Is Writing a Poem Like Shoveling Snow or Poem-a-Day 15

Embroiled as I am in my poem a day project, I must write a poem today. So far I have written 10 poems for 14 days. On two days I wrote two poems trying to make up for my trip to NJ when I wrote nothing. Are they all real poems? I don't think so. I suspect some are and some might be put together or usefully scavenged. Many of the things I've written about are the sort of impressions that fly through your head so quickly that they are often ignored.  I have a lot of trouble coming up with titles which is not something I usually have trouble with. Also, I seem to be continually hovering in the 12 to 15 line range (eek--sonnet) although I guess I could just make my lines longer or shorter to get away from that.

I fear I must also shovel some snow today even though I've parked at the end of the driveway and my street is plowed. My old car would just bull through the buildup--crunch, crunch. But I'm cruising lighter now, good for everything but the unshoveled driveway and the the unplowed parking lot.

Shoveling snow is like writing a poem because:

1. It has to be done to get anywhere (although different roads)
2. It uses muscles that never get exercised at any other time
3. It's beautiful out there
4. It's laborious
5. It sometimes seems endless
6. It's good to pause in the middle and look over what's been done
7. Sometimes the snow comes thickly, sometimes in little gusts

Plans for Poem-A-Day: the Unmasked Confessional

I have signed up to take part in a poem-a-day writing group over winter break. Don't shake your head wearily. Don't remind me that I had a lot more energy many years ago. I don't think I had more ideas in the past or more ease of creating or more notions about how to get the ship in or out of the bottle (wherever that metaphor came from). I think I have more now. I can turn to myself and pull something out--a thread, a handkerchief, my soul, a song, a frito crumb. I have hope in what has proved to be a vast well waiting.

I am always entranced at the outset of a time frame or schedule like this as if it were New Year's Eve--planning how my life will be different, more dedicated, my eyes never closing all the way, my mind poised to snatch at the impressions and shapes and ideas congregating, foregrounded in the head's temples, charging from one to the next.

I begin to avoid my desk for some days before. I don't want to put my eggs in a too-early basket. But maybe I could write something today and tack it in for day 11 when I might have run dry? Surely pre-writing is against the whole spirit of the thing. I must leap on each day of the month like a tiger ready to tear off a good poem.

Really, I embrace this idea as 30 days of being awake. 30 days of attending the paper. 30 opportunities to surprise myself. I don't expect a poem each time, but a useful nugget or an astounding freewrite like a white water cataract.

And I will have resource to some secret ideas and seeds. One of which is "coconut."

Thankful

I am thankful to be a poet. It makes me happy. It occupies my mind and strokes my hair. (Not in a sick self-congratulatory way but lovingly.) My gray cells celebrate the ring-a-ding pinball course of thought. 

Of course, there are the days I loathe my work or torture myself with accusations of being lazy. (And sometimes I am.) There are the tedious days when I look up journals to send my work to, and try to think which 4 to 6 poems go together in a provocative way. And there are the days of rejections or the weeks. The dread silence when everything is out.The days when one can only regurgitate the banal or the cliched.

White paper (or screen)--it should be an occasion for joy. A space to have my say with metaphors, alliteration, line breaks.

Writing poems is work for which I rarely get paid which means that it's the side-scramble, the column that sometimes gets jettisoned. But it has shaped me more than anything else except being a parent. It has taught me how to see the world in a way that makes for a deeper life. 

Intellectual Texture or Finding the Tabletop

I don't think this is something I have ever called for in quite this way, but recently I was making comments/notes on a student's poem and I wrote, "Cheese, cheese, cheese--you need a cracker."

And it was true. I was swirling in a vortex of color and sensation--kind of like the The Manchurian Candidate, Frank Sinatra's eyes about to roll up into his head! And as much as I beg for image in any of its guises or on any of its layers, I needed some kind of tabletop to get my foot on, too, so I could stand up and see what was going on in the poem.

I needed some grounding or stage which implies direction or a stance, and I needed some other kind of information as counterpoint to act as a balance to the heavy dose of image that was pouring on me like syrup. And I needed measure.

This should be easier to mete out than sound texture, but it doesn't seem to be, maybe because sound has more recognizable dualities and information texture is more like a color wheel or a centrifuge gone wild. The tongue limiting but the mind endless and without time.

Malleable/Mallet-able

Have I already mentioned I'm writing a series of poems? I have 7 (for sure), 1 maybe, 2 more which are as yet evanescent ideas. In an arbitrary way I am thinking there should be twelve. But maybe 14? Since one of my extremely evanescent ideas is to play around with the crown of sonnets idea but with poems that aren't sonnnets--using a line from each poem to assemble a new one. This is something I might really do or maybe it's a place holder for me while the real poem-to-come gathers its powers.

Fortunately, for me, I'm going to a lecture on poetics on Monday. This is exactly the kind of occasion that calls forth ideas (sometimes completely unrelated) and provokes a poem. The last poem I wrote was originated and half-concocted in a lecture by Bill Berkson called "Hands On/Hands Off." (Let me just say that I am always trying to pay attention, but sometimes I get called away.)

I've also planned some writing time on Saturday morning--more than just a list of ideas, please. Before that happens, I want to send out to a couple more journals (electronically, please) and decide where I'm sending my manuscript. I should have a list with deadlines for this.

My other office plan is to throw away some of the enormous quantities of paper that reside in columnar fashion on the floor. Of course, I have to look at all the sheets of paper in the course of doing this which is why I don't.

Have now looked up requirements of crown of sonnets and see that I'm only interested in writing the 15th heroic sonnet. But still am interested in the idea. All form is malleable after all or maybe mallet-able.

Grading Poems

This is a difficult thing.

Ideas of surprise, cliche, originality, even music are affected by how much one reads and, I guess, in what century. But if your instructor writes notes suggesting many changes and none are made--well? If your poems do not lift off the page, even a little, even like a chicken with clipped wings--well.

I realize it's paradoxical to say at the same time in the same conference make it longer and make it shorter--develop and delete, but people who have been practicing a while understand that there's so much chaff that drifts out of our figurative poetic mouths. Let the great wind of revision blow those unnecessary, already understood-from-context words away.

Some of my students have made me happy by finally furnishing titles that are not labels. Some have purged but not opened wider. Some have not turned their portfolios in. Some have stopped centering the text. Some have not corrected the spelling errors. How much weight to be given to ambition?

What ends with a period does not have to be a sentence. Maybe there don't have to be any periods at all. When is a fragment too fragmentary? Answer this question with the body of the poem: How can the reader know what I know?Why are you stopping too soon?

The good news is that these are only midterm grades--short-term markers of how flexible and calisthenic are the poet/poems.

In other news, I'm thinking that there should be poetry flash mobs across the land. What poem would they recite in unison? Also, cogitating the idea of a group poem whose primary worth would be in sound and performance.

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.