42º ~ slight warming, still a chance of rain, all grey, all quiet

Well, here I am, practicing BIC (butt in chair) and being present. The world was fighting hard against writing time today. I was cluttered up with thoughts of the errands I need to run and the urge to up and do them now, now, now, when, really, there is no rush. So, I fought and stayed in the chair.

I read some more Lucie Brock-Broido. I’m still working on Stay, Illusion. Today, I read “Attitude of Lion,” amid others, and in this poem, Brock-Broido draws on the elements of animal heraldry. I learned something new by investigating her use of “sejant” and “couchant” in the poem. While I knew that animals were depicted in family crests, flags, seals, etc. in different “attitudes,” different positions, I had never learned the history and meaning of this. So, I read up on them all and then returned to the poem with a new appreciation.

I read a few more poems, but none that held me as much. In the back of mind, I kept thinking of an episode of The Big Bang Theory. Yes, you read that correctly, The Big Bang Theory. I was thinking of the episode where Leonard tells how he came to live with Sheldon and to sign “the roommate agreement.” In this episode, we learn that the apartment has a flag: “a gold lion rampant on a field of azure.” That phrase “rampant on a field of azure” just kept repeating through my head.

So, I turned to my notebook and wrote “I, Rampant on a Field of Azure” and decided that made a great title. I imagined myself taking the rampant posture of an animal on a flag and sort of wrote a self-portrait, I suppose. It begins:

Fierce fingers splayed,
            ready for the raking
                        slash across my enemy’s throat,
I lead with my hands.

So there you go: one poetry lion (Lucie Brock-Broido) mixed with one popular culture reference and voila!

37º ~ the whole day gone gray with overcast, across the alley a troop of roofers punctuate the otherwise quiet air, one bright red sweatshirt catches and distracts the eye as it hovers in high branches

Well, as the lapse in posting on this blog over the past six months can attest, I’ve been struggling. Struggling to maintain a focus on my own work amidst the work of my paying job and the work of being spouse, family-member, and friend. I know the fallow period that follows completing a big project, such as having two books come out in close proximity (one out and one on the way out, in any case); however, this time has felt a bit bleaker, and things recently reached a breaking point.

If you are on Facebook, you know that a few days ago, I posted a call for help. True to form, my friends turned out in all their glory and offered support and concrete advice. This morning, I returned to the desk with new determination and plucked one such piece of advice from my FB thread and BEGAN.

This bit of advice was offered by more than one person: transcribe a poem by that you love (written by someone else, of course) into your journal.

Duh! (Head slap) This is one of the prompts I offer my students because it has helped me so many times. I happened to have Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters beside me, so I opened to “Rome Beauty.” Really, I could have used almost any poem in the book, but this one seemed “do-able” for a new beginning.

*While I’ve been struggling with poetry, I’ve also been struggling with some stress-management issues. I recently revisited Thich Nhat Hanh’s audiobook The Art of Mindful Living to try and get myself back to living in the now and being present.

As I transcribed the poem, I kept the mindfulness lessons at the surface. I did not rush. I read and absorbed Brock-Broido’s words, a phrase at a time, and I copied them into my journal with an attempt to keep my handwriting legible, my lines steady. This was, after all, not the rush of drafting, but the return to finding joy in language and in poetic lines.

After I completed the transcriptions, I felt calm, centered. However, my coffee had grown cold. So, I left the desk and hit the microwave in the kitchen. And here, perhaps I offer too much information. Often as I wait for my coffee to reheat, I stretch, twirl, dance, etc. on the old linoleum floor (yet another instance where the cats look at my like I’m crazy). Today, I pivoted on one foot with the other touching the cardinal points of the compass. I did so unconsciously, but almost immediately, lines sprang into my head.

I, too, am a bit Obsessed
with my own wind-tossed turning

on the compass wheel. …

Boom. I was at the desk and scribbling madly in my journal, now throwing any semblance of good handwriting out the window.  The draft is unfinished as yet, but 12 lines made it onto the computer, which is a fabulous start. Also, this strange thing happened, the poem is filled, I mean FILLED, with rhymes.  Frost, exhausts, lost; so, no, show, slow; in, limbs; dismissed, wrist. Rhymes, but not in any standardized pattern. Just there, singing beneath the surface.

And so, I say “thank you” to everyone who commented on Facebook, sent me a private message, or has simply listened to me whine and moan for the last bit of life. I owe you all…Big Time!

45º ~ a distinct chill in the air, bright/brilliant slanting sun, autumn in Arkansas

As always, the semester presents its marathon challenges, and then, I look up, and notice we’re 3/4 of the way through. This year, that means, I’m about to go to Iowa for a reading. Wahooooooza!

What: The Writer’s Harvest
The Drake Writers and Critics Series, in partnership with the Des Moines Public Library
When: Thursday, 13 November, 3:30 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Where: Des Moines Public Library, downtown branch
Who: ME & Aimee LaBrie, plus a sampling of Drake students whose work appears in their lit mag, Periphery

In true weather fashion, an “arctic blast” plans on blowing through while I’m up home. Highs should be right in that comfort zone of the low 30s, and, oh yes, there’s a chance of snow at some point. Uhm, yum? Still, central Arkansas will be only slightly warmer, albeit without the snow chances.

I guess I’ll be taking my winter coat along and reading some “cold” poems. If you live in or near Des Moines, I hope to see you there!

Can’t wait to visit with all the Drake writers and see my MFA buddies, Amy Letter & Brian Spears!

81º ~ feels like 85º, summer’s having a final blowout sale this weekend with temps and humidity climbing, a promise of cooling down in the new week & the new season, hummingbirds continue to battle it out, one bird trying to claim all four feeders in our yard

First, a celebration of BIC (butt in chair), as it really does work. This morning, I flailed about for at least an hour, starting two miserable drafts in my journal before stumbling onto what I really wanted to say/write.

I have to thank Brent Goodman this morning.  His poem “The Brother Swimming Beneath Me” bleeds into the line “is not dead yet… .” That sparked a first line for me, “Dad isn’t dead yet, but disappearing.” Many of you know that my dad has been dealing with Parkinson’s for years. Recently, he has shown all of the elements of Alzheimer’s setting in as well. As always, it is a struggle for me to be so far away and to know that my mom and my oldest sister bear the brunt of his caregiving. I thought that’s what the poem would be about, but no.

Instead, today poetry did that magical thing. The draft went in another direction, focusing on my dad, not me, and helping me see something about him that I’d never been able to articulate before. The draft, titled “Undersong,” actually reveals a man “letting go” of the world long before symptoms appeared because the world had advanced beyond his recognition. Yes, it is based on autobiography, but there’s a good deal of fictionalizing going on in there as well.

*Note, “undersong” is a real word with a real definition, but all these silly spell checkers keep telling me otherwise. Le sigh.

So, hurray for BIC and for poetry as an act of discovery that helps me make sense of my world. It might not make living in that world any easier, but it helps.

~~~~~

Now, to poetry versus collage. I don’t really mean this as a “versus” kind of thing, but the form of “this versus that” is easy shorthand. What I mean to say is this: I am torn. I have a limited number of hours to devote to my creative life, and I’m having conflicted thoughts about where my collages fit in with my poetry. Truth is, some mornings, I’d rather be making a collage than stumbling over the page in this broken way of late. Yet, I have been “a poet” for so long that I feel guilty about wanting to be making a different kind of art.

I worry that if I don’t keep my BIC, I’ll lose my poetry muscles (from past experiences, I know I will), but if I’m uninspired by writing and inspired by working with visual images, shouldn’t I honor that?

Anyone out there who makes art in multiple fields care to offer any advice? This is much weirder than genre-switching on the page. Each practice requires a whole different physical space and movement, a different firing in the brain. Help!

66º ~ edging toward fall, squirrels racing about with nuts to bury, no hummingbirds this morning…are they migrated and gone? — oh wait, one just flirted by

Today, I’m consumed with the idea of poetic voice.

In grad school, lo those many years ago now, I remember the moment I was said to have “found my voice.” It was when I began writing the poems that would become Blood Almanac. It was when my poems might still have held some imitative quality of the writers I admired, but had finally grown into their own skin, their own obsessions, their own range on the page.

That voice, obsessed with the Midwest, prone to mid-length lines and shortish poems, enthralled by music and sound within the line, held up for almost 10 years, into the poems of The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths. Then, with The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, the voice became “skewed” by persona. The sickly speaker had her own pace, her own Victorian-esque and baroque sensibility, and there is very little of the Midwest in her book.

Now, I’m out in the dark again, searching for “my voice.” Yes, I wrote some “angry sister” poems, which were persona (and different from the sickly speaker), but by and large, I am not gripped by any obsession at the moment. I have no fire in my belly and no sense of the line on the page.

But, today, with my BIC, a draft came calling. It is plainspoken and direct. The lines are shorter than those with which I’m most comfortable. There’s very little magic realism, fairy tale, or high imagination at all. In fact, the subject is about being “unhaunted.” I was reading a poem from Anna Journey’s If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, a book filled with the speaker being haunted by the departed, and haunted in that lush Southern way, when this draft of mine arrived.

This draft, “The Long Unspoken,” comes out and it’s all about how being “unhaunted” is a failing on the speaker’s part, which seems to me to be directly about my feelings on voice, passion, and “inspiration” at this moment. I am “un” and it is a failing.

No worries. I know this will pass and that the BIC system will work itself out. In the meantime, I continue to read, both poetry and non-fiction. I continue to open myself to the possibilities and whatever new version of my own voice is coming next.

81º feels like 87º ~ heat index to surpass 100º today, but then, the cold front lingering to our north will dip into the state and we will “plunge” into the high 70s tomorrow, sweet plunge it will be ~ whether heat or shortening days, the hummingbirds have been a bit overzealous of late

Every semester in my Creative Writing I class (a mixed-genre intro class) students come into the class with varying degrees of experience, but all with a desire to wrangle their emotions onto the page through words. And every semester, we hit a wall about now, as the students learn that writing is hard work. This is not a surprise to those of us long at the task, but many of my students have spent years writing in diaries and journals, letting the words fly and feeling great about it, but not having been introduced to the idea of writing for an audience. In my class, they come face to face with a new discipline, an attempt to apply a different kind of craft, and the great balancing act for me is to introduce them to craft without deflating their desire.

I talk a lot about messy drafts, consideration of audience, becoming aware of words as our palette, etc. And I talk a lot about BIC (butt in chair) and revision, revision, revision. Today, I’m living all of these lessons again as I search for new terrain in my poetry. I’m putting my BIC three times a week and I’m scratching and clawing, fighting with words.

Today, four messy pages of half-assed drafts in my journal before, again, I returned to the “am” poem. And then, some smooth sailing as the poem began in the journal:

Am jaw clenched hard
                            by dawn’s alarm,

It unwound from there and I got about 3/4 of it in my journal before turning to the computer to try and find the end of the draft. And here I had to persevere; I had to let the poem reveal what I had to say, and that is hard.

Are there poets out there who sit down knowing “I am going to write about the energy of nightmares through the use of a dog with a stick metaphor, and I’ll incorporate a savior figure and how the speaker trades the nightmare for an allegiance to a perhaps shady character”? Or simpler “I am going to write a poem about the lady at the pool who swims for 30 minutes and slaps & kicks the water as if trying to beat the life out of it”?

If so, I envy you at this moment. Perhaps I’ve come to the page like this in the past, but if I have, I’ve forgotten how it is done. And, this coaxing of the poem up out of the depths is terrifying…every single time.

83º ~ feels like 89º, dew point 74º, the swelter-weather returns, bubbling up to heat indices nearing the century mark later this week, no real rain, watering for the second weekend in a row, hummingbirds abound

This morning, the first thing I read was a Philip Levine poem, “Coming Close, the daily poem from The Academy of American Poets. I went on to read another Levine poem, “What Work Is,” archived by the Poetry Foundation. Both of these poems present the complicated lives of working-class people. Among Levine’s other poems there are more direct implications of what happens when one moves from the working class to the middle class, as I have done.

This set me off in writing a really cliched, too overt “political poem,” about my relationship to work. I mean, the draft is really terrible.

But, it got me thinking, how do political poets, and I count Levine as such, poets who comment directly on the conditions of the people with whom they are concerned, how do they do it? How do they honor their subject and make art of it? How do they avoid sentimentality? How do they avoid exploiting the very people they seek to honor? How do they move me without driving me away with points too blunt and too sharp?

If anyone has any answers, I’m all ears.

~~~~~

In the meantime, I must engage in that domestic labor that is grocery shopping and laundry and catching up on bill paying on this glorious holiday that not everyone gets to enjoy. Many folks, especially in retail and food service will be hard at labor today. May they prosper.