Lakehouse Diary II

Wednesday

More snakes! Although really just one when I went for a walk at the end of the drive. I wrote a very strange poem today about how people supposedly have mistaken a giant fish or a whale or a giant turtle for land. Even St. Brendan! Very long multi-syllabic words for it in several languages. The poem interests me but is perhaps in another country from other things I have written perhaps ever. I also sorted through my unbooked poems and made 5 sections—two unseries, work series, lecture series, small place series. I think I’ll put “Soldiers” by itself in the front because it seems to me it prequels several sensibilities to come. Sat for a very long time in the canopied swing thing while the wind got stronger and stronger and the light changed and the waves got higher so you could see through them at the top.

P.S. T___ makes us look bad by working longer than M___ and I.

Thursday

Danger alert! T___ and M___ attacked by a bird down by the miniature golf last night. This was after T___ had given this same bird the bottom of her cone who only got one satisfying peck at it before  there was a giant bird scramble and it was taken away. When we were going to the car, T___ shrieked and I thought she’d fallen, but the bird had thumped her head, and then thumped Mary. We discussed how this and the angry tornado of birds (also yesterday) could be useful scenes in the beginning of a horror film. Today writing another weird poem with parenthetical inclusions that answer the title. Also, we visited the coffee shop/bakery. Good coffee. M___ declares she can’t remember ever having a better cake doughnut. Planning to make a list of poem ideas this afternoon. Something that will be on that list is the Exeter book which has caught my interest.

Lakehouse Diary

Monday

We arrived at the Lakehouse yesterday. I’m staying upstairs in a room with a giant king-sized bed, yet there are no sheets to fit it. This is the only quibble I have other than the water snakes M___ reported and then I viewed myself today. There’s a narrow rocky beach here with a large portion made up of a drift of tiny shells, but the snake has taken the shine away. Fortunately, there’s this very clever two seated swing with a roof right at the entrance to the beach that is great to sit and rock and read or talk or just look out at the water, hear the waves. The waves all the time like the whoosh of your heartbeat or the anticipation of new things. Advent! All night long I heard them. Also, there are so many more birds here than at Quarry Hollow or any place else on Kelleys Island that I’ve stayed. Red winged blackbirds being the only ones I’m sure of. Yesterday, I heard a bird call that sounded like the chimes of a bell. Today I wrote a new poem in the morning—maybe in the small places in Cleveland category, and I worked on revising “At the Lecture on Lost Bones and Self Worth.” I worked it so much, I can’t tell what it’s like. I’ll have to let it be until tomorrow. Yesterday we had P___’s wonderful Moroccan chicken for dinner and today we’re going to go out to eat. When we went for a walk there were a number of 8 foot tall Queen Anne’s Lace growing. I have never seen them more than 3-ish feet. Anywhere.

Tuesday

Danger update. I started looking up the giant Queen Anne’s Lace on the internet. Turns out it’s hemlock—every part poisonous. M___ had suggested I bite off the stem when I was picking my posy. Glad I didn’t. And I just came back from the beach. I sat on the rocks so I could watch the increasing waves keeping a reptile eye out for snakes. Today I wrote a poem which at first I didn’t like. It started out by my thinking one of my small place poems should be about a censer. When I finished my poem, it just seemed so flat. I finally broke it up into tiny lines with underlining line breaks and I liked it better. I also read all my loose poems to think about making a new book. Lots of series. I think the Aunt H series being subsumed into the whole will make things better. But still lecture series and work series. I know the lecture series can’t be last. Maybe second? Maybe the soldier poem first? I should think about what to write when I go to bed again. Still no cute t-shirt for I___. Two gift shops so far.

Writing Poetry--What Is Required?

If you were going to answer my question--which of course is not rhetorical--and you were itemizing little gobbets of need in your head, please don't trot out the word MUSE which concept I have always taken against. Is it a man/woman thing--the undertones of sexuality and gender predisposing me to find the idea that I need another being to create incredulous? Perhaps. I do not want or fear (the wrath of) a muse.

Listing necessities:

• time--This is what I always want--time to think about this particular poem, but also to plan out a series or to just unload the heavy apple tree of my head. I can remember having time just how I wanted it for three weeks once when I received a grant and took off from teaching. Then my mother broke her arm and her leg. But I find there are all kinds of nooks and crannies of time that can be made useful, the necessity of writing squeezing into my life like toothpaste. Of course, would I write more/differently if I had leisure in which to find and pursue my projects?
• space--It is very nice to have one's own office, even though my office at home functions best as a repository of papers I should go through and file or throw away. I like my wooden table that was once my kitchen table as the place where my poems congregate. But I have also written in the car, the bath, the bed, at the office (shh), in classrooms, in dreams, recently at the kitchen table at my writers retreat with people drifting in to find their first cup of coffee, at other people's poetry readings . . .
• computer--I almost always start writing long hand, sometimes encouraging revision with longhand as well. I really like being able to physically cross out with my pencil or pen or draw arrows or flip back and forth to different pages in my notebook. But at a certain point, I need the computer to be able to tell how long a line looks, what words I can move up and down, how the shape feels, the white space, what would happen if I took out all the punctuation and so on. And of course now there's the electronic submission--heaven!
• idea or the thing that natters at me--This is sometimes just a whisper, sometimes the cataloging voice that says you need that even though I have no idea why. I always try to pay attention. (This is not the muse talking to me.)
• critical faculty--something that pushes in the beginning to better, newer ways of presenting, rejecting the usual, and then cleans up at the end--traffic cop and washerwoman.
• books--The one thing I would do if I had more time would be to read more books, journals, science articles, essays, poems, novels to get a better view of the world, both literary and otherwise.