s America could conjure: the Bomb, polio, Russian spies, the junior-high dance. We watch her growing awareness of rural poverty, marital disharmony, sexual repression and gender regimentation-the hidden casualties of an age of confident conformity. Alternately comical, nostalgic, and poignant, this poetic memoir is notable for its range, its skill, and its sensitivity, but especially for delightful surprises at every turn.”

--John Roche, author of On Conesus (FootHills)

“Schwartz's poems depict a narrow slice of time in a small swath of America in rich, evocative details. Here is a tantalizing memoir, a personal and remarkably universal history of an era that has left is imprint on us all. This is poetry to savor, to dwell in; this is a book for Everyreader that feeds, as she puts it, `the hunger of our imagination.'”

--Karla Linn Merrifield, author of Midst

and Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills)

“What we love well--to paraphrase Ezra Pound--as well as what we remember well, is our heritage. In Down the Middle with a Nickel, Patricia Roth Schwartz gives us the dark complexity of memory, its gift and its practice made art, in this solid and moving collection, in which what is loved, what is sweet, runs red like blood all over one's own hungry hands.”

--Steven Huff, author of A Pig in Paris (Lake Affect)

and More Daring Escapes (Red Hen)

Down The Middle With A Nickel is a book of edges turned skillfully into centers by a poet with verve and perspicacity. Personal memory becomes living history, vivid recollection of half a century ago shaped into a moving contemporary collection. From the blood of birth to the rare sugar of a cherry popsicle, Patricia Roth Schwartz understands the power of red, and her poems offer crimson's core.

--Katharyn Howd Machan, author of Sleeping

With The Dead (Finishing Line) and Flags (Pudding House)

To revisit childhood in one's sixties through the twin lenses of memory and

poetry is a journey at once of both delight and peril. When I began to

write--inspired by many other poets before me--from memory, I had an

opportunity to grapple with happenings I had long held (I have an amazing

memory--not always a pleasant thing!), but had never quite figured out. The

poems allowed me to do that--at least in some measure.

As I began to write more poems from that time in my life, I realized more

and more that the book was not just about me and my immediate family, but

about West Virgina: the seasonal agricultural workers never quite defined as

such, the legacy of the coal mines, the rural poverty. It also became about

the entire era of the fifties: into my own personal memories crept the polio

epidemic and the administration of the Salk vaccine, the first nuclear

testing shown on television (in fact, the infancy of television itself), the

legacy of WW II veterans returning to start life anew in their small GI bill

suburban houses, beginning families that would become tainted by what they

And so the volume took shape. Several poems from my earlier full-length

collection, "Planting Bulbs in a Time of War,and Other Poem (also from

FootHills), already dealt with similar subject matter: "Just Rewards," "Blue

Ribbon," and "Perihelion," and I consider them part of this body of work as

well. What I ended up with is for me bitter-sweet: I feel for the girl I was

in her scratchy school dresses drawing the birds of West Virgina in order

please her father: I see in her the birth of the poet I would become; I

still carry her emotional scars.

Making the cover collage for the book was lots of fun and helped me to get

used to images I have not always wanted to look at: the faces of those

girls my sister and I were, emotionally buffeted by the storms of our

family's problems, the young face of my soldier father... What I have

learned is that creativity heals, that "story" become the vehicle for our

own transformations--and so here is the book. I hope it speaks to you, the

reader, and helps you to become closer to your own story.

ALL THE FIVE AND DIMES

When those plastic pumpkins sprout up every year now in the shop windows, I fall back: it's October in Charleston and Mrs. Fletcher's hauling Billy up in front of the class and ordering him to bend over, even though he's tall as a man, so she can beat him hard with her wooden paddle. It's the kind kids usually play with that has a little rubber ball attached to it by a string, but she's cut that off. Billy refuses to cry. So she beats him some more until the paddle splits in half, then sends him out to the Principal.

Meek and quiet we sit in rows--those desks were screwed down, anyway, as I recall, fast to the floor. Opening up our notebooks we get to list all the West Virginia Facts we need to know: State Flower (mountain laurel), State Bird (tufted titmouse--before the cardinal was chosen instead), Capital City (Charleston, where we live), State Hero from History (John Henry, even though he's Colored), Principal Products (coal and steel). Mrs. Fletcher tells us that tomorrow we need to bring something for Billy which we can get, she says, at the Five and Dime: pencils, candy, gum, erasers, a little box maybe of eight Crayolas, nothing bigger. We're getting him, she says, a real hollowed-out pumpkin to stuff with all the things he needs. No one mentions soap or clean unripped clothes that fit or the ability to spell or add or subtract. No one asks why he and his brothers--Victor who poops in his pants and the other one with the dirty neck whose name I forget--leave school every year for half the year. They miss so much school that Billy gets to be fifteen and still in class with us, nine-year-olds.

I had to get to be twenty-four, not eating California lettuce or grapes, hearing Cesar Chavez speak at the local college, to finally figure it all out. All the Five and Dimes are gone now, but I still remember Billy's face, when he sees the pumpkin, how it floats up pale and round, the huge dark holes of his eyes. . .

DOWN THE MIDDLE WITH A NICKEL:

is a 28 page hand-sewn chapbook - $8.00

Also by Patricia Schwartz

Planting Bulbs in a Time of War (2005)

"Patricia Roth Schwartz's compelling poems unflinchingly address family's history and history's family, and we are the better for it. Hers is a voice of empathy and grace, a voice that reminds us in all ways to be mindful of `the other.'"

Thom Ward - Small Boat with Oars of Different Size and

Various Orbits, Carnegie-Mellon Press

"Patricia Roth Schwartz says, 'To live long is to remember/what things are called.' She remembers. These are intrepid poems, opening the dark rooms of family, of love, finding possibility. Her ear for speech has perfect pitch. Most at home in her herb-scented garden, her land, tuned to her world, she rings true."

Linda Allardt - Accused of Wisdom, FootHills Publishing

"Patricia Roth Schwartz explores the rigorous claims of family and earth, of memory and desire, as if 'uprooting regret/from the mind's terrain.' In a voice that accommodates waves of joy and sorrow, fearlessly pursuing the telling detail, she allows us to experience through language 'that explosion of grace/rare as deep touch.'"

Kathleen Wakefield - Notations on the Visible World, Anhinga Press

"What a pleasure to read Patricia Roth Schwartz's new book of poems, to see how the work of poet and gardener find such fruitful common ground. Whether celebratory or elegiac, deeply personal or widely political, Schwartz's poems take us in with their rich, tactile textures, their insistence that we attend-'like a fingertip/ held to a pulse'-to the unsung and ordinary moments of our lives."

Ralph Black - Turning Over the Earth, Milkweed Editions

"Reading the poetry of Patricia Roth Schwartz is like visiting a splendid aunt who left her husband for a delightful and potentially dangerous 'other woman.' Reflected in the lovingly detailed images is a deep respect for language."

Bruce Sweet - What I Really Wanted, FootHills Publishing

PLANTING BULBS IN A TIME OF WAR

A morning for choices: bed,

the muzzy drone of half-sleep,

the sinking heart-or instead, thick socks,

rubber clogs, a sharp trowel in gloved hands,

the garb of earth's midwife.

Out under the struggling sun, the lifting breeze,

you bend to work, a swarm of lady-bugs

clings to the porch door; beyond

the dying tomatoes, sumac warms

the field of fading goldenrod.

Hunkered on rain-damp ground,

deep into each hole you've dug

you press one bulb, tear-shaped;

like the ancient Egyptians

leaving the dead food for the journey,

you scatter bone ground fine as ash.

Last night with fierce surprise

you found yourself calling down

from the pale stars your parents,

as if this time they'd enter their lives

capable of comforting, but really

what you ached for was just a chance

to ask, before dark fell, for one

last story, the one you never thought

when a moment arrived--like a fingertip

held to a pulse--when a hawk's shadow

dropped over the day? Afterward then,

still childless, apart, did each of them dare

to conjure a future that one day arrived?--

a station platform, a baby whose picture

they'd pose atop a globe of the world,

then print up for cards at Christmas.

And here you still are this morning, still riding

that spinning world, the sun your incantation,

after so many burials ready to catch,

when it comes--as it must--the howling

spring, writing the story yourself, not

the final chapter but the next, deep under

your broken fingernails

WALKING THE LABYRINTH AT ROWE

I am not done with my changes.

this green earth holds me up

circle of stones hummocks of thyme

center of stone curves closer

walking curves closer walking

curves closer draws away turns again

this sojourn begins arcs into

darkness turning toward winter circle

of stones walking fern lichen

hummocks of thyme center of stone

draws away this green earth holds

me up world as lover sole companion

walking curves closer further away

center of stone turns arcs into

darkness hummocks of thyme lichen

Five o'clock in the afternoon,

fifteen finches decorate my feeder,

delicate, ingenious, as if crafted

by Faberge--although for who

really did make them, I haven't

I've been urged to smite

is clearly their home.

Lighting here now myself

in stillness, for once, lawn chair

yellow pad on my knee,

back and forth to those

aged shaggy branches where dead

wood mixes with new, green-gold

feathers of growth bright as their

summer backs, I see them dart.

These birds have settled

into my care: as one who's had

a haven betrayed, I know

just how they're going to feel,

swooping back one day

on a homing flight, oblivious,

unprepared, only to realize-

through layer after layer of forcing

eye and disbelieving mind to reconcile--

that where once sanctuary

Patricia Roth Schwartz, poet and fiction writer, grows herbs and perennials on her 35 acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven, in Waterloo, in the Finger Lakes region of central New York. She teaches at The Writers & Books Literary Center in Rochester, as well as volunteering to conduct an ongoing poetry workshop in Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security men's prison in Auburn, New York. Her work has been widely published in small press journals, as well as in book form.

Born in West Virginia on Columbus Day in 1946, Pat has also lived in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. She holds two degrees in English, from Mount Holyoke College (B.A.) and Trinity College, (M.A.), plus one in counseling psychology from Antioch/ New England (M.A.). Having taken early retirement to both write and pursue her prison work, as well as other projects, she worked previously in Boston as a psychotherapist in private practice, then in this region as an adjunct instructor in both English and psychology for several colleges as well as Cayuga Correctional Facility.

In June 2002 Pat received an ImageOut poetry award in Rochester, and was a Finalist in 2003 and 2004. She was also selected as a Finalist in the Willamette Poetry Contest from The Clackamas Literary Review in 2004, as well as the Sow's Ear Poetry Contest, 2004. She has appeared in the Genesee Reading Series at Writers & Books as well as in numerous other readings including poetry for peace. Pat served for several years as a volunteer co-coordinator for a regional summer poetry festival held at Writers & Books' Gell Center for the Arts. She was also co-facilitator of Rochester's "Wilde/ Woolf Society," an lgbt writers' support group, and is now a member of "Just Poets."

Pat is working currently on another full-length manuscript, The Crows of Copper John: the History of Auburn Prison in Poems, a portion of which was presented in November 2004 in a readers' theatre format in Rochester as a benefit for CEPHAS, a former inmates' halfway house.

Planting Bulbs in a Time of War is a 72 page hand-sewn book with spine - $15.00

TO ORDER Planting Bulbs in a Time of War ON-LINE


	FootHills Publishing \| home Submitting to FootHills \| 2007 Books \| Zazulyer \| James \| Spiers \| Hoogestraat \| Lochridge \| Lehmann \| Gittings-Dalton \| Bashkirew \| Good \| Rivera \| Calhoun \| Deer Cloud \| Wright \| Miller \| Milby \| Bird \| Quetchenbach \| Gordon \| Riche \| Richardson \| Brown \| Schwartz \| Rossiter \| Graser \| Owens \| Merrifield \| Thomas \| Krok \| Jennings \| Stelzig \| Faurot \| Costanzo \| Ordering by Mail \| Contact FHP Patricia Schwartz (See also Planting Bulbs in a Time of War) DOWN THE MIDDLE WITH A NICKEL: a memoir of a West Virginia childhood in poems ”With all the vividness and clarity of a Brownie home movie, these vignettes of a West Virginia girlhood are a mnemonic triumph. Young Patty confronts all the terrors that 1950s America could conjure: the Bomb, polio, Russian spies, the junior-high dance. We watch her growing awareness of rural poverty, marital disharmony, sexual repression and gender regimentation-the hidden casualties of an age of confident conformity. Alternately comical, nostalgic, and poignant, this poetic memoir is notable for its range, its skill, and its sensitivity, but especially for delightful surprises at every turn.” --John Roche, author of On Conesus (FootHills) “Schwartz's poems depict a narrow slice of time in a small swath of America in rich, evocative details. Here is a tantalizing memoir, a personal and remarkably universal history of an era that has left is imprint on us all. This is poetry to savor, to dwell in; this is a book for Everyreader that feeds, as she puts it, `the hunger of our imagination.'” --Karla Linn Merrifield, author of Midst and Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills) “What we love well--to paraphrase Ezra Pound--as well as what we remember well, is our heritage. In Down the Middle with a Nickel, Patricia Roth Schwartz gives us the dark complexity of memory, its gift and its practice made art, in this solid and moving collection, in which what is loved, what is sweet, runs red like blood all over one's own hungry hands.” --Steven Huff, author of A Pig in Paris (Lake Affect) and More Daring Escapes (Red Hen) Down The Middle With A Nickel is a book of edges turned skillfully into centers by a poet with verve and perspicacity. Personal memory becomes living history, vivid recollection of half a century ago shaped into a moving contemporary collection. From the blood of birth to the rare sugar of a cherry popsicle, Patricia Roth Schwartz understands the power of red, and her poems offer crimson's core. --Katharyn Howd Machan, author of Sleeping With The Dead (Finishing Line) and Flags (Pudding House) To revisit childhood in one's sixties through the twin lenses of memory and poetry is a journey at once of both delight and peril. When I began to write--inspired by many other poets before me--from memory, I had an opportunity to grapple with happenings I had long held (I have an amazing memory--not always a pleasant thing!), but had never quite figured out. The poems allowed me to do that--at least in some measure. As I began to write more poems from that time in my life, I realized more and more that the book was not just about me and my immediate family, but about West Virgina: the seasonal agricultural workers never quite defined as such, the legacy of the coal mines, the rural poverty. It also became about the entire era of the fifties: into my own personal memories crept the polio epidemic and the administration of the Salk vaccine, the first nuclear testing shown on television (in fact, the infancy of television itself), the legacy of WW II veterans returning to start life anew in their small GI bill suburban houses, beginning families that would become tainted by what they had endured. And so the volume took shape. Several poems from my earlier full-length collection, "Planting Bulbs in a Time of War,and Other Poem (also from FootHills), already dealt with similar subject matter: "Just Rewards," "Blue Ribbon," and "Perihelion," and I consider them part of this body of work as well. What I ended up with is for me bitter-sweet: I feel for the girl I was in her scratchy school dresses drawing the birds of West Virgina in order please her father: I see in her the birth of the poet I would become; I still carry her emotional scars. Making the cover collage for the book was lots of fun and helped me to get used to images I have not always wanted to look at: the faces of those girls my sister and I were, emotionally buffeted by the storms of our family's problems, the young face of my soldier father... What I have learned is that creativity heals, that "story" become the vehicle for our own transformations--and so here is the book. I hope it speaks to you, the reader, and helps you to become closer to your own story. Pat Schwartz From the book: ALL THE FIVE AND DIMES When those plastic pumpkins sprout up every year now in the shop windows, I fall back: it's October in Charleston and Mrs. Fletcher's hauling Billy up in front of the class and ordering him to bend over, even though he's tall as a man, so she can beat him hard with her wooden paddle. It's the kind kids usually play with that has a little rubber ball attached to it by a string, but she's cut that off. Billy refuses to cry. So she beats him some more until the paddle splits in half, then sends him out to the Principal. Meek and quiet we sit in rows--those desks were screwed down, anyway, as I recall, fast to the floor. Opening up our notebooks we get to list all the West Virginia Facts we need to know: State Flower (mountain laurel), State Bird (tufted titmouse--before the cardinal was chosen instead), Capital City (Charleston, where we live), State Hero from History (John Henry, even though he's Colored), Principal Products (coal and steel). Mrs. Fletcher tells us that tomorrow we need to bring something for Billy which we can get, she says, at the Five and Dime: pencils, candy, gum, erasers, a little box maybe of eight Crayolas, nothing bigger. We're getting him, she says, a real hollowed-out pumpkin to stuff with all the things he needs. No one mentions soap or clean unripped clothes that fit or the ability to spell or add or subtract. No one asks why he and his brothers--Victor who poops in his pants and the other one with the dirty neck whose name I forget--leave school every year for half the year. They miss so much school that Billy gets to be fifteen and still in class with us, nine-year-olds. I had to get to be twenty-four, not eating California lettuce or grapes, hearing Cesar Chavez speak at the local college, to finally figure it all out. All the Five and Dimes are gone now, but I still remember Billy's face, when he sees the pumpkin, how it floats up pale and round, the huge dark holes of his eyes. . . DOWN THE MIDDLE WITH A NICKEL: is a 28 page hand-sewn chapbook - $8.00 TO ORDER ON-LINE To order through mail click here. Also by Patricia Schwartz Planting Bulbs in a Time of War (2005) "Patricia Roth Schwartz's compelling poems unflinchingly address family's history and history's family, and we are the better for it. Hers is a voice of empathy and grace, a voice that reminds us in all ways to be mindful of `the other.'" Thom Ward - Small Boat with Oars of Different Size and Various Orbits, Carnegie-Mellon Press "Patricia Roth Schwartz says, 'To live long is to remember/what things are called.' She remembers. These are intrepid poems, opening the dark rooms of family, of love, finding possibility. Her ear for speech has perfect pitch. Most at home in her herb-scented garden, her land, tuned to her world, she rings true." Linda Allardt - Accused of Wisdom, FootHills Publishing "Patricia Roth Schwartz explores the rigorous claims of family and earth, of memory and desire, as if 'uprooting regret/from the mind's terrain.' In a voice that accommodates waves of joy and sorrow, fearlessly pursuing the telling detail, she allows us to experience through language 'that explosion of grace/rare as deep touch.'" Kathleen Wakefield - Notations on the Visible World, Anhinga Press "What a pleasure to read Patricia Roth Schwartz's new book of poems, to see how the work of poet and gardener find such fruitful common ground. Whether celebratory or elegiac, deeply personal or widely political, Schwartz's poems take us in with their rich, tactile textures, their insistence that we attend-'like a fingertip/ held to a pulse'-to the unsung and ordinary moments of our lives." Ralph Black - Turning Over the Earth, Milkweed Editions "Reading the poetry of Patricia Roth Schwartz is like visiting a splendid aunt who left her husband for a delightful and potentially dangerous 'other woman.' Reflected in the lovingly detailed images is a deep respect for language." Bruce Sweet - What I Really Wanted, FootHills Publishing From the book: PLANTING BULBS IN A TIME OF WAR October 2001 A morning for choices: bed, the muzzy drone of half-sleep, the sinking heart-or instead, thick socks, rubber clogs, a sharp trowel in gloved hands, the garb of earth's midwife. Out under the struggling sun, the lifting breeze, you bend to work, a swarm of lady-bugs clings to the porch door; beyond the dying tomatoes, sumac warms the field of fading goldenrod. Hunkered on rain-damp ground, deep into each hole you've dug you press one bulb, tear-shaped; like the ancient Egyptians leaving the dead food for the journey, you scatter bone ground fine as ash. Last night with fierce surprise you found yourself calling down from the pale stars your parents, as if this time they'd enter their lives capable of comforting, but really what you ached for was just a chance to ask, before dark fell, for one last story, the one you never thought you'd need to hear: What was it like when a moment arrived--like a fingertip held to a pulse--when a hawk's shadow dropped over the day? Afterward then, still childless, apart, did each of them dare to conjure a future that one day arrived?-- a station platform, a baby whose picture they'd pose atop a globe of the world, then print up for cards at Christmas. And here you still are this morning, still riding that spinning world, the sun your incantation, after so many burials ready to catch, when it comes--as it must--the howling spring, writing the story yourself, not the final chapter but the next, deep under your broken fingernails ashes and dirt. WALKING THE LABYRINTH AT ROWE IN MY 57TH YEAR October 12, 2003 I am not done with my changes. --Stanley Kunitz "The Layers" walking lichen fern this green earth holds me up circle of stones hummocks of thyme center of stone curves closer walking curves closer walking curves closer draws away turns again this sojourn begins arcs into darkness turning toward winter circle of stones walking fern lichen hummocks of thyme center of stone draws away this green earth holds me up world as lover sole companion walking curves closer further away center of stone turns arcs into darkness hummocks of thyme lichen GOLDFINCH POEM Five o'clock in the afternoon, fifteen finches decorate my feeder, delicate, ingenious, as if crafted by Faberge--although for who really did make them, I haven't a name. That old pine I've been urged to smite down to kindling is clearly their home. Lighting here now myself in stillness, for once, lawn chair in shade, to write, yellow pad on my knee, I watch: back and forth to those aged shaggy branches where dead wood mixes with new, green-gold feathers of growth bright as their summer backs, I see them dart. These birds have settled into my care: as one who's had a haven betrayed, I know just how they're going to feel, swooping back one day on a homing flight, oblivious, unprepared, only to realize- through layer after layer of forcing eye and disbelieving mind to reconcile-- that where once sanctuary so firmly stood now only remains the shimmering air. Patricia Roth Schwartz, poet and fiction writer, grows herbs and perennials on her 35 acre property, Sage-Thyme Haven, in Waterloo, in the Finger Lakes region of central New York. She teaches at The Writers & Books Literary Center in Rochester, as well as volunteering to conduct an ongoing poetry workshop in Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security men's prison in Auburn, New York. Her work has been widely published in small press journals, as well as in book form. Born in West Virginia on Columbus Day in 1946, Pat has also lived in California, Massachusetts and Connecticut. She holds two degrees in English, from Mount Holyoke College (B.A.) and Trinity College, (M.A.), plus one in counseling psychology from Antioch/ New England (M.A.). Having taken early retirement to both write and pursue her prison work, as well as other projects, she worked previously in Boston as a psychotherapist in private practice, then in this region as an adjunct instructor in both English and psychology for several colleges as well as Cayuga Correctional Facility. In June 2002 Pat received an ImageOut poetry award in Rochester, and was a Finalist in 2003 and 2004. She was also selected as a Finalist in the Willamette Poetry Contest from The Clackamas Literary Review in 2004, as well as the Sow's Ear Poetry Contest, 2004. She has appeared in the Genesee Reading Series at Writers & Books as well as in numerous other readings including poetry for peace. Pat served for several years as a volunteer co-coordinator for a regional summer poetry festival held at Writers & Books' Gell Center for the Arts. She was also co-facilitator of Rochester's "Wilde/ Woolf Society," an lgbt writers' support group, and is now a member of "Just Poets." Pat is working currently on another full-length manuscript, The Crows of Copper John: the History of Auburn Prison in Poems, a portion of which was presented in November 2004 in a readers' theatre format in Rochester as a benefit for CEPHAS, a former inmates' halfway house. ISBN 0-941053-62-8 Planting Bulbs in a Time of War is a 72 page hand-sewn book with spine - $15.00 TO ORDER Planting Bulbs in a Time of War ON-LINE To order through mail click here.