Drafting

25
May
2017

Process Notes: Petition ~ after Malinda Markham

73º ~ bright sun, but the house so well-shaded that it remains on the verge of chilly most mornings like this

This morning’s desk time was a bit hither & thither. I did not do such a clear job of setting my goal before bed last night and repeating it this morning. I let emails distract for a bit, and truth be told, let a few emails, a text, and a phone call interrupt in the last few hours, but still, I have a new draft.

No father poem today, although I did start a really terrible, forced draft about the death of the father of one of my best friends, a sudden death that happened about 6 months prior to my dad’s well-forecasted dying. I was even counting beats, but the poem petered out after the first burst of energy, and I dithered. I decided I would simply word gather from a favorite book, and I wouldn’t make it a goal to write a poem. Given that I’m freshly back to drafting, I wanted to let myself off the hook for churning out a draft. Instead, I would just sink into the words.

I’ve said this before, but for me it bears repeating. When I want inspiration to jumpstart my writing, I must go back to a book / poet I’ve already grown to love, a trusted source. Of all those books on the to-read shelves I mentioned yesterday, a very few will make it to that inspirational stack. This does not mean that I won’t find poems to enjoy and admire in most of them. I will; however, inspiration requires a much deeper connection fostered over many re-readings for me.

Today, I turned to Malinda Markham, a poet gone from us far too young, and her 2nd (and last book) Having Cut the Sparrow’s Heart. To word gather, I read a poem slowly, usually starting at the beginning of the book, and revel in all the reasons I am inspired by it. Then, I steal 4 – 5 words and smatter them across a blank page in my journal. I intentionally separate words from an individual poem. I do this for multiple poems until the arrangement of the words on my journal page begins to suggest connections (I circle and arrow) and lines begin to form. Here’s a picture of what today’s page looks like.

Usually, I need about twice this number of words, so that there is very little white space left. Yet, today, I was inspired by a specific poem of Markham’s, “Petition,” and my word gathering had already suggested my own direction. Markham’s poem ends, “On the day I am narrow as glass, / you be the sun do not let me grow cold.” I heard “On the days I am heavy leaden, / bid me swallow the chemical thorn” and began to draft. No, I don’t suffer from the same kind of debilitating depression as Markham did, but I do take an SNRI for a milder case of depression and anxiety. The idea of an antidepressant as a “chemical thorn” meant to “wake” the speaker is the heart of the poem.

Today’s draft is back in my comfort zone of free verse with plenty of intense imagery & sound and no shackles of pentameter. Okay, the shackles serve their purpose, I admit, but it was great fun to simply let the lines expand and contract organically while I measured pace and sound with white space and end-stopped versus enjambed lines only.

It’s interesting that the father poems seem to be rooted in the plain speech of my first book, and of my youth, while this new poem today reverts to the lyricism and conversational baroque of my third book. Content drives form? Yes.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
23
May
2017

Process Notes: In Truth, Dad

68º ~ central Arkansas is easing us into summer with an actual spring (rather than jumping straight to 90º), the humidity does drape & cling, though, as the yard birds signal the business of their day

After a week of family business and traveling, I’m back at the desk and eager to begin a summer of drafting. As with my last post, I’ve written another poem about my father’s passing, another poem that probably doesn’t paint me in the best light as his daughter, but I promised to “Tell the Truth!”

For today, I used my old method of reminding myself before bed and then again on first waking that I would be drafting this morning. Sure enough, the first line came to me even in the half-wake before I got out of bed, and as it came to me, I realized that it was in perfect iambic pentameter, darn it! Apparently, these father poems are falling into forms, and I’m sure my teaching has some part to play in that. In my old job, with basic intro to creative writing needing to cover prose and poetry, I rarely had time to dig into forms of poetry beyond a cursory look at free verse versus fixed forms. Now, I’m up to my elbows in the intricacies of form (and how important it is to both free verse and formal verse).

But, back to my narrative, as I woke, I kept repeating the lines: “There is no devastation here. No death / inspired wails.” Yes, I heard the enjambment there before I counted and found the iambic pentameter in the first line. Who would have thought I’d become this, after years of swearing I had a tin ear?

As I showered, I repeated the lines and more came to me. After dressing, I rushed to scrawl it out in my journal. I confess that I paused then for breakfast and coffee; I paused because I had a healthy eight lines and I knew the weight would hold long enough for me to fuel up. It did, but the rest of the drafting did not come easy. I went into it thinking sonnet (even when I was scrawling by hand), but by the time I got to 12 lines I thought I had more to say, and I resisted the form. I wrote it out. I let it go long; I let the lines rush past pentameter. And then I realized that I was overwriting and I was not telling the truth; I was hesitating. When I focused on the truth and compressed the lines (shedding the hesitations), darn it, there it was, a sonnet.

On reflection, the sonnet form may be working for these poems because they contain such difficult material for me, as I reconcile myself to the fact that my relationship with my father was nowhere near healthy, and that I am not mourning him in the expected ways. With a sonnet, the poet tries to capture* one crystal clear moment amongst the chaos, thus being more prone to lyric than narrative. This helps as lyric is my strength, and when I was getting overwhelmed today with what I was trying to say, I reminded myself to go back to where the poem began and just tell that one, small truth (the fact that I’m not devastated).

In truth, I’m feeling more exposed, more vulnerable & raw than I’ve felt in a long time when writing. As I drafted, I kept hearing that little voice say, “you can’t write that” and “you can’t publish this; it will hurt so-and-so and so-and-so.” I’m pretty sure this is what people mean when they say someone is writing “necessary” poems; I’m just not sure these poems will be necessary to anyone else but me.

 

*(and capture is the right word, as the sonnet provides the frame — the cage?)

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
11
May
2017

Process Notes: The Mourner’s Response when Charged with Truth-Telling

75º ~ 70% chance of storms later in the day, the sky a greenish gray, the slightest of breezes as the air gathers energy for thunder, lightning, rain

“I went back to my hotel room and I scrawled ‘Tell the truth’ and the Roman numeral I on the cover,” he says. “I promised myself I would fill up a page every day, and it wouldn’t matter how terrible the writing was or how crazy it was. The only rule was it had to come from a place of truth.” ~ Charlie Worsham on NPR’s All Things Considered

“There is a charge // For the eyeing of my scars. There is a charge / For the hearing of my heart– // It really goes.” ~ “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath

“Tell all the truth, but tell it slant — ” ~ “1263” by Emily Dickinson

Finally, I am done with teaching for the semester and have spent several days doing absolutely nothing in order to recharge and regroup. Given that I haven’t found a way to teach and write in my “newish” job yet (as a junior faculty member and with all new preps each semester), I’ve renewed my commitment to writing during the summer. Last year, I had the added motivation of a summer stipend; this year I have the added motivation of my own mental health. Like most writers, when I’m kept from writing because of other commitments and concerns, my brain and my emotions tend to founder, causing temporary bouts of depression and anxiety. In other words, I write because I must.

So, as I was finishing up the semester, I happened to listen to the NPR interview with rising country star Charlie Worsham, and his method of re-igniting his passion for writing lyrics stuck with me. I started a new journal this week, and while I didn’t follow Worsham’s lead by writing “Tell the Truth!” across the front, I am writing that phrase on every fresh page.

Because my father died recently, I’ve been writing some about him and about grief, or lack of it, given that my relationship with my father was somewhat strained. As a farmer’s son and as a person whose skills rested in his hands and in physical labor, my father never understood this weird, artistic and intellectual daughter, who tried to do all of the building and growing things, but was pretty terrible at all things physical/manual. And my father made several moral choices with which I strongly disagreed. So, I’ve been trying to tell the truth about that, but it’s hard b/c this is a truth that doesn’t fit the “good daughter” role.

In the process of writing today’s draft, I thought of both the Plath poem and the Dickinson quoted above. Given that my most recent work has only been tangentially informed by my own experiences, I was most certainly telling my truth “slant.” In the manner of “Tell the Truth!” I’m working on “upright” truth. I’m working more in the non-fiction vein than I have recently, so I feel the Plath quote rising up as well. I’m risking more on the page and I can feel it in my heart, a stretching, an opening, and a scrunching up as well.

In terms of craft, the funniest thing happened, again. I scrawled out the rough draft in my journal, working the phrases out loud with tongue and breath and gathering them loosely on the page with many crossings-out and nearly illegible scribbling. Then, I went to the computer and put it up on the screen in a free verse form, but dang it, in the first line I use “three-personed” to describe my father, and you can’t allude to one of the most famous sonnets, Donne’s “Batter my heart, three person’d God,” and not write a sonnet. Funnily, I didn’t even think of “sonnet” until I got to the end, a three-line closing that really contained a traditional sonnet-like couplet. Dang it! Those forms and theory classes really got under my skin. Of course, I re-drafted and now have sonnet before me. Dang it! On re-reading, the “turn” even ended up being in line 9.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn