Mother, May I or Against Permission

I'm feeling a little wiggy and free, like bouncing in my seat although the wildest thing I might do is have a shot of bourbon or not wear sunscreen when I go out in a few minutes to mow the lawn. I just turned my grades in! Huzzah! No more wrestling over quality and quantity and revision bravado and surprise inspiration and the good plain luck of having a talent.

So why did the above title suggest itself to me. (Do you remember that game--"Mother, may I?" "No, you may not!) I'm at one of those rare times when there are no expectations for a few hours or days. Why am I thinking about permission and rejecting that stance? I was a very dutiful child always conscious of obligation and ritual--quite frighteningly so for a little while.

Are all moments of freedom/release related to each other? This small soaring away from the gradebook reminding me of all other flights?Maybe it's the students reminding me of the thrill of abandoning syntax and punctuation to see how that makes language on the page different. Maybe they remind me of myself when I first stopped rhyming or using question marks or using line breaks. The necessary hubris that allows a writer to walk the plank over the unknown. What's keeping me up in the air?

Let me just say that I never tell my students something has to be earned. I find myself quite scornful of this sentiment.Maybe it's not the sentiment but the language. Just as epiphany seems to have fallen out of style, or at least out of mine. A poem does not have to have a little peak at the end--our own personal Himalaya (although put that way it sounds kind of fun).

(What is Necessary) Image Above All

I think I might have mentioned earlier my feelings about form--not dismissal which seems too brutal and foolish, but perhaps thinking of it as of secondary importance. Even as I write that, I realize what a firestorm of disagreement and repudiation I might unleash. And it's all because I learned how to write when free verse still felt new and subversive. Let me begin again. Point one of my personal manifesto.

When I teach poetry, whether literature class or workshop, the first thing I discuss is image. Image as setting, image as tone, image as the referent of emotion. Image which allows the reader to put his or her finger into the physical world of the poem, understanding what is true because he or she knows this is how sunlight really does feel on skin. Image establishing a world and an authority.

Stark image--standing in for. A chair in the poem that we can sit on. Complex image which feels wonderfully apt at first encounter and then keeps unfolding, accruing meaning, suggesting more the longer we consider. 

I was having a little facebook conversation about this with someone late last week, trying to enumerate the examples I might use--Bishop, Plath. That fork poem by Simic. And then this morning I opened a book of poems by Tomas Transtromer, Windows and Stones. I was struck dumb with admiration in the second poem:
"Now my letter is with the censor . . . . / my words leap like apes onto a grating/ shake it, go stiff, and bare their teeth." (from "To Friends Behind a Border")

How else to inhabit the world if not through the senses?

Imaginary Geography (or do I mean landscape?)

When I was young, my sister and I played a game called Good Land and Bad Land. Good Land was on the right side of my grandmother's backyard which had a giant sycamore tree. Bad Land was on the left; it was narrower and had the garage (always a place of potential menace/discomfort). I don't fully remember what happened in this game, except that we would sometimes move from one side of the yard to the other by walking on the grass and whatnot growing in the cracks of the walkway. Both sides had a border of rosebushes. (OK, we used to be Catholic. That probably explains a lot.)

I was thinking about this only because in my class I've been asking students about their good lines and bad lines.I think I have a pretty good eye/ear for this. Unlike my childhood game, the point here is to eradicate Bad Land and live only in the good lines--lines that sing (I'm sorry, they do) exploding our consciousness with their imagistic wildness. Lines that are bold and long and unabstract. Lines that are clipped as if each new phrasing were held in small hands. Lines like diving boards or knives or fragrant combs of honey. Lines that no one else could find the words to say. Lines like ripples in a pool or waves in the ocean. Lines that will not let you alone. They grip you as should each title,each word, each first line, each last. Lines that break you apart and put you together new.

(My sister remembers Good Land and Bad Land as being played at our house on Mapledale as well which could kick off a great discussion of the reliability of past senses [or as we know it--memory].)

The Good News

The good news is that I've written another poem for the manuscript--"Clamshell, Get Back"-- and even figured out a pretty terrific place for it to nestle in the ms. I think it goes, but somehow it feels unbalanced in comparison. I think it's the cheese factor--you know, it hasn't aged enough--or it hasn't somehow pushed into my brain asserting its rightness as a poem will do. For instance, I'm still fiddling around with the order of the last four stanzas. I notice I like to have a stanza that is a short, gritty list as a kind of "turn" stanza towards the end.

I'm pleased about this poem because it came from a number of notes I took when I was sitting and resting my feet at AWP (OK and in a few panels/readings, too) which makes all time spent in the pursuit of poetry just that much more worthwhile.

I've been getting some acceptances (keep your eye out!) and some rejections lately. This must mean it's time for another giant outpouring of work into the great maws of lit magazines everywhere. I just sent to Chagrin River Review (which is new and local to me) and I see next on my list is Conte (where they have liked me before). Think of me tomorrow morning hustling at the keyboard. (Electronic submissions are the best.)

So plans for the weekend--send poems out, last edits and table of contents fiddle on manuscript, make ms. submission list, maybe send the remaining chapbook out as well.

(My quotation for this last week's class: "Art is the elimination of the unnecessary." --Picasso.)

Because It Is April, I Must Confess

April 1st--wrote a book review and graded papers.
April 2nd--attended an informal remembrance of Adrienne Rich, graded papers, worked on a blog post.
Two days into April and I've already missed the possibility of complete NAPOWRIMO. I have never achieved complete NAPOWRIMO. I yearn to have a life in which NAPOWRIMO could work.

Other years, I've enlisted in numerous groups, not even always in April. I have written poem parts, I have worked from someone else's posted exercises, I have set aside so much time per day to concentrate. It just doesn't seem to be the way I work. I often think if only I had a series idea!

The closest I've ever come to writing every day was a three week period when I wasn't working because I'd gotten a grant. Then my mother broke her arm and her leg and my parents moved in temporarily.

Every time I moan in my head about not having time, I think about a friend who wrote a novel by setting aside 10 minutes every day. And I think I'm getting better at paying attention to my writing needs, even during what is the cruelest academic month. Maybe I could have a NAPOWRIWEEK this April. But which one?

Thoughts on Form (in the Large) or There are Many Ways to Make Music

I have been running from form for years. And metrics. I think because it feels like a box, I say don't put me in it! Don't tell me I have to pose a problem and then solve it. Don't tell me there should be 10 syllables in each of my lines. I might be a milquetoast, but on the page I'm a rebel. Don't fence me in (a little twangy guitar music here not really frantic enough for my emotional response!). Of course, I know that I'm unconsciously working the system in my free verse way. Using the broken pieces of form and meter and rhythm to make my own patterns and echoes. I've understood this, intellectually, ever since I took "Forms of Poetry" from Leonard Trawick who opened my eyes to the meaning and uses of measure and tradition and made me write a sonnet and a sestina.

All this is a long introduction to my present quandary. I'm putting together a book of prose poems. They are poems without line breaks but with stanzas.The book is divided into 4 sections (unnamed) with an introductory poem standing before and outside of section 1. (I believe the last advice I got floating in the creative writing ether was that dividing a book into sections was bad. But come to think of it, I can just resist this encomium as well as many others.) Can I place a lineated poem as my introductory poem? It is standing outside of the book sections. I think it might work in its subjects and references. It is perhaps a little different in tone, left over from the book before where the speaker is in a very jumbled universe with a jangly voice--think too much caffeine with a slab of betrayal a la mode.

It all comes down to the question "does it work"? Can its well-thought-out line breaks hold the door open to poems with lines like a gust of air or a gush of water sluicing out over the page with some pebbles and broken flowers and scraps of paper tumbled in. It has a great title--"Ready as Mayo."

The Unlocated City of AWP (10,000 strong)

Going to AWP is like suddenly having cable television. There is so much, too much, how can it be too much? It's addictive. How can you miss this panel? It's exhausting. Look there's a whole other wing of opportunity in the Southeast Hall. Combing through the book fair for the enterprises you know and the surprises of magazines and presses and programs you didn't. Recognizing someone's name because they're a WOMPO! Buying a book because it's called Charlotte Bronte, You've Ruined My Life. Visiting the book signings of people you know. People reminding you of how you know them in the restroom line. Finding the best swag--a tiny button of Emily Dickinson's face.

AWP was in Chicago this year which is probably why I went. Its events were divided between two hotels on S. Michigan Avenue, and I was nestled in between. From my twelfth floor room, I could look out on the suprising pale blue of Lake Michigan and the soothing symmetry of the lakefront park. To my right were the museums and the crouching frog of the planetarium with its one huge eye. To the left was Navy Pier where the ferris wheel lit up every night.

The first panel I went to was on rhyme--Apollonian, Dionysian--and someone imitated a sitar. The last event I went to was an accident because I could not find the ballroom of Gerald Stern. But the poets who read in celebration of their online magazine's anniversary were terrific. The reading ended with a guitar and a song. 

Best time--lunch with two friends who live far away, talking about the work.