82 blissful, sunny breezy deg ~ near perfect summer conditions

First, before we get to REVISION, the results of my internet rambling this morning: a few links for you.

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I’m curiously drawn in by this visual description of Chopin’s Nocture, Opus 27 #2.  I’m not skilled in music, but I did take several music classes in college, studied piano and flute as a girl, so I get the idea of intervals that this project uses.  I wonder if there is some way to diagram a poem this way?

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This one has been around the blogs lately, but if you haven’t checked it out, it’s worth it for a laugh.  SlushPile Hell is a blog where a “grumpy agent” posts an excerpt from a query letter that failed and then his lovely, sarcastic remark.

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I’ve been reading Jim Brock’s blog, God’s & Money, for a few months now.  Today’s post concerns applying for a Florida Arts fellowship and also contains some musings on the NEA fellowships.  It’s a great straight-forward post, but it’s the ending that got me laughing in agreement.  Brock writes, “And what of the usual of not getting the money?  I always eagerly read the list of fellowship grantees, and yes, I am most often Miss Congeniality, really happy for these poets because we so seldom get this kind of recognition, and sometimes I am Susan Lucci, wanting to kick the winner in the groin all the while I smile bravely.”  Hee Hee.  I’m usually Susan Lucci, especially in the book contests, and I totally agree with this statement.

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Oh, I don’t have the link or remember which blog it was on, but yesterday I read a post in which the author complained a bit about the use of “Dear Reader” in blog posts, after having watched Julie and Julia and noticing its use there. It niggled at me a bit, since I do often use this construction.  However, I stand by my use because when I do include that direct address, it happens naturally and is heartfelt.  A bit too sentimental, Dear Gentle Readers?  So be it. 

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And now to the meatier bit here, my revision process has begun.  A bit delayed by health issues, but begun nevertheless.  As many of you know, I spent two weeks in June doing a draft-a-day.  I ended up with 12 successful and complete drafts.  A great result…much self-congratulation ensued.  Now, the work of revision begins.  I read over all of the drafts yesterday and found some of them weaker with more soft spots than I remembered during the rush of creation.  When I began the project I hadn’t really thought about what would happen after.  It’s a bit more daunting to have a dozen drafts needing attention, rather than my normal two or three that might be waiting for help.  I did a quick shuffle and piled them from “best” to “worst” based on yesterday’s read.  However, nothing jumped right out in terms of revision.  I think I’ll have to simply select one poem and cull it from the herd.

I must admit that I was not feeling in the revision mood this morning.  However, two bloggers have come to my rescue.  Fiction writer, Danielle Newton has a post up about working on revising her novel.  Just reading about her process provided some much needed motivation.  Also,  Joanie Strangeland has a new post that complements an earlier one with some notes for revisions.  If nothing else, this is a tangible place to start.  Many thanks to both Danielle and Joanie for taking the time to blog and share their experiences!

80 deg ~ mostly sunny, a good bit of a breeze

Last week I reported on an acceptance from Glass: A Journal of Poetry and how the editors really helped me find the finishing touch for this poem.  In the wonder that is the digital age, the poem, “Flood Plain,” is now available!  This is the 7th issue from this journal (Volume 3: Issue 1, technically), and I’m really impressed with the poems and the layout.  I like that the contents remain visible on the margins so you don’t have to use the back button to get to the next poem.  Hope you’ll check it out.

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As for the family business, I may have blogged about this before, but if so, I’ve lost track.  In some weird twist of fate, I have two cousins (one maternal and one paternal) who also became bona fide writers.  I say this is a twist of fate because we do not come from a long line of literary families.  We are distinctly middle and working class folks who were born in smallish cities in the Midwest.  We come from grandparents who were farmers, carpenters, electricians, etc.  We come from parents who moved off the farm and into the business world that supports farmers.

All this surfaced again today because I ran across my cousin, Ryan Longhorn’s blog.  Ryan and I had lost touch, as he is a bit younger than me and I left Iowa while he was still in junior high, but we recently found each other again on Facebook.  I’ve know about Ryan’s fiction writing for about ten years, but it’s been great to start a bit of a dialogue with him again.  He has a horror story about agents and NY publishing houses, but that’s his story to tell.  For now, here’s his blog, Universal Acid.  I have to warn you, Dear Gentle Readers, that Ryan is in no way the prim and proper Blogger that I am.  He’s letting it all hang out…as we used to say, back in the day. 

My other cos. is Marta Ferguson, a poet, a sci-fi writer, and an editor.  Marta and I are closer in age and it was Marta who offered me a room in her house in Columbia, MO the year that I left my professional life and decided to apply to graduate school.  Marta’s chapbook, Mustang Sally Pays Her Debt to Wilson Picket, is available from Main Street Rag and is definitely worth the read!  Again, a bit less prim and proper than me, I admire Marta’s willingness to tangle with many of the issues I might shy away from in my own work.  By the way, Marta does poetry manuscript consultations through her editorial business Wordhound, if any of you are interested.  She definitely helped me get a handle on Blood Almanac before I sent it out into the world.

So, as the song goes, “We are family!”  I wonder if some future grad student might someday write a paper on our family ties and what literature we made of it.  I’ll leave you with this diagram from the University of Manitoba that details how to count cousins.

88 deg ~ full sun, almost no breeze at all

Last night saw the good news email striking again.  Glass: A Journal of Poetry accepted the poem “Flood Plain.”  What’s interesting is that this is the one poem that I attempted to write to fill a spot in my current manuscript.  I’ve written on this blog in the past about being in awe of people who can write toward a project or know that they need four more poems for this section and 2 for that.  In any case, this is a poem that I felt I needed to write for a section of my manuscript to be complete, but it has not come easily.  I’ve always loved the poem, but I kept fiddling with it over the last two years, knowing something wasn’t quite right.  Luckily, Holly Burnside and Anthony Frame, the editors of Glass, put their fingers right on the problem and suggested a revision that does wonders for the poem.  Once again, I am indebted to the heroic actions of underpaid and underpraised editors who do what they do simply for the sake of poetry.

Way back in the day when I first started submitting, there were very few, if any, journals that did business by email.  Instead, everything was stuffing envelopes and paying postage and watching the mailbox.  Part of this pattern meant that acceptances and rejections arrived at a certain time of the day that was fairly reliable.  A poet could gird herself for the thin envelope of rejection and do a little dance of joy when a fat letter arrived with a contract inside.  Now, emails arrive at any time of day or night, and while I’m happy to have the news in a more timely fashion and without the payment of postage, a small part of me misses those expectation-filled walks to the mailbox as fewer and fewer journals send word by post any longer.

At this point, I have the fewest poems in the past three years out in circulation.  Luckily, this is because many of them were accepted, although few were sidelined along the way…benchwarmers waiting for me to take another look and see if I can get them fit enough for the first string.  This is all the incentive I need to head into my revision process on the drafts I completed just recently.

91 deg at 10:15 a.m ~ mostly sunny, very little breeze to speak of, a thunderstorm last night that brought some rain

Day Fourteen: Dear Reader, we’ve reached the finish line!  Woo Hoo.

Last night, I noticed a photography book I had purchased back in April but hadn’t had time to really delve into.  I placed it on my desk with the intention of it serving as my inspiration for today’s poem.  That’s a bit more premeditation than I usually resort to, but I knew today would be my last day and the temptation to skip the writing would be even stronger than yesterday.

The book is Great Plains: America’s Lingering Wild by Michael Forsberg with essays by Dan O’Brien, David Wishart, and Ted Kooser.  The University of Chicago Press published this in 2009.  Knowing that many people have differing definitions of the plains and the prairie, I first checked this book out from the public library to see if it had anything about Iowa in it.  The book is divided into three major sections: the northern plains, the southern plains, and the tallgrass prairies.  The last third of the book does indeed contain information on my homeland, so I went ahead and invested in it.  I’m glad I did.  Forsberg’s photography is amazing, and the quality of the production is worth the price tag on the book.  The essays are rich and nuanced, well-written, too.

But what it’s all about today is the poem.  I started by flipping through the book and reading the captions that accompanied the photographs and skimming the essays for now.  Every once in a while a phrase would sing out to me (i.e. “following the prairie bloom” and “kettles of Sandhill cranes”) and I’d jot it down in my notebook with an attribution if I took it from one of the essays.  Eventually, I drafted six lines based on a picture of Sandhill cranes roosting on the Platte River during their migration.  Sadly, these never rose beyond pure description.  There was no heft to them.

I moved on and became transfixed by an image of a northern harrier at her nest.  In fact, I was able to find nearly the exact image from the book, available on MF’s website, link through the image and here.  The image of the northern harrier soaring is from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and taken by Frank Schleicher, link through the image and here.  Again, I started with description in part from the photograph and in part from the details provided by the Cornell Lab’s website.  These lines too failed to lift off.  It was only when I combined some of these lines with some of the inspiration phrases from the book that I got something going.  The draft is called “Prairie Conflict” and addresses one of my main internal dilemmas.  I am an advocate for restoring the native prairie and plains and protecting all the plant and animal species that have been decimated by agriculture; however, agriculture is what makes the economy of the Midwest run.  It’s what supports my parents and my family, even though they are now removed from agriculture as their primary means of income.  Frankly, the towns of the Midwest live and die by the success or failure of the farmers that surround them.  So, in some ways this is a political poem for me, but the issue isn’t black or white.  The poem focuses on the harrier, a species that has come back from being endangered, its recovery in large part due to conservation efforts.  And the poem also acknowledges the value of farming.  It’s true that farmers and hunters are often the best conservationists, but the world’s hunger and the expansion of cities seem to be growing at a rate that eclipses even the best efforts of conservation.  Perhaps this is more of an essay topic, but for now, it’s a poem.  My favorite lines of which are: “A northern harrier hunts on the wing and haunts / the air with a piercing, descending scream.”

So, that’s that.  I now have 12 drafts to show for my two weeks of purposeful writing.  This is the first time I’ve ever imposed an assignment like this on myself.  It makes me wonder.  I’ve spent lots of my writing time in the past drafting lines and crossing them out and not producing anything, happy to come up with a viable draft once a week.  What would happen if I imposed this assignment on myself each time I sat down for writing time: no email, no blogs, nothing else until you get a draft on paper.  I still worry about the material being forced.  I also will need revision time and time to read more, which this drafting has cut into.  As always I come back to balance…something it seems I’ll always be searching for in every area of my life.

A huge THANK YOU to all of you, Dear Readers, for taking this journey with me and providing your support.  I probably could have done it without knowing you were out there, but I bet it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun, and I might have drifted off the plan more easily with no one there to hold me accountable.

79 deg ~ below 80 and after 9:00…must be a cold front!

Today was a true test of this 14-day journey.  I usually write best when I have no obligations until much later in the day (late afternoon/evening), but today, the man and I have plans that begin quite soon.  I didn’t know if I’d be able to concentrate on writing with a bit of a deadline in place.

As usual, I cast about my desk for some place to begin.  I always clear my desk of everything except some poetry books, my journal, and my pens.  I set my monitor to sleep and push my keyboard out of the way (until I draft enough lines in my journal to gather the momentum necessary to make the jump to the computer).  One of the books I picked up for inspiration this morning was Oliver de la Paz’ Requiem for the Orchard.  I only read three poems and a line began in me:  “What was taken from me then… .”

I turned to my journal and started scribbling.  The lines in my journal look like one thick stanza, but as I transferred them to the computer, I saw the tercets forming naturally.  My usual method is that about 2/3 of the poem begins in the journal and I have to shift to the computer to finish it.  This may be due to the size of the journal and my handwriting.  I need to be able to see the whole thing at once, apparently.  In any case, that’s what happened today, and I’m really pleased with the leap and turn the poem took once I was composing on the computer.  It is titled “Requiem for the Girl with Sparrow Wings for a Heart,” obviously influenced by de la Paz’ title and the mood of the pieces I read in the book.  I’m definitely looking forward to sitting down with Requiem for the Orchard and reading the whole thing straight through.

That’s one drawback to this draft-a-day journey.  I’ve lost some of my reading time.  But I’ll be back to my “What I’m Reading” posts in a few days, I’d wager.  Until then…thanks for stopping by, Dear Readers.

88 deg ~ a bit of a late start at the desk of the Kangaroo today, the forecast is set on repeat (heat and humidity and sun), eating fresh Arkansas blueberries and Georgia peaches

Another day, another draft!  I don’t know why I’m so surprised, but I am.  I do know that there will be much more work to do on these during revision.

Today, I sat down with my journal and, as usual, fumbled about without knowing what to write.  I kept coming back to the fact that today was Day Nine (image from www.archetypeshardware.com).  Eventually, I decided to write a poem called “Nine for the Ninth Day” and I would write a nine-line poem with each line being nine syllables…very reminiscent of Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors,” I confess, although without the riddle and subject matter.  (Sorry, no link to the poem online.)  I made it through three lines of counting syllables and I gave up.  I have stated before and I’ll state it again, I’m not a formalist.  When I have to start thinking about syllables or meter or rhyme, I get completely pulled out of the poem.  I can’t drive a stick shift either because it requires me to multi-task in a similar way.  A connection?

Abandoning my nine poem, I grabbed the Charles Wright book, Country Music, which was still on my desk from yesterday.  I decided to fall back to my word bank and random pairs of words exercise to get me going (process explained on Day One).  Sometimes I do feel a little bit weak for needing a launching pad, but perhaps this is just because I’m not writing toward a specific subject matter.  Today, I gathered up the words and made the pairs and nothing really leaped out at me.  Eventually, my brain started scanning the page and making its own connections and I came up with “there’s a notch in the breath, / some secret root taking hold of the lungs,” and I went from there.  I still used the Wright words as fodder, but I didn’t worry about the pairs.  As I wrote the first couple of couplets (my old standby), I also remembered one of my favorite lines from Alice Walker’s story “Everday Use.”  Well, actually, I misremembered it.  The line I love is Mama’s epiphany about Maggie: “This was Maggie’s portion. This was the way she knew God to work.”  What I remembered and took for the title of this draft was this: “The Way She Knows the World to Work.”  Something that surprised me about the draft is that it is about a speaker with a troubled life, but I’m not the least bit troubled.  It reminds me of another thing I’m not very good at, which is writing the celebratory/happy poem.

Just looked at the draft again, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s composed of nine couplets.  Honestly, I wasn’t consciously thinking about the number any more.  The nine couplets are broken down into three sets of three, where each set repeats a phrase: “Some days…,” “Everywhere,…,” and “Sanctuary is… .”  Weird how the mind works ~ weird and fun.

Oh, and I also realized that some of you, Dear Readers, might have joined the Kangaroo recently and not know about the inspiration cards to which I keep referring (Day 6 and Day 8).  You can read about where I got the idea and how they work here and here.