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!

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.

Recursion Twenty-Nine: barrier islands

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.”
~ Jean-Baptiste “Molière” Poquelin, French playwright and actor

I keep feeling this dread on Sunday evenings before heading back to work, a physical sensation of it that starts somewhere behind the liver and slowly spreads out through the blood vessels. There’s some twitchiness and cold numbness. I guess maybe it could be adrenaline, and the feeling that I’m about to be spoiling for a fight, but however one slices it, I think it’s probably not good. A vacation is most definitely in order (as soon as I get through this mammoth project I’ve been doing). Regardless, I’m putting together this prompt now, because I don’t think I’ll have the time or wherewithal to get it together tomorrow; and it’s nice to feel prepared, one step closer to the completion of this exercise.

Down to business, then. I promise tomorrow’s prompt will be easier, with what I hope will be a sense of release. But for now, there is still an obstacle or two or six to be hurdled before the open ocean. I know that barrier islands aren’t necessarily normal for the kind of river and delta combination we’ve been going with, but bear with me. There are rivers that carry their particular water in traceable currents, far out into the general emptiness of the sea, and there are rivers interrupted by other flows or islands in their path. Let’s consider the latter option in terms of our inspirations metaphor: rather than allowing that final theme of yours, which you’ve deconstructed yesterday, to go hurtling into the sea, diminishing slowly and losing very little momentum, slow it down with some well-placed scraps of sand and reef. There’s no better roadblock which is also constructive than the sestina, as far as I’m aware. So buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy, repetitive ride.

Material first: to truly feel like we’re gathering up all the water from the last month into one place, I’d like you to look back at each poem you’ve written this month. Choose one word (well, more, if you have a mind to) from each that encapsulates or otherwise keys the poem, how it reflects the theme you (later) coalesced, or maybe just a turn of phrase you think works particularly well. Get them all together in one place, because the initial challenge is to use all of them in one sestina. Since the form has 39 lines to work with, there should be more than enough room to play around, and of course, you’re welcome to use up to six as your teleutons/endwords. And next, consider the overarching theme of the sestina: what runs headlong against your thematic drive, what is its antithesis? If you’ve been writing about friends with musical talent, maybe the antimatter of that is strangers who offend the ear; cross disappearing natural places from childhood with exploring new parks as an adult. You be the judge. This counter-theme will become the focal point of the poem, which may limit your choice of words a bit: you may find yourself using pieces from your old drafts in the sense of how they fail, are opposed, or can’t be found. But maybe you want to break through the shoals and inlets in the barrier islands, and allow your theme, ultimately, to triumph through their last wall.

And the mechanics: if you’re unfamiliar with the sestina, and don’t have time to look on Wikipedia, here is the crash course. You’ll have six words (like yarn, glue, massacre, fell, try, finding) that will each end one line in a six-line stanza. Then (pretend they are numbered 1 through 6) you repeat them in the following stanzas, using this pattern: 615243, 364125, 532614, 451362, 246531. This results in thirty-six lines in six stanzas, with a different order of endwords each time. Finally, use all six words in any position in a three-line tercet at the end, for a grand total of 39. Meter is up to you, though iambic pentameter is not uncommon for English sestinas. You can decide how the repetition-variation complex resonates with you: does it affect your theme, your sound, your voice? I find it to be a wonderfully Recursive kind of form.

Once you have crafted all the pieces of the sestina, you may wish to run through it more than once, revising along the way, scanning to make sure it works. This is a sizable undertaking, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for taking a while to get it right. But even though the flow is being blocked, and new passages must be found, water is still water: it moves where it needs to, and overcomes what it must. I encourage you to find creative ways to bend the rules without breaking them entirely, if it serves the purpose of the poem. (And ultimately, that should be your Golden Rule for writing, of any kind: does it serve the purpose of the piece?) Allow this to be your last hurrah for the exploration of theme this month, keeping it bound together with the different voices and shapes you’ve allowed to sing it for four weeks. Then, sieve it through sandbars and sounds, grind it between coral and underwater shelf, until it has diffused like medicine within us. (Of course, it can’t dissolve within us, instead of just you, unless you come back to share…)

Recursion Twenty-Eight: deltas

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.”
~ Orson Welles, American actor, writer, and director

I’ve noticed that maybe the primary physiological effect New York has had on me is my sensitivity to morning light. At home, my bedroom has an east-facing window, skewed very slightly to the north, so I grew up as an early riser. College and my other city apartments have had windows of various sorts, but living in a basement for the last (almost) two years, I’ve noticed a distinct difference in how I deal with the sun when I’m at home. Being okay with waking up to sunlight a 7 am changed to a slight grumpiness when I lived in Philadelphia, and DC; now that I have hardly any sunlight at all in my home, this morning (and other mornings at the old homestead), I just pull the covers further over my head and start weeping. (There was this bird singing right outside the window today, I wanted to just throw the sash open and throttle it. Dammit, bird, I need my sleep!)

(But at least they are better than those city birds that sing at 1 in the morning due to light pollution.)

We’re so close to the end, everyone. I have two more specific prompts in mind for the last two days (which I know I wanted to do from the start: the first may be a tad difficult, but I have confidence in you), so today will be the last one for that “central theme” idea I’ve been touting. Of course, you can keep revolving around one thick theme, but the river is now splitting into its final distributaries and spilling onto the shore. With that metropolis of ideas floating in channeled water and people gathering around to partake sitting on the horizon, at last we begin to taste the brackish water of the sea. Think of the Nile, the Rhine, the Rhône, the Ganges, the Amazon, the Mississippi: too much thought and action to be contained by just one path, in the end.

Not to make it seem like you’re going to undo the last week’s work of gathering a theme together into one firm but flexible cylinder of riverine inspiration, but we are now going to shave down that accumulation of ideas and themes again. Take your theme and separate it into six pieces at least. You may wish to have each of the ideas behind poems you wrote over the last six days make an appearance, but also try to get more abstract, dissecting the Main Idea into several Subordinate Ideas. See which ones have enough life of their own to find their own groove and thalweg down to the bay, or which ones will be devoured by the tide. I’ll take my biological process in the world one (I promise this will be the last time I bring it up) and chop away: evolution, the food chain, humanity as animals, symbiotic relationships (like those figs + wasps), measuring time through life cycle, and the physical sensations of being alive. So, if those are my pieces, what I want to do is devote attention to each, just a little bit: it could be the phrase itself, or it could be an image, but expose it. Make it concrete.

You then want to choose what kind of a delta you’ll have. Will it be a birdfoot like the Mississippi, building new land as it rushes to sea? Will it be massive like the Amazon, with each chunk of theme getting its own stanza? Will it be holy like the Brahmaputra, holy to vacationers like the Rhône, or choked with mangroves like… I don’t know, some other river? Think about the coastline you want to cross at last, and whether it will be straight or wavy, pushing out to sea with sediment or caving in, riddled with tree roots and flamingo legs, or empty except for dunes and beachgrass. Allow your themes to interact with the landscape in the way the delta’s distributaries cross mud flats and bob with fishing boats. Maybe you want to extend a thought the way sediment extends spits of land, or obscure a thought as wetlands muddy the boundary of water and land, or make a thought marvelously clear, as when the river reaches through desert. I leave it to you to interpret how this goes, but in the end, all the delta’s fingers reach the sea. This does not necessarily mean that they are lost — currents are far deeper and stronger than we often suspect — but the ending should perhaps be surrounded on all sides by other, different, saltwater thoughts. Threaten your themes, but don’t let them be interrupted/drowned/vanished completely yet; the reward will be greater.

We still have two more days to go, though. What better way to celebrate than to come back and share?

Recursion Twenty-Seven: city by the sea ii

“We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it.”
~ Zhuangzi, Chinese Taoist philosopher

Another delayed prompt, but at least I have a good reason this time (instead of being busy at work) (which, actually, I guess is also a good reason, I just loathe that it happens). My faux-niece’s first birthday party was today, and I have to say, she is quite the charming ham. Most infants-transitioning-to-toddlers are, I guess. I do take a measure of pride that aside from the kitchen playset, a part of my gift was the best-received: a purple-sequined zebra-striped fedora, which I’ve decided is her pimp hat. And we had a drum-off on the picnic table, which was pretty cool. I’m a fan of kids, and I think I’d like to have one in the future, but not for some years yet. I’m lucky enough to have seen comparatively little of all the fluids and screaming that I’m sure most child-rearing comes with…

I’ve resisted bringing in characters because I don’t like to force them into a prompt. I’m of the opinion that their voices — and certainly personae, if you decide to appropriate and speak in character voices — should happen organically, without prompting. But sometimes it’s good to consider an independent person who is some Other, some Not-You, moving within the landscape you’ve created. I keep asking people to come back and share the fruit of their labors, but of course people will paint what you write with their own meaningful brush: introducing a character helps you direct the narrative a bit better. (Of course, then readers will move up a little and paint the character him/herself with that same brush, but we do what we can.) And a city, after all, is swarming with characters for the taking. As I said yesterday, eventually they all get pulled to the banks of the river running downtown and outward, whether it be to admire, to cross, to jump, to work. Cities are defined by their active patterns of motion; a city is a flower that opens inward. If you follow the moving life, whether animal or hydrological, you find the skeleton of the place.

So let’s come back to that final watercourse again, channeled perhaps into flat-cut stone slabs or metal pipes. We will reach the sea proper tomorrow, with its harbors and piers, but for now let’s do twofold work. First, rather than pick apart the powerful theme that’s been vibrating along for the last several days, we should consider that the overall theme of this poem. I recommend using it (mine: biological process in the world) as the title, just for now, to be changed after the fact. You can keep it a bit abstract at the moment, as you do some free-writing about what that general theme means to you. Get as deep or broad as you want, but keep it short: one solid paragraph, maybe.

Then you’re going to have the casting call for other people in the poem. Try to gather ten personages, give them faces and names and brief histories (where they’re from, what they do, what physical deformities they have, what breaks their heart, etc.) You can gather these people from life, or people you pass in the street, or other literature, or just whatever comes to mind. Do the brief sketches of each, then pick a couple that keep you interested. Arrange them around the idea of the theme, and decide how they would write about it, almost as though you’re channeling for additional free-writes. How will their voices come through? Will you take them on completely, are they friends/family/enemies who will contradict or support you (in different ways), will two of them converse with each other? Will you erase direct opinion entirely, and show their thoughts and feelings through action and appearance? I leave it to you to determine how the population of this little thought-city will deal with what the city, ultimately, is known for. You may wish to place them in a situation to see how they react, or simply have them consider quietly, as you are doing for the work of the poem.

This may help you to get across to the reader more clearly what your intention is behind writing what you are writing. As readers, we search for lenses we can relate to in some way, to understand where the poet is coming from: we see how the images and thoughts are collected and distilled, but we don’t always understand the lesson or the mechanism of it. Show us and tell us in this instance, before that purest expression of the river-of-consciousness’ water is lost to the sea; let it run into the Comments box so we can read for ourselves.

Recursion Twenty-Six: city by the sea

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”
~ Norman Maclean, American short story author

Scribbling out a quick prompt while I have the chance…!

Because I assume you want to know more about my sorry little life, after a crisis of confidence in writing last night, I realized that I’d pretty much hit The Wall of NaPoWriMo. You know how runners talk about the wall, that point where your body just refuses to function any further, and even the physics of momentum/inertia seems like it can’t keep you going forward? Muscles and nerves refusing to fire, etc.? I think that about sums up how it was. (I ended up surfing the Net for 2 hours.) But I jotted off a quick rhymey ditty, went to bed, and woke up early enough this morning to treat myself to another pancake breakfast with my notebook in hand. I have to stop making a habit out of this, but at least  it got me feeling like there were things worth saying that I could say, and setting things in motion again. If you’re at that point with the month, never fear: we’re in the final stretch now.

Our river has begun its final descent to the sea. I’m a big fan of cities at river mouths, for some reason: New York, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, Amsterdam. And even seaside places that don’t have a major river by them: Barcelona, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco. Paris and London and Montreal are all lovely, but there’s too much land around; I love a good marine vista. There’s something about allowing the water to parcel us up that has an implicit (and sometimes misplaced) trust in nature, but also an assertiveness in catching ourselves between land and sea, in the hopes of taming both. We rely on both for survival, and have managed to turn both into mechanisms of trade and development. Or maybe it’s just that now and then we need something to gaze at which is impossible to turn busy: you need a lot of ships and swimmers to make the ocean as distracting as developed earth. People can approach such a city from all directions, and so many factors come together to make them grow, sometimes more than they should, but always in a way that seems relatively effortless.

Such a metropolis is ripe with things to appropriate for poems. If you don’t live in such a place, don’t worry: our exercise today does not rely on firsthand/current experience with it. Think back to those prompts when I asked you to grow things along the edges of a river, using its water. Rather than growing, this time we are going to allow things to come to the river; and remember, the nature of the current has changed, twisted, amplified. Go out and do some gathering in your everyday: try to find twenty items for a list, be they concrete items, abstract ideas, everyday moments, unique experiences, bodily feelings, momentary emotions, or random musings. I recommend standing up and walking around (as Miz Quickly also has you doing today), through a park, a garden, or some other liminal space between the natural and the urban. See how the built collides with the unbuilt, and make note of the interactions that take place.

With that spirit held close, begin to go through your poems this week and see how they reflect the river itself, that line of theme and image that’s been increasing its velocity. Which of the items in your list will be nourished by that stream‘s water? If you noticed a man polishing hubcaps this morning, it may not fit with iconoclastic grief, but if you saw warblers tearing yesterday’s paper to shreds, that could be perfect. Let’s say that for my biological process in the world theme, I came across bees swarming around a dead pigeon, taxicabs nearly colliding, and a woman, topless, smoking on her fire escape. The middle one probably wouldn’t work very well, but the other two have potential. Explore the interaction between these found moments and the theme in question; I know we’ve been doing a lot of resonating of this kind, but my goal is that it puts you in a state of mind to perceive and be ready to investigate such correspondences. Part of the charm of poetry is its ability to pick out the unexpected meanings; part of the charm of the river-as-city-aorta is that sooner or later, everyone wanders down to see it.

And for added masochistic shiggles, if you need a particular form challenge today, it is Day 26, so… maybe try an abecedarian, where each line of the poem starts with the next letter of the alphabet. (Start with whichever letter you want, and maybe circle back to the beginning in a final, 27th line.) Then show us what you’ve got!

Recursion Twenty-Five: a drowning

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”
~ Albert Einstein, German-American theoretical physicist

Following suit on my promise, I’m writing this the night before and saving a draft, just because I know there will be no time to sneak in a prompt while at work tomorrow. (It has all the makings of a crazy day.) Probably I’ll even try to do a poem in advance tonight. All this work to keep on top of the wave of April! It occurs to me — as it often does, in a reversal of what I’m about to say — that the Recursion part of these prompts doesn’t always come through as clearly as I would like. But I feel recursive in my life these days, with the same stuff over and over, the same words and experiences running their way through my head and my hands. I think sometimes it’s important to have that, to keep yourself engaged with where you’re coming from, and the fruitful parts of your life, but another word for it is rut, as in, being in one. Or maybe doldrums. I think I’ll be a bit relieved when these mis-named prompts have reached their final destination…

…but of course, we are not there yet. And in keeping with this mid-week bleakness, the prompt is focused on drowning this time. I don’t want this to be necessarily literal; it can be the figurative drowning in emotion, or work, or stress. (Or all three, as is common.) And I don’t want it to be something final and dismal, either. I think about that scene from The Hours (which is one of my favorite films) when Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf drowns herself: even though it’s ultimately a pretty depressing film, there’s something very beautiful about the intricate thoughts the character shares, and about the look on her face as she plunges into that beautiful water. (This is not really a spoiler: it’s the first scene.) In the novel by Michael Cunningham, a lot of attention is devoted to what she sees as she descends, and that last set of thoughts that yawn into infinity; there’s a sense of rejoining a greater whole. And the book/film are both recursive as well, joining up storylines with each other, going back and forth, always coming back to the same themes in self-referential loops. This kind of mental and psychic load can be a form of overwhelming in its own right.

Without risk to yourself, try to experiment with allowing yourself to be dunked over and over in the stream of thought. Try and focus on one point of the current of inspiration you’re riding this month: go back to (choosing at random) poems you wrote on the 3rd day, 7th day, 13th day, and 21st day. Draw out a character, or maybe an image/idea you can shape into a face to apply to a humanoid mold, and plunge them in the part of the stream that contains whatever remnants of those four days lies buried in the sediment, or caught in a bit of kelp and cattail along the bank, maybe wrapped around a bridge pier. Do four free-writes, trying to go deeper each time, exploring the depths of your final week’s theme, always searching for that bit of old treasure. If I’m keeping up the biological process in the world bit, my drowning apparatus might be shape-shifting into sea creatures, growing gills, or the unique sensation of bursting lungs; what I’m looking for could be (from previous poems) saints, minnows, quantum mechanics, and the texture of gods. How does one set of transformations (the narrative of drowning) lead to another set of connections (the purpose of drowning)? Like I said, you don’t have to be literal, but allow the themes to cover you completely in some noticeable way.

And then, write a poem. You might want to demonstrate the effect in some concrete way: this is your chance to really make the last week’s threads of idea your own, getting as concrete and shaped (or maybe as loose and fluid) as you want. Go down, and down, and down. I sometimes think the action of poetry should always feel like this, as though we have rooted around to the bottom of a locked chest and found something terrifying/valuable/unknowable, with another lock on it. Then you break it open and begin again. How far can you allow yourself to go? Even Alice in the rabbit hole wasn’t sure she’d come back (although we, the reader, and you the poet, separate from the narrative voice, know otherwise), so let yourself be uncertain. Then come back, in the end, and be uncertain with the rest of us; uncertainty shared is, I don’t know, certainty multiplied. Insert aphorism here.

Recursion Twenty-Four: bayou saints

“There is a slowness in affairs which ripens them, and a slowness in affairs that rots them.”
~ Joseph Roux, French hydrographer and painter

Generally, I’m against pre-set posts that go up at particular times, but I’m seriously considering it tonight. At the very least, I’ll probably type up tomorrow’s Recursion and then have it prêt-à-poster tomorrow morning, because this whole thing of crazy busy work time is not conducive to getting these prompts up in a timely fashion. (For which, once again, I apologize.) I ought not to complain about having a job, and I spend too much time as it is doing non-work-related things, but at the same time, it’s really awful to have the twin spectres of the Bottomless Pile of Onerous Tasks (which follow no parameters of schedule or duration), and the Critical Panopticon Boss. (This is why I don’t write allegories, I can’t think of succinct archetypes.) Without saying too much (for fear of, I don’t know, jinxes and retributions*), I’m hoping the situation will change soon and I can get a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, but maybe I hope too much.

* I was reading about Urim and Thummim in the Torah, the divinatory devices of the Israelites’ High Priest, of unknown origin. The names have a couple possible etymologies, my favorite of which is “lights and perfections”. It’s just such a cool dyad. I want to start making cool dyads like this one, like jinxes and retributions, whenever possible.

Free admission: Louisiana, which I have never been to, is informing a lot of my idea of the last few days of riverine prompts. Maybe it’s because there is such a rich history/culture centered around the unique river’s-end landscape there, certainly the richest in the USA (with the possible exception of the Chesapeake Bay). But all of my Louisiana-sense is secondhand, so I apologize if I get some of it wrong. In any case, I’d like to delve into a couple different aspects of the Mississippi’s lower limb, and I hope you’re all as enchantedly unfamiliar with it as I am. No discussion of the Louisiana river course would be possible without the bayou, so that’s what we’ll discuss today. (We’ve already talked about levees, the other big one. Maybe steamboats, too.) The word refers to a very slow-moving stream (or other body of water), often branching from one body to another, often brackish and choked with bogs and marshes. I love the imagery of those lush, flooded woodlands, and although I’m sure I’d hate to actually live there, it’s easy to romanticize the landscape. The bayou teems with wildlife, and a rich culture and lifestyle have grown up around it.

Although I keep re-hashing the idea of gathering speed, power, and volume as this month-long exercise enters its final channel, let’s do try to slow down for just a moment. (Any river becomes a bayou if the brakes you apply are to time rather than space.) Re-focus on the rich collection of themes and images that you’ve built up over the weeks, and remind yourself of those ever-present different angles of examining the set as a whole. There’s three actions I’d like to take regarding that set of inspirations: first, multiplication. Make a list of ten recycled or new things (runoff from the bayou’s banks, rain over the bayou’s mud) that spring from/fit neatly into the unshakeable column of water that is your pet theme. (For that biological process in the world thing I’m working this week, I might pick things like honey, breeding sheep, air burial of the dead.) From each item, make some lines that branch off into a couple of connected thoughts which add a perfectly Decadent richness to the words: charming honey from bees and gathering it by hand, the messy action of actually shearing wool turning into clean yarn, seven generations of a family leaving their dead out for the vultures.

Then, restriction. Slow down to a single moment, and zoom in to a narrow scope. For that honey charming, I might want to write about the feel of bees crawling on a hand moving super-slowly to lift the comb from its well. When we have slowness, we have time to think; and when we have time to think, we find meaning in the simplest or quickest of actions. Confine your imagery and themes; you may also wish to set yourself a stanzaic form (though I don’t think the regularity of sonnets or rondelets works here, as with the waterwheel prompt), or at least a particular sound structure, to make your thought more measured. The last task is connection, as every good bayou lazes from one water to another. How does the microcosm teeming with small bursts of activity in a long, drawn-out moment, reflect one of those major river-themes? What can you say, or not say, to remind the reader of the hydrological connection? Consider the vocabulary, sounds, voices, and tones you’ve used in recent poems; do they match the color of the water and type of sediment in the bayou’s sort-of-removed sweep?

Bring all of this together into a whole that may seem jumbled, but is cohesive when you go deep, along the muddy bottom. Continue to carry us along; but only a little bit. There is time enough for rush tomorrow; and until then, do come back and share, so we can follow.

Recursion Twenty-Three: third meander

“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
~ Carl Jung, Swiss psychologist and mystic

Guys, I apologize for my unruly behavior in getting these things up in a timely fashion. I know that I gripe a lot about the usual goings-on in my life, but for real, I do try to make this happen early in the day so that you have time to cogitate on the prompts, if you are in a cogitating mood. And equally for real, it has just been a shitstorm of a month. I know a lot of people have it worse, so I shouldn’t complain like I do, but when you have this low-level buzz of frustration in every aspect of your life, it wears you down after a while. You all know what I mean; we’ve all been there before, I think. NaPoWriMo is a wonderful thing, but that’s just one more aspect of life (writing) where I feel like somebody is just rubbing a key back and forth over my… muse, I guess, in this case.

There’s only a week to go, anyway, so I’m trying to think of some clever and creative ways for us all to work our craft a bit in the final days of the month. (And then, I think the best thing to do after the month ends is take one day and not write. You could revise, maybe, but just allow the spring to be spent.) Today, I’ve been taking my cue from the Mississippi, which — if you’re not familiar with how it looks — turns into the wriggliest serpent of a river as it gets down past Tennessee, into Arkansas/Mississippi territory. I could’ve called this prompt third, fourth, fifth… nth meander, since it seems to wind more than it doesn’t at a certain point. This is apparently normal for rivers to do when they enter large expanses of fairly flat plains: the things you learn on Wikipedia researching the longest extended metaphor you’ve ever kept up.

So let’s talk about how to draw inspiration from that concept. In previous “meander” prompts, I asked you to sidetrack from the momentum of thought you’d been building up to that point. But now we have a pretty solid spool of water unwound across the landscape, with your triplicate themes and images revolving around a common center, etc. (Or at least, I hope you do; if not, no time to throw those things together like the present!) Instead of swinging wide off-course, I want to suggest this, instead: let the images wrench you from side to side, as though you were a bowling ball and you’ve lined the lanes with bumpers. You can pick two fairly narrowly defined aspects of the thematic tissue holding your work together for this last week, and arrange them so that you’ll loop merrily between them on the way downstream. (But not with too much energy: a meander, after all, is a slow thing.) Say I stick with my pet example theme of biological process in the world again. I might have how flying things are born on one bank, and the surface colors of fauna on the other.

Then it becomes a matter of finding images that tick-tock back and forth from one thing to the next. I might start with the image of a cuckoo replacing an egg, then fade into camouflage to fool the nest mother which leads into birds being fledged, from which I might wax painterly on the colors of feathered things against the sky, zoom into some metaphor about souls and flying and the purpose of this beauty being different from viewer to viewer (but not forgetting about that cuckoo who kicked it all off)… and so on. It’s like playing poetic pinball, with you and your reader drifting over the field, then lurching back in another direction when you hit a particularly strong image. (Note that this doesn’t have to be as tight as a change every line, though it can be if you want: a list poem that alternates between themes works too.) But two things to bear in mind: stay linear so that you don’t jump the banks entirely, and make sure that the concluding lines of the poem are worth it. What is the synthesis of the angles you’ve chosen, what do they add up to? This is the counterpoint to the hard choices from yesterday; now you can have your cake and eat it, too, and then go back for more cake. As you reach the end of this wiggly wish-wash, you should feel a concluding relief.

And then, of course, you know what to do. Drop it in the comment box, hear?

Recursion Twenty-Two: scylla and charybdis

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I– / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.”
~ Robert Frost, American poet

I keep accidentally labeling these “Reveries” and catching myself… I guess that shows where my mind and heart are really at with these prompts, huh? And I am speeding through this one because it’s a crazy day today, after a succession of other crazy days, so if I’m going to get a prompt up at all, it has to be in the briefest scraps of free time. Good thing I already had the idea of it planned. Today, there will be very little stage patter.

I do want to re-iterate what I said yesterday about the lower course of the inspirational river. It tends to be that rivers are wholly themselves in their wide, later reaches: before the addition of tributaries, when it is just a mountain stream or meandering brook through the plains, the mighty creature that hits the sea hardly seems to deserve the same name. Think of it like this: the purpose of the last few weeks is to craft not a poem, but an aesthetic sensibility with a name and a style, off of which many poems can be drawn. (People should be able to drink in a piece from the concentrated essence of your poetic river and say, “Oh, that’s So-and-so’s April water.”) Keep an eye peeled for the centers around which your poems revolve and flow in three dimensions as we move down, inexorably, to the sea.

Today we’ll borrow from the Greek legend of Scylla and Charybdis in the Odyssey. For those unfamiliar, these were two creatures on either side of a strait (according to myth, the Strait of Messina off Sicily) in the shape of, depending who you read, a six-headed sea monster or massive rock shoal, and a benthic mawed thing or a giant whirlpool, respectively. The point is that it was impossible to completely avoid them both: you had to pass close to one or the other. (Odysseus picked Scylla.) From it, we get all those expressions like “between a rock and a hard place”, “between the devil and the deep blue sea,” etc. There are situations when we need to steel our resolve and pick between the lesser of two evils, the safer of two perils, etc. It makes for a great dramatic device, so why not apply it to your poetry? First, of course, you will need to pick your craft: think of a theme, persona, or image that can stay afloat on the triple thread of thoughts and things you’ve had pouring along through the dam (cf. yesterday). You could be your own Odysseus, or maybe a personal event will be your ship.

Based on that, consider what Scylla and Charybdis will represent. To borrow my thematic center of biological process in the world from yesterday, let’s say I want to bring in the idea of a terminally ill pet. (Morbid, I know, but bear with me.) Scylla, the vicious one, might be to have the animal put to sleep; Charybdis might be to try and keep them alive as long as possible, even though they might suffer to the end. Hard choices are the name of the game here, and they can be powerful raw material out of which to shape a poem. Don’t choose superficial problems unless there is a hidden, unexpected depth underneath, but you don’t have to be fatal about them either; Odysseus, after all, survived. You can explore different angles and resonances as well with the issue you choose to wrangle, and don’t be afraid to bring in old imagery from your previous drafts: I might muse upon how best to spend the remaining days with the animal, and recall time spent at the broken-down shed out back covered in ivy used in a previous poem, or think abstractly about desperate for companionship alluded to in an earlier love poem. Everything is echoes and currents.

…which, I hope, will lead you back here, to share.