83 deg ~ conditions continue the same, good sun, good breezes, cool enough in the shade

Today, many thanks to my friend Stephanie Vanderslice who directs the new Arkansas MFA Program at the University of Central Arkansas and writes for The Huffington Post.  In her article “Should I Read or Should I Write?” Stephanie references me and kindly links to this blog.  I believe she is referring to a status update I posted on Facebook last month.  I wrote: “Just realized that people who aren’t writers don’t have the terrible
dilemma of having to decide whether to read or write with the time they
have to do so.”

If you are dropping in on the Kangaroo for the first time, I blog about contemporary poetry and how I fit my writing life in around my teaching life.  I also post draft notes for each new poem I draft.  During the academic year, this happens once a week when things are going well.  Currently, I’m in the midst of a self-imposed homestead writing residency to finish my current project, so you’ll see a lot of draft notes.  If you flip back beyond June, you’ll find some of my mini-responses to books I’ve read and readings I’ve attended, along with links to work I’ve published.

The weather reports are a function of my second manuscript, which was largely influenced by the weather and the fact that I was reading a journal written by an Iowa farm wife in which she notes the weather for each entry.  I found I liked the habit.

Welcome to the party, I hope you’ll stay awhile.

In response to Stephanie’s article, I’ll just say that I’m luxuriating in the fact that for the month of June I won’t have to choose between reading and writing.  As of July, I’ll be back to juggling and prioritizing around other life events and responsibilities.

74º ~ a cold front entered the state last night, bringing much drier air, if not a serious dip in the temperatures, still, the windows are open, the birds sing, the breeze blows, and the A/C rests

I continue on with my iPad, as the iMac difficulty has puzzled the geniuses at the Apple Bar. They have one trick left in their magic box but it requires a part they had to order. All this to avoid paying for a new computer, which will be worth it if this trick works.

Yesterday’s draft went up in the smoke of two electricians who thought they were coming to the house for an easy job: switch out a new vent/fan unit in the bathroom for the one that conked out. We’d bought the replacement unit last year, thinking we could do it ourselves, and it took us this long to call in the experts. We live in a 1927 bungalow with lathe & plaster walls and beautiful architectural details. The wiring, well, that’s not so beautiful, as the electricians discovered. Our broken unit was the oldest vent/fan contraption this guy had ever seen and none of the wiring that existed in the attic made any sense. There was much flipping of switches and use of the live wire detector as electrician #1 stood in the bathroom hollering up to electrician #2 in the attic (it’s a one-storey house as opposed to a house with only one story…hee hee). The cats, well, they were shut in the big bedroom. Gracie cowered under the bed in silence, but George made his displeasure known, repeatedly and at good volume.

In any case, the one-hour job ended up taking four hours, during which time I managed to read a lot of blogs, surf Facebook, and finish reading Patricia Smith’s amazing book Blood Dazzler, which I’d started last fall when she came to Little Rock to read. When I finished, I started jotting some words down in my journal for a wordbank, and after the electricians left, I did manage to start a few lines, but they didn’t go anywhere. I really am that sensitive poet type who needs the calm and the quiet of the morning to get my poetry head on straight. Sigh.

The words from Smith’s book that sent me reeling this morning as I built on the scribbled lines from yesterday were “crimes,” “throat,” and “cradle.” I’d been thinking about confessions and crimes because the sickly speaker refers to her transgressions in several early poems. I definitely want to explore that idea that often percolates beneath a long-term illness, that idea that we must have done something wrong to deserve this punishment. Combine this with a comment I received from one of my best poetry friends when I shared some of the recent poems with her. Her comment had to do with the mystics. The sickly speaker calls anyone who is not a whitecoat or a nurse, a mystic. These range from janitors to physical therapists. My friend said that the mystics weren’t mystical, they were too mundane. In reading back over the older poems and comparing them to the newer drafts, I saw that I had lost the mysticism of these characters. And so today’s draft begins:

When the mystic arrives to note my crimes,
she begins by clearing my throat of the threads
I swallowed to make a muting nest. Her hands

cradle and coax me…

The draft is nine tercets, which is fairly lengthy for me and the sickly speaker. In it, she eventually coughs up her confessions on the promise of release. (See how I’m working toward the end of the series, which makes me sad.) Again, I came up with the title on my own rather than stealing a title from a book on my desk. Not sure why this worked recently and didn’t work in the past, but there you have it, “Offered Passage, Offered Healing.” I purposefully worked at using words with heavy religious connotations for the mystic this time. Perhaps the next mystic to make an appearance will be an electrician and perhaps he/she will help set the speaker free. So much imagery in electricity and wiring when all the shouting and beeping is over.

77º ~ gray cloud cover that teases with a 20% chance of storms, last evening all thunder and lightning, no rain, still the unkillable rose blooms with new flowers

Today’s draft was actually begun yesterday afternoon, after I finished reading Emily Rosko’s brilliant book Prop Rockery. I posted my mini-mini-response on Facebook, but here’s the gist. Rosko’s book is one power-packed page turner not of narrative but of lyrics crafted in language that leaps from the page. The book draws a large inspiration from Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with some of the poems taking their titles from lines from plays and poems of that era. Yet, the book is wholly modern and at heart begs the question of self-concern versus empathy, both in terms of personal relationships and our more global relationship with the earth and its flora and fauna.

When I sat down to read, I knew that I’d want to mine some of Rosko’s words, so I had my journal by my side; however, the poems were so engrossing that I couldn’t stop to pick out the words I liked. Instead, when I finished the book, I flipped back to the beginning and began stealing. As in the past, as I jotted words willy-nilly on the page (I must have blank page journals as the lines are too restrictive), I saw pairs and then groups that sparked on the page, so I drew arrows and made circles and boxes. Then, without my even realizing it, the first lines began to appear, and I wasn’t even trying to draft a poem! So, many thanks Emily Rosko! The sickly speaker took ahold of those words and sang.

The draft picks up on one of my questions from the list I posted yesterday. More flowers? In some of the opening poems, the sickly speaker talks about a garden room at the hospital/institution or about flowers being brought to her room. In some of her poems about the woman she called mother by mistake, there are images of flowers or trees. When I did my big read-through last week (or the week before…all blurs), I realized that she would want a return to the flowers as she became more healthy. The word “flower” did appear in my list from Prop Rockery, along with “statuary, crown, fire, festive, muzzle, temptress, estranged, and dominion” among all the others. This is the group of words that got connected by lines and circles/squares and began the poem. The draft now begins:

In the oceanic light, the arboretum at night,

caught in the act, scissors and blooms,
……….fingers stem-stained, thorn-stung,

I become marble skinned, a statuary body

(Those ellipses are only intended to show the indent of that line. Normally I can change their color to match the background, but I can’t find that option right now.) The draft weighs in at 16 lines, following the pattern above, beginning and ending on a single line. I know this is a risky form, as each line must bear its full weight, but I feel so much more secure in this form than in the longer, more tranditional stanzas from yesterday. I love the breath held in the white space. Also, this poem contains the energy of Emily Rosko’s syntax, which is spectacular. I have a note taped up near my writing space. It contains a quote from Yeats that I have never been able to verify. I read it in a blog or article but can’t find the primary text. It states, “Revise in the interest of a more passionate syntax.” That has fit the sickly speaker so well. She speaks in an uncommon way, with fragments and leaps, and I feel like I’d drifted a bit from that. Rosko’s book was a great return to that style. And now, I’ve just added “after Emily Rosko” to the poem, given that I seem to have drawn so much inspiration from her book.

This time the title is all me. It came effortlessly this morning before I’d even turned to the iPad to start working on the draft. It goes back to the idea of hunger now that the speaker is healing. Also, in one of the early poems, she gets in trouble with the staff b/c she eats the flowers in the garden room. So, today’s draft became “Awash in Hunger for the Pistil and the Stamen.” Funnily enough, I kept insisting that it be “pistol” instead of “pistil” and the word still doesn’t look right to me. I actually had to look it up to convince myself. I find it interesting that this poem began with stolen language and then doesn’t have a stolen title like nearly every other poem in the series does. Love that mysterious muse at work.

85º ~ the heat returning, the sun sharper, harsher in its glare

And so the goal I mentioned the other day begins to be exposed. I hope to write a poem a day during June in an attempt to figure out how the sickly speaker’s story ends. Endings are always the hardests things for me when I attempt to write short stories, and I suppose I’m running up against that same problem here. How does one decide where the story ends? Unless the character is dead, there’s always something else to say (sometimes even after the character is dead!). I suppose this story has a built-in ending, the speaker’s release from the hospital/institution. The first few poems of the series are set in the days just before her admission, so I have an idea to have her released and then write the last few poems on her first day on the outside. Yet, she has become such a part of me that I am reluctant to let her go. What will become of her and her mentor? Will she reunite with “the woman [she] called mother by mistake”?

Today, I had a rougher time of it, and I expected that. I don’t do well with writing a poem a day, but I wanted to use this one month as a type of writer’s residency at home, so I pushed through. I started with a definition poem, using the word “cell,” which contains many layers that I could use. I started in the journal, putting the words down and then scratching them out. I opened to “donor” and thought about combining the two definitions in one poem. I wrote and scratched out some more. Then, I flipped to a list of notes I’d made a week ago after reading through the whole series. I’d noticed that there were some subjects that I brought up in the beginning poems that hadn’t made an appearance lately. Here’s the list.

More plants
“My mysterious” – who is this?
Fever-more poems?
Mystic for teeth
Period?
Suitors?
Other patients?
Hunger/appetite

I’ve already figured out that I have enough fever poems, and I wrote the poem about the return of her period, so I could cross those out. For some reason, the suitors called to me today. They are only mentioned in the opening poem, which is a letter to the speaker’s mentor. Today’s draft has the speaker looking back at her life just before her illness. This feels natural to me as she is healing and must begin to think about the outside world again. The poem also brings in her appetite because in one poem she reveals that she had cultivated a heavy body before the illness and is upset by how thin she has become. Today’s draft begins:

Once, before this body failed, several suitors
courted me, interest they expressed
from a distance, eyes cast down.

The poem led me in a new direction as I discovered that the woman she called mother by mistake was trying to get the speaker to lose weight before she would get to receive the gifts from her suitors. This led to her appetite for sugar and bread and her desire to hide in her plump body. The poem is currently four stanzas of six lines each and I’m pretty unsure of it. This one is probably going to need a ton of revision, but there it is. One of my reasons for not doing the poem a day thing in the past is that I know a percentage of thos drafts will fail. I am at odds with this and yet I know that those failed poems are not a waste of time. I fight against my own impatience.

For a title, I turned to Quan Barry’s Controvertibles and turned almost immediately to the poem “the landmine as opiate” and found this line: “w/the slow tonnage of their animal sadness & the evening sky / aerial, thickening.” That phrase “slow tonnage” rang true for this draft, so I picked it up. At first I tried to keep the “animal sadness” as well, but it didn’t fit. So, I would up with “The Slow Tonnage of My Previous Crime.” I’ve been thinking about how some people begin to believe they must have done something wrong when they become serioulsy sick and how that might feel like having committed some crime. Just another layer to the puzzle.

As always, thanks for reading. I’ll try to add some non-draft process posts along the way. I’m also trying to catch up on my reading, but in order to have time to draft, I don’t have time to post my responses to all of the books. Instead, I’m posting mini-mini-responses on Facebook as I read. I’m ever thankful for a job that allows me this kind of time!

71º ~ a beautiful breeze, no humidity to speak of, cloud cover mixed with sun, birdsong, sirens, and a barking dog heard through open windows

So, the iMac remains in the hospital. They’ve replicated the issue and are probing the innards to find out if it is worth repairing or if a new computer looms in the future. I apologize for the lack of links, italics, and images in the posts.

Yesterday, I finally had a chance to read A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A through from beginning to end, where I’ve only dipped in and out in the past. It’s a beautiful biography in verse about MacNolia Cox, who in 1936 was the first African American to make it to the final round of the National Spelling Bee. The book begins with a section on her adult life, riddled with difficulties and disappointments, and then goes back and covers 1936. Of course, after I finished the book, I realized that this year’s Spelling Bee had just ended. 🙂

The reason I’m bringing it up here is because I learned something else about the sickly speaker series through reading the book. Not all of the poems in the book are from the voice or perspective of MacNolia Cox. Many are in the voice of her husband. What Jordan does to make the shifting voices clear is to provide a name at the top of the page in italics to alert the reader. While I’m not switching voices in my series, I found this an interesting tactic. Also, each section of Jordan’s book contains a bracket of dates that situate the reader. I’m wondering if that will work for the sickly speaker, only instead of years, I might use months. The book is shaping up to look like either two sections or four. It will definitely split into before the transfusion/transplant and after, but it might also split into seasons as well, as the procedure occurs at the end of winter.

I drafted another dictionary poem today for the series. This time I used the word “marrow” and drafted from the multiple definitions in my Shorter Oxford again. I had to manipulate this one a bit more as the entry wasn’t nearly as long as the one for “body.” It begins:

What lurks in the cavities of bones, a soft vascular
substance, in this patient-case, no longer vital

gone weak with fever and a leaching sweat.

It goes on in this couplet/single line pattern for 18 lines and relies on the repeated “What…” for the beginnning of the majority of sentences, with one in the middle that breaks the pattern. I used up the material of the definition after about line 12, but pushed on and am happy that I did, as I hit on something new: the perspective of the whitecoats who are fighting this unknown disease. The sickly speaker’s voice has been so powerful and the whitecoats such adversaries that I haven’t thought much about their view on the situation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to spend a lot of time on poems from their perspective, but it was interesting to see from a distance what they might be thinking. (This poem, as yesterday’s, is definitely a distant third person perspective.)

I knew I wanted to use the “…..Defined” pattern for the title, but in this case, I couldn’t come up with a phrase from the poems that included “marrow” in a way that worked. So, I’ve settled on “The Sickly Marrow Defined” but I’m not thrilled with that. It may change along the way.

68º ~ sweet, sweet relief through tomorrow before the heat builds back ~ wearing a light sweatshirt but with all the windows open, cats & humans happy with the northern breeze blown off course ~ just a drop of rain yesterday as the front moved through ~ beginning to feel parched

Today, I’m drafting and posting from my iPad, a new adventure, as my beloved iMac is at the Apple Store for diagnostics. Blogger and iPad are not easy on the HTML, so there are no italics for the titles of the books I reference below. Mea Culpa. I have a goal in mind for June but am reluctant to put it in writing lest I scare it away. (Crazy writer brain!) Still, I’m happy to report that I drafted a new poem today for the sickly speaker book.

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing several interludes, pieces not in the speaker’s voice, pieces that will serve as markers for the narrative. Thinking of Traci Brimhall’s book Rookery reminded me of how she breaks each section with a poem based on the different definitions of “rookery.” Rather than sticking to one word and redefining it several times, I made a list of some key words for the sickly speaker, including fever, body, marrow, donor, and transfusion. This reminded me of A. Van Jordan’s M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, in which he writes prose poems based on definitions.

So, when I sat down to my journal this morning, I pulled out my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary A – M and started with “febrile” and “fever,” Alas, those two words do not have lengthy definitions and I ran aground. Then, I flipped to “body,” seeing as it was housed in the same volume and N-Z was three feet away, still on the shelf. Eureka! Without reading, I could see that the definition spanned several columns…a good sign for mining. Then, I read the first part of the definition “flesh as opposed to soul or spirit” and I was off. I drafted the first eight lines in the journal and then turned to the iPad, using Pages, which required some adjustments on my part, but otherwise worked beautifully.

The draft begins like this.

Flesh, as opposed to soul or spirit,
become an isntrument of heat,
the material being, the main portion
a tract for flames in the veins
or running along the false-rouged skin.

The rest of the draft goes on (not in couplets!) for 25 lines separated into four stanzas of unequal length, although the line lengths remain about the same throughout. As I drafted, I picked phrases from the definitions of “body” that fit the speaker’s state and then elaborated on those phrases by adding images of heat/fire/fever. For now, I’m using a phrase from one of the first poems I wrote in the sickly speaker’s voice, “a febrile habit,” as part of the title, which ended up as “A Febrile Habit Defined.” I didn’t want to go full tilt with the definition poem and use parts of speech, pronunciation, dictionary formats, etc., but I did want to allude to the source of the poem. This will also set up any other poems I write in this way so that the titles would end with “Defined” as well. And I think that if I plan to use this poem in the book, I’ll need at least a few others to sprinkle throughout.

The only real bummer is that my printer, while wireless, is not AirPrint compatible, so I can’t print this draft until the iMac issue is resolved. Rest assured, I’ve emailed it to myself to save it from a sudden catastrophic technology loss. 🙂