Or Maybe Growing a Poem

Apr28

So I know that the language I often use for this blog to talk about writing is architectural for the most part, but I have not always thought of it this way. On the one hand, I see students and other writers who see a piece of writing, a paragraph, say, as a brick wall that cannot be changed without actually breaking it apart and making a mess and then getting new bricks and more mortar, and it all seems to be much more work than they are willing to do. And I tell them, well, okay, if it must be a wall, make it out of Legos not bricks, because then you can change the size and color and try to do it a whole bunch of different ways quickly and easily and with some sense of fun.

And they often respond, “Huh.”

I do tend to think of words as small varicolored toys of varying sizes and infinite complexity, but that is more often when I feel that either I am in control of a piece of writing or, at the very least, or perhaps best, the writing is in control of the writing and I just have to let it come through my hands.

Alas, as we know, most writing doesn’t work that way, even for a bloody productive writer like me (last count: 48 days, 79 poems, 100 pages). Sometimes a piece of writing, or a part of it, kicks your butt for days, weeks, even months. In this case, where I can’t see a way in to simply take out pieces and replace the working parts, I start to think of the poem as being more organic, something that needs to grow, without me doing the growing. All I can do is water and weed and wait.

That is when it helps to have a writing buddy to kick back for you, or if you are very fortunate, a midwife. For years, my Poetry Midwife, Pamela read my poems when I was stalled out. Usually her answer to my dilemma, though phrased much more diplomatically and kindly, was basically, “The ending sucks.” Over and over, I just couldn’t end the thing right. Either I was overwriting or underwriting (which sounds like I was selling insurance) or just not, well, right-writing.

The beauty, however, of having the same problem over and over is that once you have finally figured out how to fix it, you have practically no problems left, until the next one comes along. So I got to the point where, when I was stuck on a poem and ready to pass it to her for help, I said to myself, “Self, I bet you she is going to say (nicely) that the ending sucks. So fix the ending first, self, before you send it to her.”

And somewhat magically that left her saying things like, “I really like this one.” Period. Success! And in my gratitude for all she did for me, I wrote her the following poem.

…

The Midwife’s Poem

for Pamela

…

Rub your hand across this mound

of words. Do they kick? Does the rhythm

move your hand? How fast does that

counter-rhythm heartbeat flutter behind?

Does it fly in time? What kind of moth

…

child trembles under your hand, under

the skin of the poem? Is it drawn to the heat

of your palm? Does it hear yet another counter-

rhythm, the heartbeat that you bring

to your silent, mulled questioning?

…

Every few weeks, I come to you for this

questioning, this touch you have for rhythms

and the reasons behind them. Without you, yes,

I might gestate properly, but anxiety, the ache

in the night, might slow this mothchild’s growth

…

in me. You have a touch, softer than feathers

on a warm breeze, for the unborn delicate grey

wings, for the dark hot blood pumping, pumping

into each phrase, each stanza. You deliver

them, living, into the pale papery light.

Occasional Poetry, Part 2

Apr26

As a working poet, I often have the opportunity to write for specific circumstances, as I mentioned a few days ago when I offered the poem I wrote for the wedding of some friends many years back. This is called occasional poetry. It is a more public poetry, in comparison with what might be considered the “more intimate … lyric” poem (Sugano 5).

Wikipedia tells us:

‘As a term of literary criticism, “occasional poetry” describes the work’s purpose and the poet’s relation to subject matter. It is not a genre, but several genres originate as occasional poetry, including epithalamia (wedding songs), dirges or funerary poems, paeans, and victory odes. Occasional poems may also be composed exclusive of or within any given set of genre conventions to commemorate single events or anniversaries, such as birthdays, foundings, or dedications.’ (Occasional)

Some occasions are not as obvious as those listed here. For example, many years ago a good friend ended up on the wrong end of a restraining order from her roommate and bunked on my couch for three days while she sorted it out. When the judge had thrown the roommate out of court and out of my friend’s apartment, and after all the dust had settled, my friend had an Exorcism Party, for which I wrote the following poems. The goal was not only to celebrate the end to an excruciating time but also what I think of as the prophetic task of reminding us to forgive our enemies eventually.

…

The Exorcism, First Movement: The Beans

…

oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi

(out with the devil, in with good fortune)

…

In this place, we rise and shout:

Good luck in and demons out!

To darkness that has gathered here,

We now demand: Go! Disappear!

…

In foreign lands, where now sunlight

Is rising silver on beached stones,

Many-colored demons wrapped

In deerskins wander winter night

Free. They fear one thing alone.

They tremble when they hear beans tapped

…

Together, gathered for the rite

Of Setsubun, Bean-Throwing Fest,

Which, every February, means

The end of winter-darkened fright.

All folk have ways to expel the Beast;

There they drive it out with beans.

…

But here no Oni stalk our night,

Steal our rice, upset our shelves

Or walk the night to work us ill.

It’s with each other that we fight:

The dark fire is within ourselves

To stoke or extinguish as we will.

…

Now in this place, we rise and shout

To darkness that has gathered here,

Forgiveness in and anger out!

We eat the beans. It disappears.

…

The Exorcism, Second Movement: The Book

…

The book proclaims

that God’s voice

strips the bark from trees

standing in the wilderness

arms raised–

…

Your money or your life–

How long O Lord–

How long can I stand

…

here without skin. The wind is cold;

the thunder cracks through; each layer

around layer cowers.

…

The book reminds

that wilderness is wild

but not empty.

Look!

the voice shouts,

you do not stand alone:

all around you I have planted

my people, whose arms reach out.

…

Now

the voice whispers

Now

I will sing you

into new skin.

…

We Speak of Exorcism, Yet

…

demons never lived here. Just a woman

surrounded by light, who ground the heels of her

palms into her eyes, a woman surrounded

by the spirit, who steadfastly refused

…

to inhale. We must know the spirit; like a child-

…

woven paper chain, it rises and falls

here between us, these people you have

…

called to your side in trouble. We all have

breathed, these forty days, its freshening wind.

…

The spirit is the only part of God

I trust: out of darkness, invisible eyes see us

…

in our frailty. We skitter below like woodmice

cowering alone–we think–waiting,

…

praying for the spirit to swoop down,

not a dove but a hunting owl: accurate,

terrifying, saving us.

…

When She Has Finally Moved Out

…

After the room has emptied, you weigh

the air between winter-locked windows

with your kitchen scale: lighter, easier

to breathe now. You take a sip

…

of tea, the saucer in your left hand as

you wander, a sacrament. Liberated

like this air, like this room’s white door

now you are swinging

…

wide

…

open–

Occasional Poetry. Wikipedia. 9 Jan. 2015. Web. 25 April 2015.

Sugano Marian Zwerling. The Poetics of the Occasion. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992.

Occasional Poetry, Part 1

Apr25

On Her Fifty-Somethingth Birthday, Greater Boston Rejoices

…

Lo, the Amazing C. Musselman has been

On the Earth these last five decades and we,

Waving our hands and dancing with our feet,

Are grateful. So we show our gratitude

With colored banners, cakes and ale, broad cheers,

And songs (probably in Finnish) and small bonfires.

We light up the bay. The tourists likely think

…

It must be some local holy day but we

Know better. Having had the mission furniture

In our brains rearranged by her speeches

Over the preparations for every dinner,

We know that holy is not the word for it.

The word is knowledge, or wisdom perhaps,

The domain of Athena. What they both bring

…

The world is yearning for knowledge,

That sudden spark that lights the conflagration

That annihilates all we thought we knew

To make room for what we never thought

Possible. This is their gift to us, ever being

Offered, ever received. And so the fireworks

(Fireflowers, the Japanese call them) erupt

…

Across the skies of the world this night

In their honor, in the honor of her chariot

Pulled by cats, that she won from Freya

When Apollo decreed that he liked Cecelia’s

Pottery better, in honor of her baked

Mac & Cheese that Thor decreed could make

A warrior weep, in honor, in short, of her birth.

…

And though those who do not know the woman

Might think this paean overwrought because

They have never seen the shine of her mind or

Eaten the food she offers with such love, I, who

Know her, tell you it is not. As with many we know

And underestimate for their size or quietness,

Though she is but tiny, she is fierce.

Post-Modern Quilting Zeitgeist

Apr24

My roommate, Jack, is, among other things, a filmmaker. So far he has made at least three short films in the apartment, which generally means that all the furniture that was in one room ends up in another for about three days. And the cat is intrigued. When he is not making films here, he is usually making films elsewhere as he and his peers all serve on each other’s films in different capacities. Aside from being a fascinating study in collaboration, this situation means that my cat frequently gets to take over his room when he is not around, and Musashi is very much for that.

When he is around, Jack tends to start conversations about writing that last for a couple of hours, usually starting with the words, “So, do you think…?” Last night, when I came home very late (thank you, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, for failing us yet again!) after a lovely dinner of Chinese food with my poetry midwife Pamela (the one I can always count on to tell me whether the ending of a poem sucks; apparently the ones I showed her yesterday do not; Huzzah!), I found Jack actually cutting up VEGETABLES for his dinner.

In my sheer amazement at this, I got into a conversation with him that lasted two hours, largely about Post-Modernism and the death of opportunity for artists to make anything new, since we are all just rehashing what has been done before. Part of this is in regard to an ongoing conversation about my rewriting the Xena narrative, which I would argue is, yes, rehashing, but rehashing to change the world, or at least myself, which is the only way we ever start changing the world, after all.

We were discussing, among many other things, the coming reboot of the X-Files with Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny, the coming Batman vs. Superman movie (link to the retro trailer) and other rehashings of popular culture, and he was bemoaning (no, really, he was: and how often do I get to use that word?) the state of our culture and how if we only redo what we did we will not have the time, money or energy to do new things.

He is not wrong, but I do argue that this is, if you will, not the whole story.

He described how he sees humans, with our technology that allows us to see millions of miles into space, fly at hundreds of miles per hour, and delve deep into the Earth, as godlike. But it is, as one of his friends phrased it, a prosthetic divinity. We can only do these godlike things with our fancy tools. And with those tools we can do great good or great destruction.

“Yes,” I said. “And that is the story of Ironman.”

Eventually, we agreed that archetypal stories have their place in human meaning–making and identity production, and that as artists we can only be very intentional in what stories we tell and what stories we consume (read, watch, try to live into…).

Negative Traits, Or, Is That What I Was Doing with That Character?

Apr23

So I was just reading Author Matt Bowes and the Dogs Breakfast blog (and I still have not figured out how the dog comes into the picture) and lately he has been talking about how you make characters more well rounded by, duh, giving them negative traits. This is an aspect I have never really given much thought to because I just find my characters fully formed in my head most of the time, so if they have those traits I run with it and often they do not and are unconvincing, but when you are writing fantasy, as I did for many years, we expect characters to be a bit larger than life, so you can get away with it.

But now that I am writing about Not My characters, e.g., Xena Warrior Princess, the negative traits come with the fully formed character. The thing I have been noticing is that it is the other characters who discuss the negative traits. Face it, especially during the first season, Xena is dismissive of anybody who is not an actual warrior. And throughout the first few seasons she has, as the characters in the Buffyverse would say, really honed her brooding skills. She often speaks in monosyllables and pretends the emotional things do not matter.

So my job is to somehow highlight those traits, which are for the most part lacks or absences with the possibly more positive traits of talkativeness and emotional availability/frustration in the other characters and, by contrasting those things, show the whole relationship. The cool part about poetry rather than fiction is you get to write lines like these from Gabrielle:

Life on the road is better. Even when

Whole days go by without her talking,

More is said than in weeks of talk back home.

…

Versus this from Xena:

…

And after, it was hard for us to speak

Of any of it. The silence between you and me

Crashed through the trees behind us like a kite.

…

Because, oh, the glory of the metaphor and abstraction to describe the bone deep emotions we all feel when the relationship is a struggle.

Robert Okaji Is the Bomb

Apr22

So I just bought the pdf version of Robert Okaji’s chapbook of poetry, If Your Matter Could Reform, and as my southern friends would say, y’all should too. Look at the elegant sparseness of his verses, as in this example from “Wind”:

that it moves, that it blends,

that it withdraws and returns without

…

remorse, without forethought, that it

increases, expands, subtracts,

Or the important comment on our current racist moment in America from “If We Burn”:

change I can’t breathe from epitaph

to actuated plea for help?

…

Are words ever enough?

Can we stack our indifference and fear

…

into a mile-high pyre, and torching it

watch them rise to nothingness,

Or the quiet confidence that sets up an image and lets it do what it needs to, as in the end of “Ashes”:

Today the rain spells forgive

…

and every idea becomes form, every shadow a symptom,

each gesture a word, a naming in silence.

…

Scatter me in air I’ve never breathed.

I mean, fuck, people! I have seen the rain spell forgive, a very long time ago, to be sure, but I have seen it. And he just lays out this beautiful little impossible thing for us, a gift like a tiny origami crane in your open hand and walks quietly away.

The way I look at it, a man who can say, “In the marrowbone of night,/your song parts the fog” deserves your two or six bucks (pdf/paper). And as you know by now, that is a professional opinion.

In Which I Learn a Newish Thing, Possibly Again

Apr20

So I was over at interestingliterature.com reading about Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great Jesuit poet, and one of the interesting facts about him that was mentioned was this rhythm he invented. According to Encyclopedia Brittanica:

Sprung rhythm, an irregular system of prosody developed by the 19th-century English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and permits an indeterminate number of unstressed syllables. In sprung rhythm, a foot may be composed of from one to four syllables. (In regular English metres, a foot consists of two or three syllables.) Because stressed syllables often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than in alternation with unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be “sprung.” Hopkins claimed to be only the theoretician, not the inventor, of sprung rhythm. He saw it as the rhythm of common English speech and the basis of such early English poems as Langland’s Piers Plowman and nursery rhymes such as: Ding dong, bell,/Pussys in the well.

Sprung rhythm is a bridge between regular metre and free verse. An example of Hopkins’ use of it, from “Spring and fall to a Young Child,” is: Margaret are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?

I think this is what I have been doing without knowing it when I say that I am using a loose version of iambic pentameter in the poetry project I have been working on. Gosh, and here I thought I had invented something. Who knew?

Sprung Rhythm. Encyclopedia Brittanica. 2015. Web. 20 April 2015.

How Point of View Changes Content

Apr19

A long time ago, while I was living in Japan after college, two of my best friends from school got married. In my absence, they invited my parents to serve as Pinch Guests. I got three letters describing the wedding and they could have all gone to three different weddings for all I could tell. My mother described what everyone wore (and what is tulle, anyway?). James, the best man and a musician, described the bachelor party and the music for the wedding and reception. The bride wrote about how Wonderful everything had been it was just so Wonderful it was Wonderful! I suspect she could not remember a thing that had happened. This is an example of the Rashomon Effect, which as Wikipedia tells us is “contradictory interpretations of the same event by different people…. It is named for Akira Kurosawa‘s film Rashomon, in which a crime involving four individuals is described in four mutually contradictory ways.”

We have seen this used in lots of films and TV shows, from Hero and Gone Girl to the X Files and Garfield and Friends, and often the use is to shift blame or take credit, but I think it is fun to show how two different characters see an event and choose what they focus their attention on. You walk into someone’s living room and you might notice the interior decoration, but I am going to notice the absence or presence of books and what genres the owner reads. So in theory, if I have written a scene from the point of view of an American interior decorator and I change the pov to that of a Japanese businessman, the whole scene should change.

“Rashomon Effect.” Wikipedia. 24 March 2015. Web. 19 April 2015.

Not My Circus, Not My Monkeys: Or, Choosing the Problem to Address

Apr15

Life imitates art at least as much as art imitates life. This morning I walked into my office to find on my desk a Xeroxed meme of a little juggling monkey, with the words “Not my circus, not my monkeys –Polish proverb.” This is one of two meme phrases we use among ourselves a lot at the MIT Writing Center. (The other is “I am a tiny potato and I believe in you. You can do the thing,” which comes in handy a LOT during Thesis Pain Season, i.e., spring.) In life, choosing which battles to fight, and whose, is a constant struggle. The ability to create boundaries for ourselves is a crucial skill, and one that our socialization seems to make a bit harder for women than for men.

But I think this principle is also important for writing (because if you hand me a principle or concept of ANY kind, the odds are ridiculously good that I can figure out a way to make it be about writing: The arc of Susan is long, but it rolls towards writing.) Increasingly, I have been thinking about the process of writing, and that of writing poetry in particular, as being about problem solving. With a poem, I have not only a story to tell in a particular voice or voices, both of which I am managing with word choice and line length and spaces between lines (stanza control, as I think of it, even with free verse); but I am also singing this to my readers and I want them to hear the music, the rhythm and pitch, the emotions that those convey, and I have to choose each word so very carefully, so that you can pick up the poem and turn it in the light and you will see the facets of a gemstone rather than the patches of a soccer ball (unless of course you are a soccer fanatic, in which case I would rather have you see my poem as your beloved ball). And each word that I choose limits my choices for the following words.

I know that all writing has some of these difficulties. These are the things inherent in a piece of writing that make writing hard. The other, more environmental things are not at play here for me, since this is a personal, free form, deadlineless project. And I think, because of that, when I say that a poem is a series of problems that have been solved I think of it as mathematicians think about problems as opportunities for beauty to happen (no, seriously, they think that way; they are just as crazy as the soccer fans, which is also kind of beautiful).

And sometimes in writing the most important choice is to know when to stop hammering away at the thing and get up and go make dinner or play with the cat or grade papers. The words will be there, waiting for you, when you get back. Trust me on this.

The Object is the Thing. No, Literally.

Apr13

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a poem to commemorate the wedding of two friends. I based it on the traditional Navajo wedding vase, and tried to use internal rhyme to give it movement, and to say All The Things I think about marriage, have witnessed quite a few over the years. The irony: the poem first appeared in To Love One Another, a book of poetry about marriage by an assortment of poets, of whom I am probably the only one who had never been married. I also read this a few years back at the wedding of another set of friends, which was a great compliment and honor. I feel like it has held up well over the years.

Now You Have Become One

Pitcher Pouring out Water from Two Sides

…

reflection on a Navajo wedding vase

for Andrew and Cathy

…

A difficult trick, requiring cooperation

and grace, like a three-legged race

where you hop and kick your way

to the finish line. Such a pitcher is full

of contradiction. No more can you

say of the water, “This is mine,” or

of the pitcher, “I.” Now you learn

to say “we,” take turns pouring out

on the dry ground around you—

…

for desert will always surround you,

awaiting clean water to awaken the green,

the flowering red and blue, from the baking,

cracked ground. Now you will practice

togetherness mopping floors and grouting

tile, opening doors in yourselves and leaving

them open, like the spouting lip of this

pitcher on each side. Now, man and bride,

woman and groom, you will cleave

like clay braided together, reaching around

to embrace. But first, you will need

…

to leave room in your day to pour out

over one another’s faces, to quench each

other’s thirst. And in your trade-off

for closeness, you must give up those

crabby mornings, easy freedoms, blithe

old habits. Sometimes you must give away

what you most treasure. You must give

water in due season. You must give to

each other, the world, in equal measures.

…

“Now You Have Become One Pitcher Pouring out Water from Two Sides” first appeared in To Love One Another, published by Grayson Books (Ginny Lowe Connors, ed.).

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Monthly Archives: April 2015