Summer time when the writing is easy(-ier)

Every year I do this kind of computation with the same anticipation and longing I used to employ making lists before going on family vacations.

1. Figure out when I will be done grading.
2. Identify date fall semester begins.
3. Count up how many weeks are to be all about writing.
4. Lop one week off at the beginning (dissipating exhaustion).
5. Lop one week off at the end (intense phase of fall semester prep).
6. Count what's left =12 weeks (sounds pretty wonderful).
7. Make a list of books I'd like to read/annotate/buy--poetry, poetics, how-to, serious fiction.
8. List what I'd like to accomplish:

• Book ms. out (should I give it a once-over to make sure there's no horrifying weakness, no creeping gauzy semi-invisible wounds?)
• Poems out (what a wonderful thing summer submissions are)
• Poem ideas I've already had (list)
• Write, write, write.
• Gauge series I'm working on to see how to/if to expand (I'm pretty sure could use at least 2-4 more)
• Cock my eye at the poem-a-days. What do I want to do with them? I recall thinking that some could be put together. Maybe I should think fragment.
• Begin working on a new project. (I recently asked someone what they were working on and they had a wonderful historical person to bounce poems off of.)  I have a note that says "this kind of long dialogue of poems" which sounds like a series to me.
• I'd like to think about myself as a writer apart from what I am actually writing. Maybe thinking about placement or trajectory or brilliance (as if I were some kind of astronomical sign).

I find that writing is a lot like gardening. There's a seasonal quality to it. And when working fiercely (always my goal) there's time spent on the standing work and time on the kneeling.

Present But Not by Heart

I never have a class where I require my students to memorize poems. This has nothing to do with how useful/pleasurable that might be and everything to do with my secret childhood piano recital memorization fiasco. In the only college class where I was required to memorize a poem, I went with Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse," because of the rhyme and meter and brevity--all of which helped me fulfill the requirement.

I'm reminded of memorization because this month, since it is National Poetry Month, I've been posting a quotation from one of my favorite poems most days.

So far:

"The small rain down can rain." 
Anonymous

"The knife there on the shelf—
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
I knew each nick and scratch by heart,
the bluish blade, the broken tip,
the lines of wood-grain on the handle ... "
From Crusoe in England by Elisabeth Bishop

"First came the crib
with its glacial bars.
Then dolls
and the devotion to their plastic mouths.
Then there was school,
the little straight rows of chairs,
blotting my name over and over,
but undersea all the time,
a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work."
--from "Rowing" by Anne Sexton

"But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity."
from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" 

"It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailorshops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes."
From Pablo Neruda's "Walking Around" 

Tomorrow, I think it's going to be Robert Creeley: "I Knew a Man." 

Punct This!

I am mystified by the fact that I'm writing a poem using unconventional punctuation. I started out trying to use bullet points but they looked too dark and maybe too orderly. I knew I wanted to write this poem when my sister sent me the Open Culture posting of rare film footage of a number of authors. The Mark Twain film really set me off in that good I-have-to-write-a-poem-about-this way. The poem seems to be a prose poem with no line breaks, but yes stanza breaks. And I had just stopped writing prose poems!

Ten years ago, I would not have fooled around with marks this way. I used to crack down on the ampersand when my students used it! It was all about the language. I still do think it's all about the language. But white space and punctuation have become more meaningful to me, more speaking.(Although that doesn't mean I can tell you why these marks seem important to this poem.)

I find it a little zany that I can move back and forth between styles from week to week, but there's more than one way to write a poem. If I were going to put my finger on the cause of my present flexibility, I think it might be my MFA experience. I went into the MFA already writing competent poems. And the MFA took me and shook me and stretched me and threw me in the creek and hung me to dry in a tree and said read read read and write many poems in this short time. Good results.

Should There Be a Cannibal in Your Poem?

I went to a reading with my class last night. We heard Alissa Nutting read her short story about a girl who trips out on her dying grandmother's prescriptions while pursuing a relationship with a cannibal she met on the subway. (She's a vegetarian.) It was quite fabulous in its accumulations of bizarrities and weirdnesses, and as they mounted I began to wonder how will she end it, how can it have a good end, but it did.

In a weird preview, we had just looked at Kay Ryan's poem "The Pass" which features members of the Donner Party. It is a much more wry view of their dilemma never actually mentioning human meat. (Although to be fair in Nutting's story we never do see inside of the freezers.)

There was so much pleasure in these two experiences, I begin to think my students should all put a cannibal in their poems. But what does that really mean?

I have already written my cannibal poem--no Donner Party, but a series of historical references beginning with lifeboat survivors put on trial for consuming one of their number, blood and liver first. What did this do for my poem? Enter extremity? Enter distance from the self (sometimes a difficult thing)? Enter the need for a convincing narrative of strange parts?

But maybe the cannibal in the poem doesn't have to be a real cannibal. Maybe it means what makes me sit up and take notice. Maybe it's the same thing as the "so what" question--I have read your poem/so what? Maybe it's the same thing that Ryan means when she says that she wants her poems to have "teeth." She explains that as a sense of wildness in the words, a sense that anything could happen.

Fortress of the Self

In a Stephen King movie--the one with the dream catcher?-- there are several scenes that imagine the character's brain or consciousness as a library of shelves and file cabinets and stairs.

And so many things are stored upstairs, every head like a hoarder's paradise with data stacked like twine-tied newsprint. This enormous data of everything experienced, read, thought, studied, forgotten is behind every poem a person writes, infusing it with considerable unspoken meaning.

As new writers, we sometimes find it difficult to clue the other in. Isn't it obvious? Why can't the other get it? We've just lobbed a poem from the fortress of the self, sent a flame-tipped arrow from the turret, spilled the boiling oil of our life on the below, written on the great stone walls in blood.

But that's not the same thing as being inside privy to the plant life, home movies, and notes from third grade.

Maybe a fortress is too medieval although it does have the sense of the protected, beleaguered self--battlements, torture chamber, great hall, portcullis. And aren't we our own city-state?

How to compose a poem that doesn't just reflect the reader like the glassy surface of the moat. How to compose a poem with tonal music, with images like cunning levers, with words that turn the handle of meaning to at least crack open the door?

Poem-a-Day Survivor

I need a T-shirt that says Poem-a-Day Survivor. Technically, I bowed out while the rest were still posting, but I'd been posting for 30 days--27 posts. I posted many poems without titles (which I almost never do), a list poem, prose poems, poems circling the sonnet size, a twitter-sized poem--140 characters, poems built on words that had an interior hard g sound. And when I read through them I noticed repeated themes/images/ words--curiously enough one being butter!

I need to think outside the poems and inside the poems, a little conversation on paper. I need to  read through and see if they're any good, if they're parts of something longer, what needs to be revised, what needs to be thrown away, what needs to be thought about or rethought.

This morning
--I sent poems to three magazines electronically
--I sent my manuscript to one contest
--Notes towards a poem kept intruding while I read one of Larry Levis's elegies

I'm glad I have two more free days.

Day 22

My poem a day pledge is whipping my butt. It's day 22 and I've written 19 poems. Or maybe poem parts? But my poem-maker feels like a shaken bottle of pop! (I don't know what my poem-maker is.) Since I seem incapable of thinking about my poems, my process, my plans for the next few months (maybe on MLK weekend?), I'm trying to send it all out--poems, book, probably not chapbook. And I want to go on record that I'm outraged that I would ever have to pay to make an electronic submission to a magazine (not a contest).

Consulting The Writer's Chronicle and Poets and Writers for new places to submit, I notice there are far more ads for MFA programs than almost anything else. Yesterday, I also looked at what journals had poems in Best American Poetry and scanned the mags a successful poet-friend is published in. I also like to send to local-ish journals. (It feels neighborly.)

Now I have to figure out the clumps--which sets of 3 to 5 poems to send to where. Faux logic and all voodoo in the laying on of paper.