“… the wildest thing of all is to come to terms with your situation, to come to grips with it, and to trust and accept and to have faith. – Cheryl Strayed
From an interview in Poets&Writers, March/April 2012.
Learn more about this writer here.
Learn more about her most recent book, Wild, here.
This morning I moved all the scary piles off my desk and started fresh. This is not to say I accomplished anything that’s waiting for me in those scary piles, but at least they can no longer taunt me as they’re out of my sight. For now. And it’s Friday, so it’s time for a roundup. Here we go:
Claus W. Vogl; public domain from wikimedia
living vicariously Those of you who swim around in the writing world know that the annual AWP conference was last weekend. I’ve been reading everyone’s AWP posts and updates, living vicariously through their accounts of the conference. If you’d like to live vicariously, too, here are a few links to: Donna Vorreyer’s reflections on AWP, including a lovely poem; Laura E. Davis’ Top Ten Moments of AWP; Sandy Longhorn’s summary of what she learned and what she’s thinking about from AWP; a few updates (you may have to scroll down to find them) from Kathleen Kirk, who packed particularly light (very impressive, Kathleen!); and this list of “overheards” (caution: not to be read with small children looking over one’s shoulder) which includes one very funny question from a cab driver. And here is one of my all-time favorite AWP post-mortems by Kay Ryan. Ah, AWP, I hope to meet you next year in Boston.
shoebox poems Every week, Poets&Writers posts a poetry prompt (fiction, too, I think), and this week’s prompt really appealed to me. I often use prompts if, for nothing else, to get me to the point of pen on paper. As the words begin flowing, the prompt often goes right out the window, but at that point it doesn’t matter. This prompt is a bit different as it involves collecting snatches of this and that over the course of the week, and making a poem from the collection. I use the word ‘making’ purposely — the word poet comes from the Greek for poiein, “to make or compose.” To say ”I’ve made a poem,” feels different than “I’ve written a poem,” no? Here is the prompt from P&W:
I’m going to try this exercise this week, and next Friday I’ll let you know how it goes. If you want to try it, too, please join in and let us know how it went for you. And, to a certain high school English teacher in the readership, you’re welcome for your next lesson plan.
total eclipse This week I re-read one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing: “Total Eclipse” by Annie Dillard, from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. No review or summary can do justice to this piece — it’s precision, its tension, the descriptions of the earth under the eclipse, the inner and psychological spaces the eclipse takes us down into. Do yourself a favor and go read this piece here, or check it out of your library, or order it here, or ask for it at your friendly, neighborhood, independent bookseller’s. And did you know that the next total eclipse of the sun viewable in the U.S. will occur on August 17, 2017, in an area near Hopkinsville, Kentucky? Might have to road trip.
Reader, that’s it for this week’s roundup. Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful weekend, and thanks for reading. And, P.S., if you know of other AWP reports circulating the web that I should read, let me know in comments!
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 ‘//’.
this is what can happen if I leave the house... sigh
