Going deep

Today, while driving to Goodwill, I was thinking about trying to write about a childhood friend. This is someone I last saw in 1983. Two years ago this time, I found out that she had been murdered by her husband. The news came at a time when I was already fragile from several wild winds in my own life; I don't know how well I "processed" the event.

I realized, as words came together in my head, that to do this poem right, I would really have to immerse myself in memories, pictures, information about the event. And I don't feel up to it.

My poems tend to arise because of a chance (or sometimes contrived) encounter with a propitious phrase. I was scrambling last night for a subject, decided to see what popped into my head, and got that old Whitman line about lilacs. I then reeled stuff off, words in what sounded to me like musical phrases, referring intermittently to Wikipedia for some bits of information on lilacs. I like what I got, and I think it could become something better.

Does this approach strike anyone as cold? I wonder. So many of my poems come from a sort of aesthetic remove; they sing for their own sakes, and they're not overtly about some personal trauma or deep feeling. That's not to say that they aren't designed, often, to evoke such a feeling.

All that said, happenstance can guide me into more emotional poems. The one I wrote in April, about my father visiting my mother's family, was (is) pretty meaningful to me. There were at least two others that I wrote during that poem-a-day month that touched on extremely personal "hot topics"--including one that was in response to the news of the death of someone with whom I had had one of the worst relationships of my life.

I dunno, though: Sometimes it seems like other poets, especially the ones I meet in workshops, are very much in the business of writing about some very important or meaningful topic. I seldom can get to such a topic via the straight path. And sometimes this makes me uneasy.

Now I have a funny feeling that I wrote some very similar musings in April. Yup, I did. Oh, well.

Continuing to tinker with the freewrite

I found a passage I liked in that recent freewrite and wrote it all out in lines of three words each. (I took out one word along the way.) I was amused to find that it divided evenly by 3.

[EDIT: Oh, crap, never mind. The first line is four words. This is why I don't do formal stuff. Also why they stopped letting me be the cashier at the library book sale in 1985.]

The tail of the
caravan sweeps across
road, effaces. What
is the point
of travel if
no one knows
where we came
from? What is
our ruse? Why
do we dare?
Where do we
dwell? In paper
patterns, painted houses,
crooked doors, gates
that sing open.
God bless America.

Then I started looking at the first word of each line. I couldn't get a reasonable phrase from the whole list, but I found a couple of intriguing bits:

The caravan road is of nowhere.
where dwell patterns crooked that God

"Crooked that God" what?

"smudged with his finger while juggling the planets"?
"ordained for crooked travelers"?

So many fun possibilities.

This owes as much to Wikipedia as to Whitman

First draft. Just written since about 11:40. What I write here are first drafts, generally, unless I note otherwise.

WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOMED

Food to Svensson’s Copper Underwing, cousin of the privet,
some paschal sprout, pale, like blood under skin,
you mark my coming and going
with your scent:

asexual, Syringa pubescens, vulgaris, spontanea—
you are as quick as spring to show and sway,
aloof as a tomboy, fickle as water ice,
lovely and complete and duplicitous.

It is when your bloom is gone
that you will come inside my house:
your sapwood, your heartwood turning
into a twisted flute
for a homely song.

The insomnia returns

I was doing well with sleep for a while. Then I quit my job and started lapsing into something like a 4-a.m.-to-noon sleep schedule. Then I started this blog...last night I was up past 5, and then awoke before 9, when my husband prepared for work, and now I want to sleep again, to catch up, as if I could.

So I was getting drowsy here, while checking e-mail and reading Defamer and Chuck Taggart's wonderful Looka! blog, and I decided to do a few minutes of freewriting while my defenses were down. I'll dump it here and then sleep.

Oh, but one of the reasons I was still up past 5 was that, around 5, I had gone to bed but couldn't sleep because I had a poem in my head. I went and scribbled it down and then slept. So strange.

Anyway, the freewrite.

so asleep, can barely keep my eyes open, breek and breach, shallow, fallow, sane. Rain, reign, rein, rain. Squalls, cabin fever, demented, departed. Broken-down rain in the gutters, shards of puddles, pebbles, caravan. Magic is the whisper of the beast. Callow is the carapace. Frabjous day. Melancholy cabin in the rain. Who is that brute’s father? Why does he call her name? Out beyond the rip-wrap, some truth in the circle of piers. Your boat is not moored; it will sink. Its anchor will pull it to ground. Sand, shale, quell, pebbles. A scatter on the mayfair. Decks all bent. The stars bend the sky. Shy quail. Cat with a pebble. Beaches that blister. Sandwiches. Dust, Rain. Trail of mussels. The tail of the caravan sweeps across the road, effaces. What is the point of travel if no one knows where we came from? What is our ruse? Why do we dare? Where do we dwell? In paper patterns, painted houses, crooked doors, gates that sing open. God bless America.

Today's

DANGLES

Spanish moss
no moss at all, just green nooses
dying like the banners on riderless horses
turned home from the war

the dance of some snake, bored out of his
skin window, bare, powder film on his flesh

the rain on the shingle

prayers unfinished because
you fell asleep
to dream of cabbages, of moth and moon
and jugs of pinot
old math teachers, madmen with crooked
glasses and sagging
pockets

turning over: the sheet
beside your half-fisted hand
that glides to the floor
like

night

Revisiting an old exercise

Back in April, I did an exercise in which I wrote between the lines of a Jim Morrison poem. Here is what I got:


texts thrown into the fire, shoes, whatever we can for warmth sign by sign, a tongue the hearing will never comprehend their foxed leather covers, still so tempting though fragile one drugged night when I roamed the yard looking for meat or wild onions in the trees was just the dance of some snake, bored out of his skin window but missed, hitting the sun, and it rained—or so I dreamed as I walked strange calm after the levees collapsed. X marks, numbered codes, red on the doorframe, government Passover, seder of dry beans and wet books a stash of coffee in the pantry and will wake us all up from this stupor even though your face has withered like a dream in noon sun replaced by platitudes, like a meal of crackers and flat Coke Be careful where you put your head. Mind your scarf. Mind who you let embrace you. because you’re family, so I have to love you even if I don’t like you It’s like sharing a kiss, or blood. Elemental bonds, a bone marrow marriage Spanish moss, no moss at all, just green nooses dying from the death of hate, peace flags in the swampy air

I want to mine this sort of semi-freewrite for some more stuff for poetry. Maybe later today.

A bridge for a fish

It's been a weird and busy summer.

Since I last updated this blog, I've attended two writing workshops (the Tinker Mountain Writers' Workshop and the second week of Naropa University's summer writing program). (The bell in the photo is on the Naropa campus.) Both were valuable creative experiences, albeit in different ways. (I don't know how many writers would find them equally useful; you're probably best off with one or the other.)

Naropa, in particular, took me out of my comfort zone. I was surrounded by people whose aesthetics were generally different from mine. The Beat goes on, for sure, at Naropa, and I sometimes felt like people didn't get what I was doing. But that was OK; they were supportive of my doing it. I had a marvelous workshop with Elizabeth Robinson, called "Mystic Speech." Because it was interdisciplinary, I didn't feel so weird about my poetry being different from my classmates'; it opened me up to less strict ideas of what constitutes poetry. Elizabeth...I really feel changed for having known her, even for that brief time. She was one of the people whose perspectives seemed closest to mine, allowing me then to stretch my vision beyond my own aesthetic homeland.

Tinker Mountain--I want to go back again and again. I have a complicated relationship with the Roanoke, Virginia, area. My mother's family is from there.

[Damn. I'm blogging. Next thing you know, I'll be telling you about my colonoscopy or something. Anyway...]

Without getting too detailed about it, I've always felt like a fish out of water down there. So going to a literary gathering in those same mountains, running up against that accent and hearing familiar place names--and even being able to run out to my beloved Hollins Goodwill, visit Aunt Sarah in New Castle, and take Aunt Thelma out for a little nip at the ABC store--integrated parts of me--or, using the analogy I used with Elizabeth Robinson at Naropa, helped me find a bridge. I am now a fish with a bridge.

There aren't a lot of poets at Tinker Mountain. The ones who are there tend to be pretty serious and somewhat clannish--it's that ecstasy of being with people who will talk about Ted Kooser for an hour and a half, or whatever....I was somewhat under-read for these folks, to be sure. I don't read as much poetry as I should. Because it's got that "should" stamped on it, like a pharmacist's label, I tend to shy away except when I come across it by happenstance.

These were wonderful people, wonderful poets. Mostly women, mostly a bit older than me. I felt so happy, so wonderful, so right there. That said, I think Naropa ended up feeding my creativity more while I was actually there; the creative rewards of Tinker Mountain came later.

Which brings me to why I'm here now. In June, just before embarking on these two workshops, I started a full-time job for the first time in 11 years. By August, I'd quit, for a lot of reasons I won't go into here.

It got me realizing how much I like the trade in which I've had most of my work experience--editing--and how healthy it is for me to work with a structured schedule. At the same time, I don't think I've spent two less introspective, creative months in my adult life, or certainly not since I rededicated myself to poetry. There was the time I scribbled an angry little verse on a menu from my purse while waiting for the Red Line train. And damn, did that feel good. I was upset about something, right on the precipice of depression, when the poetry kicked in.

I need to get serious about this stuff again. I might be starting another full-time job at the end of this month. So I figured I should maybe take September as another poem-a-day month.

I have to start later today. I have some trepidation about this endeavor. I'd go right at it right now if i didn't have to move the laundry to the dryer and check the marinating chicken.