What I learned in Wellfleet

Wellfleet. I’m still trying to write about Wellfleet. About Wellfleet the town. About working with Marge Piercy. About the eleven other wonderful poets, amazing women all, who travelled the week with me. About what I learned; what I learned about poetry and what I learned about my life. 

It’s easier to write about the poetry, about the workshop experience. It was a juried workshop: we had to apply with an initial package of five poems (perhaps you remember my poem choosing angst?); the twelve of us who were ultimately selected then had to provide an additional ten poems prior to the workshop. We met for three hours each morning with each day devoted to a particular aspect of the craft: imagery, oral effects, titles, line length/line breaks, etc. In the afternoons we had assignments based on that morning’s work and we then workshopped these poems the following day. Each one of us had an individual conference with Marge, in the gazebo in her garden, during which she went over our fifteen poems in great detail and provided more general feedback. We capped off the week with a public reading in Wellfleet; Marge closed the reading with some new poems. There was a lot of work, but not too much, and Marge deliberately balanced the workload with us having an opportunity to explore and enjoy Wellfleet. (And may I say: I will be back with family in tow. Yes, you impressed me that much, Wellfleet.) It was a fantastic experience.

My instinct that I am good at this, that if I stick at this I will have some modest success, was confirmed by Marge, who gave me some very positive feedback. (She also suggested that I might want to consider abandoning altogether any further attempts at the villanelle; she’s nothing if not honest.) I have a good eye for the right detail and I’m generally good at titles but I could play with sound a lot more than I do. My use of the line break is generally on target, but when I fail, I fail spectacularly. I have a good instinct for revision. My best work speaks to my emotional truth; my weakest poems are those that I write because I think I should write about a certain thing or in a certain way. Much to my surprise, I have a pretty good reading presence. All in all, Marge’s message to me was: stick with this and you will be widely published. It was so rewarding to have my instincts confirmed. I do so much of my work and my attempts at growth and learning alone here in expat isolation; it is good to have those reminders that this is not a fool’s errand. 

Write. Just keep writing.

Touchy subjects, touchy poems

I spent the morning putting together a few submission packages (finally – I’ve been slothful on that front), and one of them has me a bit more fraught than usual. It’s got some infertility/IVF poems in it, and the few times I’ve done that I’ve thought it was kind of dicey; it’s a topic people can react to pretty viscerally. The IVF poems in particular strike me as pieces that can provoke a reaction about what is being said before anybody gets around to considering how well it’s being said. They’re strong poems, I’d never send them out if I didn’t think they were strong, but they could easily accidentally rub an editor the wrong way for any number of reasons: the editor might have objections to assisted reproduction, the editor might be experiencing infertility, the editor might have just gotten back a negative beta, the editor might think “trans-vaginal ultrasound” just doesn’t scan no matter how hard you try.*

I’m probably making this more fraught than it needs to be. Really any given piece could rub any given editor the wrong way on any given day; I recently read an interview with Tony Hoagland in which he said it’s gotten to the point he’d rather read about the history of corduroy than about somebody’s brother dying of cancer, so you never know what’s going to make an editor sigh and think, Please not this topic. There are a whole host of reasons an editor might pass on a particular piece that have nothing to do with the technical merits of the work (for a refreshingly honest list of some of those reasons see this post by poet Kelli Russell Agodon who is also an editor at Crab Creek Review) and the best we can do on our end is write good work, follow the submission guidelines, and do enough market research to know we’re not sending IVF poems to a Catholic journal.

It’s not, by the way. The journal I’m submitting to. It’s a feminist journal doing a special issue on poems concerning loss and things that can’t be said. So I’ve chosen the prospective home of my poems as well as I could, but you just never know who’s going to get all worked up by those three little letters: I.V.F. In my experience it can surprise you sometimes, the way people get all worked up about how my beautiful boys came to be.

* I’m just kidding about that last one, although it is my goal in life to successfully incorporate that phrase into a poem.

And a poem, at last

It was a long dry spell, but I’ve got a new poem up at Literary Mama: “Scenes From the Pediatric ER.”

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.

A cut-up

The poem-a-day prompt for day 11 (yes, I’m behind) was to write a construction poem. I decided to take that quite literally and wrote a cut-up; I used the cut-up exercise from this workbook. Paraphrasing, the instructions are as follows: take two pages from different sections of the newspaper, and two pages from two different magazines. Randomly circle interesting words and phrases. Then take one line from each of three poems. Mash them up and see what you get. Here’s what I came up with.

There is No Easy Street

With its foot in the door of your head
an alarming revelation:
the losers, the homeless and hungry,
the randomness of nature,
the primeval struggle for existence.
Fertile farmland, biotech foods,
genetically modified seeds.
A type of eggplant, Persian.
Yet it did not die.

Two minarets standing
on the broad avenue.
A grand mosque in a working class neighborhood
calling to prayers.
Changes in weather patterns.
Why can’t they be like me?

* the first line of my poem is taken from “Forced Entry” by Jack Marshall.

I can check that off the 2009 goals list

Remember when I commented on the utter gorgeousness of this journal? Guess who’s got a poem in it?

Of apples and autumn

It’s a rough draft. It came out of a free-write and still feels like prose wearing poetry’s shoes. But it’s my response to the Poem-a-Day prompt #5: a growth poem.

Of Apples and Autumn and Small Boys in Love With Horses

I choke on the calendar like an apple
I tried to get down in one bite when

even the horse knows to break it
open, crush it to a juicy softness

before swallowing. We have brought
her orchards of apples autumn after

autumn. You used to roll them under
the fence, and when you press now

your fingers together and reach out
over the fence, apple balanced in your

outstretched palm like an offering,
I realize that you have grown tall.

I try to count autumns, the apples
that have crossed this fence line.

The horse lips it from your palm,
bites it open with a crack, drools

saliva and apple juice. You pat her muzzle,
she sniffs around for another apple.

Finding none, she bends her neck to the grass.
You walk up the road towards home.

The end of daylight savings time

Daylight Savings Time Ends

Each morning she sets the clock
back, but at the end of the day
the day always ends in
the darkness of the setting sun.

She tries to write by the light
of the moon, but it isn’t always full.

End of the year sprint

Looking over my poetic output for the year-to-date, I see that I am far short of my goal of a poem-a-week. I have probably written something each week, but I have an invisible line in my head that the work needs to cross before I can call it a poem. It does not have to be a polished ready to go out the door final draft; I’m happy with rough and messy first drafts but they need to have something in them that shows promise, some clue that the poem is, in fact, going somewhere before I count it as one of my fifty-two. I figure I have about thirty or thirty-five of those for the year. If I’m going to make it to 52, I’m going to need to finish the year with a sprint. How perfect, then, that this challenge  starts on Sunday.

Who wants to join in?

Because I need a bit of a boost

I have been having a series of days in which the joys of motherhood have remained quite stubbornly on the other side of the fence. It has been exhausting. A trial. Dare I say, unrewarding? Days with very little in the way of short-term payoff. I need to remind myself that if the cliche “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon” applies to any endeavor, it applies to parenting. This isn’t about today. It’s about the long, long road I need to walk these boys down, the slow growth into manhood. These boys will be men one day, and let’s be honest: though they very clearly have their own little spirits, will be their own men, they will also enter adulthood with a bag full of gifts they got from me. So because it’s been rough, I’m patting myself on the back today.

This Time The Mother Writes a Poem For Herself

I am golden glitter and Elmer’s glue
and big blue stars on construction paper.
I am thick magic markers on the blank page.
I am beads and bangles, scissors and glue
and autumn-leaves-and pipe-cleaner bouquets.
I am popsicle stick castles and bobbing for apples
and popcorn garnish for the tree.
I am the walk in the park and the bread for the ducks
and the acorn that started to sprout.
I am the stick boat in the creek and the sand in the box
and the lemonade stand on the side of the road.
I am all of the childhood days you will likely forget
but the smell of Elmer’s glue will make you smile
and you will always be partial to blue stars
and you will know how an acorn turns into a tree.
And I will know that I am this,
that I am this and this and this.