My wonderful and talented friend, Anne Greenwood, is an artist and agreed to create a logo for me based on the antique brooch of the kangaroo that I bought last year. The kangaroo has since been named ‘Earnestine’ in honor of my earnest nature. And now, she lives on in my new logo, from which I’ve just designed and ordered new business cards. They should arrive just in time for AWP, woo hoo. But now, the star of the show:
45º ~ super sun that I bow down to for bring back the ‘normal’ range of temps, snow still in the shadow places, but melting fast
When I took the latest issue of The Writer’s Chronicle out of the mailbox this past week, I teared up a bit to see Lucille Clifton‘s face gracing the cover. Her passing leaves a hole in the poetry world and in my world. I cannot claim to have known her well; our meeting was brief and lasted only a few precious days back in 1993 or 1994. But anyone who knew her, knows her spirit is/was huge. I felt welcomed by her presence and she offered such great advice about my work at that early, early age. Her poem “won’t you celebrate with me” has gotten me through some of the worst times.
In her life, “Ms. Lucille” faced many hardships; this poem always reminded me of the grace with which she faced those difficult times and gave me a model. Now I see her theme goes on and expands with her death. While she has passed from this earthly life, she still beat all those things that “tried to kill [her];” she passed on her own terms, it seems to me. Still showing me an admirable way for myself, still giving.
But, back to the magazine. It contains an interview between Remica L. Bingham-Risher and Lucille Clifton, conducted in 2006 and 2007. Dear Reader, I hope you will read the whole interview, but here are the bits that jumped out at me.
Clifton’s parents were both avid readers, and while her father couldn’t write, he, and her mother, surrounded her with words from her infancy. Clifton says, in the interview, “I just like to read things that help me to know and try to understand the world.” Me, too, and that’s the kind of poetry I love to read and that I want to write, a poetry that helps the reader ‘to know and understand the world,” to make sense of the often senseless world we live in.
I laughed when Clifton explained why she lost her full-ride to Howard University. “I felt no reason to know chemicals. I loved writing, but I was wild and young, and I didn’t see why I had to know about chemicals. I did very badly in Chemistry…,” she says. Hear, Hear!
One of the reasons I admire Clifton’s work so much is that each poem is a straight shot of the TRUTH, no matter how hard that truth might be to say. When asked about how her family reacts to these difficult poems, including one where the speaker confesses having tried to abort her daughter, Clifton is resolute. She says, “I never tell anything but the truth. My daughter knows that I tried to get rid of her.” Wow. Clifton understands how secrets fester and scar, how brave to be so open with the world.
Finally, the end of the interview made me a bit more sad. The topic of the Pulitzer Prize comes up and the fact that Clifton was a two-time nominee. The interviewer, Bingham, asks, after naming a long list of awards Clifton had won, “Do you think you’ve managed to become ‘extraordinary’ yet?” Clifton answers no because she has never won the Pulitzer. Expanding on that, she admits that she would like to win the Pulitzer but doesn’t need it. She says, “After some time, you want to feel validated for your work. I am very much validated by my readers; I just want to feel validated by my peers. Because you know how much you have doubts. For a long time, I was the ‘Grandma Moses’ of the bunch because I wasn’t educated in that way. So I would like to feel that I have their respect.”
Oh, wow. That certainly puts my doubts in their place and reminds me that those doubts are all a part of living the writing life and even winning nearly every major award there is to win won’t put them to rest. Bless Ms. Lucille for another lesson, another passing on of wisdom hard-earned.
Thanks to Josh’s comment from my process notes earlier today, I thought I’d walk y’all through one random word bank experience that resulted in a poem that has since been published, “Late Aubade.”
First: I began with Pablo Neruda’s book Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, translated by Stephen Mitchell. Neruda’s word choices are divine, and Mitchell does a fabulous job holding true to that in translation as far as I’ve been told. (I took French.) I flipped through some of my favorite poems (the book is well dog-eared) and jotted down lists of words that jumped out at me. Then, I numbered the words. Here’s the page from my journal.
After I had the list, I went to Random.org and used their random number generator. I created pairs of words based on the roll of the dice, so to speak. Once I had a healthy number of pairs, lines began to form. The part that’s a bit hard for me is to really keep the pairs random and not to force things. If I force things, the draft usually ends up stunted. There’s something about the random smashing together of words that sparks lines in my head. Here’s that page from the journal.
You’ll see that the second word pair is ‘undulate’ and ‘foxes,’ if you can read that mess. I was probably ready to start drafting right then, but I kept listing the pairs and more sparks resulted. The first three lines I have here in the journal are:
The foxes undulate
through the ditches filled with
cattails dense and wounded.
You might notice that ‘cattails’ came up in two different pairs, once with ‘dense’ and once with ‘wounded.’ Having words come up more than once used to bug me, but that’s the nature of randomness, and it worked out well in this poem. Of course, everything gets fine-tuned in revision, so it’s all about mindset at this point.
Finally, I was so inspired that I went right to the computer. Usually, I draft more lines than this in the journal first. To see the resulting poem, which went through several revisions, please go to the Connotation Press site and read, “Late Aubade.” You have to scroll to the bottom; it’s the last poem on the page.
Thanks again, Dear Readers, just for being out there.
Today has been a gift of drafting, and I actually completed two drafts in the last hour, something quite rare for me. Again, I’ve gone to bed thinking about poetry. Erin over at Being Poetry has been writing about staying focused and I feel a kinship to what she wrote recently about simply thinking about writing even when she wasn’t writing as a way to focus. She says it better here.
When one of the cats woke me up at 3 a.m. and left me unable to get back to sleep, I started thinking about poetry some more and lines began appearing. Miraculously, I remembered them when I woke up (after drifting back to sleep around 3:30). However, once I put them down, I realized they had no spark in the light of day. So, I turned to creating a word bank and used Luke Johnson’s new book, After the Ark. I’ve read the first of three sections and am blown away. Will post about it soon. In any case, I scanned the poems I’d already read and noted down the strongest words, working up to about 55 words. Then, I used Random.org to generate random couplings and wouldn’t you know it, a poem began to show itself after about six pairings. If you know Luke’s work (and if you don’t, go read it now), you know that there is a lot of religion going on in there, so I had some power-packed words to begin with. There are also lots of down-to-earth domestic words as well. I ended up with a poem I’m unsure of but that I’m calling “Prophecy” until something better comes along. The first tercet is: “Soon the city will learn to live / crowned by dangers, / the air marked by blackbirds,” And no, the blackbirds don’t fall from the sky, even though that epic flock death at New Year’s happened just a hundred miles from here.
Well, “Prophecy” slid out onto the page pretty quickly and yet I felt like I had more to give today. “Prophecy” also ended one notebook and I got to get out a new one! Woo Hoo!
Yesterday, I received some really great feedback on “Cautionary Tale for Girls in Love with Fire.” I have my three fairy tale poems from last fall, but I knew they weren’t quite right. I just couldn’t find the final tweak to set them straight. It turns out I was over-writing the endings. Jeez…how long have I been doing this and I’m still making beginner mistakes! I beat myself up for a minute and then took the lesson in stride. I was able to look at all three poems this morning and see the revision shimmering there, waiting for me. With that good vibe feeling, I decided to try for another one this morning. I opened up the fresh notebook and thought about what other prairie element I could tackle (I’ve done Fire, Blizzard, and Lake). It came to me suddenly: “Fairy Tale for Girls Enthralled by the Storm.”
Here’s a picture of the process.
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| If you can read these words, please don’t steal them! |
I started in the journal on the page before the one pictured. I wrote three lines of landscape description and found myself off track. Then, I remembered that the others all start with ‘the girl,’ so I started with her again. “Once there was a girl who loved the prairie wind,” and I was off and running. I got about half of the poem into the journal and then switched to the computer for the rest. (You can see Luke’s book at the top of the picture as well.)
So there you have it, Dear Reader, another day of drafting that I get to put in the Win Column! Thanks for reading and commenting and following the process.
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| My reading chair on the deck. |
I hadn’t planned today to be a day of links, but that’s what’s happened. Three links today, but they are mighty links.
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I’ve mentioned Nic Sebastian’s blog/project Whale Sound before. Poets, editors, readers can all submit any poem that has been previously published online. If a poem is chosen, Nic produces a podcast of her interpretation. The voice alone is to die for, but the careful handling of the poems is a close second. In any case, Monday, Joshua Robbins’ poem “Theodicy” was the feature. Do yourself a favor and listen to the poem right now.
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The editors of one of my favorite online journals, Linebreak, are embarking on a lightning fast foray into the world of producing a book of poetry for e-readers, Two Weeks: A Digital Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Here’s a bit from the announcement:
They are accepting submissions until January 19 and will sell the anthology they create on the 25th. Holy Lightspeed Turnaround, Batman!
I had my first look at a book of Emily Dickinson poems on an e-reader over the holidays. I was so sad to see that several of the line breaks in each poem had been destroyed, and she has some famously short lines. One reason I haven’t purchased an e-reader is that I read so much poetry and so little is available in e-format. Now that I see how it is being presented, I’m doubly glad not to have bought one yet.
Click here for the announcement.
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Finally, like most of the nation, I’ve been struggling to make sense of the shooting in Tucson. The fact that the shooter had attended the area community college and had been expelled due to mental instability struck home with me, especially when commentators began to say that the college should have done more (we heard this same refrain of Virginia Tech, so it isn’t limited to cc’s).
I’m thankful this morning for fellow poet and cc instructor/administrator, Kristin Berkey-Abbott’s post about the subject. I hope you’ll read it and think it over.
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We’re finally going to start the new semester, two days late due to snow and ice conditions. I find I’m ready to rise to the challenge again. Onward.
Take care and tell the ones you love how much they matter.
The official snow total from the backyard of the Kangaroo is 5 1/4 inches. It’s a near perfect snow as well. No wind, no drifts. No ice on the front end or the back end of the storm and snow wet and sticky enough for building any decent snowperson or hurling any snowball.
It’s been a bit of a hodge-podge morning, since we knew before going to bed last night that there would be no school today. The first snowflake touched down at 2 p.m. yesterday and the school district announced the closure at 5 p.m. Where the K-12 schools go, mine usually follows, so there was much rejoicing in the land.
I spent some time on reading blogs this morning and then was suddenly inspired to hit my poems in progress and spent a good hour or two revising. There were several poems sitting there right on the edge of feeling “ready.” I don’t say “finished” until it’s been a good two years of so! In any case, I polished up four of the poems to a state where I think they can go out in the February round of submissions and I read and re-read the remainder until I couldn’t stomach it any longer. Those will have to sit some more.
As an intermission, I went out and swept all the snow from the two cars and cleared the porch, sidewalk, deck, and driveway. Since it is such a rarity for us, I’d forgotten how snow can quiet a neighborhood (not many kids in our neck of the woods). The snow was deceptively easy to move, and only now am I feeling it in my arms, shoulders and back. Here’s a pretty picture of our backyard, untrespassed upon. (Not sure you can see it, but back by the fence, there’s a tipped over red wheelbarrow, upon which so much depends.)
Back at the desk, I realized I had two more folders out that needed attention. These were folders for two book publishers who accept unsolicited manuscripts during January. No contest fee! (No award beyond royalties either.) Bless their hearts for accepting manuscripts online ~ no loose ends of having to wait to slide over to the post office tomorrow. I started to send the manuscript to one more contest when I discovered they were accepting online submissions; however, as I went through the steps, I realized they hadn’t given clear directions about payment. It appears I’ll have to send in my check no matter what (rather than be able to pay online), so I decided to just send the whole thing together to avoid confusion. That will have to wait another day or two.
While I’m not up for sliding to the post office, the mail carrier did manage to stop by on schedule. Go USPS! I only note this because, the bounty of the mail box included my signed copy of After the Ark by Luke Johnson…hot off the presses people!
And now, since I need a bit of a break from the desk, and today was supposed to be the first day of classes and I’m all prepped for that, I suppose I’ll adjourn to the couch and get in a few hours with my all-time favorite detective, Lenny Briscoe (RIP Jerry Orbach), on Law & Order. I’m sure there will be freshly popped popcorn (from the stovetop not the microwave!) and maybe some pomegranate tea. The work of teaching will have to wait for better traveling conditions.
Given that my experiment with doing a smaller number of poetry submissions each Monday didn’t really pan out last semester, I’m starting this semester off with a big effort. Today, I submitted to 13 journals, using three groups of four poems each. The task was made easier by the work I did last Monday when I went through each poem with a fine-tooth comb and sorted them into groups I thought worked well as mini-manuscripts. I only did a wee bit of tinkering on two poems today and the rest were ‘shovel-ready.’ 🙂
I’m still wishing for the sorting hat (see Monday), as the first part of the day was taken up with going over my spreadsheet, checking guidelines, and making the final decision on which poems might fit where. I know it’s still a subjective game, but I do believe that knowing the journals well helps put the odds in my favor.
Of the 13 journals, eight had online submission capabilities (two required small fees, $1.75 and $3.00) and five were postal only. Either way is fine with me, although I have to admit to liking the ease of the online submission, and I don’t begrudge the small fees at all.
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| Pick Me! Pick Me! |
This clears the desk for a bit of the more strenuous work this week: revising some more of my fall 2010 poems. I’m going through a bit of a low concerning these. For some reason, I’m not feeling confident about very many of them. I’m guessing this is because the table of contents in the new manuscript has stabilized and I’m spinning my wheels during the transition to whatever’s coming next. I need to remind myself that it’s all part of the process, and while I might be slow, I’m steady as she goes.
Last month, I was fortunate to exchange books with Kathleen Kirk, who blogs at Wait! I Have a Blog?! Kathleen has become a friend via the blog-o-sphere, for which I am thankful. Kathleen works in a used bookstore in Normal, IL and shares my sensibilities as a Midwestern poet at heart. It turns out we are also both collagers as well, she making bookmarks that put to shame my cards.
When I received two of her chapbooks, Selected Roles and Broken Sonnets, I rushed to read the first and have savored the second more slowly. Selected Roles contains a wonderful group of poems based on Kathleen’s experience as a professional actor in Chicago and includes “lyric and prose poems in the voices of various women and one male animal” from iconic plays/TV shows/stories. The book is arranged, cleverly, like a play with a prologue, five acts, an epilogue, and program notes at the end. I particularly liked the program notes as the poet explained the inspiration for the poems, often mentioning specific productions.
Here’s the opening of the first poem in Act I, “Miranda,” one of my favorite Shakespeare characters.
I love that clause at the end, so sly.
With that taste, I’ll move on to Broken Sonnets, which I just finished this morning, and I’m still processing. True to the title, the book is made of lyric poems that sometimes fall a bit short of the official sonnet definition, but are really close. In fact, one of the strengths of the book, I think, is the way Kathleen plays with this form. Some of the sonnets are in traditional stanzas, but there are others in couplets, in varied stanzas, or with no stanzas at all, and there is even one prose sonnet.
In this book, published three years after Selected Roles, the subject matter shifts to the more deeply personal, love, birth, and death, all presented in quite an intimate way. While I felt a bit voyeuristic when reading these poems, it was not in a bad way. I felt like I could walk into Kathleen’s kitchen and pick up the threads of her life. I have no idea how TRUE to life these poems are, but they are TRUE to the feeling of life as I know it, which is all that matters.
In “Roof Leak, Mima Calls,” the speaker’s husband receives a call from his mother who has been diagnosed with cancer. However, we are led most gently to this painful moment. The poem begins:
I love “their social order” as a way to describe shingles, and perhaps I’m drawn so much to the opening of this poem because I spent a bit of time myself helping shingle houses when I was a kid.
I don’t want to give away too much more of the book, but trust me when I say that you should read it. To get you going, Dear Reader, I’ll leave you with one full sonnet.
Support Poetry
Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today
Broken Sonnets
Finishing Line Press, 2009
39º ~ good, strong sun ~ the wind is stronger today and will get stronger still as a cold front moves in tomorrow, but for today: 60º
Today is a special day; today I turn 40! In fact, I’ve been 40 for nearly an hour. (Many thanks to all who have left good wishes on Facebook!)
Each year, my dad calls around 7 a.m. to sing to me. When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate the wake-up call (and neither did my college roomates 🙂 ), but now that I’m usually up and moving around by this time in the morning, I love it! Today, he reported that it was about 40 degrees warmer in Waterloo than it was on the morning of my birth. I’m a caesarean baby, as are my two older sisters, so the moment of my birth was chosen and lacked any element of surprise or drama. Still, there was no predicting the Iowa winter, and everyone in my family continues to comment about that cold, cold day when celebrating my birthday. In honor of my 40th year, Arkansas is ready to join the party with a cold front tomorrow that may bring snow on Sunday and highs that will stay below freezing for the rest of the week. We start classes on Monday so it should be interesting. Oh, and yes, I’m the instructor who says “cold? cold? you don’t know cold!” to my Southern students.
Now, to poetry. I was really ready to get back to drafting today after a week of prepping for classes. As I’m trying to make a habit, last night as I was going to bed, I reminded myself that today I would draft a poem. I remembered then that Lucille Clifton had once told me that she wrote herself a birthday poem every year. While I didn’t get out of bed to find the one I remembered, I did start thinking about how I might go about doing that. First, I thought vaguely about Jimmy Buffett’s song “A Pirate Looks at Forty” and thought I might play with the title. Then, I drifted to Charles Wright’s “1975,” which seems to be his own birthday poem for 40, but I’ve never verified that. The poem appears in Country Music, one of my favorite books. When the lines started forming in my head, I made myself stop, since I was too tired to get up and write them down, and I didn’t want them to be lost. (I know this sounds a bit crazy.)
In any case, this morning I cleared the desk of everything except my journal, turned on the classical music (I can’t write with lyrics in the background), and took up my pen. Then, I jumped up and got the Clifton poem from the shelf. The poem I’d remembered was “climbing” and it appears in The Book of Light, which is always in my top 10 when asked to list my favorite books. I read “climbing” several times. Then, I drafted a few weak lines in my journal. I have always been drawn to Charles Wright’s repetition of the phrase “Year of the …” in “1975” and I started a few lines with “Year I (verb).” Getting a bit strangled at one point, I found the Jimmy Buffett song on YouTube and got a bit lost in that. After listening, I knew I couldn’t use the song as a jumping off point, but it did energize me to go back to the poem.
There was a lot of puttering and for me a lot of shifting of stanzas. Most days when I draft, the initial draft comes out in a certain order that remains fairly stable. Today, I was all over the place and a bit frustrated at first. However, once I got some lines on the computer and started shifting things around and broke loose from the order that had appeared in my journal, the poem sort of clicked. For now, it is “A Poet Faces Forty” and begins this way: “Year I bless this body, ripe / as a peach in July, no sharp / and souring edges protruding.” Who knows where it will go in the process of revision, but for now, I can chalk up ONE poem for ONE week in 2011. Woo Hoo!
33º ~ bright sun beginning to filter through the trees behind my left shoulder as morning enters its second hour ~ the tiniest of breezes that requires a moment of concentrated watching to discover
Next week classes begin for me, and this week has been filled with preparation. I’m teaching a new class this time around: Intro to Poetry, and online at that. So, my comp and world lit classes nearly prepped themselves after years and years of fine tuning. Intro to Poetry, that’s a different story. Lots of thinking and hesitation going on at the moment, and I have to remind myself that this will be a trial run, that I’ll find things in my plan that work and things that don’t, that I must be kind to myself about all of this. I am proud, however, that I’ve still managed to do something with poetry every day and that I’m not quite as anxious as I’ve been in semesters past during this week of ramping up.
All that leads to today’s post, the title of which comes from Joshua Robbins’ post on Little Epic Against Oblivion today. Josh and I have become poetry friends over the last year or so, ever since he published one of my poems in GRIST (a great journal…go out and get you a copy!). I read LEAO religiously because the posts are honest and helpful, because the posts often include individual poems with comments that lead me to new poets or remind me of old favorites, and because I feel a kinship there. Recently, because J. and I are going through the same contest submission emotions, I sent J. a gift in the mail, and he writes about that today, along with other gifts from the “online poetry communal pool.”
Some writers are lucky to live in major metropolitan areas or cities with lively MFA/PhD readings. Others of us live in smaller cities/towns/rural areas and we have to make a writing life happen there if we want one at all. I must admit that Little Rock has come a long way in hosting readings lately; however, when I first moved here I felt the absence of that lively presence (which could have been more my fault than the city’s). Regardless, I began this blog as a place to explore the life of writing, to talk honestly about the emotions of rejection and acceptance, and to try and find a community of like-minded people. Today, I can say that I’ve received all of that and more. While connecting online isn’t the same as meeting face to face in the pool, it has been a life-saver for me. Of Josh’s options at the end of his post, I choose ‘water wings’ to describe the role you all play, Dear Readers, in keeping me afloat. For that I am grateful.
PS: For readers old and new, when I began this blog, I vowed that I would not link/promote anyone/any book/any journal that I did not feel strongly about in the positive. I am not a critic and I hope I am not a schmoozer in the worst sense. In the end, I mean to be earnest each and every time I post.