50º ~ doom and gloom skies, although nice temps ~ to remain this way all night and into the morning, then threat of thunderstorms, lightning, and tornadoes as we plummet to 26 during the day

AWP, AWP, AWP, how you are on the mind today.  I’ve been busy trying to get all my classes outfitted for the week and in shape so that I won’t feel an onslaught when I return.  I do what I can, although I know it is a bit futile. 

This year, the pre-conference talk of panels and speakers is overshadowed by THE STORM.

http://www.weather.com/

See where they Y is on “Oklahoma City”?  For anyone not in the know, Little Rock is just a bit to the right of that, and I’m flying from LR to Dallas, which is just beneath the white & pink under “Oklahoma City,” and then on to DC.  DC looks poised to be on the southern fringes as well.  Every report I’ve checked about my airports lists WIND as a delaying factor as we will be on the edge of the front that will be causing such grief to my writer friends north and northeast of me. 

What a mess.  I am not happy about this since I count on being able to connect with folks in person at the conference who I might only see online without it.  I am not happy about this as it has caused a great deal of stress for people I care deeply about. 

So, I will hope that the predictions become more tame in the next 12 – 24 hours and that everyone who is destined for DC has safe travel if not swift.

38º ~ bright sun, slight breeze, on our way to the 60s today ~ wahoo

I started today with the happy, happy, joy, joy of recent acceptances and publications.  Given that the poem of mine selected by Jonathon Williams and Ash Bowen for Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, was one of my cautionary/haunting/fairy tales about a girl from the Midwest, I began my session today by reading over all five of the poems I’ve drafted in that series.
Cautionary Tale for Girls in Love with Fire (in Two Weeks)
Haunting Tale for Girls Embraced by Snow
Fairy Tale for Drowned Girls
Fairy Tale for Girls Enthralled by the Storm
Fairy Tale for Girls Who Seek to Meet the Horizon

After reading through these poems, I spent some time brainstorming other Midwestern landscape phenomena that might fit the series, but nothing was happening there.

Then, I remembered what I remarked in the last post, that both of the poems accepted by Anti- were first drafted using inspiration cards. (Read about these cards here.)  For anyone keeping score at home, they took “Backdrop for an Archetypal Bloodline” and “Urban Archaeology: Reading the Ruins.”  Given this bit of good news, I opened up my folder of cards and flipped through.  It turns out that once I’ve gotten a poem out of a card, it loses a certain appeal.  Then, I realized that there were four different cards that interested me and that maybe I could find a way to use a little bit from each one.  So, I set the four cards out in a square.

I started in my journal with the words from the blue card: “An ancient wind” and “making heartache sound transcendent.”  I also liked the words on the yellow card:  “trying to reclaim language” and “Stamped by history.”  The red card says “Prepare to be dazzled by” and “gadgets” and “grace and personality.”  The green card says “the industrial Midwest” and “a foreign landscape of small acreages.”  This time around, I used a bit of language from each card and at least one image from each of the four cards.  I found that having a multitude of choices kept me going.

In some ways it was a bit of an aimless draft at first because I didn’t have the structure of the fairy tale, that narrative, that I’d been working with most recently to hold up the draft.  Really, I was going with gut instinct and collecting lines along the way.  This may be the nature of the lyric poem, I suppose, but sometimes even when I work on a lyric poem, I have a stronger sense of theme, for lack of a better word.

For some reason, the first lines ended up as a tercet and a couplet, so I kept that up.  After I got four stanzas, I wanted a title to help guide the poem.  That’s where the green card game back into play, as the title is currently “The Mythos of the Industrial Midwest” and boy that didn’t come easy.  I must have tried on five or six titles.  The first one I tried I thought was fabulous but it drove the draft to a standstill b/c it didn’t fit the images I was working with.  I’ll save that for another day perhaps. 

As for the images, here’s the score on which ones I used.   Green card: images of clockworks, blueprints, and Depression glass.  Red card: another clock and the structure of a sign attached to a building.  Blue card: the moth and the map.  Yellow card: the bridge and the weighing receptacle from the scale with the money in it.

Here are the opening lines as they stand right now:

Facing another season of ancient winds,
the echo in the bridge piers making heartache
sound transcendent, I stand here trying

We will see where things go in the round of revisions.  As always, thanks for reading, commenting, and being supportive of the journey.

Oh, and if anyone wants the older cards I’m not using anymore, leave me a message and I’ll be glad to send them on to you, as I’m always making more of these.

37º ~ solid gray skies today, the sun well-hidden, slight breezes in the branches, a threat of rain

I’ve been reading Kelli Russell Agodon’s blog Book of Kells for so long that I no longer remember how I first “met” her.  I do know that I was lucky enough to be able to follow the entire journey of Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, from the post about winning the White Pine Press Poetry Prize to the post about cover art, and finally the finished product.  I ordered my copy directly from Kelli so I could have it signed, and she even included a drawing of a kangaroo, just for me. 

I was remiss in not reading this book the second it arrived, but that’s the joy of books; they wait and they are patient.

The poems in this collection are brave and brazen, addressing love and loss, questioning God and mortals alike, mixing Dickinson, Neruda, Einstein, and Alice from Wonderland with the deftness of a practiced mixologist.  Here we have a speaker adrift in a world that often feels directionless, a speaker who desires nothing more than connection and yet finds that connection difficult because of the very fact that she is a poet: “the broken ones become artists,” says the father in “Letter to a Past Life.” 

The father is a key figure woven throughout the book, a figure who influences the speaker when young and challenges the speaker’s belief when he dies.  In “Letter to a Companion Star” we see the speaker in the hospital and overhear the doctor.  There is an epigraph from National Geographic about the Hourglass Nebula.  The poem begins, “When the doctor said, / We’re only delaying death, // I forgot words and let nebulae / answer.” 

Throughout the book, the speaker (who is unmistakably the same speaker throughout) makes declarative statements in an attempt to define herself.

In the opening poem, “Another Empty Window Dipped in Milk,” she states:
“Trust me, it’s not bitterness I carry

…..I like to call my ribcage.”

In “Selected Love Letters I’m Still Trying to Write,” she claims:
“I am the handwriting of a car crash,
bent metal and adrenalin-filled.”

In “Quiet Collapse in the Dharma Shop,” we are told:
“I celebrate small things
…….–apples, beetles, faith—“

I love that ‘faith’ is a ‘small thing’ here.  Throughout the book, Kelli manages to take the ordinary moments of a woman’s life and transform them into the extraordinary, the special, the saved.  She is unafraid to tell the truth about what it means to be a poet as well as a mother, daughter, wife, and lover, and how sometimes those worlds don’t always mesh.

Aside from the deft handling of this subject matter, the book is a delight of language.  There are puns and anagrams and metaphors galore.  There is music in the lines and specificity in each description.  This is definitely a book to be read aloud and savored.

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Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room
Kelli Russell Agodon
White Pine Press, 2010

35º ~ rain in the early hours, just gray and heavy skies now ~ near calm in the branches

Luke Johnson is a fine young poet who I’ve come to know solely through the blog-o-sphere.  I began following his blog, Proof of Blog, several years ago and have found a kinship in Luke’s poetry as well. 

Just about a week ago, Luke’s first book, After the Ark, hit the shelves of bookstores and the desk of the Kangaroo.  As many of you know, I’ve been reading it all week.  A complex elegy on a mother’s death, this is a book that must be read slowly, and given recent conversations about reading straight through or dipping in and out (here and here), I would advocate for reading this one front to back, as the progression of the speaker seems paramount to experiencing the book as a whole.

The speaker throughout the book is the son of two ministers, and in the acknowledgments, Luke thanks his parents for “their love, their bookcases, and their level-headed pulpits,” identifying them both as reverends.  So, the reader assumes the close confessional nature of the poems.  The book is divided into three untitled sections, with each section being introduced by a triolet.  I’m in awe of this tactic, as the triolet is not often connected with funereal themes in my mind.  However, these three triolets do a fine job of setting the tone for each section. 

The first, “Nor’easter,” has as it’s second and final line, “the highway buried, sky a grave.”  And we begin, then, with an image of death.  The poems in the first section, take the reader through the illness of the mother, memories of youth, memories of a split in the parent’s marriage that was healed, and the death; however, not in chronological order.  This circular time line is crucial to the entire book, as it mimics the fluidity of time during a long illness, a death, and the aftermath.  We begin with “Moving Day,” a poem filled with ordinary domestic images as the speaker clears away “boxes of sermons / collected in her study” … “prayers ready / to be gathered and stored away.”  He notes “the weight of her words” and that weight filters through every poem in the rest of the book.

The second section is formally interesting as well as being filled with more poems attempting to reconcile the grief of the son.  There is the triolet and then a series of sonnets.  There are nine sonnets, but between the fifth and the sixth is one that is purposely unfinished, “Box Kite” at only eight lines.  That gaping space where the sextet is supposed to be becomes the formal metaphor for the grave and the unsayable fact of grief.  The speaker of these poems has much to reconcile: his mother’s death, his own residual anger with her over a fracture in the parent’s marriage, his position as the child of two ministers, how to help his father cope, and how to move through the world now as a motherless son.  In “Vulture Tree,” the sonnet opens “We were never so holy, and apples / in the ministers’ orchard rot the same.”  Of all professions, perhaps we believe ministers, and by extension their families, most capable of dealing with the great tragedies of life, and yet, these poems reveal that human nature is human nature no matter a person’s profession or calling. 

Finally, in the third section, the poems become wider, deeper, more exploratory as the speaker moves out into the world after the death.  The poem “Manse” begins “It might be easier to blame the dead / for disrepair… .”  This honest admission floors me as it also hints at the ease with which we often blame our parents for our own faults left unrepaired.  The speaker, though, resists this, still searching for a way to make sense of human nature.  The section and the book conclude with the title poem “After the Ark,” which weaves together the religious questions and the familial ones that have embedded themselves throughout the book.  In this poem, the speaker contemplates the Ark story, and how “scores of sinners” … “would’ve drowned in what my mother showed me // of God’s love, the ever-lasting compassion / too definite / to be human… .”  He struggles with this:  “how // my mother left my father and I still don’t know / how to forgive her, if I need to — Genesis // missed these unpaid fares… .”  The poem ends with a devastatingly true couplet:

I applaud Luke’s generous work for managing to be both religious and domestic, without being high-handed or overly sentimental.  Above all this book is an honest account of difficult love.

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After the Ark
Luke Johnson
NYQ Books, 2011