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.

The curse of the mama schedule

I have two small boys at home. They are both pretty interactive little boys (which translates variously as “strongly attached” or “made of velcro” depending on the day). I have daycare for Small Boy two days a week, days on which I used to get a fair amount done - or at least enough to feel as though I had gotten a fair amount done - but as The Boychen grows older and more adventurous (which translates variously as “curious” or “highly destructive” depending on the day) I’ve found that my single-son days are hardly more productive, work- and/or adult pursuits that replenish the spirit-wise, than my double-son days.

I am not one of those people who can get by on a fistful of hours a sleep a night; on the contrary, getting only a fistful of hours a sleep at night brings me dangerously close to a return to the post-partum depression days. Staying up late and working, or waking before the boys (who are early risers), is simply out of the question at the moment. I can work after the boys go to bed until about 9:00 or 9:30 but then it’s time to start getting ready for bed.

Here’s the problem: I find that when I work right up until bed-time, when I lay me down to sleep my mind is racing with ideas, reviewing that poem I wrote or thinking about that journal I might submit to. A phrase comes to mind, a better way of closing out that stanza that was troubling me. I’m wide-awake, as wired as if I were hooked up to a caffeine-IV drip. Last night I was awake until 2:30 this morning - the new 2:30, that is. (I got a lot done - one submission package completed and ready to go out the door and a group of poems picked out for revision and submission to a second journal - but it’s hardly the ideal situation.) Fortunately today is Sunday and R and the boys are over at The Farm for lunch and a little afternoon stroll with the grandparents and I can recover. But when that sort of thing happens on a Tuesday night it’s a bit of a disaster the next day.

So what’s the solution? Only work until 8:30 in the evenings and then spin-down with a book or TV? But Small Boy only goes to bed at 8:00 - that’s hardly any time. Crunch all the work in on the weekends when R takes the boys? But weekends are family together time. It’s a real time-crunch. The hours just are not there and when I steal them from the wee hours, the wee hours take their revenge.

It’s just where I am these days, this is what my days look like right now, but I’m having a hard time accepting it gracefully.

Haunted

I’ve been captured by the villanelle lately. It’s a very precise poetic structure with both a rhyme scheme and a pattern in which two lines - introduced with the first and the third lines - are repeated at specified intervals. It does not come easily to me; I find it difficult to pull off a natural, lyrical villanelle. And yet I find myself writing them. I have heard it said - or read it written? - that the villanelle, circling back as it does to those two key lines, is a good form in which to explore obsessions, recurring events, memories one cannot, does not want to, escape. It’s a good form to use when a few images have you by the throat and won’t let go.

The villanelles I’ve been writing are about my father. I remember my father best as a fisherman. As the years pass and specific details fade - what shampoo did he use? what did his voice sound like? what was he wearing the last time I saw him alive? what was he dressed in for his funeral? - there is still a  tightly held clutch of memories, solid like river rocks in my fist, that I can still see, taste, hear almost two decades after his death. Almost always, these memories, these moments, are connected to my father’s life as a fly-fisherman and to the places that life took him, took us. Invariably my memories of my father are bound up with the waters he fished, the waters that became the companions of my childhood and the rivers to which I always, though years may pass, return. The places I love and the ways I love them have everything to do with this simple fact: my father was a fisherman.

That is the line I cannot let go of. The line that will not let go of me. That is what I return to like a salmon to her spawning ground. That is my one true thing.

My father was a fisherman.

My eye intent on all the mazy plan

Sunday night as I was lying in bed I had an idea for the collection of poems I’m working on. Dare I call it a manuscript when I’ve only got five poems I would put in the “ready” pile and the rest are drafts, notes, mere puffs of smoke jotted down in the corners of my workbooks? Not an idea about the poems themselves, or the general theme of the collection - that I’ve known for a long time, since before I realized that I was writing a collection of poems that belong, that could belong, together in a manuscript. What came to me was an idea about the structure of the collection and the order in which the poems might eventually find themselves. What came to me was a plan.

I’ve never done this before. I’ve never said that rather than write this poem and that poem I’m going to write this collection, this - go on, say it - manuscript. I picture nineteen poems (that’s not enough for a book-length manuscript but could make a nice chapbook) on four themes. The themes would determine each poem’s place in the collection. I wouldn’t just have Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV - no, I’d move back and forth between the themes coming back around to each at  certain point. It could work, or it could be too clever by half, or it could go completely un-noticed by any readers I might one day entice into reading all nineteen poems. I might abandon it by the wayside as I continue to work.

But having this plan, this artificial impositon of order on what is by its very nature a disorderly process - the creation of something - makes it all less scattered and terrifying. I can be methodical and practical about something that is neither methodical nor practical. I can say I have three out of the four Theme A poems written and they are poems One, Six, and Twelve. I can say I have one of the Theme B poems written; I’ll make that poem Three. I have a Theme D poem written and it should probably be poem Four. And all of this will probably change but having this structure, this ladder to climb, makes it all seem so do-able now, so completely do-able.

And so it goes

Another form rejection letter. Am I picking the wrong markets, is my poetry less polished than I think it is, or both? (That’s a rhetorical question, by the way.) I know that rejections are the rule rather than the exception but it gets a girl down, you know?

Taking stock

Little Boy A is at the grandparents’ farm and Little Boy C is taking a nap. I make a cup of coffee and spread a sheaf of poems around me on the floor; the Tour de France runs in the background (in July a cyclist’s heart turns to France like a sunflower turning to the sun). I group the poems into two piles: “would be thoroughly horrified if I died and somebody found these and thought that was the sum total of my work” and “would not be horrified if I died and somebody found these and thought that was the sum total of my work.”* I move the cat, who is attracted to piles of paper laid deliberately on the floor as surely as if I had dipped them in tunafish, repeatedly. To my surprise, the “not horrified” pile outnumbers the “horrified” pile, but in all likelihood that is a function of my process: the truly horrifying poems have not been printed yet. They are still in the pen-and-paper stage.

I set aside the poems I’m not happy with (setting aside entirely the issue of whether I can ever be happy with a poem), concentrate on the ones I’m proud of. I sift them and sort them. I find common themes: poems inspired by old black-and-whites of my parents, my childhood, my fisherman father, infertility, motherhood, a pile that refuses classification. Several poems could fit in more than one pile. I have a pile of short poems like this and this that I’m pleased with. Of the poems I’m proud of my least favorite are my poems about motherhood - they fall so short of the true moment.

Why is that? The thing I want most to capture, the thing that pierces my heart, is the hardest to pin down.

* a distinction stolen, of course, from Anne Lamott

Confused

See, this is why I need a writing group and a mentor: after several iterations of a poem, I`ve just revised myself back to the original draft. Now I`m just thoroughly confused.

Protected: Just fence me in

Four a.m.

Jillypoet is writing a poem a day in June and inviting others to join her. I think I can try to write a poem a day in June - my husband will be out of the city for one week and then out of the country for the following two, so this is either a really good idea for my mental health or a really bad one - but I’m not sure I can commit to actually posting them every day. I’m happy to post pages from my notebook now and then, to work through the creative process in public on a poem here and there, but I’m not sure my fragile poet’s ego is prepared to post poem after poem that misses the mark, that dissatisfied me, that seems so pale compared to the colors in my head that I meant to describe. I took a long, long break from writing poetry and I’m so pleased it has come back to me like a homing pigeon bearing the answer to a missive I had forgotten I’d even sent. I don’t want to burden the poor thing with too many messages too fast. It was a long flight and my cooing bird needs to rest in its coop and get strong on sleep and grain.

I’ll do the writing, but I’m not brave enough to share it all. Not yet.

That said, I did write something this morning. Very. early. this morning.

You are incandescent
at four a.m.
even I
have to smile
rub sleep
from my eyes
give you my pinky
to chew
for awhile
in this minute
between dream
and day
at four a.m.