45º ~ thick fog persists even this far into the morning, gray gray gray gray gray all around

Today I offer a bit of this and that.

Many thanks to Adam Tavel and Eric Anderson, poetry editors at Conte for including my poem “Prophecy” in the latest issue (7.2).  It’s a wonderful, compact issue full of both humor and foreboding.  A quick note on the poem must include a hat tip to Luke Johnson.  I drafted this poem based on a word bank collected from Luke’s book After the Ark, which I responded to here. 

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Another set of thanks to the editors of Crab Creek Review and Weave.  Both journals recently sent me happy emails to kick-start 2012 in the right frame of mind.  I’m thrilled to have finally made it into these journals after several rejections in the past few years.  Revise & try, try again, is my ever-faithful motto.

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Huge thanks to you all, dear readers, for voting on the title for manuscript #2.  I realized that What Blooms in the Marrow is probably more apt for a title to my sickly speaker poems, although it does come from a line in “It Matters, the Kind of Wound,” which is in mss #2.  The poem opens with an image of “minor cuts” and how that blood “renews itself– / tiny blooms in the marrow.”  There are two or three poems in mss #2 that point to the poems in the sickly speaker series but don’t fit with the series as they feature completely different voices/speakers. 

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I’ve been thinking about tinkering with mss. #2 and adding the best of the fairy tale poems to it, since they are grounded in the Midwest and the sickly speaker is not.  Big project.  Gathering strength.

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February is going to be a BIG MONTH for poetry in central Arkansas.

29º ~ the sun rising and burning off a thin cloud layer, predictions of upper 50s, maybe 60 for the next few days, a small breeze to the south, even smaller to the west,  my robin has been replaced by the cardinal, who does not hurl himself at the window, thank the stars

A brief interjection before the process notes: many, many huge thanks to Traci Brimhall for mentioning the Kangaroo in one of her posts, “A Little Delirium,” at Her Circle.  I was only sorry that I didn’t have a draft note up a few days ago for anyone who visited.  My patterns have been upended by the beginning of the semester, and I have a new teaching schedule this time around.  I’ll be teaching on campus MWF (along with my online sections) and am now scheduling my drafting day for Thursday.  For any new readers, I schedule BIC time (butt in chair time) four times a week during the academic year, but some of that time is given over to other poetry business and reading.  My goal is to draft one new poem per week when I am teaching. 

I’m happy to say that the sickly speaker (my current project, a series of poems whose speaker is a woman with a difficult to diagnose/treat illness, who is hospitalized) did not let me down.  Last night before bed, I did my self-reminder about using this morning to draft.  Sure enough, an hour after laying down, the sickly speaker spoke up.  I fumbled for my journal (someday, I will remember to move it from the desk to the bed before I lay down) and scratched out what she had to say.  This time it was about how she is learning to predict her fevers based on a certain type of headache that appears first.  In other words, she is learning the course of her disease. 

The draft today begins much as it began last night:

Before the fever replenishes and returns,
the pain advances on the hollow spaces
behind each eye. 

For the time being, the poem is drafted in four stanzas of five lines each.  This is very uncomfortable for me, as I love the couplet and the tercet.  However, after the first stanza appeared as one unit and then the next stanza developed, quite naturally, as five lines again, I tried to listen to the poem and not to my comfort zone.  Time will tell.

As the poem developed, the whitecoats (what the speaker calls the doctors) inserted themselves as a disapproving force.  Here, I should retrace my steps and say that before I turned to drafting the poem, I gathered words from Quan Barry’s Asylum.  One of the things that Traci says in her blog post, linked above, is that she was advised to “revise toward the strange,” and then she includes Yeats saying that in the later years he revised only “in the interests of a more passionate syntax.”  Those two things were percolating in my brain and I thought they were good advice for initial drafting as well.  Also, one of the things I love about Barry’s work is the “passionate syntax” and “the strange” combinations of images that work so well for her.  So, I wanted to borrow some of her energy by making a wordbank.  I gathered words until I came upon the word “alms.”  Instantly, in my head, I heard the rhyme with “balm,” something my speaker craves.  That worked its way into the second stanza, with the speaker trying to prove herself worthy in the scathing eyes of the whitecoats. 

Some bee balm for my sickly speaker (click for link)

When I reached what felt like the end of the draft, I went searching for the title.  For any new readers, when I began writing this series back in August, I started using bits of lines from Lucie Brock-Broido for my titles.  I don’t always use the bits word-for-word, but often as a jumping off point for the title.  Today’s title comes from Barry’s poem “lullaby” (one of my all-time favorites from Asylum).  The line that leaped out at me is “…your kisses dark and gelatinous.  They ruin things.”  I used the word “jelled” in the poem, so “gelatinous” fit really well.  I tweaked the line to “A Dark and Gelatinous Ruin.”  I’ll let things rest for the time being and see what rises.

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And now to turn my attention to that unwieldy NEA application!

62º ~ a fierce wind, gray skies, heating up to 70º today, chance of storms to follow

When one of the original participants had to step aside due to a timing conflict, I was lucky enough to be asked to join Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum’s wonderful panel for AWP.  I’m humbled by the company and thrilled to be among such wonderful poets. 

F114. Redefining Lyric: Five Poets Featured on PoemoftheWeek.org Read Their Work
(Robert Wrigley, Nicole Cooley, Tim Seibles, Daniel Khalastchi, Sandy Longhorn)
Waldorf, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor
Lyricism,
most commonly associated with poetry, is applied to nearly every genre
of narrative writing: plays, essays, music, stories, film, nonfiction,
and novels. But what happens when it works the other way around and
narrative elements of these forms are applied to lyric poetry? Join
PoemoftheWeek.org for a celebration of its first five years with a
reading by five of its award-winning and emerging poets whose work
explores this question, redefining lyricism and poetry itself along the
way.

 *If you aren’t a subscriber to Poem of the Week, check it out ASAP.  Pure awesomeness.

58º ~ welcome back oh brilliant sun and warmer temps

Here’s just one of the events I’ll be attending at AWP in Chicago!

26º ~ hazy, whitish overcast sky, a very weak sun after a bright shot of it to start the morning, central Arkansas is bundled up against the cold, all hats and gloves that last for years from such infrequent use, a male cardinal just lit on the tree, his black mask stark against red feathers

She has done it again, friends and fans of the Kangaroo.  The sickly speaker spoke up this morning to the point that I had to interrupt my normal routine and grab my pen and journal.  I confess that I began thinking of drafting a poem within a few minutes of waking, needing to remind myself that this was the time I had carved out of the week to put my butt in the chair.  (It’s also worth noting that I was in a foul mood for much of the day yesterday and it slowly dawned on me as to why: after several weeks of being on my own time and being able to put my BIC each day, I am now on school time and I didn’t balance myself well enough Monday – Thursday.  A lesson I often need to repeat in order to remember.)

In any case, what bubbled to the surface this morning was a continuation of recent drafts, the speaker’s state of mind and body post-transfusion.  I continue to ponder the questions listed in the last few process notes, and here is what she had to say as I was trying to put on my socks (for heaven’s sake, it’s cold, how rude a time to interrupt!).

This new blood has taken root,
my donor replete and replicate.
I felt it first as a flutter in the womb

The poem goes on, in seven tercets, to explore the way this surge of health has the speaker sinking back into her body, from which she has become a bit dissociative.  The whitecoats have a huge role in the poem and are kind of creepy, which I like.  The poem also deals with the speaker feeling as if she is a host to a parasite in her acceptance of this donor blood.

As I read the draft again, one interesting parallel is that if the poem is read on its own, outside the sequence, it could easily be read as an unwanted pregnancy or at least a speaker who isn’t happy about what a pregnancy will do to her body or maybe a speaker who has had trouble becoming pregnant and has had to rely on doctors and such.  Still, I know in my heart that the speaker MUST feel those donor cells in her womb.  I want there to be this notion of a new life because a transfusion (or transplant for that matter) does mean the body being regenerated by another body, a marking of something new.

As for a title, I still had Quan Barry’s books on the desk from yesterday’s post and picked up Asylum after my own struggle for a title went nowhere.  Flipping through, I found this line from part IX. NAPALM of “child of the enemy,” “Like all effective incendiaries / I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.”  (So, yeah, I bow down to Barry’s prowess!)  That idea of blooming went right along with my first line and the idea of those donor cells replicating, so I tweaked it to: That Which Blooms Beyond Where it is Planted.

Here is a picture of a pot of hyacinths that a friend surprised me with on my birthday.  I am transfixed by how the weight of the bloom bends the stalks.  They definitely seem intent on blooming somewhere other than where they were planted!

**I do know that a blood transfusion only supplies a healthy dose of cells and that they don’t replicate (that would be a bone marrow transplant), but I’m working with how the speaker’s mind is thinking of things.  Perhaps this is fodder for further exploration.  Yes, I’m now thinking that she definitely needs to have had a marrow transplant and I need to learn more about that.

36º ~ 2 p.m. and just a nudge above freezing, low tonight = 20º, we are lucky that it is only for one night and the warmth returns soon, a brisk wind = wind chills, not something we deal with often here

A decade ago, I was browsing the poetry shelves at The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO, one of the best independent bookstores in the country, when I came across Quan Barry’s first book Asylum.  It had a fantastic cover and had won the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, one of the top contests on my list.  I added it to the stack of books growing on the floor at my feet and eventually cracked the spine when I’d returned to my apartment in Fayetteville, AR, at the conclusion of the trip.  As I read, I remember being transformed and knowing I had found a new poet to love.  To my delight, the book was actually assigned later in a grad school class. 

In 2004, when Barry’s second book came out, again from the University of Pittsburgh Press, I ordered it ASAP.  While I love Controvertibles and see the same shimmering language and agile poet there, I confess to loving Asylum more. 

Last year, Barry’s third book, Water Puppets, came out, again from U Pitt Press, this time winning the 2010 Donal Hall Prize in Poetry.  I have been gradually reading it over the last month or so and am so happy to say that the book lives up to its predecessors. 

If you haven’t read Barry’s work, what you need to know up front is that these are political poems while also being deeply personal in the sense that they struggle with what it means to be a “person” in this chaotic, war-fraught 21st century world.  The tenor of the poems reminds me of that classic, “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forche.  While the poems are not necessarily autobiographical, they do reflect Barry’s history or having been born in Saigon and then being raised in Massachusetts.  The Vietnam War permeates the pages, but these poems are not historical relics.  Barry also touches on popular culture, often referencing popular films and current cultural figures.  Of course, there are references to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the way those poems echo the poems that center around Vietnam just blow me away.  I have to read these books slowly, as the poems will not allow me to look away from the tragedy of war.  That may be Barry’s greatest gift, her ability to take on tragedy and transform it into something with a “terrible beauty” (a la Yeats). 

As to the craft in these poems, I am swept away by Barry’s language, which dances from common diction to elevated academic phrases, and by the way the poems move on the page.  There are poems here that are composed of short lines and only a handful of stanzas, and then there are poems with long, Whitmanesque lines that run for several pages, and there are also prose poems, that form that always makes me wonder (in Barry’s case, a positive wonder).

In fact, it is one of those prose poems that gives insight into the title of the book, Water Puppets.  The prose poem is one of several toward the end of the book that are simply titled “poem.”  This one begins: 

This led me to make one of those wonderful discoveries where poetry teaches me about some new thing in this world.  I learned about the long tradition of water puppetry in Vietnam.  (Just google the phrase and check out the videos on YouTube.  Amazing.)  However, the poem isn’t simply an attempt to describe a traditional art.  Instead, it moves beyond that and leaves me gasping.  After a description of the puppets and their movements, the speaker says this:

Being Vietnamese and American, Barry is positioned to expose both sides of the war and its aftermath.  She transforms that experience into an empathy for the global community as it struggles with our current conflicts.  But before I get to that, I want to say something about the craft of the poem I’ve just quoted.  Look at the first sentence.  We first get ‘the stage’ juxtaposed against ‘knee-deep’ and the knowledge that it ‘looks solid,’ which forces us to realize it is NOT solid.  With that sentence and its sounds, its phrasing, I am hooked.  I am transported and willing to be told something new.  Also, do not underestimate the skill it takes to weave nuclear weapons into a poem about a puppet show and pull it off.

Now, here’s a poem that moves to a more global view.  “If only I had been able to form the idea of a substance that was spiritual” begins:

The poems in this book open up all of the complicated relationships between people, poems that question how we justify violence, not only against each other in a formal war, but also against the flora and the fauna and the planet itself (the cover photo is of either an oil derrick or a natural gas derrick burning off some excess).  The long poem “Meditations” takes us through the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, the release of Nelson Mandela, persecutions in China, back to Vietnam, to Haiti and Afghanistan, and elsewhere while the speaker engages with a group of people clearly having some culture shock.  Another long poem, although with a completely different form, “History,” exposes the male gaze / female object relationship and openly discusses how this can’t help but effect a woman’s sexuality.  And then, there is this very short poem, which I will quote here in its entirety.

Now, there’s no one I’m praying to forget (although I remember those times in my life vividly); however, that first part of the prayer “Make me a better person” seems to be what the speaker grapples with throughout the book.  It echoes how I felt after reading almost every single poem in the book, and that feeling provided the hope to balance the tragedy exposed in many of the poems. 

Support a Poet / Poetry
Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today
Water Puppets
Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

49º ~ the abnormal highs have taken leave of us and we return to the 40s and 50s, still quite nice for January, heavy gray overcast sky today

Sometimes, when I’m not reading or writing, I make collages.  Here are four recent attempts.