Protected: Right here

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?

Political poetry

I “cheated” - this is something I wrote awhile ago but I somehow managed to miss about a month of RWP poems so I wanted to get back into the swing of things one way or another. I generally don’t write poetry of witness; I know my limitatons. But now and then poets should confront the forms they generally avoid. All of us, now and then, should confront the things we generally avoid.

Fifty Years in the Making

Flame of shame
is too obvious a rhyme,
but sometimes the obvious is true.
Sometimes the obvious sits in front of you
fifty years
waiting to be noticed
and when it is,
pent-up energy sparks
a chain reaction
picked up by strangers
who don’t speak your language
but understand every word
and send the signal on down the line.
We’re the flame now
this conflagration of outrage
sending sparks across channels
and oceans
and to the roof of the world
where they wait for this burning
fifty years in the making.
No domesticated flame, this
no desecrated flame, this
just the fire of an outrage
fifty years in the making.

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There’s more poetry - political and personal - here.

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.

Just fence me in

My husband’s first training is as a farmer. That’s how I know that when you set a flock of sheep into a fresh field to graze, you can’t give them access to the whole field at once. They’ll wander here and there, crunching a bit of grass, pooping everywhere, trampling down the grass before they get to graze it and will ruin the field long before it is able to reach its full potential as grazing land. You have to fence the sheep in to a portion of the field at a time, first this quandrant, then that one. There’s a reason most farmers think sheep are pretty stupid, and that’s one of them.

The past two weeks, I’ve felt pretty much like a sheep. I’m still in the weeds after my single-parenting stint; setting me loose in a field full of words in this state of mind is just a waste of perfectly good words. So this week’s prompt encouraging us to use a word-limiting exercise to create our poems was perfect for me. Working with some externally-imposed constraints, fencing in the wandering sheep of my mind, forced me to focus.

Focus: the first thing that goes with sleep-deprivation and the jangled nerves of getting two children through dinner and bedtime single-handed. Little Boy C’s* dinner time is about when I should be preparing dinner for myself and Little Boy A*. Little Boy A should be eating dinner just about when Little Boy C needs to go to bed. Two weeks of doing that alone will drive anybody a bit around the bend. I had thought, when this two-week trip of my husband’s came up, that a bit of poetry at the end of the day, after Boys A and C were in bed, would be a good way to even myself out, keep myself sane. The truth of the matter was different: by the end of the day all I could do was watch a bit of TV and then go to bed myself. Very little got written. My husband is back now and I hope to slowly acclimate myself to having a whole field in front of me. For today, though, being roped off into one corner worked out just fine.

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See other (un-)limited poems here.
 

* The Cat in the Hat Comes Back is largely responsible for Little Boy A knowing his alphabet.

What you think I would have learned in my personal poetry 101

I would know myself well enough to know that after two weeks of parenting these boys myself, my husband six time zones away; and the week before that two week trip he was gone more than usual; when ten days out of fourteen I had both boys in the bed with me (and somebody tell me, please, how a boy who is 68 centemeters long take up so much space); after I’d leaked tears in public and yelled at A in private; when the sleep deprivation is like grit in my eyes and a forest of ticks colonizing my nerve-endings; when all I want to do is hide in a closet with a nice bottle of red wine and a chocolate cake, fork optional; on this day of all days I would know better than to open the SASE from the magazine that was a long shot to begin with.

“Thanks for sending us your work, but it’s not right for [us].”

Parenthood and poetry. Two of the crueler gods in the pantheon. Yet both so beguiling. How can I not worship in their temples?

Lather, rinse, repeat

Revision. For me, revision is the difference between journaling and writing. If the sudden rush of words in a first draft are all heat and fire, then revision is about shaping and forming like a glass-blower. As a much younger writer I resisted revising my poetry, so in love with the first words was I. I have always been a ruthless editor of my prose, but it took time to come around to editing poetry. I’m not sure why. Perhaps, as a younger writer, I bought into the romantic imagery of poems arriving in toto on the page, deposited there by some generous muse. Now and then a poem still comes to me that way, but they’re rare. These days I revise everything.

My initial drafts are almost always written in my notebook. I carry it everywhere, either tucked into the undercarriage of the stroller or slipped into my bag; I no longer buy purses or shoulder bags I can’t fit my notebook into. I might start off by jotting notes on an image or a memory or an idea I’ve been toying with. I make some false starts. There is much crossing out; circling of lines or entire sections and drawing of arrows to the place they really belong; insertion of little asterics and fresh lines jotted at the bottom of the page. I wish I could scan a page from my notebook to show you what a mess the first round is. Eventually it becomes so chaotic that I have to copy it out again; at this point I generally type it up and print it out. The next round of revisions is also done by hand, on the printed page. When that page becomes too cramped to continue I type up the revised poem and print it out again. I do this as many times as I need to. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I’ll spare you all the intermediary iterations of this poem - I’m not sure I could reconstruct them anyway - and just show you the first full draft and the current one. The first draft isn’t even really the first draft, as my notebook shows several false starts on this; some lines from those attempts did survive, though, and the moment behind the poem was there from the start. As for the current draft, I don’t think it’s the last draft but I do think it’s almost the last draft. For now.

Draft One: (I have four alternate titles on the first draft) Leaping? Swift Current Lake? Exaltation? Bound? (I have taken the liberty of fixing all the misspelled words I scattered along the way)

The only way to do it was to run
one two three four
down the short dock
where the canoes tied up
and close my eyes
when the air brushed the soles of my feet.
You’d gone ahead
(you always did)
shouting in blue lipped exaltation
and surfaced to shake your hair like a sheep dog
(you wore it long that year
like the boys did back then
with a courduroy jacket for school picture day)
I was the girl who eased into even indorr swimming pools
little toe top shin knobby knee skinny thigh
breaking out in goose flesh and rattling teeth
while you bounded off the board
getting it over with
and I took little steps, bound foot steps
tasting every degree.
But even I knew that there
under a feeble late summer Montana sun
the only way to do it was to run
one two three four
down the short dock
where the canoes tied up
and to close my eyes when the air brushed the soles of my feet.

Here’s the current draft:
Bound

The only way to do it was to run
one two three four
down the short dock where the canoes tied up
and to close my eyes
when the air licked the soles of my feet.

You’d taken flight ahead of me
(you always did),
surfaced to shake your hair like the stray dog
who’d claimed us the day before
and to shout in blue-lipped exaltation.

I was the girl who eased into indoor swimming pools
toe shin knee thigh
breaking out in goose flesh and rattling teeth.
You got it over with,
bounding off the high board.

But even I knew that here,
Montana in the fall,
the only way to do it was to run
one two three four
and then to surface shouting in blue-lipped exaltation.

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Peek at more revisions here.

Supposing

This week’s ReadWritePoem promt was a good exercise for me: take yourself out of the poem, let the narrator of the poem be somebody receiving a story rather than telling it. (You’ll notice I didn’t quite pull it off.)

 Suppose

Suppose I had looked right
instead of left that day.
Would he still have caught my eye,
taken my hand,
my life?
What would I be
if I’d looked right?

(It’s not something she should be asking
me)

Suppose I had said no
instead of yes.
Woul have have asked again
Persisted, insisted on
acceptane?
Where would I be
if I’d said no?

(It’s not something I want to hear from
her)

Suppose I had gone to college
instead of typing class.
Would I have had a sorority sister
a homecoming
a life?
Who would I be
if I’d gone?

(A good question, but not one to ask
your child)

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You can read more stories here.

Who are you reading?

A while back Poet Mom wrote this post about who the top selling poets in the US seem to be: either dead (Gibran, Whitman) or well-known (Seamus Heaney, Mary Oliver). It wasn’t that Poet Mom was suggesting that the poets on the list aren’t quality poets, but that there are so many good contemporary poets writing today that don’t seem to get attention (to the extent that poets in modern America are getting any attention at all); that casual readers of poetry reach for names they’re familiar with and aren’t willing to read a new name in poetry the way they might be willing to read a new name in fiction.

Which got me wondering. Who are you reading these days? Who’s the last new - new to you, that is - poet you stumbled upon and how did you make the discovery? What’s the last book of poetry you bought? I’m reading Dorianne Laux and Anna Akhmatova at the moment. My most recent “discovery” is Jack Ridl; his poem “From our House to your  House” in the current issue of Poetry East spoke to me enough to inspire me to order his book Broken Symmetry, and while I was at it I also ordered this and this.

So tell me. Who do you like? Who do you read? Who’s on your “must read” list?