Writing goals: 2011 wrap-up and 2012 goals

I took a look back at my writing goals for 2011 and I see that I didn’t accomplish a single one of them. I started the year intending to:

• Write 52 new poems. How did I do? It’s possible, if I count all the jottings and rushed drafts that are clearly going nowhere, that I wrote 52 drafts in 2011, but I think the real count, still a bit generous, falls at 42.
• Submit to 20 journals. How did I do? I sent out fifteen packages last year.
• Attend a juried workshop. I didn’t attend a live workshop last year, but I workshopped twice on-line with Kim Addonizio and both workshops were amazing, challenging, and extraordinary helpful. I’m starting another eight week session with her on the ninth, and for anybody out there looking for an on-line poetry workshop that’s really going to kick your butt and be worth the money, Kim’s is it.
• I wanted a contest ready chapbook by September, and here I fell furthest from the goal. Not even close. In fact, now I have two half-way chapbooks instead of one finished one because half-way through the year I started writing a series of poems on a theme.
• Two blog posts a week. Also, no. I had 77 posts in 2011; twice a week would have been 104.
• Read 52 poetry collections. I read 32 books for the first time and re-read some old favorites.

And yet I feel like it was, on balance, a good year. I got a lot done, even if I didn’t reach my target numbers on, well, anything. I learned a lot, had some mild successes, and got better at what I do. It feels like a win.

Not having a chapbook together is starting to sting; it seems like that’s something I should have put together by now. Maybe the problem lies in not knowing how to put a collection together; perhaps I’m trying too hard to have everything relate to a theme; perhaps I’m simply not ready to be thinking about collections yet. I don’t know. The chapbook goal, that’s the wild card every year.

My goals for 2012 are essentially the same:

• Produce 52 decent drafts
• Continue to strive for a daily writing practice
• Post to my blog twice a week
• Enter poems in one contest
• Send out 20 packages
• Participate in two writing workshops, either live or on-line
• Finish the in progress chapbook (if only in terms of sheer number of poems). I’ll eliminate the requirement that it be “contest ready” but dang it, I want to finish this project at this point if only for the sake of finishing the project.
• Build relationships with other writers

Watching the Small Boy at hockey practice is one of my greater joys; I love to watch him give his honest best, to work so hard. I tell him, honestly, to just keep doing what he’s doing. If he continues to work as hard as he does now, improvement will come and he’ll be fine. He’ll surely be ready for the next age group up when he ages out of Bambinis if he keeps doing what he’s doing. He’s vastly better than he was in September, and he was making really rapid progress until he was side-lined by his concussion. Just keep doing what you’re doing, I tell him, and you’ll be fine. That’s the ultimate goal, to be as clear-eyed about my own progress as I can be about his, as I’m trying to teach him to be about his own self.

Whenever Small Boy has to play a team he’s lost to before, I tell him: “That game is over. Today is today. You play today’s game.” I think that’s going to be my motto for the year.

There’s something happening here

Something is happening with my writing, something I’m afraid to look at too closely lest I scare it off. It’s as though I’ve changed gears – I spend less time circling around and around the subject, warming up with an hour of rambling before the poem finally takes off. It’s – smoother. I won’t say easier, because it’s not, but the work comes more readily. It’s like the half-wild cat my mother-in-law has courted these past two years to the point where it’s not afraid of her anymore. It’s still skittish and half-wild, but it doesn’t hide anymore. My poems – they are skittish and half-wild, but they don’t run off and hide anymore.

More than that I’m almost afraid to say. Things like this shouldn’t be examined too closely.

Vacation

We’re off for a much needed family vacation to someplace warm with a beach. I’ll be back in a week. See you then and have a good week!

In the meantime, for your reading pleasure, check out this amazing poem by Traci Brimhall in Passages North: “The Women are Ordered to Clear the Bodies of Suitors Slain by Ulysses.” Then go back to the table of contents and read the other three she’s got in that issue as well. Wow, huh?

New poem

My poem “Mother and Son at Hockey Practice” is up at Literary Mama, my favorite place for the literature of motherhood. Enjoy, and check out all the great writing while you’re there.

New Poem

My cento “Long Ago My Father Died” (you can find a description of the cento form here) is in the inaugural issue of Found Poetry Review. You can read it here, and check out the rest of issue 1 while you’re there.

New Poem Up

I’ve got a new poem up at Blast Furnace. Unfortunately, there’s not a link that will take you directly to my poem. This link will take you to the issue I’m in, then you have to scroll down about half-way to find my poem “The Expat Offers Some Packing Advice.” Enjoy!

Reading Wallace

I’m still reading a Wallace Stevens poem a day, usually at the end of the day though I enjoy it most fully on those rare occasions I get to it first thing in the morning before anybody else has begun to stir. His is an insistent intellect; I can feel him sometimes straining through the pages to tell me something, to express what Harold Bloom calls “that solitary and inward glory we can none of us share with others.” It is, in the end, inexpressible of course – I can no more truly convey to you what it means to be me than you can make me understand what it is to be you and yet here is Stevens trying, in poem after poem, to do just that. Here we all are, poets and writers and bloggers trying to shape words in some magical way so that they take on finally the form of the self so that I might share it with you. It is the endless project; endless because we must begin the endeavor new again each day, this quest to understand and be understood, and endless because we must all fall short. But we wake again and try again, and it is a noble project.

One step forward…

…one step back. Rejection email today. Sigh. I was invited to submit again in their next reading period, which I know from an interview I’ve read with the editor is not a statement they blankly attach to every rejection, so these particular poems didn’t work for them, but they have some faith in my possibility as a poet. I can summon up a glass half-full attitude about that. But first I’m going to pout.

Poems!

It’s been a long depressing run of rejection letters lately, so I’m pretty happy to be able to say I have two poems up at Shot Glass Journal. “Reading the Book of Psalms Behind Closed Doors” is oldish and I’m happy that it found a home and “Meanwhile, at Departures, We Bow to a Twenty-First Century God” is one of the new poems I’ve been writing since Wellfleet, so I’m very glad to have a positive response to this new direction.

I know it’s about the writing, but a professional pat on the back now and then is very, very encouraging. I really needed this.

Reading Wallace

My poetic education has been spotty. As a reader, but above all as an American poet writing as part of a tradition of American poets, I have some appalling gaps. One of the poets of whom I am far too ignorant is Wallace Stevens. I am familiar with his most familiar poems, the ones that might have been anthologized or taught in a survey course, but the vast body of his work is unfamiliar to me. Unforgivable, really, for an American poet, and so my project for this year is to read a Wallace Stevens poem each day. I’m currently making my way through Wallace Stevens Selected Poems – I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t just start with Collected Poems and be done with it, because the selected poems will not get me to the end of the year, other than that I had the Selected Poems on my shelf already and international Amazon orders are reliably slow to arrive.

By reading a poem a day, rather than trying to swallow the book whole, I find I’m able to reflect a little about each poem – I’m even keeping a journal of sorts. I hope this slow emersion in his work will allow me to really get to know it rather than just be able to say I have read it. And I’ve noticed in the past week or so that after finishing my poem for the day I want to read more. One poem is not enough. But rather than jumping ahead, gulping down the poems and perhaps losing this reflective approach to them, I move backwards to re-reading.

Today’s poem, “Farewell to Florida,” was the first taken from Stevens’ second collection, Ideas of Order. This is from my reading notes:

The brief chronology included in Selected Poems notes that from 1925 to 1933 Stevens “virtually stopped writing poetry.” I’m curious if there will be some sort of recognizable shift, a change in his voice and style.

Curious because I am definitely recognizing things now. His cadence. The use of rhyme. Repetition. And the colors. The Harmonium poems, at any rate, are bursting with colors: “rosy chocolate” “gilt umbrellas” “Paradisial green” “swimming green” “brilliant iris” “glistening blue.” And those are all just from section I of “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”

The colors are there in this poem, the first included from Ideas of Order, and the use of rhyme. Clever internal rhyme. And the curling back of repetition, the almost-repetitions, the repetitions-with-a-twist. The assertive I voice in section III – “I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools/Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness/Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms” – feels new. Stevens didn’t avoid the I voice entirely in the Harmonium poems, but it appeared rarely (at least in the ones in Selected Poems). It feels like possibly a new experiment on Stevens’ part. I shall have to read more of the Ideas of Order poems to see if it appears again.

Sometimes I start my day with the poem and sometimes it is the last thing before going to bed, but it’s becoming my practice. Some people meditate, some people jog, I read Wallace Stevens. There are worse habits to have.