2010: The Year of the Line Break

My lines are too short.

I’m going through a revision phase again, trying to find the five poems that will get me into this workshop, (and frankly I’m about to tape my best twenty to the wall and just start throwing darts) and it’s clear to me that in many instances my lines are too short. I’ve come back to several poems that I haven’t worked with in months and have made major changes to the line breaks in all of them, in each case producing revised poems with longer (and thus fewer) lines. Longer lines create more possibilities for interesting line breaks, breaks that carry the poem forward on its own momentum; in several instances I think the poem just looks nicer on the page as well.

I write almost all of my first drafts by hand in Moleskine notebooks, and in most cases my lines are as long as the page is wide: when transcribed into typeface that can yield a pretty short line. (It also reminds me of the oft-told story that William Carlos Williams wrote many of his poems on prescription pads. Did he write on the pads because he wrote short poems, or did he write short poems because he wrote on prescription pads? Did his tools influence his style? Did his style dictate his tools? Did the two feed off of each other?) What’s interesting to me is that it shows me that I am not in control of my material, not on the first pass-through at any rate. I’m letting the width of the paper I’m writing on determine my line breaks; and line breaks are a poet’s most powerful tool. 

About a year ago I started paying more attention to stanzas, to controlling the pace of my poems by introducing some breathing room. I think it made for some better poems; certainly thinking more closely about form, making decisions about form, made me a better poet even in those instances when I held on to the original version. Thinking critically about the way I write has to be a step forward, it has to be a sign of something. Growth, maturity, something. So I’m going to look at my lines more closely.

If 2009 was the Year of the Stanza, then 2010 shall be The Year of the Line Break.

Morning

Wednesday morning. The Small Boy goes off to Kindergarten with R. (Have I told you? Can you believe it? My Small Boy goes to Kindergarten four mornings a week.) I walk across the driveway with the Boychen, knock at my mother-in-law’s door. It’s Wednesday, she is taking the Boychen for the morning. I walk back to our house, come down to my studio, pour a cup of coffee into my sunshine yellow mug with the white spots. I put on some internet radio, open half-a-dozen tabs, see that Crab Orchard Review is accepting submissions for a special issue featuring Illinois writers. I’m an Illinois writer; far-flung, it is true, but I lived there for the first 21 years of my life. I think it would make an interesting line in a cover letter: “I am an Illinois native now living on a farm in Switzerland…” I think it would be enough to make somebody keep reading. I have my task for the morning, the boys are away, I have these two quiet hours in my studio, and I have a task. I close the windows, go to work.

From my notebook

“I’m trying to force out poetic phrases in the hope that they will lead to thoughts when what I really need to do is let my thoughts run until they trip over a poetic phrase.”

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.

January wrap-up

My experiment with listing out my writing goals in December went so well that I’m making it a regular part of my writing practice. At the beginning of the month I type out my broad goals for the month, print them out, and tack them to the cork-board hanging above my desk. I can keep track of my progress and make notes on the page as the month rolls along.

January was a strange month; it started with a burst of energy and ended with me falling into a wordless lull. Experience has shown me that something is going on under the surface during these seemingly quiet periods, so I’m trying not to push too hard, but at the same time I don’t want to give myself over the down-turn completely. Experience has also shown me that I can use a lull as an excuse to get lazy. It’s a balance I still have trouble finding.

Nevertheless, I did meet most of January’s goals:

• Follow up with [magazine still holding a submission]. I sent a follow-up email but haven’t received a reply. Now what do I do?
• Write short prose and submit to this beautiful journal. Didn’t get to this one.
• Begin piecing together a post-partum depression essay I’ve been avoiding.  I’ve started the “thinking out-loud” process on this one.
• Revise a submission package I’ve been sitting on and write a cover letter. I even put it in the mail!
• Write four new poems. Almost; I made it to three.
• Continue revision work on three or four poems.

That’s a really good month! Especially for one that includes a lull and a poor poor Boychen cutting three molars and a canine at the same time. Seriously, Mother Nature, you couldn’t have tweaked the timing there?

Oh yeah, that feels good

I feel so much better now.

The best laid plans…

… probably never had children. Not my children, at any rate. I think I’ve had a sum total of 14 seconds to myself since I wrote this, so the December goals, they are not looking good. And there are things, writing related things, I didn’t even put on that list.

Sigh.

Rest days

I’m back from two days away from the family feeling fresh and energized. I filled the well. I took long walks, just me and my camera. I ate soup and sipped coffees. I revised a prose piece. I did hours of market research on-line (doesn’t this journal look gorgeous?) and I have my December writing goals lined up. I’ve got a success in my back pocket now and I know where I want to go next.

I can do this. It will take time, because there is life, after all, but I can do this. I can see the way, I can plan my next step.

When I was a cyclist, my coach always talked about the importance of rest days. Every Sunday night we would have a team meeting at his place and plan the next week’s workouts, and there was always a hard day – spinning drills on Flat Bottom Road or sprinting up Firehouse Hill – and there was always a rest day and every Sunday night he told us not to skip the rest day. It’s not a day off, he’d tell us, it’s a rest day. It’s meant to be active rest. Make it an easy 20 miles, maybe just out to the Causeway and back, don’t climb any hills but you’ve got to get your legs moving on the rest day. The recovery days are as important as the hard ones. They make the hard ones possible.

Sometimes I think the most important things I ever learned about life, I learned on a bike. 

So I rested. Active rest. I took my pictures and did my research and used my muscles in a casual, familiar sort of way. To let them recover. So that I can keep climbing.

The chapbook challenge

I found this Chapbook Challenge via ReadWritePoem – though I found it a few days late into the month, it’s a perfect challenge to drive forward my chapbook project. I’ve stalled on writing new poems for this manuscript I’m building in my mind. I’ve made massive revisions to one poem – the poem that would open the collection, the poem Brewer would call the “hook” poem – and minor revisions to two more, but I’ve only written one new poem: a villanelle that, upon re-reading, is far too similar to another in the collection. It’s my intention to have a running theme, but there’s a running theme and then there is flat-out repetition. Because villanelles are, by their nature, repetative within the structure of the poem, two similar villanelles is too much. At least my two are.

At any rate. The chapbook challenge. I’m taking it up, but forgivingly.

And really, when did it become November?

Note to self: the stanza is your friend

I’ve doing a lot of revision lately – and I’m still enjoying the work of revision almost more than the work of creating new poems – and most of the revisions involve major changes to the form of the poems: breaking long free form poems into shorter stanzas, making each stanza a self-contained unit. Exercising this control tightens the poems, forces me to find the overarching idea and how each stanza contributes – or does not – to the development of that idea. It’s been wonderful, exciting. I even revised a poem using the “many two-line stanzas” form I’ve been seeing everywhere and, frankly, am skeptical of. But over the weekend I used it on a poem that’s been giving me trouble since the summer and wow, did it really turn the poem around. Forced me to cut extraneous language, tighten the narrative, hone the language; there is a growing tension now as the work progresses to the final stand-alone line. Okay, I get it. I still think it’s a form that should be used sparingly, but I get it now.

This is the work of revision, the hard glorious work of revision.