44º ~ tornadoes and high winds last night heralded a cold front returning us to cooler temps, wild skies remain

Wow.  A draft!  Let me tell you, Dear Reader, I was sitting at my desk this morning, following my routine, knowing that as it was a Thursday, I would go into work an hour later than I do on MWF, but not really conscious of why.  As I read through the blogs and saw a lot of NaPoWrMo posts, a wee bit of lightning struck me upside the head: “It’s Thursday!  That’s drafting day.”

And this is what I mean about courting the muse and not waiting for her.  I have put a pattern in place, and usually, I focus consciously on that pattern so that I’m thinking “draft a poem, draft a poem, draft a poem” on Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.  At this point in the semester, things are starting to fall apart, the gyre is definitely widening (check out Yeats’ “The Second Coming” if that’s a new one for you).  But, despite the chaos, the pattern remained.

As I stated on Monday, I’ve been haunted by the news of a missing girl in Arkansas, and she keeps coming up in drafts, but I’m uncomfortable about two things: 1) the ungainly narrative/clumsy prose nature of what I drafted, and 2) telling a story not mine to tell.  This morning, the angry sisters returned and said, “We’ve got this.  We’re mad as hell, and we’re going to take over.”  So, the new draft begins:

In the woods,
           the angry sisters search

That’s the line that sent me spinning to my journal.  I hadn’t done any of my normal routine of clearing the desk, reading poetry by others, etc.  I was simply looking at blogs and Facebook and Boom!  The lines also came out in ragged indents, short, compressed, clipped.  All that I’d been longing for in that burdensome earlier draft.

I owe Traci Brimhall yet another debt of gratitude because her work reminds me that there can be brutality and ugliness in poems, and I mean that in the best way possible.  So, when the angry sisters wanted to get ugly about bodily rape and emotional violation (which sadly, is very often the story when young girls and boys go missing and stay missing like this), I took a deep breath and didn’t turn away, as I have in the past.  It definitely helped that the angry sisters were speaking.  Their persona allowed me to say what I had been struggling to say in that earlier draft.  Their persona also allowed me to fictionalize the situation beyond this specific case in Arkansas right now.

I have often wanted to write what might be considered political poems, but I’ve never been able to put those ears on the table as Carolyn Forche does in “The Colonel.” (And she does it with the most limber, gymnastic prose poetry ever.  Damn.)  “The Colonel” is one of those foundational poems that rocked me to the core as a young undergrad and made me want to write.   Perhaps I shied from the overtly political, though, because I didn’t understand my own need for persona to do so.  Who knows?  Maybe this is just another angry sister poem or maybe the angry sisters just discovered their mission.

65º ~ hello spring

Just a quick note to say that even though I tried to draft over the weekend, nothing came of it except a bunch of terrible lines more prose than poetry.  And then, this morning, I was reading my blog feed and stumbled on Verbatim’s post of “Four Trees Quartet.”  Verbatim is a site for found poems, in this case, a set of poems built from lines in a field guide to trees.  Of course, this was right up my alley.  As I read, I kept coming back to the last line of “Eastern Hemlock,” “as fuel, the wood throws sparks.”  Eventually, I had to copy that line into my journal, and then more lines followed of my own.

This weekend, I kept trying to draft about the fact that there is a girl missing here in Arkansas.  Her stepfather was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound but so far, she has not been found.  At the beginning, the searches met daily; now it is on the weekends and holidays.  Let me say this: I do not want to write about this girl, this tragedy, but she keeps turning up.  I’ve seen too many of these stories unfold to hold out much hope for a happy ending, so I kept wanting to write her an alternate ending, an ending of power.

That’s what happened this morning.

Still, I do not know if this poem will go beyond this draft.  I do not know if this is my story to tell.  I do not know if this is exploiting the girl in question.  I only know the draft had to be written.

55º ~ spring storms have settled in, gully washing away the morning, all gray and wet

Well, praise be!  My hope from Thursday materialized, and I did find time this morning to draft a new poem.  There’s not a lot to tell about today’s process that is new.  I sat with my journal and a book and a little instrumental music on soft, soft, soft.  I had my cup of coffee.  I listened to it rain.  I caught hold of a line from the book I was reading and thought I had a beginning.

After scratching through some hard-won lines, I feared that maybe I was pushing this angry sisters thing too much.  Maybe they only had a handful of poems in them.  Maybe I’ve grown addicted to the idea of a persona leading me through an entire book. 

Then, I remembered that earlier Eduardo Corral had put out a call for favorite words on his Facebook page, hoping to use some of those words given to him by others in a draft of his own.  My word was “cauterize.”  Remembering it snapped today’s draft into focus.  I confess there’s a bit of fever in it (ah, you sickly speaker, haunting, haunting).  The angry sisters seem to also have a thread of burning/fire/ashes underlying many of the drafts so far. 

Oh, I forgot.  Before I started drafting today, I read over last week’s draft and realized that I had to cut an entire stanza, which contained one of my favorite phrases.  Guess what?  Most of that stanza worked to make the last stanza of today’s draft.  This rarely happens for me.  In this case, I kept trying to use that left-over stanza as a beginning, and then gradually realized that it had to be the end.  Again, I rarely begin working on a poem knowing the ending, but there you go. 

As for the title, it began as the first line at some point in the draft, and when I realized that I needed to add a bit of information to the first stanza, something had to give.  Cutting the first line created an instant title. 

In the end, I’m still not sure about the angry sisters and if I’m pigeon-holing myself or forcing too much, but I do know that April looks to be an insane month and I’m happy to have this draft in case I’m derailed for the next few weeks.

38º ~ sliding backward into winter temps, but at least we have sun and not the sleet predicted, rain is in the offing through tomorrow, highs only in the low 40s ~ cruel, cruel

Today’s time at the desk of the Kangaroo is a tale of both failure and what might be counted as a success. 

Last night, I remembered to remind myself that this morning I would write a poem.  I remembered to remind myself all through my morning routine of shower, dressing, breakfast, coffee, &etc.  Alas, no spark of inspiration like last week.  Instead, I sat down at the desk with all of my necessary ingredients (a clear desk, my journal & pen, some instrumental music [today, Thelonius Monk], and a window), and NOTHING.  So, I went back and read all my new drafts since finishing the sickly speaker.  The fall was mostly silent, with a few poems drafted in November, but things picked up in December and onward, so I have a nice little handful.  Luckily, I still like many of the drafts, and luckily, I didn’t get sidetracked with revisions, just jotted down any notes that struck me so I could come back to them later. 

Once I finished reading the work in progress, I expected something to happen, so I opened my journal and scratched out a few forced lines.  Bleck.  Then, I decided I would open up Traci Brimhall‘s Our Lady of the Ruins (my personal response to the book is here) because she uses the plural first person in many of the poems, and several of my newer poems (the angry sisters) use that point of view as well.  After reading two poems, I thought I was inspired; I thought I was beginning a draft.  I dutifully wrote out ten lines or so of really terrible narrative, the most non-poetic stinkbombs I’ve written in a long time.  Those lines languished on the page and did not give me the excitement, the tingle (yes, the spidey sense) that I needed to switch to the computer and finish the draft.

Le sigh.

So, back to the book and back to a process that has yet to fail me: word gathering.  I started at the first poem in Our Lady and gathered (i.e. stole) a bunch of nouns and verbs from Traci, with all respect and admiration.  Once I got abut thirty of them scrawled in ramshackle fashion across the page, connections began to spark.  I drew my arrows and circles connecting words (it’s important to note that I never collect two words from the same line and make sure to place words from the same poem far apart on the page in my journal; my intent is never to plagiarize).  The two words that sparked today’s real draft, the one that might be a successful poem someday were “honey” and “hourglass.”  I suddenly had an image of the sand in an hourglass replaced by honey and what that would mean in terms of time.  In that moment, the angry sisters snapped back and started singing. 

We filled the bedside hourglass
            with honey, slow slurry
to time our ill-fated rendezvous…

Another important note about word gathering: I usually only end up using three or four pairs from what I’ve scribbled in my notebook.  As the draft takes off and gathers to a critical mass, I’m able to access my own word store and find my own interesting clashing together of language.  I guess I’m a bit like those old engines that need priming before they fire to life.

As for the title, this poem takes place after the family catastrophe, and the draft ended up taking a really quirky turn with the angry sisters becoming these pulsing, sexual bodies, and I had an image of the sirens of mythology, but this time the setting is on the prairie (oh, how I missed it while I was away with the sickly speaker!).  I hope folks will get the allusion in the title when they read the full draft.  I know that sirens on the prairie are usually associated with tornado warnings, so I’ll have to see.

Until then…

48º ~ bright sun, tiny breezes, a massive drop in temps predicted after today (snow forecast in the northern tier of Arkansas counties for Friday) and through the next week  …uhm…hello?…spring???

So, this is Spring Break.  A little bit of sleeping in; a lot of catching up on household tasks waylaid by the semester and AWP.  Oh, and yes, there is grading being done as well.  It never stops!

In terms of poetry, yesterday I had the great fortune to read for and talk with Dr. Nick Boone‘s Poetry Writing class at Harding University in Searcy, AR.  While I love to do readings, combining them with class visits is my absolute favorite thing to do, and Dr. Boone’s students did not disappoint.

For the reading, Nick had me email him a file with my poems and as I read, the poems were projected onto the class screen.  This was the first time I’d done something like this and it was interesting.  First off, as I finished each poem, I needed to scroll down to the next one.  I read from printed copies and then leaned over to maneuver the mouse.  What I liked about this was the forced break between poems.  When I read, I definitely try to give each poem its due by pausing after the last line. (Pet Peeve: when at a poetry reading and the poet rushes to say something almost before the last word of the poem is out of her mouth.)  Having to manipulate the computer made a natural break between poems.  Second, as I read, the students were following along on the screen.  This was a bit of a difference for me, as I practice my readings a lot and really try for eye contact with the audience.  Luckily, there were a few students who seemed focused more on me than the screen.  I do see the value of the printed poems as I read, especially for beginning writers of poetry, as they could see linebreaks and stanza breaks and all the white space on the page.  

After I finished reading, I had some craft notes prepared, but I really just love to talk with students and opening up the room to questions worked perfectly.  The students were bright and articulate and asked all the right questions so that I was able to incorporate my craft notes into a more free-flowing discussion.  We talked about poetry being part inspiration and part craft and that the craft comes along from reading a lot and writing a lot.  In particular, I covered sound and form, form in terms of free verse still needing structure and how important linebreaks and stanza breaks can be, even when not using a formal method.

All in all, it was a great day focused on poetry and students, two of my favorite things!

54º ~ oh yeah, baby, 54º and the sun is just starting to come up…hello spring!, hello Spring Break (in four hours!)

Many thanks to Kaite Hillenbrand and Ken Robidoux over at Connotation Press for showing the sickly speaker so much love.  These four poems are from near the end of her journey.

And earlier in the year, the irreplaceable Patty Paine and Jeff Lodge over at diode gave her a bit more encouragement.  Two poems that also appear near the end.