Learning
I understand in short flashes that I am a beginner. Reading sample poems from a journal I might submit to, I see suddenly the depth my poems are missing. I almost see the way there but then it is gone. It is a glimpse. Like seeing a brook trout that is long gone by the time you start your back-cast.
* * *
If the poems come back with a form letter rejection slip I might understand the rejection but I do not know how to make the poems better.
* * *
It is like holding fog.
* * *
Is there a literary journal devoted to tasteful nostalgia? It seems out of fashion, nostalgia. It is one of the things I do well.
* * *
Now and then I am very good. I do not know why that happens. Is it my effort? Is it the topic? Is it luck? Is it a gift? Is it that sometimes I take a deep enough breath to go deep and other times I do not? Will it happen more often if I climb the mountain and train at high-altitude?
* * *
How do you know when a prose-poem is a prose-poem and not a paragraph?
* * *
My 2009 calendar features pictures of doors and windows. By the time I turn the page to December, will they be open?
* * *
Read, read, read. Lay speechless on the floor for a week, the open pages of books fluttering around me like pigeon wings. Let the words fall on me like feathers. Jump up, send the pigeons swirling, the sun glinting off their oil-slick grey wings. Watch, look, listen, read, write. This is learning.
* * *
I do not know when to stop revising. I could tinker with my poems forever like a teenaged boy with his car up on blocks in the garage who instinctively knows that it is safer to keep his head tucked under the hood than to cruise the strip and call to the girls who might not call back.
* * *
Who will tell me when I am ready?
* * *
I want I want I want.
Filed under My process | Comments (7)
7 Responses to “Learning”
Leave a Reply
This is so powerful. And I can relate to it in more ways than you will ever know.
“I almost see the way there but then it is gone. It is a glimpse. Like seeing a brook trout that is long gone by the time you start your back-cast.” Yes. Exactly.
[...] there was this. And then this. Two completely different posts. One for each of my two [...]
and now i shall add my big fat YES.
And so we carry on learning.
Me too me too me too.
(That paragraph about reading is one of the most perfect things I’ve ever read. And everything else too… One country away, I’m nodding with you.)
We’re always learning, and always ready – that’s the secret underneath it all. That’s what life is.
“If the poems come back with a form letter rejection slip I might understand the rejection but I do not know how to make the poems better.”
Don’t given them such weight. There is nothing about receiving a rejection that necessarily means the poem needs to be made better. (Maybe your poem didn’t have seagulls in it and the editor is envisioning a seagull theme. Maybe the intern reading submissions that day is cranky and just broke up with someone and opened the envelope and thought, “ENNNGH, I hate poetry, it reminds me of my broken heart” and stuffed a rejection slip in the SASE and then went down the street for a latte.)
Right now, go purchase or borrow from the library this marvelous little book: Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews & Rejections Reading and memorizing the absolutely scathing judgments levied against acknowledged major masterpieces of literature will go a long way toward diminishing the deadly “authority” of the potential publisher!
You are ready. You will have, you will have, you will have.
Oh, yes.
On the question of sometimes being very good, for me at least, that happens when I’m least invested. That is, it feels more like I am allowing myself to be a channel for something very good, than I am creating something very good. I open myself to it, it is there. It is the opening that is the thing to be practiced. And it is very hard.