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May 18, 2010

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Compassion: what is the point?

About nine years ago I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. I was so happy to finally get a diagnosis that I didn’t think much about what it would mean to deal with this disorder for the rest of my life. That changed. I spent seven years trying to figure out how to live with it and ultimately only one very simple idea worked: being kind to myself. I repeated this over and over because it gave me a reason for not doing things that made me miserable. The thing with fibromyalgia (FMS) is this: if you push yourself, you tend to get flare-ups and you don’t want that because they suck. They suck MASSIVELY. And this idea worked. I stopped volunteering at my kid’s school library. It’s a worthy thing to do, the kids loved it, but standing around in a room filled with dust and shrieking children and a serious lack of sunlight made the FMS flare so bad I would go home feeling like a zombie with a hangover. I stopped cleaning my house every week (pushing a vacuum = flareup). I stopped gardening. I stopped bowling. But even more than those physical things, the mental anguish had to stop. I needed to stop berating myself for not doing stuff because FMS is intricately tied to one’s mental state. If you’re happy, the FMS is easier to handle. So I began writing a lot more seriously, because it made me happy. I stopped worrying about what other people had accomplished that I couldn’t (ok, I’m still trying to do this). I spent seven years working on this idea.
Once I mostly figured out what worked and what didn’t, surprisingly, the lack of self-flagellation opened up an entire world of things I didn’t know I could do. I didn’t realize I could dance, or travel with my kids. I didn’t know I could complete an MS 150 (bicycle charity ride). I didn’t know my family would be happier because I said no more often; there are so many things a woman in this society is supposed to do (most of which I hated). I never would have guessed, but I suppose happiness is contagious. Then one day I woke up and realized that I wanted to try something different. What if I applied this idea to others, not just myself?
I knew that would be tricky. If I spent too much time and energy being kind to others, I would get sucked right back into volunteering and spending time doing things that caused massive flare-ups. And I couldn’t figure out why I wanted to extend the sentiment. What is the point of compassion, really? It’s not reciprocal. I don’t care what anyone says, I know from experience: it doesn’t matter how many times you open doors for other people, it does not guarantee that more doors will be opened for you. People often suck and there’s really no way around that. But why? Why do people suck? Why is life so often violent? I asked myself this question over and over again, and since I’m a writer, the answer became vitally important. I mean, how do I write about people if I don’t understand what makes them tick? How do I appeal to readers if I don’t know what they feel?
I asked around. Seems I’m not the only person with an annoying health problem. I asked around some more, and it seems that I’m not the only person who has kids with health problems. I’m not even the worst off, not by a long shot. This was interesting. Maybe everyone is cranky at the grocery store because they have a migraine. Or a mother in a nursing home they can’t afford. Or whatever. So, okay, that sucks, I said to myself. What happens if I hold open a door? I tried it. The relief on some faces was its own reward. If I opened a door and paired it with a smile, it was even more fun. Simple. And it made me happy. Which made me feel better. Sure, sometimes I still wake up and can’t tell if I’m a zombie or a living person, but usually by noon I’m okay. If I listen to my friend telling me about her hideous day and then smile and joke around with her, it makes her happy. This makes me happy. But even more importantly, it makes me a better writer. I know why people do the things they do sometimes and this will help me write awesome novels with complex characters and who suddenly wake up with super-powers and save the universe.
It’s weird, but so far I’ve found being compassionate to others is much more difficult than being nice to myself. The effects are not immediate. The results are often not what I expect. I get cut off a lot in traffic and people sometimes give me dirty looks when I smile at them. Sometimes I forget that not everyone thinks the same way I do. Not everyone wants to think the way I do, and I forget that some things which are very important to me are anathema to others. Oddly, this pursuit of compassion is making me more open-minded not less.
Ultimately, I suppose compassion, empathy, sympathy, whatever you want to call it is a selfish endeavor. If you expect others to treat you well, you might grow resentful when they don’t. That’s self-defeating. But if you are compassionate to others because you think it will make you a better person, it will. If by being compassionate you learn patience, that is a wonderful thing and your kids will thank you when they spill grape juice on the carpet. If compassion teaches you how to forgive yourself, awesome. I’m not proselytizing here. I’m just saying: this works for me. It makes me happy.
Addendum: I wrote this several days ago, before a massive flare-up that made all these words seem like a foray into the idealistic world of self-righteousness. Except, well, they’re all still true. Compassion is lovely, but it’s not a perfect solution. Compassion, for oneself, for others, is not the holy grail of happiness. It’s a brick. It’s useful and durable and it has a lot of staying power, and sometimes it’s fun to throw it through a window, but by itself it isn’t the answer. I don’t know exactly what makes happiness so elusive, but I know compassion is something that can help alleviate misery from time to time. That makes it worth the effort, at least for me.
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December 31, 2009

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Ten years of internet poetry (is poetry dead?)

I like to tell people that I’ve been writing poetry since I was ten or eleven years old, and it’s true. I went to school to write, after college I went to work as a technical writer, and I wrote poems throughout my twenties, but I never seriously worked at it until 1999. I posted my first poem in an online workshop in 1997 and received scathing comments which sent me into hibernation for two more years. Then I decided I couldn’t wait any longer. I couldn’t wait for my kids to get older or easier, I couldn’t wait to have a better computer, I couldn’t wait for more time or sleep or space or any of those things you tell yourself you need in order to write.
By 2001 I was posting regularly at Poets.org and I learned how to let the nasty comments slide. I learned how take the helpful ones and use them to make my writing better. I didn’t submit often, but when I did I was mostly rejected. The few acceptances I received gave me the impetus to keep going. I learned that most of my writing was dreck because the stuff I read online was amazing. The people with whom I discussed poetry were intelligent and insightful, and their advice and commentary made me rethink everything I thought I knew about poetry. Ironically, these people were not widely published. They weren’t famous. The internet poets I knew were somewhat stigmatized, somewhat separated from the print poetry scene. Online publishing was somehow lesser and we all knew it.
I had to reevaluate the reasons I wanted to write: Did I want to be widely published? Well, yeah. Was that more important than the love of language, the thrill of writing something unique? Well, no, thankfully, because I’d finally accepted that being published wasn’t the point. It was the extra bonus, the frosting, the: oh yeah, by the way this is awesome when it happens. I wanted to continue online because it was easy to post poems. It was easy to meet other poets. I didn’t have to spend all my time writing snail-mail letters and waiting and waiting for a response. I didn’t have to spend a lot of money for an MFA I didn’t want and couldn’t afford with small children in the house. I was convinced that the web would change the face of the writing world; I just had to be patient.
I went back to the beginning and spent the next several years relearning the basics: metaphor and rhyme, meter and imagery, intent and audience. I still submitted, thought not a lot and the rejections continued, both online and snail mail. I kept writing because I loved that sensation of joy, the moment of creation that I felt when I really had a good line or image. I kept writing because I discovered that the more I wrote, the easier it was to find that joy. By 2009, I’d written four chapbooks, one full-length poetry manuscript, and two novels. I started submitting more, both online and via snail mail. All along this journey, I’ve posted poems online to Poets.org and other poetry workshops like Desert Moon Review, the Atlantic (now defunct), The Gazebo, and lurked at others just to learn: Eratosphere, Slate’s The Fray, etc. I’ve dealt with trolls, flame wars, and discrimination. I’ve been encouraged and helped and published in small poetry magazines, more often online than in print. I found that I love the flexibility of online publishing and started my own poetry journal, Autumn Sky Poetry, which now gets hundreds of submissions every few months, poems from writers who are beginners and from poets who have published widely.
Today is December 31, 2009. In the last year, I’ve won the 2009 Ellen La Forge Poetry prize. My manuscript, “Dark matter,” made semi-finalist in the Brittingham and Pollak Poetry Prizes (University of Wisconsin Press) and is a semi-finalist at the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry (waiting to hear about the winner). Today I found out that my freaky sci-fi poetry chapbook manuscript, “The Quantum Archives,” that I never, ever thought anyone would read let alone like made it to semi-finalist status at the Black Lawrence Press’ Black River Chapbook Competition. I’ve had two chapbooks published: “How to photograph the heart” by The Lives You Touch Publications and “The book of small treasures” by Seven Kitchens Press. It’s been a good ten years of waiting for the two worlds of poetry, online and print, to collide. And everything I’ve learned about writing is possible only because the internet has revitalized the poetry world. Right now, all of us who write poems are benefitting from the diversity and richness of the web. This online world made it possible for me to get to today: I don’t have an advanced degree and don’t teach. I do, however, love to write and because the internet made it possible for me to learn and meet other writers and put my work out into the virtual world, I’ve become part of a community of poets that didn’t exist fifteen years ago.
Is poetry dead? Not even a little.
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July 8, 2009

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I am so tired of reading about Zeus

. . . and all the other ancient gods and goddesses in poetry. I mean, why do we have such a fascination with these dudes? Seriously? Why the urns and the lightning bolts? Why must I read about Aphrodite again and again? I admit, I’ve written exactly one poem about Aphrodite, but that’s it. Enough already.

I would like to read about something modern. Why doesn’t somebody write a sci-fi sonnet? That would be cool.
And then I found this: D’oh! On a Grecian Urn
“A lot of students just don’t know many words. I don’t mean the kind of words you find in Elizabethan verse. I’m talking about everyday modern words, including many monosyllables. When we use a word such as “paucity,” “hierarchy,” or “realm,” we need to write it on the board and define it. Then add a couple of synonyms, and maybe an antonym or two. We need to find excuses for vocabulary lessons, and not just in the vocabularies of our respective disciplines.”

Wow, that’s just damned depressing. Maybe I shouldn’t be complaining about Hera and Troy, maybe I should run outside and accost the next kid I see and staple a multi-syllabic word to their shirt. Every month my kids and I pick a “word-of-the-month” and then vie with each other to see how many times we can use it. Last month’s word was irksome. That was a good one. This month the word is monstrosity. I didn’t want monstrosity; I wanted discombobulate, but I lost the vote. It’s not difficult to interest kids in words as long as you keep it fun. Perhaps that’s the true problem with our educational system: it’s just too unpleasant. Who wants to be trapped in a classroom all day with a bunch of other kids, forced to read iambic pentameter?

So, instead of shoving bad poems about Hercules into our children’s Eustachian tubes, why don’t we find some fun poetry, something edgy enough to appeal to a teen? What the hell, read Bukowski to them. Or maybe some rap. Hell, even Shakespeare, as long as it’s absurd and fun. But please, no more urns. Make them build a catapult and lob rolled up boring poems across the lawn. The winner gets to burn the next poem about Zeus. I guarantee the kids will like that project.
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June 26, 2009

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The myth of the "good old days"

Was just reading an op-ed on the NYTimes by Judith Warner about how nasty moms are toward each other. The sad reality of it and the anecdotes in the comments that followed convinced me to click away before I ruined my entire day. I ended up on yet another opinion piece, this one about Jon & Kate (seems none of us can escape articles about this particular couple). As I read through the educated opinions, I came across this one by Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer:

“When children had more freedom to play outside, and families’ front doors were left open for the neighborhood kids to traipse through, grabbing meals from which ever mom was handy when hunger hit, children would regularly see how other families lived. “

I want to know: who has ever lived like this? I just had a conversation with someone last week about this utopian vision of life. People talk about it all the time, but I certainly didn’t grow up in world where I could just pop into the neighbors’ houses. In my neighborhood, the kids stayed at home by themselves as our moms and dads worked at the factories around which the economy of my hometown was built. I would’ve been in big trouble if I rambled over to the neighbor’s house, and most especially if I’d begged food! You do NOT ask for handouts because that implies your own parents cannot take care of you. Big time no-no. Still, I wondered if someone, somewhere had a childhood like this. I asked my mom:

“Well,” she said, “I used to be able to hop into my cousin’s apartment.” My mom’s mom worked in a factory and her dad was a butcher. Her grandmother took care of her and her cousins.

“That doesn’t count,” I insisted. Really, it doesn’t. The whole extended family lived in one house and they had doors that opened into each other’s apartments. That’s a bit different from playing with the neighbor’s kids in a sort of suburban utopia.

I asked my dad. He just looked at me incredulously. His dad was a coal-miner, his mom worked in a factory. I asked my husband. He was in day-care when he was a kid. I asked my mother-in-law. Nope. My father-in-law? Not even (the family was a wee bit concerned with escaping North Korea when he was a kid).

I asked an old friend: she was in boarding school. Another friend was in day-care. Another friend told me that she and her friends ran wild in the streets and that she’s lucky she made it to high school. I asked a bunch of other people and none of them lived like this either. How far back into the past must one go to find this lovely childhood? If you go too far, you run into child labor and hideous infant mortality rates. Hmm. Before WWII a lot of people didn’t even own their own homes where kids could dash to and fro because the culture of the single-family house wasn’t yet built.

So, where did this particular vision of the wonderful good-old-days come from? I think it’s a collective yearning for better than what one has. There’s always someone or sometime that was or is better than your life now, and you want it, desperately. You want it enough to paint the past with lovely colors over top of the grim reality. I suppose this is not surprising. It’s much more pleasant to repress the horrible details of the past than it is to remember fully just how difficult life has always been, otherwise the future stretches ahead of us too awful to bear.

Or perhaps my sample-size is just too small and really, paradise existed in small-town America. I don’t know the location of this town, and I haven’t met any of the kids who grew up there or their kids, but maybe, just maybe it was real.

Yeah, NOT.


ETA: I just realized that last week the neighbor’s grandkids came by unannounced, as they often do, to play with my boys. I put a bowl of strawberries on the counter for them to eat. A few hours later the girls went home and the bowl was empty. The “good old days” aren’t in the past, they’re today and tomorrow!
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May 19, 2009

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Creative Writing and Class

One of my favorite books is Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. It takes a rather tongue-in-cheek look at a subject about which a great many people get themselves quite upset and makes me laugh every time I read it. Of course, class pervades every part of life, including writing. For as long as I’ve been writing I’ve had an unconscious awareness about the kinds of creative writing that are “better” than others: poetry, essays, and extremely complicated science texts are on the top of the heap, at least if you’re among academics or intellectuals (if you’re in the middle of a gathering of working class folk, telling them you are a poet is akin to admitting that you still suck your thumb at night—the news is met with blank stares, so I usually prevaricate and tell them I’m a stay-at-home-mom which has more cachet). Science fiction, fantasy, romance novels, and (gasp!) erotica are at the bottom of the literati’s list of what one should read, unless of course you’re writing a scholarly article about erotica or compiling some sort of academic erotica which usually has something to do with feminism or gender studies at which point the erotica rockets to the top of the pile (one must find some legitimate way to read one’s favorite porn, right?). These days, thanks to the internets, there’s an even lower form of writing, the lowest of the low, the very dregs of the whole enterprise: fanfiction. I mean, that stuff isn’t even published! My word!

So, of course, growing up, I did my best to hide the fact that I love genre fiction. Sci-fi and romance have always been my novels of choice. While everyone around me was reading Tolstoy and Plath, I was busy sucking down every last one of Asimov’s books and chasing them with a helping of regency love stories. When I tried to force myself to read Dickens or Austen, guess what happened? Yes: FAIL. What does this all mean? For me, after many years and thousands of books I have discovered a secret: there are really excellently written sci-fi/fantasy and romance novels, and yes, even some incredible fanfiction. Eventually I forced myself to read some classics and I found that I far prefer literary non-fiction to fiction (I have never finished a Dickens novel, not ever, though I love Poe). This gave me an extremely broad vista of material from which to form my ideas of what is ‘good’ writing and what is not. I didn’t limit myself to what I was ‘supposed’ to read and in so doing, I have discovered that buried beneath all the dreck are some pretty damn good stories. I would not be the person I am today if I hadn’t read the incredible and far-reaching political theories in sci-fi, or learned how very deeply love can heal the soul from reading romance novels. And the best part? These books are fun! They don’t make me weep uncontrollably at the end, wishing I had put out my eyes with a spoon instead of reading that insanely sad novel (see Cry, the Beloved Country, and no, I don’t care that it was brilliant, it was freaking depressing).

Now, this begs the question, why do so many academics and professionals insist that one should only read the stuff on the top of the creative writing class heap? Why do they wrinkle their noses and sniff if you happen to mistakenly fart out that right this very moment you are reading the latest Laurell K. Hamilton book? Why do I still reflexively hide the cover of my fantasy novel when I’m in public? Because what you read is a form of self-advertising. And because the collective mass of people around you believes you are a nerd if you read sci-fi, or stupid if you read romance, you hide your guilty pleasure like you hide your fixation with American Idol. It’s so much more impressive to bleat about how much you like NPR and did you know that people are reading Rand again? than it is to just own up to the fact that you could care less what subject Gladwell has tackled lately as long as you can get your Balogh fix. It’s all about appearances, which is, of course, the original function of class ideology and status in the tribe: full circle baby, go directly to Fussell’s book. So, when I say I’m a poet and I read non-fiction books about science, I’m not lying. Yes, I’m waiting for you to be impressed and hoping my literary superiority will rocket me to the top of the pile when grazing amongst the herd. However, I also read Scalzi’s and Asaro’s sci-fi novels and most hideously, Emma Holly’s erotica and I love them. Yes I do. I just don’t tell you.

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May 10, 2009

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for Mother’s Day 2009

I’ve been a mother for nearly fifteen years. I still remember the first shocking moment that I realized what I’d done, and no, it wasn’t in the hospital or even when I brought the kid home. It wasn’t even that night. It happened a few days later when he suddenly stopped staring adorably out at the world and began screaming non-stop for the next ten months. Well. Right then I learned my lesson: your child is not an extension of you. This small, helpless infant was his own person. Sure, his dad and I fed him and hugged him and made sure he didn’t die from lack of sunlight, but still, none of that is actually the point, is it? Really, the fact that I kept him and his younger brother alive for all these years isn’t the point either, even though I am justifiably proud of it since even now I can’t keep a plant green for longer than a year or so.

Now, I suppose I ought to get all sentimental and explain to my own mother (who will hopefully read this) how much she means to me and how grateful I am to her for feeding me and keeping me alive long enough to talk back at her and slam doors and all the other repellent teen stuff, but you know what? She already knows. Instead, I’d like to explain what I really think motherhood encompasses: the job is to teach your child how to ask questions. Really, it’s not anything more complicated than that. The truth is, the ability to survive has always depended on how good you are at solving problems. That used to mean understanding about winter and how to store food and learning enough about being charming to secure your status in the tribe. These things are still important, but one problem that seems to loom in our culture even larger than the issue of mere survival these days is how can I be happy? The funny thing? You can’t teach your kid how to be happy unless you’ve figured it out first. By the time you do figure it out, if ever, you have learned that teaching happiness is impossible (which, damnit, was a really aggravating discovery). You can only show them how to ask the questions that they find important, because remember, your kids are not you and what makes you happy will not necessarily make them happy. The trick is to teach them how to find their own answers. The other trick is to let them ask their own questions.

I wrote a poem a few years ago called, “The book of small treasures.” It’s the title poem from my unpublished chapbook in which all the poems are about motherhood:

The book of small treasures

Each day, he holds out his empty book,
the pages filled with blankness as if to ask:
so, now what? I have no answers. I am
a mother. Philosophy reveals itself slowly,
if at all, in the small things: a dark tree
suddenly clear in the fog, a tadpole
moving ecstatically in the roadside puddle.
I teach him to fold these little treasures
in his book, to save them forever, and he does
what I ask, mindlessly, but it is still not enough.
He needs more answers to fill up the landscape
he’s just discovered. He needs both love
and distance, like the garden that won’t bloom
until you step away. This is what I write
in my book, slowly, with much prodding
and resistance. These are the things my mother
taught me when I was a girl, when she let me hold
her book, its pages filled with thin drawings,
penciled resignation. The blankness punctuated
with the occasional, brilliant letter.

Ultimately, I think the question of how to be happy is really not a question so much as it is a walk somewhere. Along the way it’s helpful to note which things in life bring you joy. In the true perverseness that is life, they’re never what you expect and certainly not anything to do with “success” or “what you’re supposed to do.” Often, the stuff that really makes me happy are the things that take the most work, like learning how to write, drinking a perfect cup of tea (you would not believe how long it took me to get the temperature right), or finally realizing that every person I love isn’t perfect and forgiving them and myself for having expected the impossible. I could go on, but my explanations would be meaningless since every person’s happiness is, well, personal. This is the thing I want my boys to learn. This is what I’m teaching them when I ask: what are your questions? Go find them and don’t worry if you don’t figure it out right away. Life may often suck, but it’s cool, too. You get to try things more than once.

Some of this I learned on my own. Some of it I learned from my mother who stubbornly continues to listen to me, despite my insistent departure from her most familiar philosophies. That can’t be comfortable for her and I am always amazed when she tells me she has learned something from me. I want to be that kind of mother, the one who listens to her kids and respects their discoveries about happiness. Maybe it was her insistence that “contentment is boring” that made me ask and ask and read and move out and live completely differently than anyone else in the family that convinced me that the question is the answer. Whatever the case, I wouldn’t have managed it if she hadn’t had the fortitude to let me be my own person. Today I filled in some more pages of that blank book she gave me when I was born (hey, I’m speaking metaphorically here, don’t expect a photo, sheesh). This morning I wrote: Hey Mom? Thanks for the book.

.

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May 1, 2009

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Genius? Uh no. Madness.

. . . Or maybe determination and revision.

I used to think I was talented. Seriously. Okay, you can stop laughing now. I have always known what I was going to do with my life. Until college, it never occurred to me that other people did not have this comforting knowledge. Then I met people who walked around as though life was a complete mystery. It was a source of great angst for them and much amusement for me. I was a repellent creature, wasn’t I?

The most ridiculous part of thinking I was talented was expecting to not only be good at my chosen calling, but to also be successful at it. Ha. Yes, I hear you laughing again. Stop. Needless to say, these dreams were crushed rather dramatically in my twenties. Well, the idea of success was. I still thought I was talented. It took another ten years for that to be crushed (can you say: rejection slips?). However, don’t despair, this story has a happy ending. I learned that neither success nor talent matter. They don’t matter. Why?

Because determination trumps them both. Where the hell determination comes from is still a mystery to me; perhaps it’s just sheer stubbornness masquerading as a positive trait (can you say: screw you to the whole world?). Happily, success has mostly lost its luster for me, at least success as other people define it. I’m no longer so obsessed with being a best-selling novelist (though it would be nice, all that money). However, I am obsessed with being a good writer, good however I define it, that is. My husband believes that even if you are determined, without talent, all the determination in the world will not matter. Perhaps that’s also true. Perhaps it takes both. However, I do know that talent is useless unless you have the determination to hone it, practicing over and over again for years. Years.

Today I read an article in the NYTimes that seemed to reflect some of this pet theory of mine: Genius: The Modern View. In it, Brooks discusses genius and how we all seem to think that one is born with it. Einstein was destined to become a famous physicist. Phelps was destined to become an insane swimmer. Uh no. Not necessarily. So, what is it that makes these types of people so “successful?” The ability to practice the thing that interested them over and over again for years. This practice can make practically anyone into a genius. Except, who can stand to do that sort of thing? You miss a lot of TV and nights out at the local bar. You might even have missed the last episode of BSG (gasp!). So who is determined enough to do something like that for hours every day? Hmm.

Many people ask me how I could possibly write a fairly complete poem each day for a month. The short answer: I can’t, really (yes, I know I didn’t finish the last seven days of NaPoWriMo this year, enough already). The long answer: I didn’t used to be able to do that and now I can, but it’s only because I studied for ten years. See, I thought I knew how to write even though I didn’t do much of it during the 1990s. I was wrong. In 1999 I couldn’t stand it anymore. I missed writing. I hated not doing what I always thought I would and I hated even more the desperate sensation of being trapped in a hell of one’s own making. I began writing. Much drivel appeared at the end of my pencil (if you are desperate for proof, I’ll post a poem from 1999 so that you may laugh and hurl simultaneously).

Point is, I spent the next ten years practicing. It was useless as far as careers go; I think poetry is the last art at which you make nothing (there are a few cash prizes, but still, no millions). Why the hell would I do this? I was determined. I promised myself when I was ten I would be a poet. And it was exciting to get better at it. I can’t even begin to explain what it feels like to grow a sixth sense about line-breaks or the first time I really understood what an iambic foot was. (Although I still think Hopkins’ sprung rhythm is madness. He pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.)

So, I slogged through Mary Kinzie’s A Poet’s Guide to Poetry with her fascinating ideas about metaphor and her bizarre charts. I slogged through The Heath Guide to Poetry, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Writing Poems, In the Palm of Your Hand, The Language of Life, The Face of Poetry, and about one hundred others (forgive me, lists are boring, I know). Then I wrote. I focused on one aspect of poetry for months at a time: sound, metaphor, personification, etc. I revised. This cannot stress this particular thing enough: I REVISED A LOT. Anyone can write a vast amount of dreck every day and not improve the writing one iota if one does not think critically about what one is doing. I revised one poem over seven years time and it still isn’t my best work.

By 2008 I could consistently write a poem I felt worked in a style recognizably mine without much revision. By 2009, I could write a poem that worked in a style not recognizably mine without much revision. Consistently being the operative word (there are always those happy accidents, but the ability to do something intentionally is the goal). So, the most important thing I learned from all this? Stuff takes a long time. It took a minimum of ten years for me to feel like I’d figured it out. Ten years to learn how to write a poem. This doesn’t include college or high school or all the years of my twenties. Ten years of study and obsession to get a good poem at the end and no monetary compensation? Madness.

Of course, the question remains: is the stuff I put out any good? I like it. Some others seem to like it. It doesn’t look like a lot of what’s published today, but I don’t mind anymore. I am successful in my own head which is, oddly, right where I was when I was eighteen years old and a freaking genius. I have walked forwards and ended up at the beginning, but at least I can say that I know what a poem is now. I can knowledgeably converse with others about poetry. I recognize a sonnet even if it doesn’t bite me on the ankle first. And none of this is attributable to any freakish inborn aptitude.

Sestina circa 1999 — only thing good about it is that it’s not in first person

Rejoice

There she stands at dusk, lost on the curb,
staring silent into the dank gutter.
The autumn leaves are trapped, still
and frozen in the open iron grate.
Cinder and ice islands lie stranded
around her, surrounding her:

unfortunate winter monuments. Her
face is tight, holding a desperate curb
on her emotions. A thin strand
of hair flicks across her cheek while the gutter
smells wrinkle her nose, grating
against her senses. She is still,

lost, until a sharp wind stills
her thoughts. She crosses the street, her
heart beating fast. She hops another grate,
avoiding the mess in it to step onto the curb.
Up in the sky painted clouds far from the gutter
in her mind leap across the blue expanse in strands.

Looking up, startled by beauty, she imagines the strand
of her life changing, streaming free. “I am still
alive,” she thinks. She looks down past the gutter
and glimpses of trees and water beckon her.
She pivots, and turns down the walk, another curb
in her way. Jump! She leaps over the edge, past the grate

and runs down the hill to the valley. No grates
collect waste and ice here; there’s only rich strands
of old leaves woven into the ground. No sharp curbs
trap the yellow grass, no slippery sidewalks still
the wildflowers. She leaves the blocked gutter
up on the dark mountain city far behind her,

to still herself in the valley, see the deepening sky. Strands
of starlight curb the horizon, so beautiful! The gutter
above is silent; its grates are frozen shut far away from her.

Free verse circa 2005 — a happy accident

Suicide

Don’t judge me
she says as I walk in.
I know love is a puzzle,
but her words confuse
more than usual as they fall
from blue lips.
What is she doing there,
on the floor,
wanting to be unmade?

Blood does not lie
as it streaks linoleum.
It doesn’t soak in.
It just leaks like a dropped cup
of coffee, a wasted taste
I lunge for, try to staunch
with a dishtowel.
It’s too late
the tree outside says.

Leaves drop like grief
onto wet ground.

first appeared in: Ibbetson Street Press, November/December 2005, Issue 18

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April 28, 2009

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Sonnets and Static

I wrote twenty sonnets this month. No, seriously, twenty (and I will be deleting them from Poets.org soon, so read them while you still can). I read somewhere that when artists want to learn something, they draw it 100 times. I wanted to learn how to write a sonnet. I’d been writing free-verse with the occasional foray into forms for years but I want to be a writer, not a one-hit-poem wonder. In my life I’ve written technical manuals, insurance books, safety manuals, letters, resumes, stories, poems, and done a slew of other writing-related things, yet there is always something more about writing that I don’t know. I suppose there always will be, for which I am profoundly grateful.

About sonnets:
Some people asked me how I did it. How did I write so many sonnets in a row? I have a system. I decided to study cloud forms at the same time which provided a framework. I already know I like to talk about relationships and emotion; that provided subject matter. When I sit down to write, I open up one thesaurus in my browser and two rhyming dictionaries. I choose the last word of the lines based on how many other words rhyme with them, and how interesting the words are to me before I write the line, with a few inspired exceptions.

I chose consciously to enjamb most of the lines, saving end-stopped lines for when I truly wanted to make a point because I think that fundamentally changes the traditional nature of the sonnets, bringing it into the modern era and making it more palatable to the modern ear. I say to everyone who asks: follow the punctuation, not the lines when reading aloud; follow the lines only with the eye. I also stuck mostly to iambic feet, with the occasional trochee substitution and in one poem, an amphibrach at the end, for my meter. When I begin, I chant a fake iambic pentameter line to myself and settle down to work. That’s basically it.

About static:
I recently bought Jack Gilbert’s new book, “The Dance Most of All,” and on first glance it seems to be more of the same. He’s one of my favorite poets and I’m certainly looking forward to reading his new poetry (it’s all so comfortable), yet I can’t help feeling as though he discovered one way to do something and hasn’t varied since then. His poems all look the same: like a herd of horses, they’re different colors and even breeds and beautiful, but still, all HORSES. I’ve noticed that other poets tend to do this, never changing that one style that works, that brings them recognition and awards. It’s a trap.

Both beginners and old-hands fall into this trap, in which there are two sides. On one side you write only for yourself, on the other you write only for other people. The best work of any poet straddles the sharp line in-between: where you understand how much information a reader needs to relate to your poem and you also understand that you must push the boundary of sameness and move into artistry. Most of the stuff I’ve read in journals now, respectable journals and respectable poets, is so random that comprehension is also random. These poems do not even pretend to speak to a reader. Most of the other stuff I read is all too conscious of the reader and fails to provide that spark of difference that moves the poem from ordinary into innovative. Boring, boring, boring, both sides.

I don’t want that. I don’t want to write the same kind of poem over and over for the rest of my life. I don’t want to write only for myself and I don’t want to write what is fashionable right now. So, I wrote twenty sonnets and learned how to manage iambic pentameter and rhyme and to my amazement, twenty was enough. I moved on to a type of stream-of-consciousnes poem whose form I invented for myself in a burst of sheer joy one night. It will be another chapbook, yet another unpublished chapbook. I have three finished so far, and one full-length collection, all still unpublished. And now, when this new set is done, I will have four. Absurd. Still, at least they are all different (except in voice, which you can’t run away from and is another topic completely).

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April 21, 2009

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rambling

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Wow. I am again reminded how much I love English.

Not because I speak another language and therefore have the ability to compare, no, because I don’t. Not because other languages are substandard (I’m sure every language has its beauty), no. I am reminded because the alphabet and the way we use metaphors allows English speakers to combine words and ideas in a way that allows for an insane amount of variation and individuality. Of course, the idea that individuality = good is a bit of a cultural trapping, but still, to my knowledge, we don’t have this problem:

Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says from the NYTimes.

Can you imagine being told you must change your name because the computer cannot read it? I can’t. What would happen here if all the Shahyla’s and Meaghan’s and Kristyn’s were told to standardize? There would be an uproar.