Early this morning, my grandma, Mabel Longhorn, passed away.  She was 90 years old and, until this past November, she lived on the farm where she had spent the majority of her married life, even after my grandfather died several years ago.  One of my uncles lived there with her, and while others farmed the land she was able to watch the passing seasons in the fields around the house and keep track of the cardinals (her favorite bird), robins, blue jays, bluebirds, hummingbirds, orioles, and more from the big bay window in her living room.

She loved her family, her dogs and cats, her garden, the Chicago Cubs, and the Minnesota Twins, and she made the best cinnamon rolls in the world.  In the summers when my sisters and I would visit the farm, we all took a break after lunch to watch her “stories” and take a nap.  Grandma often kidded me that I ate one meal a day when I was visiting her; it started at breakfast and ended with a snack before bed.  She was worried that I might develop “kitchen elbow” from opening and closing the door on the refrigerator.  What can I say?  There was always a cookie jar full of candy on the counter and good eats in the fridge.

While the farm was mostly about row crops, when I was young, Grandma and Grandpa often raised two or three cows to butcher for the family.  I learned early about the cycle of life and where my food came from.  Grandma named the cows and we would help feed them when we visited.  Then, later in the year, when we ate, Grandma would joke about our “Sweetie burgers,” with Sweetie having been one of the cows we’d petted that had been sent to slaughter.  This may sound harsh to those not used to farming, but it was natural to us, and I’m thankful for having learned those lessons.  

My grandpa, Bud, worked the farm and a job, second shift as an electrician at the Sara Lee plant in town.  Because of the plant, their small town had a Sara Lee discount store, and I remember countless holidays, birthdays, and vacations spent eating slices of Sara Lee cake or pumpkin pie, sprawled out on the floors with my countless cousins.  One Christmas, among that brood and with the advent of the VCR, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life for the first time; already known as a “cry baby,” I wept openly when the town rallied around George and the money to save the Savings & Loan came pouring in.

Times weren’t always easy for my grandparents, but there was love and laughter, and in the summer we had fresh sweet corn and whatever strawberries we could wrestle away from the red-winged blackbirds in the garden.

Rest in peace, Grandma.

40º ~ we survived the coldest weekend of the winter, with lows around 18º and then a snow-sleet mix yesterday, today warming back to normal (50s) but still gray

Dear Reader, I’m holding on to the reins with a firm grip, but poetry time is getting squeezed once again.  This is to be expected as we are now a fourth of the way through the semester, and the first event in the Big Rock Reading Series is this week!

This morning, I spent my little bit of time recording rejections.  While receiving three rejections in as many days can be a bit overwhelming, I’m happy that one of the rejections from a top-tier journal included this line: “This is not our customary rejection.  We hope you will keep us in mind.”  Silver lining, anyone?  Still, these are the first sets of rejections for the sickly speaker poems and so a bit of my faith is shaken.  I placed two of the poems quite quickly this past fall, so I guess I overdid it on the faith and the rejections are a good reminder that nothing is a sure-thing in the poetry world.  Also, I’m wondering if these will be harder to place for the very fact that they are part of a larger project.  Lots to think about. 

Now it’s off to school to put the pieces in place for Thursday night’s reading.  I am incredibly excited to host Stacey Lynn Brown.  If you are reading this in and live in central Arkansas, I hope you’ll come out.  Feel free to email me if you need directions.

40º ~ a dipping down of temperatures into the 40s for the next few days, nearly a dead calm, must stare hard to find a hint of breeze in the leaves (leaves on bushes only, trees winter-bare as should be the case), graygraygraygraygraygraygraygray

18th c. apparatus for reviving the apparently dead! Click for link.

A strange thing happened on the way to the draft this morning, dear reader.  I did my self-reminder last night and then again after the alarm went off and I snuggled back under the covers for 10-more-minutes-please.  I confess, I had a hard time clearing my brain for poetry.  There’s been a lot of intensity at work lately surrounding a large project.  Problem-solver that I am, my monkey mind kept wanting to go back to that knotty subject and try to find a way to please everyone and still be realistic (tilting at windmills, anyone?).  But, this is not the strange thing to which I refer.

As I rested in the aftermath of the alarm and focused my energies on my sickly speaker, I knew I wanted to chart that time when her disease seems to be responding to treatment but before there is a definite sense of “cure” or at least “management.”  (The quotes are for the way health care professionals use those words.)  This is a time of hope but also of disbelief and fear.  At the same time, the donor cells keep coming back into the conversation, and so I came up with the line “the donor cells infiltrate my dreams.”  I’m loving exploring the speaker’s connection to the anonymous source of her donor blood / cells and how she feels changed by this donation/transfusion/transplant not only in body but also in personality.  So, I started thinking about how the speaker might have unfamiliar dreams, the dreams of the donor.

And here’s the strange thing that happened on the way to the draft.  After going through my morning routine, I sat down with my journal turned to the page where I’d scribbled the above line after getting out of bed.  But, for some reason, I didn’t start the draft with that line.  Why?  I have no idea.  Normally, I would re-write the line a bit more neatly and see what happened from there.  Instead, I got sidetracked with the idea of the sense of healing and started the draft this way.

Monitor, needle, and chart,
each new diagnostic hints
that I am healing, …

I ended up drafting a total of eight tercets and only got back to the line about the dreams in the seventh tercet, and then it became “They infiltrate / my sleep.” Amazingly, this led me to a surprise ending that I love (of course, I usually experience a rush of love right after drafting).

So, here’s to letting go of the reins a bit and listening to the speaker and the poem and “learn[ing] by going where I have to go.” (Roethke)

Turning to the title, I still have Blood Dazzler on the desk after Patricia Smith’s reading Monday night.  By the way, she mentioned that as she drafts, she reads each line aloud and lets the sound help craft the next line.  While I don’t go line-by-line, I do read aloud, a lot, in the process, once I have a critical mass on the page/screen.  I highly recommend it.

In any case, I flipped open Blood Dazzler, and after only one false start, I hit upon the title of the draft, a line from “Golden Rule Days”: “and was resurrected as a refugee.”  No real tweaking required, all I did was trim off the first two words and voila.

37º ~ some sun, some clouds, chilly mornings and cool days, winter in Arkansas 2012

Last night, I had the great good fortune to attend Patricia Smith‘s reading at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, sponsored by the UALR English Department and flawlessly planned by Professor Nickole Brown.  I knew the Smith came from a background of slam competition before turning to poetry of the page, so I anticipated an exciting night.  I was not disappointed.

No demure and docile poet here, no staid professor intoning with great seriousness.  Smith’s voice soared and dipped as she captivated us all.  While I was looking forward to hearing poems from Blood Dazzler and was a bit sad that Smith only read two from that book, I thoroughly enjoyed each poem she presented.  Smith is an expert with the persona poem, taking on the voice of John Lee Hooker, Tyrell (a barbershop owner in Chicago), Ethel Freeman (a woman who died outside the Convention Center in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and, in the book if not last night, the voice of Katrina herself.

The best thing about Smith’s reading style is that she does not sacrifice the poetry for the performance.  Throughout the poems, the attention to language, rhythm, and sound shines through, even while Smith brings the words to life on the stage. As a page poet with little background in theatre, I found a lot I might learn from Smith, most importantly, another affirmation that it is okay to love the words and let that love come through in the reading.  During my days in graduate school, there was a way of thinking that tried to stomp this out of us.  We were told to read “straight” and not let our voice rise and fall, not caress the words or add extra emphasis with body or timbre.  (This, the kind of reading that brought me to poetry in the first place, when I heard the likes of Joy Harjo, Quincy Troupe, and Li-Young Lee and they drew me into their magic spells.)  Slowly, I’m shaking loose that straightjacket, and I am more than thankful for Patricia Smith for showing me the way, again.

Finally, I’ll be looking forward to April when Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, Smith’s new book, comes out from Coffee House Press.

50º ~ nearly at our predicted high for the day, a week of 50s on the horizon

I’m bleary-eyed, mentally exhausted, and ready for a break from these words, word, words!

Still, I’m satisfied.

Cool computer graphic of the human eye.  Click for link.

Yesterday, I spent roughly six or seven hours proofreading and entering corrections for the journal of academic writing I edit at school.  According to Microsoft Word, there were 16,407 words in the document. I had read each essay three or four times over the course of the last six weeks, but yesterday was the final proofread before sending the text to our designer for layout.

Each essay had been read by multiple faculty members during the selection process and global revisions were suggested then.  Once we settled on the selections, I read and did the heavy-lifting of suggesting revisions to the student-writers, who had the chance to agree with our suggestions or disagree and make their own suggestions, with me being the guardian of the files, inputting final decisions.  Then, the faculty members on our editorial board each did close proofs of two essays before everything came back to me to put in a certain order (a fascinating process) and to proof again.  After all of that, I still found two surprising mistakes (“altercation” for “alteration” and one subject-verb agreement error with an is/are situation) along with a half a dozen questionable commas and many cases of uncertainty that had me going back to the MLA Handbook and The Little, Brown Handbook just to be sure. 

I must say, my brain was quite sufficiently scrambled by the early afternoon yesterday, and I was reminded again that while this kind of activity does not require manual labor, it is still WORK and there is a kind of exhaustion that sets in, a fatigue of the eye and brain that pleases me.  (Also, the tendonitis in my rand hand is out of control, particularly in my thumb.)

Today, I began with doing the readings for my Creative Writing I class for the week.  We are still at the beginning when we are reading established writers rather than class-generated material, and I’ve read the stories and poems many, many times in my life.  Still, I go through and remind myself why I’ve picked these examples and what I hope my students will learn from them.

Finally, finally, I was able to get to some poetry time at the desk of the Kangaroo.  I’ve spent the last two hours submitting three packets (all to journals with New in the title).  Yep, two hours and only three packets.  This is because I’ve taken the leap off the non-simultaneous submission board.  Starting in December, I’ve kept a list of the top-tier journals I’d like to try this year.  Most of these top-tier journals do not take simultaneous submissions due to the overwhelming number of writers sending work their way.  For these journals, I see the need for this and am willing to bend my rule of only sending to places that take simultaneous submissions.  If any of these places keep my work for over a year without a word to me, I’ll know to scratch them off the list in the future.

So, my submission days usually end up with the packets being sent to more journals, but the time spent at the desk averages out to be about the same.  The biggest time-eater of the process is the review and revision of each poem.  Here are the fine-tuning revisions.  Do I really need that “the,” that “while”?  Can I tighten that line, that stanza, this poem? & etc.  Then, there is the sort through the guidelines and the compilation of the submission packet.

Again, I’m bleary-eyed and mentally exhausted, and again, I feel that sense of a job well done. 

Now, to collapse in front of a few episodes of Law & Order as a reward.

48º ~ we continue on our path of upper 60s, lower 70s as we usher in this new month, and while I celebrate the warmth and the lower than normal utility bills, I worry and mourn melting ice caps & glaciers, the great self-created migration of the climate that may destroy us all (feeling a bit apocalyptic?)

Dear Reader, here are my notes on today’s draft, which was a slow and steady process rather than any rush of inspiration.  Today I offer an example of the work to pull each word from thin air.

I did remind myself last night that I’d be drafting today, and I wondered if the sickly speaker had more to say.  However, I didn’t dwell on it and drifted off to sleep with no new lines offering an interruption.  This morning as I bathed and readied myself for the day, I thought of the speaker and her frustration at the doctors and their lack of communication with her, and, perhaps more importantly, I wondered if she was healing.  It turns out she is, and the first few lines appeared to me: “Some days have passed without a fever.”  I spun out the scenario in my head and then lost track of it a bit as I moved into the kitchen for breakfast and was interrupted from my reverie by two cats intent on being fed.  Luckily, I noticed my own distraction and grabbed the grocery list notepad and scribbled down my thoughts.  Then, I was able to feed the cats and eat my own breakfast without worry.

Some of you may wonder why I didn’t just run to the computer and get to work.  Here’s the deal: I do not work well without quiet and calm.  Also, I do not function well if I haven’t gone through my routine for the morning.  (A little OCD perhaps?)  Also, each weekday, I make C. his breakfast to carry with him to work.  I do this because I love him not because I feel any sense of wifely duty. I make no apologies.  So, once I am showered and fed, the cats are fed and exercised (played with), and C. is prepped and out the door, then, then I am able to clear the desk, and get to work.

So, once I got to the desk today, I had my scrawled notes.  I opened my journal and transcribed/revised until I had a sense of where the poem was going.  I did not stop to do a word bank today.  I suppose I have a much stronger grasp of the speaker’s diction, which relies more heavily on Latinate usage than I might and a more baroque (although sometimes broken) syntax.  With the draft gathering weight, I turned to the computer and fleshed it out.  In the process, the opening lines changed a bit.  Here’s how it begins for now.

Six days have passed without a sign
of fever. I keep my own chart,
pulling loose six fragile threads

So, I’m already getting to the speaker’s agency in her health care.  What the poem explores is the fact that the whitecoats refuse to share her results with her, and the nurses just go about their routines.  I suppose some of this stems from a recent visit I made to my own doctor.  I was only having a prescription refilled and didn’t need an exam, but the nurse still took my temp, pulse, and blood pressure and duly noted these in my chart.  However, she did not offer to tell me the results.  The nurses never do and neither does my doctor when she comes in.  This always frustrates me, and sometimes I remember to ask, all the while trying to be polite.  So, the sickly speaker has developed a way to tell if her temperature really is gone by noting how many numbers the nurse writes in the chart. (Three digits before the single dot of the decimal point means fever is back.) 

Also in the draft, the speaker feels cut off from any offer of hope from the whitecoats, so she embraces her own feeling of recovery and begins her own exercise regime at night.  Yes, images of Sarah Connor from The Terminator (what was it, T2?) in the psych ward doing pull-ups on her bed frame ran through my head, as well as the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper creeping around her room’s perimeter.  I tried to re-invent these images, and my speaker has to contend with being attached to machines, so there’s that, too.

A whitecoat with his records via Science Photo Library

I said earlier that this was a slow and steady process today.  What I mean is that the answers to “what comes next?” in the poem didn’t immediately surface.  There were a lot of stops and starts and “wonderings.”  Finally, I arrived at something I’m happy with for now.  For a drafting day, that’s a victory.

Turning to the title, I followed my old routine of seeking inspiration from other writers.  This time, I happened to pick up Louise Gluck’s (forgive the omission of the umlauts!) book of essays, Proofs & Theories.  This is the first time I’ve turned to prose for a title, but Gluck’s essay style is definitely Latinate and full of complex syntax, so I thought I’d take a chance.  It didn’t take long to find this quote “What has been sacrificed or shed seems only opacity, a sluggish dullness” (from her Introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993).  I pushed and pulled at that until I came up with today’s title: “A Sluggish Dullness Sacrificed or Shed.”

fini

55º ~ oh dear weather gods & goddesses, they say it might reach 71º today (with rain for good measure), the last day of January? 

I am suffering from great fits of monkey mind today and wish I had some cohesive post to offer up to the loyal readers of the kangaroo.  (See, now I’ve got a monkey and a kangaroo…there’s a lot of hopping and screeching going on in there.)

Forester Kangaroos, click for link

Red Howler Monkey, click for link

I knew this shift to teaching on MWF was going to be hard on my poetry mind, and that is bearing out.  So far, Thursdays have been okay for drafting and spending dedicated time in with my “butt-in-chair” for poetry, but Tuesdays are more of a struggle.  I’m in the thick of things with students, the journal I edit on campus, and the reading series I run.  All of these things make me happy and fulfilled, so I’m not complaining, just observing.  That’s all you can really do with monkey mind.  Observe and try to re-center, re-focus.  (No, I don’t meditate regularly, but I’ve been to a few classes, so I know the lingo.)

Flitting around in my self-talk is the fact that yesterday while browsing the blogs, I read, out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, a blogger who stated that he was going to try to focus more on the poetry world and less on himself because readers were sick of bloggers talking about themselves.  Uhm, yikes!  That’s what I do, talk about my own process, my own successes and failures.  Oh no!  Readers are sick of me!  I should give more and take less! 

What I am reminded of in times like this is the need to be gentle with myself.  To accept that every one of us has a different process, different interests, and a different time line.  Here I am.  This is me, imperfect, but whole.

On a happy note, I’m in the midst of reading Blood Dazzler and eagerly looking forward to Patricia Smith’s reading at the University of Arkansas Little Rock next week.

On another happy note, my creative writing students are stunning me with their raw literary energies. I’ve just read over their first two weeks of free-writes & exercise prompt responses.  Holy buckets!  I cannot wait to read their workshop pieces.  Wahoo!  

44º ~ a drop in the temps last night reminded us it is winter, but a return to warmer climes and bright sun today fool us again

Yesterday, I spent several intense hours with my weather manuscript, the title of which is now in shortened form: Such Weather as This.  Here is a brief outline of those hours.

~ take current manuscript out of binder and toss on the futon
~ print any fairy tale poems I might consider including & toss on the futon
~ check on any random poems that don’t fit the sickly speaker series that have not been included in the weather book previously, print a couple & toss on the futon
~ mix well (this was harder than I thought as papers like to stick together, esp. those that have been grouped in a binder for six months)
~ reform (hah! re-form?) poems into stacks of like-minded work
~ remember that all of the folks who have seen the manuscript have advocated a non-linear approach to themes and arcs, go for some “random” element to order
~ pause to take care of some laundry
~ get out the card table and begin re-grouping the poems, giving no thought to previous order (this was last part was easier than I thought, as I was able to ignore the page numbers already printed on certain poems more than I thought I would be able to)
~ become greatly frustrated with self for wanting to tell a linear story
~ weave in a few fairy tale poems but keep noticing how different they are in texture and tone, being that they are solidly narrative and the rest of the book is lyric
~ finally gather up the new order
~ pause to return to the laundry
~ return to desk and do a “save as” on the last version of the mss., creating the next version and inputting the results of my manual labor
~ copy, cut, & paste; copy, cut, & paste; repeat, repeat, repeat, & etc.
~ notice again how the fairy tale poems don’t fit, except one — “Midwest Nursery Tales,” which is the most lyric of them all and the least reliant on the “Once upon a time” opening
~ abandon new version of file and go back to the one before
~ make toast with butter & peanut butter because that’s how I like it and “gluttony” is my middle name
~ remove three poems that didn’t make the cut during the “new order”
~ add “Midwest Nursery Tales”
~ move three existing poems around given what was learned from the “new order”
~ revise table of contents (something I always do by hand b/c it helps me see the order of the poems in the big picture)
~ print out new version of the version before the big shuffle and call it a day
~ reward self by going to neighborhood frou-frou salad & pizza restaurant & get a “Santa Fe” with extra dressing

19th c. weather balloon, click for link

And now, Reader, I am resolved.  I will send out this manuscript for six more months to finish out the academic year of reading periods & contests.  If there are no offers for publication after that, then these poems are going in the drawer for a bit.  After all, the manuscript is in its third year of circulation, and while I have changed the order and the title and shifted a few poems here and there, it is largely the same book.  It is hard to justify the time and expense of sending it out over and over to places that have already seen it.  Yes, I’ve made it to the semi-finalist and finalist phase a few times, but at some point, I feel I need to give myself completely to the next project (the sickly speaker).  Also, I do know that many contests change readers each year, but I’m guessing that the overall aesthetic remains about the same. 

So, today, I will prepare my packets for five publishers and send this chunk of poems out into the weather once again.  Hopeful & pragmatic at the same time.

46º ~ rainy, cold, & gray, a repeat of yesterday, much fog this morning

Getting into the swing of my new routine at school means shifting my drafting day to Thursday, and I confess, I had a bit of a rocky start today.  I tried and failed to call up the voice of the sickly speaker last night and earlier this morning, although I did remind myself that this was going to be a drafting day.  I did manage to figure out what the speaker might be thinking about at this point in her treatment, so I had a wee grip on something as I started.

I decided to read through all of the sickly speaker poems and see what might shake loose.  I did know that the speaker was itching to write a letter to her mentor (the Dear Madame letters that appear once or twice a month in the series), and I knew that I wanted to continue to make clear the distinction between the mentor and the other major woman in the speaker’s life, “the woman [she] called mother by mistake.” 

After I’d read a handful of the existing poems and checked to see when the last letter poem was written, the first few lines came to me.  They survived into the actual draft.  Here they are.

Dear Madame—

Have you heard from her,
the woman I called mother by mistake?

She visits me at night, I swear.

The rest of the draft explores the speaker’s absolute surety that this woman has been visiting outside her window at night, but as always, they are unable to communicate.  The speaker worries that this woman will somehow see her as radically changed by her blood transfusion and wants her to know she remains connected to her.  Also, the speaker believes that her mentor can somehow complete the missing link between the two and she begs her mentor to seek out this other woman and explain.

We’ve had a lot of wet and cold weather here lately and that seeps into the poem in the form of hoarfrost on the window.  Sadly, it hasn’t been cold enough for hoarfrost to form here.  Instead, here’s a picture of the beauty I imagined for the speaker (remember, she only has a tiny window above her bed and no other connection to the natural word).

from Science Photo Library, click for link

I said above that it was a rocky day of drafting.  After I had those first few lines, I flitted back and forth between a word bank from Quan Barry’s work and the draft.  Somehow the words from the word bank did not slip easily into the draft as they have done in the past.  I suppose this is a good thing, as it means I’m learning the speaker’s voice more clearly; however, I still held at the forefront my desire to use evocative language, charged with energy.  The draft also took a wrong turn about 2/3 of the way through, and I spent a good while figuring that out and righting the forward progress, so to speak. 

I’m not on solid ground with this one, but I’m thrilled to have been able to set aside the uproar of other duties for this little bit of time and to have crafted something new.