85 deg ~ another day of full sun and full on humidity…thank the stars for the wonders of A/C, not even the birds are singing today

Another day, another draft, more delight & surprise & gratitude.  Again, the draft spilled quite easily from my fingers once I got a grip on where it wanted to go.  I used two different inspiration cards this morning, a bit of a dream/nightmare, and without re-reading them, the memory of two  Charles Wright poems from his collection, Country Music, one of my top ten poetry books that now bears re-reading. 

I’ve included a picture of the two cards here.  The bits that made it into the draft are these:  the words “Urban Archaeology” became part of my title, “Urban Archaeology: 2027”; the letters and the flicker made it into the poem; the religious imagery of the gold-leafed door made it in, but not as a door, as an icon; and the “renegade secret” became “the secrets of renegade prophets.”  I really wanted to use the bluebird but felt that the flicker was enough bird for this one poem.

So, I started looking at the cards and remembering a dream I posted about on Facebook.  In the dream I had night before last, I cut my cat’s claw too close but instead of it bleeding, my upper molars started bleeding, not from the gums, but through the enamel on the chewing surface.  Highly disturbing, but weirdly no pain in the dream.  As I recalled that, I remember a Charles Wright poem that begins with a litany of four lines that all begin “Year of the… .”

Here is his poem:

As I said above, I didn’t re-read the poem until after the draft was finished, and I’d forgotten the turns the poem takes in the second and third stanzas.  My draft is a four stanza litany, with the first two lines of each stanza beginning Year of the… or Year we… variations.  The third and fourth lines of each stanza are indented right now.  I think I’ll need to add some kind of turn and remake a different ending during the revision process.

My first line right now comes from my dream and is “Year of the bloodied tooth and torn claw.”  That set the tone of violence for the rest of the poem.  I’m not all that comfortable with violent poems, so this was a new direction for me.  Then, somehow, I blended the above Wright poem with another, “Self-Portrait in 2035,” which obviously has a futuristic quality.  I toyed around with setting my poem in the current year, “Urban Archaeology: 2010,” but it wasn’t clearly based on real events of this year.  Then, I remembered Wright’s future-looking poem and decided to set my poem in the future as well…thus 2027 in the title.

Here’s the other Wright poem:

I love Wright for his lines, which lengthen and fragment in his later works, but I also love him for his use of ADJECTIVES, of which I’m always being told to be wary.  I can’t quite believe that I have seven drafts to show for eight days of work.  I FEEL LUCKY TO BE ALIVE IN THIS WORLD!

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Country Music: Selected Early Poems
Charles Wright
Wesleyan/New England, 1991

86 deg ~ only 9:30 a.m., highs predicted at 97 or 98, plus humidity = summer in Arkansas, can’t imagine how it feels in Louisiana/Mississipi

Today is Day Seven, Dear Reader, but as I sat down to draft, I decided to start with reading over my favorite poems in Allison Titus’ first book, sum of every lost ship, for inspiration.  Instead, I got drawn right back into the lovely drama of the book and lost my drafting mind.  Not to worry, it will return as soon as I write this mini-review.

Before I start though, I have a question.  Both Titus’ book and Suzanne Frischkorn’s, that I write about here, have titles that are not capitalized on the covers; however, in the LOC data on the copyright page, they are capitalized.  The authors and the presses often use the capitalized form themselves.  I’m not judging, but I’m wondering what is going on.  Is this a font thing?  Or is it intentional?  If it is intentional, why switch to the capitalization for the official documentation?  How would the author like me to present the title? 

Now, to Titus, the power of this book is in the way the author creates a mood of longing and loss with such beauty that the reader is sucked into the vortex of the poems and feels compelled to keep reading.  The book is separated into five sections and paced like a good meal: in fact, the book begins with an untitled proem that I liken to a petite bouche.  It begins, “Think of the nights that / have broken without a word, // have left a starless sky in / your throat.”  That lament of brokenness, of disconnection, is the theme that holds the whole book together.  Of the five sections,  each is made up of a handful of poems, with Part Three being a long poem “From the Lost Diary of Anna Anderson,” a woman who may or may not have been Anastasia Romanov. 

The book begins with an epigraph from Don DeLillo’s Americana: There is a motel in the heart of every man.  Every section of the book, save the Anna Anderson section, contains a prose poem titled “Motel.”  Each of these highlights another thread in the book, which is a sense of urban landscape encroaching on the rural, a clash between what is human made and what is wild.  For example, here is the first motel poem.

These motel poems become touchstones, as we sense the speaker in transit, never able to rest as she searches for something, something never quite named.  Throughout the entire book, I felt I was in strong and capable hands, such empathy pouring out from the pages, that I knew there was a real human heart at work here, but not in the sentimental sense.  There is intelligence and careful attention to craft, the diction just right, the line breaks and stanza breaks fit just so, and the use of the caesura in a way I envy.  Another example, the verbs in the poem “Reckon Thy Disease Its Courtship” sent me spinning (i.e. “Where water baskets / the shoreline…” and “Mineral weeds ratchet the cold…”). 

Here’s a brief glimpse from the end of “Inclement”:

or The sky is a box of wings.

I will definitely be on the lookout for more work by Allison Titus, she moves me in new directions as both a reader and a writer.


Support a Poet/Poetry! Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today
Sum of Every Lost Ship
Allison Titus
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010

84 deg ~ cloudy skies, brisk breeze, humidity so high it’s hard to breathe

Before I get to today’s process notes, I’d like to acknowledge the disaster that struck western Arkansas early Friday morning, when a flash flood wiped out Camp Albert Pike, which can hold as many as 300 campers.  So far, 16 are confirmed dead, but that number may continue to rise today as more search and rescue teams deploy in the remote, mountainous and heavily-forested area.  If you pray or not, I hope you’ll take a moment of silence or two for the families and individuals who died there. 

~~~~~

Today is the sixth day of my write-a-thon project, and I was so worried it would be another tooth-pulling day like yesterday.  However, I sat down to the desk with determination.  I switched up the music I’d been listening to and selected Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach: The Cello Suites.  I sipped my coffee and thought of how to begin.  Without too much waste of time I reached for my inspiration cards and selected one, pictured here.

The yellowjacket in the bottom right jumped out at me, along with the caption.  As I began writing about the yellowjacket and it’s “simpler story than ours,” I wanted to refresh my memory about the species.  I clicked on Wikipedia (yes, yes, I know it’s not a solid source, but it’s fast and easy to understand…I always confirm the details later.)  As soon as I saw that the genus name was Vespula, I felt a surge.  Two things struck me:  One, a good friend has recently acquired a Vespa and I wondered if the name came from the name for wasps?  Probably not, but I like the association.  Two, that friend has had problems with arthritis in the hips and back…This led me to think about a friend I knew a long time ago, with whom I’ve lost touch, sadly.  This woman was older than me, a mother figure, and diagnosed with MS while I knew her.  At the time, I also happened to see a television clip about people who used bee venom to alleviate the symptoms of MS, arthritis, and other debilitating diseases.  I have no idea if it really works, but it all came together in today’s poem “Vespula Cures.”  A few lines I like so far:  “Old wives and snake oil / salesman agree.  They give the capture nets / away for free but sell the secret for a hefty fee.”  Maybe too sing-songy.  Time will tell.

77 deg ~ if yesterday was gray, today is positively black, storms throughout the night, rain coming down in sheets though not perpetually, windows still specked with water

I knew this 14 day write-a-thon would be a challenge, and it is living up to my expectations.  Perhaps, my pace is more the once-a-week drafter, and that will be okay, but I’m determined to see the 14 days through.  Today, I began by reading over the drafts in my “In Progress” folder.  There are a few from April and May, and then the three I’d already completed in this brave new attempt to write a draft a day.  I’m proud of these drafts and feel that they all may well survive.  Today’s results, not so much. 

Without an immediate spark, I decided to try another launching platform today.  In this one, I copy out sentences from some work of prose and then replace each noun, verb, adjective, and adverb with either words of my own or words I’ve gathered from various other sources.  This is a bit like a Mad Lib.  Once it’s been filled it, I redraft the poem into lines and allow variances to emerge from the original sentences.  This has been highly successful for me in the past.  Today, given that the Bruce Metcalf catalogue was right at my elbow, I turned to one of the prose pieces about his work and picked a few sentences for my framework.  Then, I decided I would copy out all the major words from his titles and use those as my word bank, along with any words I brought to the table on my own.  After ten minutes of trying to force the puzzle to take shape, I knew the process wasn’t going to work today.  However, I did come up with these two lines on my own during the process:  “No longer queen — / a body betrayed.”  I flipped to a clean page in my journal and wrote:  “Detained in a braided cotton cage / No longer queen — a body betrayed.”  There, that felt right.  There was an energy in the lines that I felt would go somewhere, so I started drafting.  After three more couplets (my favorite drafting form, often revised out), I saw that all three couplets ended on slantish rhymes  “cage / betrayed,” “wound / bruise,” and “fever / fervor” so I thought aha, almost heroic couplets…just missing the iambic pentameter.  So I started fiddling in that direction, and alas, Dear Faithful Reader, somewhere along the way, the wheels came off that wagon.  (Oh, I’m just full of cliches today!)

Still, I have something typed up and printed out to put in the folder, and I can say without hesitation that I’m 4 of 5 in my drafting challenge.  This one may be the weakest of all, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something there I can return to in due course.  That’s one of the wonders of being a writer.  The material is malleable. 

Thanks for taking this journey with me, Dear Readers.  Knowing you are out there keeps me honest and motivated!

75 deg ~ summer rains on and off all day, breezy, grayish day

Well, what happened to Day Three, you ask, Dear Readers.  Day Three was a bit of a wash.  I woke early enough but I never wakened fully all day.  There was coffee.  There was sugar.  Neither could conquer my drowsiness.  I felt drugged all day, despite having been off the painkillers and sleeping pills for a full week.  I did put in the time at the desk, although my back was not in a happy mood (it’s hard to adjust to the fact that I’ll have some bad days here and there while I’m rebuilding the strength in my back…I used to take for granted sitting in front of the computer for long hours). 

I had one of those writing days I’d predicted.  I read some first and then struggled to draft a few lines here and there…lines I thought wholly unconnected at the time.  This photo is of Lou-Lou agreeing with me that we should just go back to bed, which we did at 10:00 a.m.  (Believe me, I know I am blessed with this summer schedule.  I do not take it for granted, but I also know I earned it and I do not apologize for it).

Day Four arrived in total opposition to Day Three.  I slept well and I slept long.  I woke up with clear eyes, a clear mind, and great energy.  I brewed my coffee and skipped the sugar, and although I burned my tongue, I knew it would be a good day.  I opened my journal to the lines from yesterday, and like a puzzle, the pieces snapped into place.  The cover of the catalogue of the Bruce Metcalf show was sitting beside my arm.  The cover image is a detail of the work shown here:  “Deliverance from a Gilded Cage.” (Photo from this article at the Traditional Fine Arts Organization’s website.)  The poem took shape in response to this piece, but not necessarily as an ekphrastic poem.  Aside from there being a gilded cage (I know, I know, risky, right?) in the first line, there is little else taken directly from the visual of the piece.  It is more a response to the mood/ emotion/ feeling/ whatchamacallit of the art.  Is there a word for that type of poetry? 

In any case, I ended up with a poem titled “This is Not my Body, This Body That Refuses.”  (Are you detecting a theme, Dear Reader?)  I had originally scribbled those phrases as two lines for a poem.  This morning, I saw them instantly as the title that went with some other lines I’d eked out yesterday.  I had about 1/4 of the poem from yesterday’s misery.  Today, I added and elaborated.  I ended up with another couplet poem, but of shorter lines.  However, I also have a new form going on (new for me).  Half of the couplets are from a first-person speaker.  These are left-aligned.  After each “I” couplet, there is a response from a chorus type of speaker, sometimes responding to the speaker, sometimes telling the audience something the speaker might not want revealed.  This response is also a couplet and indented one tab.  I kind of like it, but the whole thing seems much more fragile than the poems I wrote on days One and Two.

So there you have it, I’m 3 of 4 so far, with 10 days to go.  Thanks for accompanying me on the trip, Dear (sensitive) Reader.

80 deg ~ bright sun lighting up the tree leaves (I first wrote tea leaves), a cardinal calling what-cheer, cheer, cheer ~ yesterday a pair of Carolina chickadees outside the window, today replaced by a chipmunk scaling the bushy tree

Amazingly, I was again able to produce a draft with relatively little hesitation (knock wood).  I guess it’s true that bouts of non-writing can lead to bouts of writing.  (There is hope!)  I’m a little dizzy with the high of having written.  I’m writing without any project or topic in mind and just seeing where the words take me.  Lovely, lovely feeling. 

Today’s draft is a mix of two moments/events from yesterday. 

First, after I finished drafting yesterday, I went back and started blog surfing.  I found the new prompt at Big Tent Poetry: write a pantoum that somehow addresses a personal anger.  I printed out the prompt, mostly to remind myself of the pantoum form.  I was heartened by the sentence:  “Pantoums aren’t as scary as one might think.”  As my Dear Devoted Readers must know, I am no formalist, and in truth, forms tend to scare the Dickinson out of me (hee hee).  But, I knew that I’d need something to start with today, and I figured if I blew it, that would be okay, b/c I’m on this 14 day journey and not all 14 drafts will be winners.

Second, my good friend Anne Greenwood (artist, bee- and chicken-keeper, gardener, and so much more) came for a visit yesterday.  We had a wonderful lunch and then headed down to the Arkansas Arts Center to see “The Miniature Worlds of Bruce Metcalf.”  Metcalf is a studio jeweler (a phrase I hadn’t heard before) whose work spans five decades and is amazing for its intricacies and its visual poetry.  I went so far as to buy the exhibit catalogue, which is something I’ve never done before.  I was particularly taken by a piece from 1980 titled “Vessel with a Cargo of Light.”  Sadly, I can’t find an image of it online, but here’s a link to Metcalf’s website, which includes samples from each decade.  I’ve linked to the 80’s and the top two images are from the same family as the one that inspired me.  The work in the photo here is “Two Doves in a Private Garden” from 1999, taken from Metcalf’s website as well.  Like many of Metcalf’s truly miniature pieces, this functions as a brooch, although Anne and I wondered about the weight of the pieces.  One of the drawbacks to museums is not being able to touch.  I’d gladly don white cotton gloves or whatever protective gear required to touch paintings and sculptures and all the other categories of art held behind protective barriers. 

So, I rose this morning early and pulled out the catalogue from Metcalf’s exhibit and the description of the pantoum.  I knew immediately that the anger angle didn’t really interest me, but I wondered about using one of Metcalf’s longer titles as one of my repeating lines in the poem.  I started flipping through the plates and when I saw “Vessel with a Cargo of Light” I knew I had my line.  That phrase is the fourth line of the first stanza, thus becoming the third line of the second stanza as well.  At first I was stymied because the art focuses on an oceanic image.  I tried writing from that perspective but it didn’t feel genuine, since I’ve mostly lived as a landlocked person (save 18 months outside of Boston, even then I wasn’t near enough to see the ocean everyday).  After scribbling around a bit, I found a new direction: a landlocked girl who romanticizes the oceanic and feels dessicated by being landlocked.  (Not sure I’m really good at boiling a poem down to a descriptive sentence, but that’s close.)  The poem is called “Pantoum for the Landlocked Girl” for now, with an epigraph naming Metcalf and the piece that launched the poem.

As for the form, I found it a bit constraining, as I normally do.  However, I can admit that it forced me to think in a different way and perhaps some lines emerged in this draft that wouldn’t have without the form.  I will definitely let this one sit for a bit and then come back to it and try to figure out if the form works or if I need to revise away from it.

Woo Hoo!

77 deg ~ clear skies, light breeze in the upper branches, bushes and lower limbs nearly still

Today begins an attempt to write a draft a day for 14 days.  My own mini National Poetry Writing Month, two months late, but there you have it.  I’ve been frustrated in not writing since school’s been out (nearly a month now…sigh).  Yes, I’ve been reading a lot of poetry, as evidenced by my posts of late, but I wasn’t getting the pen to paper and what was worse, I was making excuses for it.  Paperwork and laundry and floors that needed cleaning…which led to a back injury and a delayed trip up home.  Even as I simmered in frustration I knew I could have been writing throughout all of that (well maybe not the worst days of pain and medication).  So, after the trip to Iowa and resettling into my routine here, I decided on my 14 day challenge.  No excuses!

I even have a new journal to set things off on the right note.  I finished my last Moleskine a few weeks back and went down to WordsWorth, my favorite independent bookstore…just four blocks down the road…how lucky am I…to buy some more and right inside the door, I stumbled on a display of these amazing journals from a company called Two’s Company (can’t find a website).  About the same size as my preferred Moleskine and with blank pages!  Ever since I read Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones when I was a young and innocent 18 years old, I’ve written in journals without lines.  It turns out I’m one of those people who need the room to roam.  I also have atrocious handwriting and sometimes it gets a bit on the large size.  Now, I find having to write on lined paper a total nuisance and rarely do so.  In any case, when I saw these journals were unlined, I did a little jig right there and proceeded to buy every version they had with birds on the covers: nine in all.  The back cover states both the common name of the bird (Red-whiskered Bulbul in this case) and the scientific name.  It also gives the region (nearly always Asia and/or Africa) and a brief description.  Totally cool for a bird lover like me. 

Happily, today’s draft went so smoothly, so easily…scary!  Knowing I’d been away from the journal for a bit, I decided to use my favorite starting point.  I gathered a word bank, this time from Allison Titus’ book, sum of every lost ship, which I’ll be posting about soon (fabulous!).  I randomly jotted down strong nouns and verbs and tossed in a few adjectives.  Then I counted (48).  Using the random number generator at Random.org, I gathered the words into groups of 3, gaining a bit more distance from the original text.  Really with the second or third grouping I knew a poem was taking shape.  I drafted it in my journal…two pages of solid words.  Woo Hoo!  When I felt myself winding down from the inspiration point, I shifted to the computer.  The title of the draft is “Lament at the End of a Long Convalescence” (obviously inspired by real life events of late!), and with such a long title and such densely packed hand-written beginnings, I landed on couplets with longish lines.  There’s too little vowel music for my likes at the moment, so I’m sure I’ll be revising the dickens out of it, but I’m thrilled that I had something to say and that what feels like the skeleton of a complete poem found its way to the page today, rather than fits and starts of lines here and there.  Two things about the poem:
1. It centers around my recent injury and recovery

2. I first used a fox due to Titus’ poems; however, we’ve had a recent influx of coyotes into our somewhat urban neighborhood, so I changed the fox to a coyote…much better for this poem, no offense to Titus. 

I know a lot of people post their drafts on their blogs and then sometimes take them away after a few days.  I’m just not that brave, and if I did post the draft, I’d probably forget to evaporate it.  A lot of journals are becoming even more regimented about what they consider “previously published” so I’ll continue to opt to keep the drafts to myself.  As a sneak peek, here are my favorite lines at this time:  “……..  There is salt.  // As in a refrain we hum.  As in thirst.  / As in what the body considers necessary.”

Well, Dear Readers, this morning’s drafting has made me a bit verbose and slightly dizzy.  Now, I’ll be running those errands and I have a date with a good friend to see an exhibit at the Arkansas Arts Center this afternoon.  Woo Hoo!

83 deg ~ sun, sun, sun & it’s quite difficult to determine if there are minor clouds anymore, given I’m enclosed in a shelter of green leaves on both sides that afford a view of the sky

Readers who were with me for my AWP posts know that Suzanne Frischkorn helped me kick off the conference by having dinner with me that first night in Denver. Suzanne is one of my blogger friends, blogging at Lit Windowpane, and it was a delight to meet her in person, finally! As dessert, I received my copy of Suzanne’s new book, Girl on a Bridge. I’m only sad I couldn’t read every book that I got in Denver (plus those remaining on my stack from before) simultaneously. Still, Suzanne’s book was worth the wait.

It’s appropriate that the first word of the title is “girl,” but we are not dealing solely with the child-girl in this book. Instead, the word “girl” stands for all the complicated facets of the feminine, all the crossing overs we experience in our lives, and thus, the “bridge” becomes apparent as well. In this case the girl eventually becomes a wife, then an ex-wife, a wife again, and a mother. While the poems are always expertly crafted and with wonderful turns of the language, there is a sense of wildness caged here, of emotion contained.

The opening poem “Great Lash” begins with the speaker as a city teen exploring all the accoutrement of femininity & sexuality. It opens with the lines “Our cornfields were paved in asphalt, sulfur / lights snuffed our stars” and goes on to list moments experimenting with makeup and boys. The sentence “We were not sweet girls” is used as an effective refrain. These girls are the girls of my generation, when parents continued to have a life of their own and the nuclear family frayed or fragmented. The poem ends with this: “We were not sweet girls, no. If there had / been corn, or stars? Maybe the deep / sweet girlness would have surfaced–dreamy / fresh-faced girls–petals listening to rain.”

As the book progresses, the girl grows into womanhood. There are poems of marriage and the aftermath of an ended marriage. Then, there are poems of new love and motherhood. None of these poems are sugar-coated; they all read as honest, true accounts.

Perhaps my favorite poem in the book is this one, which I’ll leave you with.

of circumference most.

Support a Poet / Poetry: Buy or Borrow a Copy of this Book Today
girl on a bridge
Suzanne Frischkorn
Main Street Rag, 2010

84º ~ full sun, the slightest of breezes

Here’s a picture of Lou-Lou that sums up the last couple of days. Having spent 5 days away from the desk of the Kangaroo, I’ve been having some trouble getting back into my routine. There were things to deal with (bills and laundry and whatnot) and my back is still not up for long stretches at the computer. (I cannot believe how long the recovery period for this simple injury is going to be!) Also, I’d fallen incredibly behind on my blog reading. I use Google reader, and while I almost never read every blog post, I do have quite a few blogs on that list and so many of them are especially compelling.

Over the last two days, I’ve cleared the list. Woo hoo. I must confess, Dear Readers, if your blog is a usual haunt of mine, I might not have done it justice b/c I skipped leaving comments, mostly; however, such is life. I’m always grateful to know you are out there reading what I’ve posted, and I cherish your voices, too.

Speaking of other voices, here are some links you simply must check out.

Late, late, late, but this past week’s poem at Linebreak is stunning in it’s simplicity. Click here to read “Salina, Kansas” by Trey Moody. I’m jealous, jealous, jealous of this Midwestern poem.

Also, Suzanne Frischkorn’s poem “Zoological Garden” from her new book, girl on a bridge, is up at Verse Daily today! Lovely, lovely.

Michele Battiste has been doing some interesting things with templates and some new results are up. I’m intrigued by this process and may use it next week as I begin an attempt to write a draft a day for two weeks.

If you missed it, Jehanne Dubrow was on Fresh Air on Monday. Take a listen! (Link is in her post.)

Onward!