reading: lesley wheeler, “the receptionist and other tales”

Another book from the stack! I do have a few more that I’ve read in the last few weeks (or will have finished by the time I feel like posting another reading post, at least), so maybe this will be the formation of a Good Habit. And then I can always shuffle back in time and pick out some stuff I’ve already slogged through that I think you, dear readers, might enjoy. If your appetite is whetted for some reviews, then mine is too for writing them.

So, Lesley Wheeler (whose book also arrived as part of the April Giveaway, and whose website can be found here) is an academic-poet, who (in my experience, at least) are rarer than one might think. Recently there’s been a meme going around the Internet about how various famous poets held other day jobs (doctors, mailmen, etc.), which seems to underscore the idea of not needing to be an English professor to be a poet. As someone who will most likely never be an English professor (maybe of a different stripe), there is some relief in that; but it still pays to have an appreciation of the tremendous depth of knowledge and training that Wheeler, and other professor-poets, go through. And she has done a remarkable job of portraying the world of academia with the title piece of her collection The Receptionist and Other Tales, with tongue firmly planted in cheek: there is an equal mix of everywoman sensibility, nuanced university politics, and a rich literary allusiveness.

First, the structure of the title piece is impressive: Wheeler presents thirty-three terza rimas that get playful with their rhyme and meter, but stick pretty closely to thirty linked lines of pentameter each. (I’ll assume that the number of “cantos” and their form is a send-up to Dante; and the narrative is itself reflective of a climb down through hell and up to heaven.) Over the course of those 990 lines, a coherent semi-fantastic narrative emerges slowly but surely, with each piece having a title reflective of the trope keyed by the individual poemlet: “The Priestess and the Primitives”, “A Glimpse of the Dark Lord”, “The Final Confrontation”, etc. (I note with amusement that Wheeler acknowledges Diana Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland, a must-read for anyone interested in the genre.) (And then, Jones’ book is a spinoff of the Joseph Campbell tradition: more allusion.) To carry a story that long in verse is most impressive, and I think the divisions — each terza rima is a bite-size two pages — were a wise choice, as a poem of that length can quickly grow stale for readers.

The eponymous receptionist Edna (and could the author have picked a more perfect name?) seems to sum up several kinds of boundary: her family had the original benefactors of the university where she works, but she herself never finished college, she is invaluable as an administrator, but tends to side/identify with the professors, she is down-to-earth but has a number of preternatural moments that reinforce the poem’s feel. On the surface, the story is one you know well: sociopathic boss abuses his power, put-upon employees realize they must hang together else they all hang separate, etc. But presentation is everything: the drama and wry humor of the scenario is brought to life (and just as carefully put back to bed) from page to page with the fantasy element. Consider this:

…the drama professor billowed in,
followed close by the work-song-humming
medievalist. Edna dimmed her crystal
ball discreetly with a click. Her pulse was thrumming.
“The Dean,” Galina declared, “is a scoundrel.”
Her role: Head of Women’s Studies. Her métier:
to hex his sly designs.

These characters have a pulse, and use all manner of verbs to express themselves, and are doorways to side stories that flit in and out of the main one. It takes a careful read to keep track of them all, but as with any good novel, once you get involved, you make room in your brain. And look at how seamlessly “crystal ball”, “hex”, and even “medievalist” are worked in there. On the higher, architectural level, the poem makes clear when it is leading us up and down the standard paths of a fantasy narrative, but on a finer level, the genre shakes a thousand droplets of itself onto the words. And it is that best kind of fantasy, confounding a sword-and-sorcery male-centered genre with unlikely heroines in what could be the stuffiest of modern settings. You feel as though Edna, Galina, and the rest are people you know, and may have a hard time divorcing them from actual individuals in your mind. (I know I did.)

I don’t want to give too much away about the specifics of the plot (that snippet I put is from the third part, so it’s not too deep in for spoilers), but as long-form poems go, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find one that is more accessible, friendly with its allusions, and steady as a steam engine. (I’m as much a fan of The Waste Land as anyone, and The Changing Light at Sandover is still on my list, but they’re not easy reads.) So let’s turn our attention to the “Other Tales” mentioned in the title, which fill out the rest of the book. It can be tough to carry an entire book on the strength of just one poem, though I do think The Receptionist is lush enough that it overbalances the other poems in the collection. Still, they carry Wheeler’s same English-academic wit, love of received form with its quality of sound, and relationship with fantasy as subject matter. The Waste Land itself gets a send-up with ”Zombie Thanksgiving”, and a number of well-known antagonists get their say in a series of near-sonnets called “Villainous Creeds”. From this latter poem comes this example snippet from the segment called “God”:

…I need my space,
I have earned the right to insist, and you won’t
ever be sure what lives behind the door.
Get used to it. Pray, worship all you want,
sacrifice a virgin. Your fix is dire:
yes, your parents helped to cook your head,
but I am the best bad idea you ever had.

Excellent stuff, that. I think what I find most memorable about the book is that, beyond the individual factors which are rare enough (who writes terza rima these days?), their combination sets the collection apart. Wheeler’s voice and storytelling tactics do not disappoint, and the technical execution helps any uncertainty about the subject matter or English-major wellspring go down very easy. (Plus, I see from her website that she has a BA from Rutgers; represent!) And that, I think, is all I have to say about that.

Have I earned a banana protein shake? Yes, I think I have.

Heart’s Thaw

Oh, what the hell, why not a random poem. We Write Poems wanted a Zen poem about body-soul connection, and while I can’t claim this is either Zen or a body-soul connection kind of poem, I guess it veers, like a wheeling bird, slightly close to both. I just wanted to have some fun with rhyme and structure, and come up with an image or two worth repeating. It was just something to do for a Monday evening, I suppose.

Heart’s Thaw

After such a long time heartsick,
to see the birds’ northward line
and the archery of homecoming–
from the bone to the flesh grown thick
moans a green sound, the rhyme
of the body with the sky hums
vowel on drowned vowel– the signs
meaning spring and rain running
will fill each part and cavity– the sun
paints bird backs as a flame the wick,
gravity claims their upward climb–
and the flock tacks right, lowly divine
with the sleepless heart caught undone
in its wake– knotted by the quick
turn, by the art of so many dimensions
and leaves who burn with becoming.

The Refinery: guy traiber

Well, first and foremost, happy fourth birthday, blog. I suppose I should start looking at blog-kindergartens and whatnot. The official day is actually, I think, tomorrow, but since I know I won’t have time to post, might as well mention it now. My blog is a Taurus-cusp-Gemini.

It’s been a pretty hectic week, but I’ve let the weekend just kind of happen as it will, which is refreshing. But as I may have mentioned before, I am worried that work has drained so much out of me already (calmness, rest, low blood pressure, relationship stability) that now it’s starting in on my creativity. The silver lining is that, for example, a bunch of us coworkers got together yesterday for a brunch that turned into a seven-hour event. If I do have occasion to plan an exit strategy, I will miss them.

It’s raining here in New York. I want to feel like this is a good day. The Refinery could use some warmth in the gears and grinders:

“There is No Rain Tonight” by Guy Traiber

Guy Traiber is one of the blogger-poets I’ve known longest (why, almost four years, in fact!) online, and I am constantly envious of his travel stories, his propensity for meditative thought, and the easy simplicity he seems to cultivate. On top of that, he writes poetry in a couple different languages, which I always appreciate. He also has a book coming out (although the current byline on his blog is “this is not a poetry book — in fact I am not sure what kind of book it is”) called the Pocket Zen Book of Irrelevant Answers. Looking forward to it! But in the meantime, please see the verse below, which I think is a good representative of Guy’s writing style…

There is no rain tonight.
The meteorologist foresees rain during the weekend
but this is not a tropical land;
no rain falls to extinguish
the summer,
no rain to interrupt the sleepless
mosquitoes.
The only falling things are the piano’s
hammers: a melody in a diminished scale
with bass notes;

the right hand is left
free to scratch and there is much of that
tonight: fingers groping lonesome bodies,
children strolling grownups’ valleys,
thirsty mosquitoes fluttering in the drying puddle
under my window,
words fumbling lines
that would’ve never been written
if the rain was coming
to play Dvořák’s romantic larghetto.

It’s always good to have a poem about not-raining on a day when it is raining (and vice versa), in my opinion. Without further ado, some further opinions:
- Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates, but I’ve been very set on this idea of how internal and personal to make a poem, and the subtle effect of an implied voice within an otherwise ego-less poem. I’m centering on a single word here: that “my” in the sixth line of the second stanza, which I want gone. I was perfectly enchanted right up until that moment, and I’m making a big deal out of such a small thing to make a point about the presence of the poet. If you’ll notice, there are no other pronouns in the entire poem: it’s a piece that brings in a constant, easy flow of new and specific images. But as in haiku and some other types of waka, there is an implied presence in the images. The piano does not play itself (and don’t say “it could be a player piano”, bear with me), someone needs to watch/interpret the meteorologist, it takes a human consciousness to assign adjectives like “lonesome” and “romantic”. That kind of subtle reflection is very powerful, and I feel that “my” disrupts it; why not just “the”, or even “a”? Conversely, if this is meant to make plain the speaker, the poem might benefit from even just a couple more hints of “I”, “my”, or “you”/”your”, but I suspect it’s not meant to be that kind of a poem (and in fact, would lose some of its power ).
- I think the poem needs to figure out where it wants to land. In workshop, we talk very often about the microscope versus the telescope, and how each poem ought to end by either zooming out from its contents to carry the reader’s thoughts outward, or by zooming in to a very specific moment which sums up the poem into a microcosm. The poem ends on its most specific image of Dvořák’s larghetto, the meaning of which we can sort of get from the poem (it’s a piano piece; it’s romantic/Romantic), but not all (the quality of Dvořák’s music, unless we’ve heard it before; what a larghetto is). Assume that your reader has no background in the details you’re tossing in (in this case, Romantic music), and can’t be bothered to find out. Mosquitoes, meteorologists, children, hands, and pianos are all pretty universal, but you take a chance when you introduce a proper noun. I do like the concept of rain coming to play the piece in the poem, which would then make the poem itself needless — it’s a complex and whimsical combination that works, I think — but the larghetto could be introduced more delicately earlier. In the grander scheme, though, the poem starts with a very general statement, and then follows with a succession of details that don’t seem to strike at something deeper. I feel as though there’s a larger point to be made, which the elements of the poem could lead to or at least demonstrate, which is not coming across as well as it should.
- And following from that, while I like the complicated images, they do take time to figure out, which might distract the careless reader. For example, the “tropical land” and extinguishing summer: doesn’t rain often extinguish summer in non-tropical lands? What is all this “scratching” that is being alluded to? What are grownups’ valleys and “words fumbling lines”? They seem to fit into the poem when I read it, and I can glean some kind of meaning by digging deep into the phrases, but they can be impenetrable (still beautiful, though!) when read quickly. The reader’s intention skips off their surface as light would from a jewel. I’d recommend making each link in this chain of events an images more defined and clearer: are the children roaming around because there’s no rain? Does the poet feel that lines are being fumbled because the absence of rain is less lyrical than rain itself? The number, type, and quality of images seem to be correct here; I’m just not convinced that they’re described in the way they need to be.

And the fineries that don’t need a re-:
- As mentioned, I love the concept and images of the poem, which stand out the more times you read the thing. “The only falling things”: gorgeous! It reminds me of Li-Young Lee’s “One Heart”, which has been one of my favorite poems since I heard Dorianne Laux read it at the Dodge Festival. I almost want to see less motion in the poem (no scratching or groping), just those hammers falling. A sweeping statement of setting and connection with nature in the first line, followed by such an amusingly specific second line, creates a great contrast and sense of space in the piece. The story as I read it, overall, is this: poet is playing piano (possibly with one hand) on a quiet, rainless summer night, with all of these small things of the world happening around him and reflecting the easy feel of the larghetto, but he is contemplating how rain would alter the world, and his poem. This is pulled off masterfully.
- In addition to the theme, and with the few exceptions I noted above, the word choice is well done, I think. Those verbs are music themselves: extinguish, interrupt, grope, flutter. And although I take some issue with bringing in Dvořak’s name, at least the position of it, the central nouns that are the cores of the imagery are well-picked: like I said, they’re universal, and straightforward, elegant things to pick. That first line rings like a meditation bell, and that second line with meteorologist and foresee and weekend is just so steeped in the chaos of daily modern life; if that wasn’t intentional, my compliments to Guy for his instinct on the structure of that opening.
- The character of rain is not quite personified here, though giving it the capacity to play a larghetto is certainly dancing around the idea. I do like how the title echoes the first line, and then the word “rain” appears over and over like a lover’s name in the first stanza; the suggestion is that even though rain is not here, it is still a presence that will make itself known. It disappears for a while in the middle of the poem, and then comes back right at the end, surprising with its return as rain often is. (Although this rain seems to just want to make some music, not necessarily refresh the mosquitoes or extinguish the summer.) The meteorological aspects of the poem were almost more attractive to me than the human ones, though I suspect both are essential to the poem. I would suggest that Guy dig deeper into why both of these halves are in the poem, and what work they are doing to create the mood he wants: then, figure out whether one or both need more or less detail/description, and do some fleshing out or stripping down.

A few more things:
- I’m nit-picking, because this is a fine poem, but the non-pianists among the readership may not get some of the piano terms at the end of the first stanza, let alone “larghetto”.
- Very fond of the enjambment going on here. No line seems too long or too short, and no line seems to say more or less than it needs to.
- Something about the punctuation is bothering me. Try playing with it.
- Listening to some Dvořak as I type this, and thinking that they work very well together, the poem and the music. I believe I know just the kind of rain Guy means.

So I hope those suggestions will be helpful to Guy on further crafting the poem; I think it needs relatively little work to achieve its goal. And for those of you who want to draw some inspiration from the piece, here is a prompt for y’all:

Put on a piece of classical music from your favorite era. (Mine’s either Renaissance or Romantic, but your call.) What natural images (landscapes, biology, weather) do the piece summon up? Write a poem that combines your everyday life with those images, and consider what different elements (like music, other people, etc.) influence how you’d react to when the natural and the daily combine or collide. Then decide whether you want those elements to be present in the poem, and how much of the natural and everyday should be too. The poem should not have more than four complete sentences, and the title should be the same as the first line.

Cheers, and see you next time!

reading: jessie carty, “an amateur marriage”

I thought I’d start doing a post or two about the things I’m reading lately, since I’ve made this whole resolution to read more poetry, and I ought to follow up on that. There’s this whole stack of books to get through in my room, so I figured a good motivation to make a dent in their number is to bother you all with them. And since Jessie Carty (whose fabulous website, if you’re unfamiliar, can be found here) was kind enough to send me a copy of her chapbook An Amateur Marriage as a prize for the April Giveaway, I sat a spell this weekend (mostly on the subway, since I had a few long rides) to read it.

One of the things that bring together readers and writers is the challenge of an unshared point of view. From the reader’s point of view, in my case, it’s clear what the difficulties will be: I’m not married, I don’t have a house to call my own, and being male immediately changes the relation to those elements, socially, historically, and personally. My first worry was, will I be able to relate to poems that — although I am confident in the universality of the themes and emotions in each poem — often deal with aspects of the domestic and the romantic that I’m not familiar with? And then of course, the challenge to the poet is to overcome that hurdle and offer up an obtuse reader like myself something that is digestible. I might as well let the cat out of the bag now: yes, the book does that, and allows its orbit to swing away from its parent star. There are several poems featuring marriage and even rooms of the home, but there are also poems about hopes (dashed or otherwise), art, love of any stripe, and longing.

Part of the book’s charm is its capacity for honest transformation, kept spare. There is a keen observational eye informing the work (“the root of married is mar”, dropped delicately into a meditation on the subject), which readily couples with a cheeky trickster (who secretly switches out ground beef for turkey in one poem, and notes — without an overt snicker — her husband’s inability to tell the difference), a somewhat wistful would-be mother (“I’m not one; that wasn’t / a part of this life”), and a touch of frustrated wife (“I don’t / want to wash excess pots and pans / for a dish only I will eat”). Nothing overwrought or expository weighs down simple statements delivered in the hat the speaker’s wearing for a given piece, although the compact nature of a chapbook keeps any one poem from growing long enough to transform too much within its own body; they change more often page to page. I’d hazard the overall theme of the book is not to break open marriage, invert it or celebrate it. Rather, it seems to turn on its head the common idea that somehow one is changed by being married, that love or commitment or whatever will alter who we are. What a surprise it must be to discover, then, that you are more or less the same person you were before.

One of the lines in the prose poem “Marriage Scales” suggests this to me: “The young bride felt she was marrying her soul mate. This thought implied she was a damaged organ…” And yet, she is not, unless we consider complication and being human a vice. The threads of these themes are tugged loose so gently that it’s easy to skim across them, and after all, maybe I’m reading this entirely wrong. But they are delivered in an easy, lyrical manner. The author certainly knows her way around a well-turned phrase to hook her reader in. “Color Wheel” begins with the line “Start out with the red / left hand of any rainbow / then throw your heart in.” Dazzling! And there are small gems of description for the little acts of love: the husband crowning himself with melon rind, the wife fiddling with strands of his hair or calling him to stay at work so he won’t have to drive through a storm. With the sound and language bringing to life the scenes, the reward for beginning to unravel the weft of this marriage — only just to divine how it was made, not to leave it in a heap — is doubly sweet. It has the kind of cookies-in-the-living-room feel that I hope was meant to be conveyed.

The word amateur has taken on a connotation of unpracticed that I don’t care for; very literally, it means a person who dips their feet into something because they love it. An amateur marriage itself may be unpracticed, but it is only undertaken because there is that love. Think of the opposite: a professional marriage sounds hideous, to me. And it summons up all those ideas of what married people “should” be, what a marriage itself “should” be, that are being confounded here by the simple humanity of what it is. But a welcome professional aspect of the book is the self-awareness of its author, and her candor that doesn’t come across as confessional, or fraught, or preachy. For someone who truly is unpracticed (but hopes to be an amateur himself one day, it must be admitted) in the art of marriage, it brings a sigh of relief to see that some of those who have taken it up have done so with such easy grace.

I feel like I’ve given too much of the book away already, but I just have to share snippets of my three favorites:

“…but now it is time to cook
something, to hold polite
questions about his day.
As I downshift, I try not
to strip the gears.“
- “The Homemaker”

“My son
Watching me Gauging
if I’m
how he’ll define
woman“
- “If I Had a Son”

“There the girls and boys welcomed rug burn on their palms
as they practiced voices in bass.
Tomorrow their backs will flower
irises beneath their clothes.“
- “After Choir Practice”

If I have tantalized you enough with this post, then I suggest you might want to go have a gander at the purchase page for the chapbook, and give it a consideration! And I’ll be sure to let you know the next thing on the bookshelf as well, if you’d like. Let’s make this a symbiotic thing, okay: you let me know if this review is worth a damn, and I’ll keep riffing.

The Refinery: pamela sayers

~dusting this thing off~  Oh, hey, Internet. How’s it hanging?

So maybe I took slightly more of an absence than I intended, but I do think it was one that I needed. There’s been an undue amount of stress, agita, drama, and other synonyms for the same complex of blah floating around, as you are probably aware from my constant griping on here. As much fun as the April challenge was, it was a great relief to just shut off a little bit for ten days. But I can’t keep away from you guys for long, so here we go again. As I said in my last post, I’m going to be focusing less on drafts on here (while I focus on revising them/working on a couple of nutty ideas offline), and doing more musings, readings, promptings, etc. I hope to take a page from Margo in this regard, whose blog is always a good indicator of the blogosphere’s pulse. If you don’t know her blog, do go visit! But for now, the triumphant return of the Refinery!

“Bust the Horizon” by Pamela K. Sayers

First, my apologies again to Pamela for the delay in getting this up: her email got lost in the shuffle when it first came in, and then April was running before I found out, and then I had the nerve to take off for ten days. So this post is two months overdue, basically. And Pamela lives in the shadow of a (currently-erupting, I believe) Mexican volcano, so she has it tough enough. But aside from that, her life has the kind of arc I dream about my own taking (up and moving to another country, living as an expat, teaching English and taking it easy – except when there is a volcano erupting), and her work has a characteristic lushness to it that reflects that trajectory. So, bear that in mind as we launch into her poem today:

Cul-de-sac moon of a mother’s love
shines on the silent sun, counting pearls in
beauty’s duration.

Sun shines soul’s abundance
as the moon swallows riverbanks,
spilling into night.

Fingers touch, healing wounds, scars lift
from vision, smiles form peace,
faces reveal skylines —
bust the horizon.

Aerial seas float paper boats;
alabaster winters wave-kiss
pages – unfound embedded,
this child’s life.

Where alchemist fire melds spiritual
metal, pride-heart dies silver
on desert sand, or a carousel
riding on godbent tranquillity
suspended forever in wishes from stars.

There is no sorry in visual sensation, no
wrong walkways through rootless trees,
Mother’s cul-de-sac yields begotten;
dance hope fades in willowed song.

Appropriate for Mother’s Day tomorrow, don’t you think? Let’s have a deeper look.
- I think the overall sticking point I have with the poem is the articulation of some of the concepts and feelings. While I believe I understand the premise of the poem, its evolution and the necessity for its being, I’m getting tripped up repeatedly by some of the ways images and ideas are expressed. For example, the second-to-last stanza: there are some wonderful notions in there, like fire acting as an alchemist or the starry sky as a carousel (of fortune, perhaps, with those wishes?). But the verb “melds” confuses me a bit, the hyphenated “pride-heart” doesn’t really sing to me, and I’m not sure how something rides on godbent tranquility. I’m not in the habit of re-writing in Refineries, but here’s a general note that I think will serve Pamela well: take each stanza and separate out each image into its own piece. Write as its own complete sentence or phrase that is completely straightforward outside the context of the poem. Link them all back together — which, yes, will result in a much longer piece — and then start picking out pieces, trying to reduce phrases to synonymous words, etc.
- Similarly, and yet not at all the same, is the intention of the poem. The poem opens with a dense and cryptic image, the “cul-de-sac moon”, which immediately demands the reader’s scrutiny. (Note: consider carefully whether you want to open with such a mystic image.) But I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away from that description. It may be Pamela’s desire to let the reader interpret it as s/he will, but given the clear maternal tone of the rest of the poem (unless I am misreading it entirely), she seems to want us to go in a particular direction. “Cul-de-sac” makes me think of being trapped, a limitation of perception; I’m not sure it fits with the poem’s idea. It could be a purely visual image: maybe along the lines of, A mother’s love scoops sunlight / into its cul-de-sac, or something, creating a firmer idea of refuge and physical shape. (I know, I just said I wouldn’t re-write. Poets are liars.) There are other moments the intention seems to get a bit muddled in the poem: going back to the second-to-last stanza, that dying on desert sand. Or, the last two lines of the poem, which I find very hard to interpret. Choose your words carefully, and before not putting one in, or excising one, make absolutely sure the poem doesn’t need it.
- I don’t want to prattle away the dreamlike quality of the poem, which is sometimes reason enough to write a poem. But if your poem doesn’t demand the feel of a dream — if the poem itself is the dream — you must take pains to lead your reader. That free-form imagination is a wonderful excuse to get all these feelings and visions out in almost any shape, but to share it with us, we need to be awed without being confused. Of course, every poem should make it easy, at least possible, for the reader to get into it; dream poems just require a particular effort. Remember that we are not inside your head with you, and we may not understand all of the things keyed in your mind by this or that image/feeling. It’s better to spell things out and have it click in the reader’s mind. You want them to go, “oh, wow!” rather than “that’s interesting, but what?”

But aside from that:
- I love some of the sounds happening in this poem. Particularly in the second stanza, with that relentless sibilance, there are moments when certain consonants echo around the poem like ripples in a lake. And even though there are words whose choice I would dispute for semantic reasons, like meld, they are beautifully lyrical. I do think that at certain points (like the second stanza, again), a bit of rhythm through unstressed syllables to break up the heavy beats of each word would serve the poem well. But overall, Pamela has picked these verbs and nouns and adjectives like ripe fruit, and they have a significant weight in the poem. It demands a slow, steady reading.
- And the theme is a complex one, at least, as far as I can tell. We often think of poems as a pithy, terse method to pick apart the most sweeping of ideas, but that’s often not the case. Instead, what the best short poems do is examine a seemingly insignificant aspect of a broad topic, like motherhood, and outline it completely, until by the end the reader understands how that one facet stands as a microcosm for the whole. Of course, other poems go deep and explanatory, and are much longer; that’s fine too. But with this one, I feel as though Pamela is trying to cover every aspect of mother’s love in all its forms, and also trying to keep it as tightly metaphorical as possible. My advice would be: don’t be afraid to expand such a rich topic! Or, if you want to keep it tight and metaphorical (which I prefer, from both sides of a poem), zoom in on one element — that “scars lift” makes me think of a healing mother — and use the metaphor of the moon and/or the sun to demonstrate the wide sweep of that interpretation, how it applies universally to a mother’s identity.
- To go back to some of those images I picked out before, even though I may question the reason behind using some of them, the beauty of them flies hard and fast: the paper boats, the rootless trees, etc. If the poem can find a justification for them to be in there, I hope that they’ll stay; they give the poem its feel, which is a terrible thing to sacrifice. (It is not, however, a terrible thing to mitigate if necessary when the trade-off is creating an entryway for the reader.) I can’t speak to the inspiration for the poem, but I suspect that there is a great deal of honesty in Pamela’s choice of metaphors here. Perhaps they really did come in a dream, since it certainly feels like they did. And they seem unadulterated, kept whole and undistilled, which shows a faith in the reader’s ability to accept, swallow, digest, and be nourished by them.

A couple more things:
- I’m not wild about the title. I think it’s that “bust” jumping out at me, when the poem is so smooth and weighty. If the title is to be a line from the poem, I think there are better ones.
- The first two lines of the last stanza, in concept, are probably my favorite part; a nice moral to round out the poem.
- …though I do feel they could be worded a bit better.
- The metaphor of simple, human things becoming celestial is a good one. Chase it! Hunt it down and make it work in the poem, even if you have to use a net and night-vision goggles.
- I do worry that there were actually a couple of words missed entirely in the poem. I recommend re-reading and making sure they didn’t fall by the wayside by accident (rather than on purpose).

Thanks again to Pamela for providing the sacred cow for us to, I don’t know, make steaks out of. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so I hope the Refinery hasn’t lost its sharp-but-meant-to-be-helpful edge. And for those of you who are in April withdrawal and need a prompt, here’s one:

Write about a personal relationship using a celestial metaphor: heavenly bodies, space, weather, etc. Don’t make it about two specific people, but make the interaction they have specific. Have the poem be six stanzas long, each no more than five lines; in the fifth and sixth stanzas, the reader should begin to see how this metaphorical interaction represents the whole relationship. Include the words “skyline”, “suspended”, and “paper”.

Happy writings!

meta-blogging: now what?

Oh man, you guys. Thus endeth NaPoWriMo…

Well, first, the final count is 59 new drafts in April. I admit that I was shooting for 60, but I’m satisfied; probably I wrote something late enough on March 31 that it was technically April somewhere in the world. There were also four overhaul-revisions that basically led to new poems, but several April drafts were also centi, tanka, translations, or remixes that I don’t really count as new work either, so it balances out. Anyway, I think maybe a couple of the ones that came out of the month-long exercise are worth going back to and seeing what can be revised out of them. (For after all, that’s what May is for: revision.) (But not the first week of May. The first week of May is for recovery.)

There were also 30 prompts in April, which, again, I can’t really believe worked out. I’d like to continue doing prompts — there are still a stack of Refinery poems to go through (I haven’t forgotten you! I promise!) — but probably never again on the same daily unprepared basis. Maybe it will just be as the mood strikes me. To those of you who attempted some/most/all of them (I’m looking at you, Barbara), were they interesting and generative? As I’ve said before, I want to continue the heritage of complicated prompts for people who have the time to do them. I know that a lot of people can only squeeze the one-word kind into their daily practice, and that’s cool too, but I’d like to present an alternative. But I only want to do that if people actually find them helpful.

And of course, the moment of truth: winners for the Giveaway. I have to say, I felt put to shame by so many bloggers offering several different books, whereas I had a measly two on offer. The lesson: for next year, I need to read/buy more poetry to give away. Anyway, after assigning all commenters a random number and using the handy number generator at random.org, the lucky ladies are Allyson at Literary Austin and Patricia at Expressive Domain! Congrats to you both! I will send an email shortly. And for those of you who would still like to obtain my chapbook, or James’s, mine can be found here, and his can be found here.

Speaking of books and publications and prompts and things, I’ve been thinking about the direction of this blog over the last almost four(!) years, and, as I do from time to time, wondering whether I should re-align some priorities a little. I am going to spend a lot of the next month revising and polishing, followed by a wave of submissions, with an eye on the possibility of putting together a full-length manuscript in the near future. Between the winter getaway, the workshop, and the writers’ salon this year, I’ve been thinking more and more about trying to “make it” as a poet without sacrificing my blogosphere roots. I hate to say it, but the climate of journals is such that I’ve sometimes reserved what I feel is my best work, since I don’t want it to be considered “published” on the blog. Astute readers may have noticed that a few of the older posts are password-protected.

What I’m leaning towards now is doing fewer drafts on the blog, and more sharing of what I’m reading, more thoughts about craft, more attempts to help network people together, the occasional prompt, more attention to Curio (because Lord knows I’ve let that go to shit), more reading of your blogs and responding to comments (that too), and the like. Occasionally a poem will still pop up; occasionally you may see a password-protected post. I think the other thing I’ve realized is that I want to say a lot of what I’ve written about before, in a better way after years of practice at this point. Some of those thematic re-visits will, I think, be kept offline. But I hope that my work is attractive enough to you that you’d like to see it at least from time to time, if it can’t be always. I still have a prompt site or two that I enjoy frequenting, and there’s always the possibility another will arise that just drags me in totally; but I welcome more of a communication and meta-writing focus here, because my inner compulsion to get new poems up as often as possible does not jive well with my inner compulsion to produce quality work in the tangible world.

I hope that all makes sense. At the very least, I’ll probably be quiet for the rest of the week. (No promises, though.) Definitely need a vacation to somewhere writing-friendly. But I look forward to what the future holds, and hope that you’ll all be along for the ride. Cheers!

Adam and Steve

All right, last one for the month, at least on the ol’ blogmachine. This is for Miz Quickly‘s prompt to write about a stereotype; at the risk of being heavy-handed and beating people over the head with the topic, I elected to write about the first one that sprung to mind. But I tried to have some wry humor mixed in with the bummer stuff, at least. I don’t think it’s really ending April with a bang, but then, I didn’t really expect to, and didn’t really start the month with a bang, either. Maybe tonight/tomorrow I’ll have the blog giveaway and the final summation of the challenge, but for now, I am going to head home and cook some flounder. How’s that for a happy ending!

Adam and Steve

are not in your kitchen destroying your marriage,
ripping out cabinets and screaming in falsetto
this tile has got to GO. They are not upstairs
whispering to your son, whose voice has just begun
cracking, who locks himself in the bathroom
(where he stares at his own reflection), nor are they
on your bed, filling your sheets with their sweat
so that you can’t sleep for the unholy reek of it.
They are not strutting this-hip-that-hip down the walk,
stuffing porn in the mailboxes and snorting cocaine
off the hood of your car. They are not gelling their hair,
popping pink polo collars, looking over aviator shades
and sucking their teeth. They are not at the gym,
or the bathhouse, or the park behind the supermarket
(because everyone knows what goes on there).

Adam is taking the bar exam in two weeks.
These days he lives in the library, while Steve
drives back home from seeing his dying mother,
which he can only do while she is doped unconscious
(she swears and spits on him when she’s not).
One of them will call the other to pick up dinner,
to share while they watch their favorite sitcom
on the royal blue loveseat. Adam worries about debt,
Steve worries about death. If you look in their window,
you will see them opening envelopes, wiping the table,
folding gym shorts, and once in a while, standing
quietly wrapped around each other. Their curtains
have been torn down by an unruly mob; their doors
unhinged and battered to kindling. Everyone passes by,
peering in, jumping at long shadows in the dusk.

The Subjunctive

You know, I bet I could write a better poem called “The Subjunctive”, but at the moment, this is an exercise for NaPoWriMo (and the last!), to take a short poem we like and turn every word/phrase in it on its head. A recent find is Ada Limón’s “The Conditional”, which you can read here. I liked it as soon as I saw it, at least partially because of the grammatical reference, so I went back to it for the exercise. I think my poem is more similar than I thought it would be, even though I did my best to really alter a lot of elements. Ah well. Language, she is the universal beast.

The Subjunctive

Let yesterday tumble in.
Let the sun unfold its tropical bloom.
Let rhubarb bend with reddened youth.
Let the moon glint as a pure blue monocle.
Let the cat’s nose flare valleys.
Let snakes coldly leave no trace.
Let his cap be a velvet planting-pot.
Let me always keep on watching: the squinted
past, trickling like water on rock, always
orbiting, always changing its light.
Let me meet him again and again. Always him.
Let me waste that first forever glancing away
from each other, back to shy back, catching
a butterfly and letting it crawl the cool sea.
Let it be worth something. Let it never be
enough. Let him say he’s done: not I, buried
elsewhere, ignorant with joy.

Recursion Thirty: out to sea

“Words are the voice of the heart.”
~ Confucius, Chinese scholar and philosopher

As anticipated, today was pretty much a hell on Earth kind of scenario at work, but we all survived by the skin of our teeth. (Which is not a skin by which I am fond of surviving by, but it beats not surviving at all, I suppose.) I apologize once more for the delay in getting this prompt up, but at least it’s the last one, so I don’t have to freak out over doing them early in the day for a while. I hope that the exercise has been helpful to you overall; I probably should have followed them along during the month, but it was enough of a time challenge to write anything, let alone write to the madcap mayhems that were these Recursion things. If I do this again next year, I’ll probably take a page from some wiser person’s book and auto-post, so I can breathe a bit easier.

But I do think that, even if you haven’t been reading along this whole time, you can always go back and do them at your own pace. The key thing about these prompts were that they were meant to flow into one another, each one borrowing from what came before. I wish I could say it was some kind of character-building exercise for me to come up with them and post them, but I think I’ll have to look long and hard and find time to think about the process before I make that kind of assessment. The river metaphor didn’t carry quite as well the whole time as it hoped, but it was nice to have some kind of driving theme for the series. And all rivers must, eventually, reach the sea. (Or a salt lake in an endorheic basin, I guess, but who’s counting?) So I wanted to meditate for a bit on releasing some work into the wide, wild world.

Although the current of river water carries far into any final body, and scientists can track the currents long past their terminus, we’re going to treat it the way we would looking from overhead: the water is blissfully lost into that bay/gulf/ocean. Like yesterday, I’d like to recommend looking back at everything that’s floated downstream from the very start of the month until now. Try to separate out all that stuff that was caught around the reefs and shores of yesterday’s prompt: since I had suggested single words/phrases that centered on images and the like, I imagine what you’ll have left are underlying feelings and vague notions, diluted into the chaotic whole. Make a list of them and see what stands out the most to you. What bit of poetic flotsam rises to the very top of the list, and how do the other elements support it, buoy it up? If you find yourself focused on ghosts, and you have fruits of the forest, grandmothers, a focus on scent running through a lot of your work, maybe there’s something about a dead grandmother’s blackberry tarts that you want to write about. The final statement of April doesn’t have to be significant, or universal, or, my pet peeve, about endings. Every ending is a beginning when you look the other way.

Allow the poem to be shapeless and free (verse), dissolving into some larger poemscape; try to keep its edges undefined. But still allow it to be powerful enough to have a bit of that feeling come through that you’ve worked all month cultivating, even if you weren’t aware of it. You can let theme fall away; now, hold on to nothing but tone as your life preserver. I won’t make a very strict requirement for the shape and structure of the poem, I only ask that you be honest, but I will add another process requirement. Release your poem into the wild, be it on a postcard tacked to the corkboard of your local coffeeshop, graven into the sand before the tide washes it away, or spray painted on somebody’s windows. Share with a friend, lover, enemy. Try singing it at an open mic, or (gadzooks!) posting it on the comments section here to share with us. The last lesson I want to thread its way out to the great oceanic gyre is that you have a voice, and you must be true to it. For poetry, more than perhaps anything else, that might be the most important unspoken lesson of all.

Symphony through a Basement Window

I have to say, I will be relieved when this month comes to an end. I just feel bled dry, creatively, right now. I’ll make it through tomorrow — I’ll get the prompt up (at some point), I’ll write a poem (maybe two), I might even hit my goal of sixty for the month — but then I am taking off for a solid five days. It doesn’t help that I feel bled dry in several other aspects of my life right now, so I think there’s got to be some slow re-accumulation. I say this every year, and never stay away for long; probably this one won’t be any different. But I think I need to start taking a more measured look at what I’m producing, how to improve it, how to find things worth saying and say them uniquely.

This one is kind of for NaPoWriMo. The five foreign words required by the prompt are in there, I promise.

Symphony through a Basement Window

There’s a woman who plays the berimbau upstairs,
scratching along with an old LP from her batizado.
The chorus bubbles out, and her voice lifts with it, starling
greeting starling. I do not think this is the same woman

who, during dinner, hurled a stack of china plates
into the airshaft as she screamed, maricón, cabrón,
the one whose husband slammed the door behind him
and let his dinner petrify on the table. And she
is not the only musician careening round the courtyard:

theremin bows awkwardly over the collapsing fence,
flickers through the screen, laced with bass guitar
like tectonic plates discussing their shift. This band
always holds parties full of hiccuping laughter
that I’m never invited to. And when the sun droops

red into the chimney, some animal, must be a dog,
wails its awful diminuendo and I want to drop everything,
climb the fire escape, come to the rescue–
but I could spend hours trying to figure out

which window to break, the building an echo chamber
drinking sound like the sea drinks a river. Sometimes
I press against the screen humming into it
so it can imbibe me, too. When the alley grows dark
and the boiler quiet, I press my head to the pillow. There,
far-off is the tempered beat of the subway buried alive,
there I am, riding it into the night.