2011 Writing Goals

For the past few years, inspired by January O’Neil, I’ve listed out my writing goals for the coming year. I want to push myself, but I want my goals to be manageable: I have learned at last in life – perhaps from mothering these boys, from leading them gently from one stage to the next, from three-letter words to six letter words, from standing on the ice to walking across it – that setting the bar unattainably high tends to discourage more than it inspires. It’s been a fine line with the Small Boy, for example, teaching him to read: leading him to what I know he is capable of without pushing him there so fast that he gives up in frustration. We had some false starts as I tried to move him too fast, and we had a long lull over the summer when I did not move along the ladder fast enough. Certainly the first year he was in hockey school I expected too much of him and very nearly turned him from the sport that has become his six year old passion and which has taught him so much; because of that experience we are handling Boychen’s time on the ice much differently. I try to treat myself with that same balance and gentleness – pushing but never too hard; setting goals, but never too high – that I’ve finally found with the boys.

I also believe in making specific goals, goals with numbers and dates, whenever possible – I learned that from January’s poetry action plans. It’s easier to be accountable with numbers attached: did I write 52 poems or did I not? And making my goals public, here, also pushes me to accountability.

So here are my writing goals for 2011:

• write 52 new poems
• send out 20 submission packages
• attend a juried workshop, preferably this one
• have a contest-ready chapbook manuscript by 1 September (did I really just say that out loud?)
• write two blog posts a week
• read 52 poetry books in 2011

And just to make sure I keep my life bigger than my notebooks, I plan on continuing with my armchair bird watching (which Marge would say could only improve my poetry) and registering for a photography class.

The year in review, ever so vague

2010 was a strange year in poetry for me. The highlight of the year was attending Marge’s workshop. The low water mark has to be my plummeting acceptance rate; I published a grand total of one poem in 2010. Yet I feel like my writing has really developed and deepened this year. I stumbled onto a theme at Marge’s workshop: a simple exercise in using sound in our poems opened up a whole new avenue for me. Since June I’ve written just over dozen poems that work together as part of a collection. I’m half-way to a chapbook. These poems are new territory for me both in the topic they directly or indirectly address and in the voice I’ve found myself using in them. I believe they are good. They are certainly, for me, exciting to write.

I am trying to focus on that rather than the acceptance rate for the year. It’s easy to get hung up on the publishing game. I can fritter away hours on “market research.” But prior to the publishing has to come the craft and maybe 2010 was a craft year for me. I hardly published anything but I have found all this new work, this new vein to mine, this new voice to deepen.

Cecily wrote about her word for the year; I’m hesitant to put a word on 2010. It’s been a strange year. I haven’t written about the half of it. I figured some things out, and made some decisions, and even made some changes, or tried to at least, and have pin-pointed a few more changes that need to be made. I’ve been clearing some underbrush, literally in the garden and figuratively in my life. Navigating my way towards something different, yet still grounded in the here of my life.

Maybe I’ll call 2010 my navigating year. Which means perhaps in 2011 I’ll come in to port.

Protected: Thursday Night, Hockey Practice (A Poem)

Protected: A location poem

Protected: Poetic Interlude

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.

Protected: A cut-up