On Poetry

When I was in high school, I used to write poems in physics class to keep myself awake. My eyelids feel heavy right now from the act of typing the word physics. The poems were always nonsensical, gravity-defying, a fight against the certainty of physics.

I have one more creative writing class to take before my master's degree is done (yay!) - and the only open class is poetry. This week, I'm taking a 2-day poetry workshop to see if I would like a 16 week class. To get in, I had to submit two poems. I had one that was solid. The rest were full of teen-angst. I haven't been a teen in a long while, so I decided use anything else. I typed out a long text message rant I had sent to my husband on a day when I had been pushed to the edge. (I did ask him first - he's the kind of guy that never minds.)

In the workshop, they compared the two poems, one I spent weeks on - the other about two minutes.

In the end, they hated my "good" poem and loved--LOVED--the text.

I'm left not knowing what to think.

Poetry, I do not love you so much anymore. I want the certainty I get from a well-composed story.

And I would give anything for a face-on-the-desk 30 minute nap right now.

Tonja

A Haiku Kind of Weekend

My daughter is a fantastic writer, but she doesn't want to be told what to write and doesn't want to read her words aloud, especially if she didn't get to choose the subject or poetic form.

Her assignment this weekend for her sophomore English class is to write five short, haiku-like poems.  She has a long list of onomatopoetic words she and her classmates are encouraged to use in their tiny poems.  It is very likely she will have to read one in class.  Did I mention she's a perfectionist?

So a somewhat simple assignment has been made very difficult because she's fighting it and will not be satisfied until it feels perfect to her. 

I, on the other had, am excited and want to do it too.  I really need to write four new chapters, the ones I've been putting off, so this is an excellent diversion for me.

Every day of this long weekend, I am going to sit outside or go for a walk with my daughter and observe nature with composition books and word list in hand.  I'm confident by the end of the weekend, we will have a collection together of twenty or more.  

Too bad she's unwilling to write five poems about how much she hates this assignment.  She would be done in three minutes.

I need to look up haiku format now that I figured out how to spell it.  Have a great weekend!   

N is for Nevermore

I have been a fan of Edgar Allan Poe and Gothic literature since I first read The Raven as a child.  I think if I tried hard enough I could recite it, although I haven't read it in more than 20 years.  Here's the first stanza: 

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

I got really excited when I found the words to the poem and read them again for this post.  It's so cool to me that he wrote this sinister stuff and got so perfectly into the heads of people going at least a little crazy in 1845.

I loved Poe so much as a teen that I recited and gave a way-too-long literary criticism on The Conqueror Worm in 10th grade Honors English, a poem I'm sure few of you have ever heard of.  I thought it was cool because it was so dark and strange with images I thought no one else could ever imagine.  No one, including the teacher, was anywhere as excited about it as me.

Below is one of the more interesting stanzas:

But see, amid the mimic rout,
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.

I probably need to blame my dad for my love of Poe.  We watched each and every movie adaptation of Poe stories more than once.  I can't wait for P day - P is definitely for Poe and Vincent Price....

E is for Eliot and Emily

T.S. Eliot and Emily Dickinson are two of my favorite poets, poets that inspired me to be a poet and quite likely affect everything I write, poetry or not.

I remember instantly falling in love with The Wasteland.  The Wasteland is my first love - in terms of poems.  As a teenager, I read it repeatedly.  I then took to reading it out loud to my older sister, absolutely convinced that if she heard it enough times, she too would fall in love with it. She looked like she would punch me if I read another word, but I persevered and read until the end.  "Did you love that?" I asked. "Not really," she said more than once. 

I knew she was wrong - she just didn't get it yet.  After several attempts over several years to make her love it, she told me, yes, she definitely did like it - maybe just to make me stop, maybe not.  Maybe I will get her a fresh copy next Christmas just to see the look on her face.  I am certain she hasn't forgotten the poetry readings I forced on her more than twenty years ago.

Emily Dickinson has had a profound and more direct impact on my poetry.  Do not get me wrong here, I am not saying I'm as good a poet as Emily Dickinson.  I am just a wanna-be.  I think from sheer immersion, from reading her poems over and over again and taking maybe just a few too many American Transcendentalist Lit. classes in college, I hear her song when I want to say something poetic and make her rhythm my own without meaning to.  It all flows out of me like "I felt a funeral in my brain," but with different and quite likely less cool words.

The Struggle to Publish a Poem

On Saturday I was determined to work toward getting a poem published over the next calendar year.  Over the weekend and up through last night, I relentlessly searched through the current poetry marketplace book, did final edits on several poems that I think are done if not done-ish, and bought envelopes. 

Most of the publishers of actual printed poetry journals seem to prefer mail over email.  The vast majority of the publishers that do accept electronic submissions are electronic publishers - in other words, web sites that post poems.  As a former software/web site developer, that seems a little too easy for me.  In about an hour I could create a poetry web site of my own and post my own poems there.  Why would I hand it over to someone else's website, especially knowing how easy a task it is to copy and paste poetry on a web page?

Admittedly, I may well resort to creating a web site for poetry by the end of the calendar year if I don't find anyone out there that loves my poetry enough to print it on a piece of paper in a nicely bound book. While the puffing up of my own ego and validation from people who like poetry enough to consider themselves experts is definitely one of my motivations for getting my poems published, the real motivation is my kids.  I am determined to show them by example how important perseverance and self-confidence is in life. So I will set aside my self-doubt and send as many copies of poems to as many publishers as I can until I either find my name in the index of a book or become an electronic publisher of poetry myself.

The payment from most publishers of poetry journals is usually a copy of the journal.  My vision of success is not monetary.  Instead it involves a section of my bookshelf with poetry books and journals each with one of my poems. 

I found several - actually way too many - potential publishers of my kind of poetry.  The book and most of the blurbs from the publishers highly suggested reading a copy of their journal to be sure your poems fit the kind of poems they tend to publish.  This sounds reasonable, but it doesn't seem wise to invest $8 or so a journal for twenty journals to decide which ones I think fit me.  I decided to go to the library to check them out with a backup plan of going to the bookstore in case the library didn't have all of them. 

Both of my older kids said they were in - they would go with me to the library, which we haven't visited in well over a year.  While I looked for the journals on my list, they planned to do research they needed to do for school.  Perfect. 

When I got there, I asked a clerk organizing a cart of books if she could point me to the poetry journals.  She gave me a blank stare.  "The poetry journals?" I repeated politely. 

She asked, "Poetry books?"

"No.  Journals.  Periodicals," I said, trying to use a word she might recognize. 

"Maybe you could ask someone else."

I politely agreed to just look it up on the computer.  When I did, I found two of the twenty-something journals at the main branch of the library and absolutely nothing at the very nice branch in the burbs very near the local poetry writer's group hangout - the branch I was standing in.

I walked back to my kids, completely stunned.  I sat down and waited for my son to finish his homework.  I got some gum out of my purse.  Then it occurred to me that my vision of a library filled with literary journals instead of rows and rows of DVD's came from my college experience.  When my daughter returned with a stack of books about Ozzy Osborne, Eric Clapton, and Woodstock, I told her I needed to go to the university library.  She asked if I could check out books without being a student.  I replied in the negative, "No - I don't think so."

We agreed to try the bookstore.  They should at least have the anthologies published in the state by three of the larger universities or the Ohio Poetry Association.  I walked down the wall of periodicals that spanned the entire side of the building.  There were magazines about quilting, cooking, and trucks.  At the very end of the aisle, right next to the adult section, there was a shelf labelled, "Art."  I walked right to it before I realized it shared space with the adult magazines.  A woman looked at me while I read the label on each magazine, seeing the men's magazines out of the corner of my eye.  All that was on the shelf were art journals and photography magazines.  Nothing for me.

I walked to the section that used to sport three or four bookcases of poetry - I remembered where I picked out several poetry books just a couple of years ago.  I motioned for my kids to follow me.  The shelf was gone, replaced by empty space.  I did an about-face and walked to the other end of the store - I thought the poetry could be in the literature section.  I scanned the labels on the bookshelves and found no poetry at all.  I asked my daughter to ask the clerk.  She motioned for me to come where she was standing.  There, next to the classic literature section was a single section of shelves for poetry.  Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Butler Yeats, but no current poetry anthologies of normal people.  Not even one.

As we walked to the car, it occurred to me that the quest to get my poems published maybe shouldn't be that big of a thing.  After all, no one can read the poems if they aren't available at a library or a bookstore.  Only wanna-be poets who are determined enough to spend $8 an issue by mailing in a check to a publisher with a letter requesting a journal will have the opportunity to read the poems.  Seriously?

I expressed this to my daughter who spent the entire ride home encouraging me that I should not give up.  I told her I would definitely take her advice.  But I am going to focus my energy on writing instead of on getting published.

Anxiety

Last night, I decided to take a break and set aside my novel that is basically about a woman with a lot of anxiety.  It's a dark comedy, my favorite genre.  I like laughing while I'm horrified.  I remember going to see The Shining in the theatre when I was a little girl - that's right, a little girl - and being so desensitized to the genre that I laughed instead of screaming.  Or maybe I screamed and then laughed, then giggled at the continuous suspense in that movie. 

I took an hour long nap and then decided to take the time to research how to get some of my poems published.  It seems to me a reasonable goal to get one - just one - poem published by the end of the calendar year.  I looked through a poetry market book that I have had on my desk for about two months.  I read through the book and found several options for several of my poems. 

Sounds easy, right?  Just decide on one - or multiple publishers since most accept simultaneous submissions.  It's as simple as picking the right publisher for each of my favorite poems, reformatting them to the specifications of each publisher, and then mailing them out.  Couldn't be more simple...just a clerical task...and yet I couldn't do it.  I got hung up on the contests for collections of poems and found myself paralyzed with self-doubt. 

By the end of this weekend, I am going to make myself do it.  I am going to put myself in clerical mode and pretend the poems are not mine.  I am going to pick a few publishers for a few poems, stick to the ones that publish new-be's since that seems the course of least resistance, and choose the ones that allow for simultaneous submissions.  I am going to make a spreadsheet like a very good office worker to keep track of where I sent each poem and its status.  I'm just going to do it, I keep convincing myself...or maybe today I will just write....

The Same Little Girl But With Wrinkles

If you had asked me a year ago who I was compared to the me of my childhood and early adulthood, I would tell you I had completely changed.  I would tell you my change was the reason my first husband and I couldn't possibly have stayed together forever - I changed radically and he, even now, a full nine years after our divorce, now forty-five years old, is the very same twenty-four year old I married when I was only twenty-one. 

Something happened over the past year that makes me feel I haven't changed that much at all.  I cleaned out my desk drawer and read through old papers I didn't know were there.  I found abandoned applications to graduate school, several children's stories I had forgotten I wrote when I was in my early twenties, and the saved rejection letters that stopped me from writing more.  While on the same cleaning spree, I found old boxes of paper in the basement.  I told my husband to shred them or put them in a fire.  Instead he looked to see what was inside and found all of my college essays and notes along with a huge file of poetry and fiction that I didn't know I had saved.

One absolutely surprising thing that has changed forever my perception of myself when looking through the little time capsule was the fastidiousness of it all.  The yellow plastic box of my college writings was meticulously organized.  My notes and papers for each class were separated into manila folders and labeled with the class name and number.  Each file contained class notes, the then carbon-copied syllabus, and all my graded work including typed essays and blue-book exams.

Before I found this hidden treasure, I thought I had become profoundly more tightly wound and organized as an adult, but it turns out I was the same when I was younger.  I have learned some lessons as an adult that have changed my approach to life.  I learned when I got divorced that I have immeasurable inner strength that shows itself when my back is against the wall.  I have learned to love myself if only as an example to my kids.  When I had my first child, I learned to stand up for her and also to stand up for myself in ways I never could before.  But behind all this new found strength and courage is anxiety, the same anxiety I had as a child and a young adult.

Last night as I got ready for writing class, I looked in the mirror with complete surprise that seemingly overnight I have developed creases in my neck, waves upon waves of wrinkles if I lower my chin just a little, the same wrinkles that my mother and my grandma's sister have.  I was overwhelmed by the realization I am getting old and contemplated laser removal of the wrinkles on my neck as I drove quietly to class.  I felt old until I got to class and read out loud a poem I wrote when I was nineteen, one of the poems I found in that yellow box.  I have modified the poem slightly to make it better, more fluent, more readable, but basically it's the same poem. 

As I read the poem out loud, I slipped back into the teenaged me that created a poem that is still uniquely me after all these years.  I got very anxious and upset as I read, and a tear welled up in my right eye before I had read eight lines.  I was genuinely surprised at my emotion to read a poem separated from me by 23 years.  Every part of me felt uncomfortable revealing to a room of women-writers the very soft person I am inside the much harder, protective shell I have worked so hard to grow over twenty years since I first wrote those vulnerable words.

Inspiration From Bad Communication

I had the most horrible day today.  My son is sick, my foot hurts so bad that I am really worried it's broken again, my mom gave me absolutely terrible news about a surgery she needs immediately, and I have had horrible communication issues with my husband to the point that we are so frustrated I think we could both easily give up on each other if we were the giving-up type (we are not).

The crazy thing is that while I sat on the couch watching Chelsea Lately, the pressure cooker of my mind working hard on the events of the day, I wrote a poem about disconnected communication that I am really happy with.  I couldn't physically get to a pen or paper, so I texted it to my husband who was at the grocery store in frantic disaster mode, likely fearing more than me the potential that I won't be able to walk tomorrow.  He replied with "Like:)" which was good enough to make things between us a little better, good enough to end the hostility and frustration that was filling my mind and keeping me awake.

The irony is I needed two footnotes for my poem, one for each of the different meanings of the same word, in a poem about the difficulty communicating today, about being lost amid all the words, spoken and not.  I needed footnotes just in case the reader didn't understand.

When Will It Ever Be Good Enough?

When I did software development, there was definitely a clear line when a new application was good enough to put into production.  If the application was functional, had no major errors, and provided at least the basic functionality that was requested by the end users, it was a go.  If it was pretty, that was fantastic but unnecessary.  The bottom line is that it needed to do its job.  If the application served its intended purpose and was used by people, it was a success and made me very proud.

Writing technical documentation feels the same to me.  If the instructions and information are clear, the presentation is logical, the text is free from obvious errors, and people can actually use the documentation for its intended purpose, it is perfection.  There's always room for improvement, but why bother when it serves its purpose, when it's good enough.

Poetry and fiction writing is totally different though.  At home, I can write a poem in twenty minutes, be gleaming with happiness and feel like I've wrapped an idea in a beautiful, compact package.  I feel like it's perfect until it's time to consider getting it published.  Last night I decided it was time to attempt to get several of my poems published.  The university I attended in my twenties has a poetry journal.  The professor in charge was one of my favorites.  If anyone would get my poems, it would be him.

As I thought about it more, I panicked and my entire body filled with anxiety that I couldn't calm or set aside.  As I reformatted the poems into the format requested and read the lines again, self-doubt filled me to the point of overflowing.  If this professor rejected my work, who could possibly like it?  I want to apply to the MA program at this college as soon as my son is old enough for preschool.  If they publish the poems, this would really help my chances for admission; if they reject them, I could be ruining my chances right now. 

While writing poetry and stories is so much more gratifying than software development, I'm not sure if I am ever going to feel like my writing is good enough.  Good enough for me to satisfy my need to be creative isn't the same as being good enough to be published.

Tonight I have another writing class.  I have no doubt I will walk in filled with anxiety; I hope I walk out the door with at least some of my confidence restored.

The Day After Writing Class

Last night I went to writing class after missing three weeks of classes.  I got so excited that I was feeling well enough to go that I forgot my notebook and had to do my fastwrite in the journal I have designated for writing my children's story.   My story is done, and I'm not sure why I left it in my purse. 

The journal is small, hot pink and is covered in cartoonish aliens.  I liked the way it felt to write a serious piece in this very childish journal.  I wrote about how writing is like playing a violin and writing class is like an impromptu symphony, with all of the instruments playing together and tuning their sounds off of other people, players trying to be better because of the performance aspect and because other people are depending on them and are listening.  Actually, it's more like Honors Orchestra where people from different schools come together for one night to play together.  I think I will buy another crazy little childish journal just for class. 

In class last night, I brought two poems, the dark poems I wrote about in an earlier entry.  I had never read them out loud before since I wrote them when I was sick.  My husband and daughter read them silently as did I.  I love the poems and the act of putting incidents that are horrifying into pretty little poems but found it exhausting to write them and maybe too emotional to read them out loud.  I got good feedback but have some nagging doubt this morning about reading them out loud.  I question whether they are good poems or are just emotional ones.  I need to walk away from them for a while and let them rest.

I am happy now that I feel like turning my full attention to finishing the edits on my children's story.  I feel wonderful about the idea of completing it, maybe before Christmas and giving it to my family as a gift.  I initially signed up for writing class hoping it would give me the motivation to finish the children's story and so I can get feedback from peers.  I know my family loves the story.  The characters are us - the human ones are there, but it is the animal characters that personify us.  Somehow the story is real to us.  After reading one chapter in class, I am not that worried about the quality of it anymore.  I do intend to try to get it published and can't wait to try.  I will let my kids help me manage the rejection letters so they can see that's how life is, and that we just need to do our best work and persevere in reaching our goals.

For my next class, the last one with small group, I want to bring chapter 3 of the story to read to my group that has been so kind reading with me the dark poems I have been sharing with them.  I hope they like it.

Writing Dark Poems

A few days ago, I wrote two dark poems, perfectly in keeping with the Halloween mood around our neighborhood.  In my writing class, my small group noted that a theme in the poems I read two weeks ago was lost innocence and stolen childhood.  Since that seems to be an overwhelming theme in my life, I explored that more and wrote two horrific poems.  My husband read each poem and found one more disturbing and terrifying than the second. When I wrote them I was so happy, proud, and excited that I wrote the best quality poems of my life and that I took control of this recurring theme in my life.  I couldn't be more pleased with the poems, but today I still feel like I can't wash them off of me, like I'm walking around with the film of them all over me or like I am carrying them around in my arms, unable to put them down. 

I think it's funny and telling about me that I enjoy writing children's stories and tend to oscillate between writing happy, loving tales of talking animals to gruesome, Poe-esque poems that are too creepy and honest to let my children read.  Maybe that's balance, but maybe it's more like the part of my mind that needs to touch the tragic things to put them to rest also needs to find some comfort in happy stories of childhood.

I'd like to find a little more middle-ground in my writing, at least until I no longer feel saturated in the macabre of my poems, particularly these last two.  I do have two short stories in process that could give me balance without going to the extreme of writing about sweet bunnies and chipmunks.  It's hard to know if I should just continue on my dark poetic path and just get it all out, purge myself of everything that's bothering me under the surface - there's a lot there for sure. 

For today I know that I am physically exhausted from allowing these two memories to come to the surface and from the energy it took to touch them in my mind, look at them directly, and mold them into something artistic.  It makes me laugh (a sinister, terrible laugh) to think of these horrific stories becoming art as if I molded clay from the depths of hell to make a pretty pot.

Simmering Poems

I have been sick all week with just a cold, but with severe asthma a cold can quickly turn into a hospital stay or weeks of higher doses of steroids that turn me into someone that's not me even weeks after tapering off.  I have given myself permission this week to not write, to take a break, to watch hours of whatever reality crap is on TV or episodes of House I've already seen. 

Even though I consciously made the decision to step back from writing, my mind was concocting poems in the background.  As a former programmer, I liken this to a forgotten background process running in an application that throws an alert when it's done.

As I stood in the shower this morning with water pouring over me, the poems came to me.  Poems of my youth, of my family, a series of poems with the images I can never let go of as a child.  My mother blaming my four year old sister for my near-death at two; the way my grandma smelled as she alternated between being so loving and beating us with a switch she made us pick from the tree in her yard; the day my sweet grandpa let me sit on his lap and drive his red Duster to the hardware store when I was only six years old; the way my parents escaped extreme poverty and my dad withheld money from my mom so she would always feel poor; and many other images I would love to write storis about, and may someday.  This morning these were the beginnings of poems instead, like that's the only box they fit into today. 

I am amazed at how these poems simmered in the back of my mind and just came out when they were ready, like a baby ready to be born, like an unwatched tomato in my garden ripening at its own pace. 

My son was late to school today because I wrote down the ideas, the images, and several lines of several poems that were distinct but interrelated before I got him out of bed.  I apologized for making him rush to get to school and explained I was writing poems and lost track of time.  He sleepily smiled his sweet smile at me and understood. 

The soup is done - this batch at least.  I need to scoop it out ladle by ladle into a pretty dish while it's hot and bubbly.  Some of it I will freeze, put on hold, and set it aside until I have time, warm it up again and hope it keeps. 

My grandparents are deceased except for one.  I don't know if they would resent me writing their stories, feeding their metaphorical soup to strangers.  My parents would hate it but won't care that much since poetry is not of their world, doesn't matter to them, can't hurt them any more than an opera can.  Isn't it cool that someone born of them would compulsively and instinctively write poems in her subconscious?

Two days and counting...

Yesterday I felt wonderful all day after writing in the morning.  I had achieved my goal before I finished my second cup of coffee.  I felt hopeful, a feeling that has been very fleeting in my life. 

After writing, I got a little manic - I painted my home office, only intending to paint one wall, but ending up painting the whole room.  I got the idea we could have a back yard vegetable garden and secretly thought we could do it all in a weekend.  Once I saw the extreme anxiety this caused for my husband, who believes in his heart that gardens should be planned out with the precision of a computer program before being executed, I realized this should be a slow, summer-long project with the goal of a garden for next spring instead of next week.

I am happy to be writing today.  It's a little later in the morning, but it is the only quiet time I have had since I woke up.  I really need the calm meditation in the morning to allow me to be calm and sane the rest of the day. 

Journaling and blogging has been great practice to help me find and trust in my voice as a writer - if you don't do this daily, I highly recommend it, as well as reading, Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.  I love the idea that what I write doesn't need to be perfect, it's something I can throw away and not attach myself to.  I love being able to throw away old journals and not hang onto them, not put an extraordinary amount of perfectionism into every sentence.  It is liberating.  But I want to work on writing the stories I have sketched out, some on paper and some in my mind.

I remember being in 6th grade.  I was given a writing assignment to our new replacement teacher, who I loved.  Her name was Mrs. Pendergrass.  She was young and beautiful and so kind and loving.  I wanted her to be my sister or my mother.  It turns out my daughter is just like her.  Mrs. Pendergrass was in stark contrast to our previous troll-like teacher, Mr. Wells, who hated us, clearly despised teaching, and had a heart attack toward the end of the first quarter.  We all were so happy to have a new teacher who was a shining light at the front of the class.  I don't know if I learned anything in 6th grade, but I finally found an adult who was nurturing and loving in a way I had never known.  I learned that level of kindness existed.  Now, I wasn't abused anymore than anyone else in my generation.  My parents were hardened by their lives in Appalachia and just weren't nurturing.  They try to be, but they aren't.  I'm afraid this has rubbed off on me. 

Back to topic, the writing assignment was that we had to write a fiction story of our choice.  I wanted to write a story about a mouse.  I could not for my life come up with a story line.  I had no plot.  I was a perfect student except I blushed and talked in a tiny little voice when I spoke out loud.  I could not complete the assignment.  I could not write fiction (in my 11 year old mind).  I wanted nothing more than to be a writer.  That day, my writing hand was paralyzed only when it came to fiction.  For the rest of my life up until now, I have not been able to write fiction except for little children's stories that I made up as bedtime stories for my kids.  I held that paralysis with me all my life up until now, when I have suddenly been freed, I believe by daily writing and allowing myself to be imperfect.

Somehow, I have always been able to write poetry just fine.  It's probably from all of the Dr. Seus injected daily into my brain.  I am a rhyming fool.  I love helping my kids come up with silly rhymes when they have to write poems for school. 

When I was a junior in high school, I wrote a serious poem in French that everyone misinterpreted. I think it was then that I realized the beauty of poetry - no one will understand it anyway, so there's no threat of criticism.  The more terse, more cryptic the poem the better.  Like a work of art, it is whatever the person who reads it thinks it is.  I loved writing poetry in college and letting people read it to find out what they saw in it.  I wish I still had those poems.  I would love to look back into my 19 year old mind.