80º ~ conditions continue the same, some high white cloud cover, some small breezes

Well, I do seem to be re-invigorated today.  After my earlier post, I turned to Charlotte Pence’s new chapbook The Branches, The Axe, The Missing, which arrived on my doorstep yesterday.  I figured I’d ease into things by reading what I was sure would be a great blend of heightened language and nervy story.  I was not disappointed.  The chapbook covers a speaker newly divorced, her thoughts on that divorcing and on her father, 15 years out of her life.  Interspersed are poems of a more general, philosophical nature about the evolution of human communities, especially surrounding the use of fire. The sum of the book is deftly woven.

After I finished the chapbook, I went back to cull out the words that leapt from the page.  I started my wordbank and about 2/3 of the way through Charlotte’s poems something clicked & sparked.  Fire is akin to fever, and my sickly speaker knows all about that.

The draft begins:

So, this is what it means
………………………………..to conquer
………….the fire of fever,

click for link

The poem is 33 lines, all of them deeply broken and indented in a random pattern that fits the phrases to my ear.  This is the first draft in a long while that began with these broken lines and ended that way as well.  This used to be one of my favorite ways of drafting and it felt good to return.

The title came along easily again and is based on one word from my wordbank, instinct.  I wrote out the line “The body’s instinct is to bloom” but then it never fit into the draft, so I moved it up to the title and it brought a new focus to the lines and offered me a way through to the ending.

So, many thanks to Charlotte for her beautiful chapbook (highly recommend) and for the inspiration.

And many thanks to all who are following the sickly speaker on her journey.

72º ~ on our way up to 90 or so, should be that way for the foreseeable future ~ no rain today or in the next week, just endless days of “Mostly Sunny”

from Creative Commons, click for link

 Yesterday, I hit the wall.  That was day 12, and it served to remind me that brain work is tiring work.  No, I haven’t been working ten hours in the heat and sun, but each day when I’ve finished writing and reading and commenting, I’ve been tired.  Yesterday, I never fully woke up.  Everything felt wrong from the get-go, and even the cats were out of sync, sleeping when we normally play and vice versa. 

So, I spent the morning trying to organize the series, make revisions, and prepare for submitting some poems.  I kept my BIC, b/c I am nothing if not stubborn.  I do have something to show for the several hours of slogging: five sets of poems divided and ready to be sent to any number of lit mags.  Back in the day, I used to send each packet to up to 10 places (those that accepted simultaneous submissions, of course); however, in the last year or so, I’ve lowered that number to 5, as I’ve had more success and sending out withdrawal notices took up so much time.

There it is, that pesky word, time.  Several of my poet-friends have brought this up recently, the time it takes to send the poems out there, the time it takes to record where the poems have gone and later the results.  It’s true, in order to be successful in getting the poems out into the world where they might be read, one must devote nearly as much time to the business/secretary work as to the creative work.  Thank goodness for online and email submissions, which do seem to cut down on the minutes spent in this labor.

In order to begin the process yesterday, I had to first record the two rejections that came in over the last few weeks.  I am at a nearly all time low for having things out there, so I’m not swamped with rejections.  One of the two rejections was the typical form note on a 2-inch-square sheet of paper.  Sigh.  However, the other, was an email that included a specific comment.  The editors took the time to praise the poems (a handful of sickly speaker poems) as “highly imagined” and “interesting” but they felt like the poems needed “a title that would give the speaker’s situation” more clearly.  Ahhh. 

This was a discussion I had just had with one of my poet friends who had read some of the sickly speaker poems mid-stream, but who doesn’t log in and read the blog much. Her response was much the same, in that she wondered which of the poems would stand alone and which would need more context.  We had already kicked around the idea of being super selective about the grouping of poems as I sent them out into the world, and now I have this added advice from those two kind editors. 

As I work on submissions, I’m going to include an overarching title for the groups, something along the lines of “from the book-length narrative, Fever of Unknown Origin.”  I’m still kicking that title around.  I’m wondering if it should be Suffering a Fever of Unknown Origin, but then I remember that some folks don’t like the long titles.  I also have What Blooms Beyond the Marrow and The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, but it seems like those last two aren’t clear enough for communicating the speaker’s situation. 

Hmmmm, more brainwork. 

81º ~ the chance of storms removed for all but Tuesday, the sun returned, the dew point rising, a furnace of wet heat kind of day

Yesterday, I read two chapbooks during my reading time, Emma Bolden’s Sad Epistles and Yosano Akiko’s On the Scented Breeze, as translated by Dennis Maloney & Hide Oshiro.  The first is a series of epistolary poems, the second a series of tanka, both dealing with a similar topic, the speaker’s separation from the lover.  I recommend them both.  After I finished each one, I did my sloppy wordbank in the journal, circling words and drawing arrows as interesting combinations jumped out at me.  I wondered how it would work to take words from two sources and mash them together.  Then, I had a movie date and so left the wordbank until this morning.

It was interesting coming to the wordbank this morning instead of jumping right into the poem while I built the bank.  The words still worked and perhaps even better as I had more distance on the tone of the poems from which I stole.  Today’s draft returns to one of the key figures in the narrative and begins:

The woman I called mother by mistake
sends me secrets, envelopes addressed
by some other modest hand, letters arranged

in code …

from Science Photo Library, click for link

There is an earlier poem, one that will come out in Crazyhorse soon, that references the sickly speaker receiving letters from the woman she called mother by mistake, the woman who brought her to the hospital/institution.  That was a fever poem, so I figured I could balance it with a healing poem.  It came out as seven tercets, but I’m not sure if it will remain as such.

The title is actually inspired by one of the chains I created within the wordbank with my circles and arrows.  I thought for sure that I would use it in the poem but it didn’t work out that way, which was actually a blessing as I didn’t have to struggle for  the title: “To Taste the Sooty Tangle of her Signature.” 

I am feeling like I need to do a day of big revisions and a day of submissions but I’m loathe to drive the drafts away.  Luckily, this week is fairly free and clear in the afternoons, so hopefully, hopefully, hopefully.

81º ~ cloud cover and humidity climbing, dew point hitting 70º ~ storms predicted for Monday – Wednesday with highs in the 90s likely ~ this the June I know

Wow. I had not expected to draft today. I overslept.  Yes, overslept.  But, wait, you say.  She’s not “working” and is on her self-imposed homestead writing residency; how can she oversleep?  It turns out, despite my lack of daily responsibilities beyond the desk, I do not do well if I sleep past 7:30 or so.  Thus, I have an alarm even when I’m not having to get up and go to campus to teach.  C. finds this ridiculous and very Midwestern to his relaxed Southern ways of sleeping late and staying up even later. 

Groggy even with my coffee, I decided to take the day off from drafting and instead work on reading through the sickly speaker series and making notes on themes or images to bring back as the speaker heals.  I began.  I remembered that I still hadn’t address the fact that there must be other patients there. I made a note about the wolves and geese from an early poem and the question of whether she will “escape” or “be released.”  Then, whamo!, I got hit upside the head with “the courtyard” and remembered that in my delirium of struggling to the surface this morning I was thinking about a courtyard where the now healing sickly speaker is allowed to walk. 

And without willing it to happen, I started drafting a poem that combines the idea of the other patients and this courtyard. It begins:

Each day that I progress, I make some new
discovery. The fact is there are others here.

Not the most electric of openings compared to some of the others, but after describing the evidence of the other patients, the speaker moves on to describe the courtyard and her prescription of 20 minutes walking there each day. The other patients come back at the end.  This helped me find my way to the closure of the poem.  It’s in a dozen couplets, and this time I didn’t resist, as I’ve stayed away from them for the last handful of drafts.

The title was much harder.  I don’t have any inspiration books on the desk since I’d cleared it off yesterday in order to set up the computer again, and I was resistant to getting up and pulling one off the shelf. That seemed like a crutch.  I wracked my brain.  I tried out some ill-fitting phrases and deleted them.  Finally, finally, my aching brain came up with “Let Loose in Blue and Green.” 

The courtyard is high-walled and allows the speaker a larger square of sky than the window in her room.  Here’s an image that comes close.  Imagine a carpet of lush grass at her feet.

from creativecommons.org ~ click for link

Oh, I forgot to mention that before I started reading the series from the beginning, I did a count.  For some reason, I’m fixated on balancing the # of poems into two parts: the fever & the healing.  To date, I have 20 poems of fever and 16 poems of healing (with today’s draft).  I also have the 4 definition poems I’ve worked on in the last 10 days.  Wow!

81º ~ the heat builds back, felt most in the lack of leaving the 70s at night, a chance of storms predicted for Monday, until then, no rain but rising humidity, today a bit of cloud cover to the south, blue sky to the west, the two compass points of my windows

Hallelujah!  My computer is returned and reborn with a new hard drive, after much misdiagnosis.  (Everything really does come back to the sickly speaker in the end.)  I was surprised at how much more comfortable I felt this morning with my desk cleared of everything except the folders of poems, my journal, and the dictionary, and my desktop screen greeting me with so much clarity. No clutter from the iPad, keyboard, and laptop set up.  I am a creature of habit, it is true.

The inclusion of the dictionary in my list hints at today’s draft, as does the title.  I want some dictionary poems for the latter half of the series, and so far, the three I’ve drafted deal more with sickness than with health.  The natural turning point is the procedure that begins to heal the speaker.  I’ve said in the past that I don’t know whether it was a transfusion or a bone marrow transplant. Here’s the thing, the speaker was so sick and out of it that she doesn’t know.  The speaker also has no visitors, no family/friends to record what the doctors are saying.  Over the past five years, my mother has gone to endless doctor appointments with her mother.  This began when my grandmother’s hearing starting failing, despite her hearing aids, and when my mother no longer got the “straight story” from her mother.  This seems to be a truth in dealing with a serious illness.  The mind is altered by the body’s sickness and it’s hard to keep up with the doctor (I experienced a tiny slice of this after my recent oral surgery.)  Sadly, the sickly speaker has no one by her side to be her advocate.

Getting to the point, I turned in my Shorter Oxford first to “transfuse,” thinking it would be a gold mine, and it is, if short.  However, on the facing page my eyes found “transformation” and the eureka light went on.  Using “transformation,” I keep the prefix but don’t have to narrow down the procedure.  Wahoo!

The poem begins:

The action of changing in form, a metamorphosis.
………..In the patient, there are two–

image from Wikimedia Commons, click for link

I have four stanzas and 22 lines, although the stanzas are all different lengths.  After those first two lines, lines three and four are indented yet again.  Like the last dictionary draft, each of the four stanzas begins with a phrase from the dictionary, but this time there is more indention and the only period in each stanza occurs in the first line, which serves like the heading in a set of notes.  The indenting within the stanzas signifies the scratch outline method of taking notes, and it is in those indented lines that I weave in the sickness & the health of the body with the more global definitions of “transformation.”  There is one specific definition that applies.  “In biology. The genetic alteration of a cell by the introduction or absorption of extraneous DNA.”  Are you kidding me?  That’s exactly what I needed!  And a condensed version of that serves as the beginning of the fourth/last stanza. 

The title came pretty easily and happened while I was still hand-drafting in my journal, which is a bit unusual.  Usually, I don’t worry about the title until I’ve got the whole of the thing out on the computer screen.  Not today.  Again, playing with the idea of definition, I came up with “Transformation, Definitive Notes from a Learned Hand.”  In my Word document, I’ve used the accent that signals making Learned into two syllables….learn-ed (that last bit pronounced like the name Ed for any non-English lit majors out there).  I can’t get blogger to accept the HTML to make that work out here.

Not sure if I’ll get to a book today, as I have lots of paperwork that piled up when the computer was down and I want to re-read all of the series and include these newer poems so I can see where I am and where I need to go.

Thanks for accompanying me today!

72 deg ~ glorious morning, squirrels busy at their burying, the St. Francis of Assisi statue calm among the ivy and the shadow, a mockingbird and a cardinal dueling somewhere close

Today’s draft returns to the dictionary definition inspirations I mentioned here and here.  (For those following the sickly computer, there is hope for its recovery, but I’m using a substitute laptop until we know for sure, so I’m returning to the ability to link in my posts…wahoo!)

But back to the draft notes.  I do like the idea of these definition poems with the more distant point of view as interludes to break up the sickly speaker’s narrative.  I wonder about her voice becoming a whine, about her constant obsession with her illness becoming a burden on the reader.  These are the same worries I know we experience when we work through long-term illnesses and unburden ourselves by talking, talking, talking with family and friends, so I’m not too worried.  Still, I’d like to offer the reader a break every now and then, a little bench off the path where he/she can catch a breath.

Today, thinking toward the end of the series, I flipped to “health” in my Shorter Oxford and the lines began almost immediately.  There’s a slightly different form to this one, though.  The two previous dictionary drafts are threaded through with phrases from the entries.  Today, I’ve used the four main definitions as the starting place for four sections of the poem.  Right now it isn’t broken into stanzas, but the elaborations on the four main definitions are indented.  So, given that “health” has a fairly short entry, I was able to elaborate and make something of it.  Wahoo!  The draft begins:

Sound condition of the body
………..as in able to lift the wet laundry
………..and pin it to the horizon line;

For each of the four parts of the definition, I’ve added six lines expanding the definition to fit the sickly speaker’s reality but without using the first-person.  Ahem…she tried to butt into the draft at the beginning.  In fact, in my journal where I draft by hand the beginnings of all my poems, I spy that pesky “I” several times.  As I drafted on the computer, I had to throw her out b/c I really do want these definition poems to be separate from her poems.

If you’ve been doing the math, you know that the poem comes in at 28 lines.  I’m debating whether to separate into four stanzas, but I like the way the form mimics the form in the dictionary right now…no room for extra white space there.  As for the title, I went round and round with this one.  In this case, I can’t steal from someone else b/c I want the title to point to the dictionary.  After much tweaking, I came up with “Health, an Expanded Definition.”

The desk of the Kangaroo with today’s poem & post in progress.

 And now, I plan to read my book for today while sitting on the back deck and enjoying the last of this cup of coffee.