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Yesterday: a read/write day. Read some and wrote some. “Finished” a new draft that I’d been stringing along last week. By finished, I mean simply that the poem now has something like a beginning, a middle, and an end, although it isn’t narrative. Must now let it rest (like bread dough rising) before I poke and prod at it any more. I also made some major revisions to a piece I’ve been toying with since the summer. Breakthrough moment, possibly. Some drafts arrive fully formed and need modest shaping…others arrive in broken bits, leaving me to choose between the crazy glue, the twine, or the acetylene torch.

Today: submission day. I’ve been entirely neglectful of submitting poems this fall. Managed a round of submissions in August, only to realize I’d rushed the process on one whole set of poems. Then, I sent out a few in October. Today, I have two sets of 5 poems. Each set of 5 will go out to 5 simultaneous submission accepting journals. I like the balance in that.

Tomorrow: no post. I’m covering classes for a colleague and getting set to receive papers on Tuesday. Then, the onslaught of final grading begins. Last day of class is Thursday, with finals the next week. Is that speck I see ahead of me a light at the end of the tunnel?

This blog is two years old today. I almost missed the anniversary/birthday/whatever you call it. I think it took me 20 months to figure out what to do with this space, but I’m happy with what I’ve been doing since August.

Dear Readers, if there is something more you’d like to see here, please leave a comment. If there is something you’d like to see less of here, please leave a comment, too.

In honor of turning two, I’m giving away two copies of Blood Almanac. First come, first serve. Email me with your mailing address if you’d like a copy. The first two emails win. I’ll post a comment here when the two copies are gone.

All thanks to whoever reads this space, my faceless, ephemeral audience.

Well, I’m finally reading The Southern Lit issue of The Oxford American, which has been out for several months now. While the issue is fat with wonderful stories and poems steeped in the southern literary tradition, an essay by Rick Bragg titled “Upending the Muse” stands out to me the most. I can’t help but quote from it here and recommend you read it (available online) as soon as possible. (Of course, I may be so far behind on my reading that this is old news. If so, consider a re-read.)

“Upending the Muse” is an exploration of not only regional issues in writing, but class issues as well. In essence, Bragg explores the Romantic idea of the muse, which in the South seems to mean writing on the veranda in riding boots while drunk in order to court that wispy beauty, muse. This is a muse that eludes Bragg, perhaps, he wonders, because he has not been “better bred.” He writes, “The muse, it seems to me, is watered in juleps and fanned with old money.” Later, he adds, “Or maybe, just maybe, it’s all an invention by the rich folks–a kind of pink-buttoned-down plot–to keep this writing thing to themselves.”

As for the legend of great Southern (male) writers writing while drunk, Bragg admits this: “And I don’t write at all, drunk. I can fight drunk and fish drunk, but I have to be clearheaded to drive cars, explain myself to my wife, and move a semicolon.” (This may be my favorite quote of the entire article.)

Bragg also talks about writing to support oneself, writing on a deadline in order to meet a contract in order to get paid in order to eat. The Romantic idea of the muse does not fit with this reality in any way shape or form. Bragg is also quick to point out that this kind of work, writing for a living, is nowhere near as physically demanding as “roofing, or toting cement blocks, or wiping tables at a Waffle House.”

Finally, the piece ends with a vision of Bragg’s muse, “not a fairy at all,” but “a hairy, goatlike beast, something you pin down with a boot on its neck, just so you won’t be so goddamn lonely during this hateful process. And at night, when you believe you are done with it, it bumps and growls from underneath your bed.”

Thanks to Bragg and the OA for a great read on a sunny long weekend, alas I have no veranda on which to lounge while finishing the issue.

“There is no reason to write a book unless the process of imagining it changes one’s life forever.” — Richard Manning

“Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.” — Virginia Woolf

“Don’t go through life with your eyes closed, even though you may have chosen photography as your vocation. The machine may see for you, but its eye is dead. Your eye should furnish it with life. But don’t believe that all open eyes see. Seeing needs practice–just like photography itself.” — Alred Stieglitz

“The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all.” — Annie Dillard

Thanks to Kevin Brockmeier for these:

“Nearly every writer has been given the advice, ‘Write what you know.’ This seems to me to rely too heavily on the narrow, limited ego and conscious mind I’ve already slandered. I prefer another piece of advice I have heard, ‘Write what you need to know.’” ‒‒ Susan Power

“Writers don’t write from experience, though many are resistant to admit that they don’t. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.” ‒‒ Nikki Giovanni

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupery

“I’ve never been in charge of my stories, they’ve always been in charge of me. As each new one has called to me, ordering me to give it voice and form and life, I’ve followed the advice I’ve shared with other writers over the years: jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.” ‒‒ Ray Bradbury

“Poems, even when narrative, do not resemble stories. All stories are about battles, of one kind or another, which end in victory and defeat. Everything moves toward the end, when the outcome will be known. Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. Yet the promise is not of a monument. (Who, still on a battlefield, wants monuments?) The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.” ‒‒ John Berger

Check out this great post from Sandra Beasley on Chick’s Dig Poetry about her making of a video for her poem “Vocation.” Watch the video. Now!

If I can figure out iMovie, I may just try this for some of my poems over the Xmas break. Sean…beware, my Mac guru, I will surely be calling on you for help and probably James K as well. Either of you want to provide some instrumental guitar accompaniment?

Like many writers I know, I am a pack rat when it comes to my work. I have boxes full of journals that go back to my teens and early twenties. I have the first booklets I made when I was around thirteen or fourteen, using my mom’s electric typewriter. I copied poems I’d been given in school, “The Eagle” by Tennyson being one I remember…those talons described as “crooked hands,” that last line, “And like a thunderbolt he falls”…ah…the drama! I loved the sound of the keys clacking that seemed to echo the sound of the words in the poems. I loved the precision required in the copying so I didn’t have to start over or use the messy version of white out that existed in the early 80’s. Then, after copying several of the masters, I included my own fledglings. I collected all of this in a school folder and titled my book, decorating it with unicorn stickers and magic markers.

In high school, I kept writing my own poems…about broken hearts mostly and full of horrific rhymes. I gathered these together in folders with three-hole tabs, again, making my own “books” out of my work. For the most part, I went through sheets and sheets of college-ruled loose-leaf paper in my drafts, even though I might not really be changing much. Each new word change required a new hand-written draft. Only when I felt the poem was “finished” did I type up my draft for my booklet.

When I started college as an undergrad the slow transition to personal computers had begun. St. Ben’s installed its first computer labs around that time and we all carried around precious floppy disks and fought with the dot-matrix printers that seemed to jam constantly. While I still drafted poems on paper to begin, I moved to the computer for revision. This was when I first began saving each new draft with the title and a number, so that after several months I might have six or seven versions of the poem saved so that I could go back and revisit previous drafts if I took a wrong turn. Of course, I also printed each one out and kept it in a manila folder as well. That process stayed with me for well over a decade and took me into grad school and beyond.

I have always begun poems on paper (and still do), usually in a journal, most of which I have in boxes in the closet–heavy, heavy boxes. Once the poem takes on a shape and heft, I move to the computer. I cannot quantify what I mean by “shape and heft.” It is different with every poem; it is an intuitive leap in my gut that says the poem is ready for the printer. Still, until the last year or so, I saved each new version as a new file in the poem’s particular folder.

It dawned on me yesterday, that sometime in the last few years, I’ve jettisoned the saving of multiple versions on my hard drive. I still have the printed copies, which I date. However, I simply save over the original version on the computer now. I wonder if I do this because I now have a better grasp on my own voice and more confidence in my vision of the poem. I feel I take fewer “wrong turns” on the way to figuring out the poem’s ultimate form. Do I eliminate some options by saving over the last version? Probably.

I wonder, too, how this shaping of poetry is different, if it is, from the the way writers of the pre-computer days shaped their work. I still print off my poems and hand-write many of my revisions on the page, although I know plenty of writers who do this on the computer. There is a visceral nature to the pen and ink that is lost for me on the keyboard. Wendell Berry wrote somewhere (and I apologize for not having the reference) about the physical link between the pencil in his hand and his imagination. For him, using any technology, even a manual typewriter, created a distance between the work and the creative center of his mind…a mind/body connection that was crucial to him, I guess. I’ve wondered about it myself ever since reading that in college. Now I wonder if this change in my drafting process results in stronger poems.

My drafting process exists in two technologies: blue-black rollerball gel ink scrawled in journals & black and white text in computer files. These technologies are symbiotic in my process, and I imagine that process will continue to evolve right alongside my evolution as a poet. While I used to worry about there being a correct way to do this drafting and revision, I think I may finally be in a place where I’m comfortable letting things develop in their own way and simply taking note from time to time about my process. I suppose if I ever take a drastic wrong turn, I will know I’ve run off the road by the heaping pile of rejection letters that will surely arrive in my mailbox, be it physical or virtual.