friday round-up: why read it?, the book you’re afraid to read, and the men who became streetnames

desperate times call for desperate writing surfaces

Dear Reader, did you think I’d forgotten the roundup today? No, indeed. This morning I was busy rounding up squirrelly fifth-graders into class lines at morning yard duty. I don’t do yard duty very often, but when I do I’m right in there with the same class of yard duty gals as the one who my kids describe as “the mean yard duty lady with the megaphone.” I don’t have a megaphone yet, but I admit the prospect is tempting.

Then I was rounding up things around here. I’ve packed two boxes now! Am I done yet?

At any rate, for today’s round up I want to talk about the books you don’t want to read. Here we go:

why read it?  I’m taking a class up in the college town and we’ve been reading a wide variety of poets. For this week, we read Tomaz Salamun‘s A Ballad for Metka Krasovec. I have to say, it’s not my favorite book. It starts out very fragmented, without footholds, or connective tissue. As the book goes on, the poems take on more substance syntactically speaking, with titles, narrative threads, etc., and you kind of think to yourself, Geez, this guy can write. Why was he putting us through all that at the beginning? Okay, so, the obvious answer is because it was some sort of artistic strategy. Long story longer, there’s one person in the class who has not been shy about his distaste for a lot of contemporary poetry. This reader wants a poet to be generous — not to withhold or create puzzles that keep the reader at arm’s length. He had started reading the book and put it down after the first several poems. He asked, very genuinely, “Why read it?” So we talked about that as a class. We all have our personal taste in poetry, right? Some books we love; others we struggle through and just don’t like at all.

For me the answer to “Why read it?” is: because I might learn something. Or I might find ten words used in a way that interests me and gives me an idea for my work. Or the way the poet gets out of the poem on page 23 might help me figure out my most recent failed poem about fill-in-the-blank. Sometimes it’s good to struggle through a collection you don’t particularly love to see what you might learn. If, on the other hand, you’re reading purely for enjoyment and you hate the poems, I give you permission to put it down and move on.

We also had a really interesting conversation about the professor’s assertion that Salamun was “creating a persona” of himself in order to make a social comment (the book is rife with autobiographical details of the sex, drugs, rock-n-roll variety that I, for one, could’ve lived without). Some of the women of a certain age, myself included, wondered why we were talking of the poet “creating a persona” for this book, while last week, when discussing a book by a woman poet, we talked freely of her use of personal details in her work — no discussion of the woman poet “creating a persona” to  make a statement. Do I smell a possible double-standard? But that’s a post for another time, or perhaps for a doctoral dissertation.

the book you’re afraid to read  There’s the book you don’t like, and then there’s the book you’re afraid to read. Come on, admit it, we all have one or two. Maybe we’re afraid the book will bring up issues we’d rather not stir up. Maybe we’re afraid it’s going to be so good we’ll be shamed into writer’s block for months. Maybe we’re afraid this book is the book we were going to write.

Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Last night in the dance studio waiting room, I opened Steam Laundry by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell (which I won in Erin‘s Big Poetry Giveaway, thanks Erin!). I began with the author’s note, and put the book back down with a stone in my gut. I was afraid to read this “novel in poems” about a wife who had followed her husband West during the frontier days. The Mail Order Bride’s ears were ringing. I was afraid my book — you know, the one I haven’t written yet — had already been written.

What do you do when you start to panic? I write. I started digging in my purse for a pen and paper. No paper. No paper? Oh, no. But, luckily, I had brought the priority mail envelope the book had come in. Desperate times call for desperate writing surfaces. Away I went on a draft called, “I Find Myself Without Paper, Holding a Book I’m Afraid to Read.” The draft is all about the fear that someone else has already written my book. It ends:

What worries me is, whoever
wrote it, what if they forgot
the most important part,

which is the pre-dawn moment adorned
with stars and my mother’s hand
pressed to her throat. Translation: Goodbye.

I’m not saying it’s ready for prime time. But I will say this: you never know where a draft is lurking. Also, once I wrote through the fear, I started reading the book and immediately understood that (a). this is not my book, and (b). this book will help me think about my work in new ways. No fear, poets, no fear!

the men who became streetnames  And about Steam Laundry, I’m on page 45 and I love it so far. I’m sure I’ll be telling you more about this book soon. For now, though, here’s the opening poem. I love how it looks at a town through the eyes of its founders.

**

River Town

The men who became street names
meet in a saloon in the afterlife.

They raise glasses, clink. Whiskey spills over the lip
on onto their dirty fingers. They smile

and nod, bob their heads in the only agreement
they’ve ever all shared:

it’s a pleasure to see the roads they cut
through stands of willow paved.

Whether they’re in heaven, surrounded by dance hall girls,
straps falling over shoulders,

or they’re in hell, sweating in starched paper collars,
bones aching with regret, they’re still with us,

perched on poles, peeking out between
the loops and columns of the letters on their names.

The two brothers-in-law who intersect
at the library and the Korean restaurant

watch a man jaywalk, wondering if he ever sold out a partner,
or brought a bank to ruins.

The bank president looks down from his corner
onto run-down apartments.

On Saturday nights, cruiser lights reflect off him,
as men in handcuffs shuffle through the winter’s first snow.

The rent collector snakes from First to Third, disappearing
before Fifth. On that street, everyone locks their doors.

When a boy jumps his bike over a curb, and looks up,
he thinks he hears faint applause.

And the woman signaling left on Isabelle feels an inescapable
longing as the tick of the turn signal counts out

her heartbeats, as if she had to sneak out of town
in the middle of winter in a sled, hands clasped in a wolf fur muff.

All of them wish they could climb back down, muddy
their feet on the riverbank, but the afterlife, if anything,

is green and reflective, and perfectly still,
unlike the river, which so long after they bottomed out,

is still going in the same brown direction.

– by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell, in her book Steam Laundry

**

Reader that’s it for this week’s round up. I think it’s plenty. In fact, I suddenly have this feeling that I talk too much. Have a wonderful weekend. I hope you have some time to read something you really love. As for me….. I’ll be, um, packing.

the great poem sort of 2012

little groups

Last week I wrote about having wide open spaces in the new house — the perfect place for a poem sort. Although I had planned to go over with a tall stack of poems to spread out and wander through, I quickly realized that it would take me the better part of a day to locate, print (when necessary), and organize the actual documents. Instead I wrote titles out on index cards and sorted those. I also put color coded check marks on each card to denote the theme and/or subject matter of each poem. Many cards had several check marks, of course.

The first step after labeling all the cards was to group like with like. So, for example, all the Mail Order Bride Poems went in one little pile, all the motherhood poems in another, all the illness poems in another, etc.

Then I started moving the cards into what poets call an “arc of meaning” — an arrangement that capitalizes on themes and connections throughout the many poems. It may tell a story, or it may evoke a sense of something (emotion, idea), or it may do both. I ended up with four strands of poems weaving in and out of one another.

I learned a lot from my poem sort. While I knew there were plenty of motherhood, illness, and Mail Order Bride poems in my files, I didn’t realize there were several “survival guide” poems, several poems in the tradition of old tales, and several poems having to do with maps/navigation. This gives me some new ideas for how to move forward with what I have so far. It also sent me to the library to do some more reading on themes of survival and navigation (well, I haven’t actually done the reading yet, but I checked out a big stack of books). I also learned that I have more-than-several poems with the word “girl” in the title. So I’m going to be doing some thinking about girls — the concept of girl, the word, etc.

Know what else I learned? I learned that I have too many poems. Too many poems for what, you may ask? Just plain old too many. Too many to keep working on before sending out, etc. So I culled about 30 cards out of the mix — these will go in the abandoned poem file. Not that they were all terrible poems, just that they weren’t as necessary as the rest. That’s kind of a hard decision to make, or was for me — to say goodbye to a poem. But I did it.

All in all I’m very glad I did my poem sort. The next time I do one, the cards will be spread over counters, tables, the living room rug and the hallway. I will be yelling down the hall, DON’T.TOUCH.THOSE.PAPERS! I will be having to move several of the piles so that we can have dinner. No matter, I’m used to it. But it was awesome to work in a wide open space just this once.

And now, Reader, my attention must shift. Moving day is less than two weeks away. I’m taking this week off from writing — or maybe mostly off from writing– and I’ll probably be at the blog a bit less over the next few weeks, too, until we are moved and functional (notice I didn’t say unpacked, just functional) in the new house.

Happy Monday and thanks, as always, for reading.

April was poetry month: winners and wrap up

31 revisions

Reader, National Poetry Month has passed us by. I’m excited to announce the winners of free poetry Margo Roby and Tara Rae Mulroy. Thanks to everyone who threw their name in the hat.

I know many poets who are heaving a sigh of relief this morning — no mandate to write a poem today. As for me, I counted up my revisions for the month of April and ended up with 31 (sometimes the Muse strikes in revision mode, you know; I never pass up a date with the Muse, so I did one extra). The thing I love about a poem-a-day (or, in my case, a revision-a-day) challenge is that it reminds us that having a focus can lead to real results. For April, my first priority after my morning reading and writing was revision. With the exception of one or two poems that are still knocked out on the operating table, I now have a stack of poems that are ready for the spit and polish. The one-a-day rate, whether drafting or revising, isn’t sustainable over a long period of time, but it’s good to make a push every now and then, isn’t it?

In other news, I’m very happy to have learned that my poem “Aubade For Peter Pan” received an honorable mention in the Tupelo Press Winter 2012 Poetry Project. You can read my poem and many other wonderful poems at this website.

From the Keeping It Real desk, we have news of a rejection or two and a grant proposal passed over. I’ve found that, over time, my skin is thickening. For one thing, I don’t expect to win anything the first time I try. For another, I’ve learned that submissions are, to a certain extent, a numbers game — the more you submit the more publications you’ll have. Sadly, I’ve submitted very little since January (must remedy! must remedy!). It helps, too, when the rejections are the good kind of rejection wherein one is asked to submit more work. Little nudges from the universe that say: Poet, persevere! And I shall.

Lastly a big thank you to Diane Lockward, who included links to my revision tips in the May edition of her poetry newsletter. If you aren’t receiving this newsletter, may I recommend that you sign up here (scroll down — the sign-up field is in the right hand margin). Every month Diane provides a book recommendation, a craft tip, and many useful poetry links. It’s a great resource for the working poet. Thanks again, Diane!

And now, Reader, May is Moving Month. It’s true. Currently the wee, small house is shrouded in a red tent and lethal gas — termites are a fact of life in this subtropical climate, and most houses are fumigated when they change hands. Husband asked me if I took a picture. Um, no. No, I don’t want a reminder that my house was filled with lethal gas and the entry sealed for three days. I suppose I’d better issue unto myself a box-a-day challenge. Yeah. We’ll see how that goes.

Happy end of poetry month, happy May Day, and happy Tuesday to all of you. Thanks, as always, for reading.

I can see clearly now

public domain from wikimedia

Reader, I am caught up. What this means, exactly, I’m not sure, but my inner caught-up indicator is saying ‘yes.’ The behind-on-everything dashboard light is no longer on. I spent a few days taming the wild to-do list beast, and now I’m deliciously relaxed.

Deliciously relaxed and thinking about how April is Poetry Month. That means Poetry Month starts in exactly six days! There will be the usual poem-a-day pledges, the great big poetry book giveaway, etc., etc. Usually, I’m teaching poetry in my kids’ classrooms in April, but this year I think I’ll sit out, since May is Moving Month (insert deer-in-the-headlights look here).

For much of this school year, I have been a drafting machine — new and unexpected drafts tumbling out one after the other. For the last few weeks, although I’m still writing every morning, there has been a lull — a draft here and a draft there, but less time dedicated specifically to drafting, and less urgency behind the poems finding their way to paper. Although I love the heady, draft-a-minute pace of intensely creative times, I know there is a natural ebb and flow to the creative process. Even as I’ve learned to understand and respect this rhythm, I always feel a little sad at the waning of an intensely creative time. Sigh… .

My intuition says now is the time to turn to revisions (Dear Intuition, I trust you, I really, really trust you!) – and, believe me, I have a stack of ‘em. . As part of my focus on revision, I’m planning a post on the most useful revision advice I’ve found/tried/used, so stay tuned for that.

If you are a writer or an artist (and I use that terms in the broadest sense of the words — perhaps your art is gardening or home design and decor), do you find there’s an ebb and flow to your creative process? How do you navigate the highs and lows? Share in comments if you like.

And have a wonderful last week before Poetry Month!

wendy in print

"Aunt Pearl's Watermelon, #1" by April Dobbins

calyx (n.) the sepals of a flower, typically forming a whorl that encloses the petals and forms a protective layer around a flower in bud; a cup-like cavity or structure; a journal of art and literature by women produced in Corvalis, OR, and now celebrating its 35th year.

Reader, last week this journal appeared in my mailbox. On page 39 is a poem I wrote about motherhood called “A Wendy House.”

I wrote “Wendy House” when I was in the thick of it — three very small children and in poor health from my chronic autoimmune condition, living far from family, winter. I had been reading Peter Pan to the children (or to the 2/3 of the children who were old enough to listen at that point), and came to the passage about the Darling children’s arrival at the island of Neverland. Do you remember that Wendy was struck by an arrow (Tink’s) and came down from her flight dead, or nearly dead? Then the lost boys built a house around and over her, hoping to protect her, or maybe hoping only to revive her. They wanted a mother.

This passage in the Peter Pan story made me think about life — the way we think our life is going to unfold versus the way it actually does unfold. The “island of make-believe and the same island come true,” as I quote in the epigraph to the poem. And also about motherhood, and the great needs of children, and how all mothers start out as “only / a girl. With no experience.”

This poem was an idea that brewed for a while. Then one day I said to myself, “It’s time to write the Wendy House poem.” I sat down and wrote it, worked on it for a few months, then began sending it out. It was rejected severally (as usual), but this fall I had a note from CALYX saying they’d like to publish it.

I am honored to have my work in the same volume as pieces containing these lines:

“… so slack / are the strings between my bones, so lucky / is my electric blood to be inside my skin.” — from “Reading Whitman in the Chemo Room” by Rochelle Hurt

“Tang was laughing a jellyfish laugh, with his hands on his stomach as it swelled and shriveled.” –from “The Vestige” by Rita Chang

“That’s all there was, it wasn’t much but joy is like that, / joy surprises: the scent of mint, a baby’s wrist, a woman / in a white truck, driving.” — from “Woman in a White Truck, Driving” by Sarah Rossiter

and, this bit from “The Apple Orchard” by Bethany Reid, winner of the 2011 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize:

“Spring mornings / it was a regular whorehouse / of an orchard, the trees / frowsy and bedraggled, / in nightgowns and slippers, / hair tangled, lipstick askew, / straps slipping from their shoulders.”

!!!!! a regular whorehouse / of an orchard !!!!! Reader, that line alone is worth the cover price.

And speaking of the cover, I find the cover photograph to be absolutely stunning. I think it’s my favorite journal cover ever. Have I  mentioned how much I love the cover?

If you haven’t read CALYX, let me recommend it. I’ve read it for years, either borrowing it from friends or subscribing. It never disappoints, is always full of good poetry, fiction, essays, art, and book reviews. It’s thick and varied enough that you can keep it on your nightstand and read through it for months. Happy 35th birthday to CALYX. And thank you for finding a home for Wendy in your pages.

process notes: letter to rodin

from The Gates of Hell

We are lucky to live just down the peninsula from the College Town. This particular college (university actually) has a large, permanent collection of Rodin’s sculptures including a cast of The Gates of Hell, which I think I could sit in front of for the rest of my life and never get bored. Last week and again yesterday, I spent some time with the Rodin collection, and was struck by the commingling of passion and suffering his work seems to embody. One interesting thing about his work is that he’ll often break the scale of a piece and include, for example, an outsized big toe, or a hand that is much too small for its body, or a too-long arm. And many, many of the eyes he sculpted look curiously blind — there, but not there. Another interesting thing about Rodin’s work is that he often leaves bodies purposely unfinished to enlarge the evocative power of a piece. Here’s something he said about that: “A torso contains all of life.” O, he seems to say, we are flawed and unseeing, never finished. By the way, this makes me think about how much to reveal in a poem, versus how much to leave unsaid, allowing the language to evoke without being bossy. But that’s another post for another day.

As I looked at the collection, I was furiously tapping notes into my phone — poem seeds and snatches of language. Words like: gouged, fragment, pocked, torsion, seam.

Thus began my most recent draft, which I came to after spending some time in my notebook scribbling all the words that came to mind as I thought about Rodin’s sculptures and what little I know of his process (one detail of which fascinates me: over time, The Gates of Hell became a work-in-progress and treasure trove of new work. He would add newly shaped forms, take away others, use one figure as a model for a new piece, etc).

Although I normally draft in my  notebook, this time I did not. And I didn’t use words from other poets as I often do — the words for this draft rose up to the page out of my scribbling and a line echoing in my head: Sir, you must know something of suffering.

I really wanted this poem to be about suffering, but as it skittered down the page it turned its back on suffering to explore themes of imperfection and longing. During revisions, I will need to figure out if both themes can coexist in this poem, or if one needs to be cut. I worked in couplets as I usually do when drafting; we’ll see if they stick. I’m also unsure of the ending which right now is tied up pretty tight but probably needs to be incomplete, unfinished, evocative.

Even so, I’ll leave you with a few lines from this draft: “This is how we meet each other, right Sir? // Headless and missing a limb, nearly / blind and tripping on a too-long leg, // the half-length of an arm / saying more about arms // than the intact limb ever could, absence / becoming presence?”

The syntax is a little too talky for me, but it’s draft with some energy behind it. I think I’ll try to revise toward the strange.

of saints, rabbit holes, and literary genuflection

WWII poster by H. Coffin; public domain from Nat'l Archives

The children went back to school last Wednesday, and on Friday I finally had a wide-open morning to spend near my favorite sunny window in the library. I keep a file called “the blotter,” which is just a long list of poem-seeds — ideas for titles or first lines; begged-borrowed-or-stolen phrases; questions that maybe, just maybe, could be answered by a poem. I was planning on drafting toward the latest title dictated to me by the Mail Order Bride: The Mail Order Bride Takes to Her Sickbed (for more info on how the Mail Order Bride came into being, you can read this post and this post on my old blog).

As I was packing up my desk to head out, I glanced at the headlines at The New York Times website. The task master in my brain scolded me for getting distracted — “don’t get sucked in by the Internet!” — but the curious soul in me saw a link to an article about Joan of Arc.

Who isn’t fascinated by Joan of Arc? Of course I had to follow that link.

Even as I read, I thought of an article in this month’s Poets&Writers about the downsides of our online world and the distractions it can cause for writers (and everyone else). The article spoke of writers who work on Internet-disabled computers, and one writer who moved his family to the woods of New Hampshire, away from the wired world, to write his book.

I get that, but the curious soul in me resists the idea of writing in an Internet blackout. So many of my poems were born of ventures down an Internet rabbit hole, just such as the one I followed last Friday that led me to my latest draft.

I followed that link, printed the article, and took it with me to the library. Once there, I dove in via Google and found a bazillion fascinating facts and stories about this girl saint. Before long, my curiosity had gone beyond what Google could dish up, and I found myself on my knees in the stacks with the reference librarian (I pause here to thank the Universe for reference librarians) paging through art bibliographies for references to paintings of Joan of Arc. On my knees in the stacks of the library is one of my favorite places to be.

So, now I had a bazillion facts and stories, the titles of several paintings, and a small word bank from a poem by Sally Rosen Kindred from her book No Eden. I also had the verb “to halve” echoing in my ears, so I let that be my starting place:

“I’m halved by what’s asked of me, / too. I’ve sheared my hair and tied myself /up in ill-fitting clothes…”

The draft goes on as the speaker of the poem talks to Joan casually, as one would talk to a friend in the kitchen, putting dinner together. But when the friend is Joan of Arc, “the saints’ urgings simmer / over our shoulders” and eventually a parting of ways must ensue. The draft ends: “And Joan, this is where / we part, you and I, at the crossroads / of faith inking itself on your every limb / your mouth ruptured by a sudden current of doves, while I / chew and swallow, turn back to the stove, reach / for the only things I can believe in tonight: // Salt, this spoon, / and stirring.

So, we’ll see where Joanie and I go from here. Meanwhile, I’m voting for following those Internet rabbit holes (within reason, of course) — you never know where they’ll lead you.

You just might end up making dinner with a saint.

P.S. WordPress is giving me fits about couplets — there’s an automatic feature that creates a double space between lines if the text isn’t wrapped at the end, so until I figure out how to turn that off, the linebreaks of poems will have to be noted by ‘/’ and stanza breaks by ‘//’.

the mail order bride at /linebreak

from K. Anderson's pinterest board, "down the aisle" http://pinterest.com/mllevoyageuse/down-the-aisle/

I am beyond thrilled to have the Mail Order Bride make her debut at one of my favorite online journals, /linebreak.

And I’m honored to have Sandra Beasley, whose poetry I really admire, reading my poem there — she did a fantastic job.

You can read and listen here.