O, wealth

No one makes furniture for the money.

You make furniture because you love to make things, you love the materials, and you want a great place to sit.

No one makes wine for the money.


You make wine because you love to make things well and you enjoy drinking wine.

No one makes poems for the money.

I write poems because I love the music, and I'm not a musician. I love the images and the light in the images and the many shades blending, and I'm not a painter. I love a story, and I'm not a novelist. I love creating a new world, an egg with a creature inside it, and I'm not a god nor a chicken.

I am waiting for the mail. My ship is in the Hebrides, tides writing their own charts.

I am also ga-ga over Martha Silano's new book, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception.

Tharp habits

During my vacation, I read The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life, by Twyla Tharp.

The book is meant to apply to all art forms, all creative endeavors, but I found Ms. Tharp's dance stories and movement examples especially invigorating. They brought back memories of standing in the studio, at ballet class or at rehearsal, choreographing, teaching phrases to the generous women who danced with me--and it reminded me of the time I auditioned for Twyla Tharp (longer story, there).

In the section on scratching for new ideas, Ms. Tharp advises to always scratch in new places for new ideas. At first, I thought that sometimes I like to revisit my tried-and-true sources. For example, I've learned that reading Lynda Hull's poems lights a creative fire for me. Then I realized that it's the difference between a new idea and a rejuvenation. One is the spark for new work, and the other is the inspiration that helps me start.

I liked Ms. Tharp's advice in "Accidents Will Happen" to pick a fight--to create your own accidents. This is an intentional way to keep you on your edges, an idea that is again explored in the chapter on skills. I'll admit that this chapter flummoxed me some--on the one hand, you need your skills at their peak, the very best, but you also need inexperience, so that you're forced in new directions. That all makes sense--you want skills, and you want new directions--but I found the juxtaposition unsettling. Maybe that's the point. (I liked the stories about standing behind the best dancers and copying their moves, and the general advice to copy the experts--but honestly, I don't know if I want to copy anyone right now. I'm 51, and I want to learn from the best, but I don't want to copy. Talk to me in a week or a month.)

In that same chapter, Ms. Tharp suggests that readers take an inventory of their skills. That sounds like a good plan (haven't done it yet--but I was on vacation). She also provides a 20-questions exercise that could also fit in the section on "spine."

Then I suffered a crisis of confidence. It was in the Waipio valley, and I thought, "Maybe I'm not a writer! I'm not looking at every plant and transcribing it into a poem. I'm not seeing so many shapes in the clouds." And if I'm not a writer, what? I've already ruled out visual artist, musician, and dancer and choreographer. Then I convinced myself that this is ridiculous, and I reminded myself that I've spent years learning to let go of the constant need to look at every experience as a poem and to live in that experience as completely as possible instead, to trust that the experience will return when I need it.

I'm still working through the idea of spine. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense: Pick a concept and make sure that all your efforts fit with it. On that other hand, I've heard that poems work best if you can not know what they're about for as long as possible--and I believe that. So although Ms. Tharp says, "Once you accept the power of spine in the creative act, you will become much more efficient in your creativity," I don't think that for me it's about efficiency. I do think that spine is a critical tool in revising and even more so in choosing poems for a manuscript.

I spent the rest of the week trying to figure out what the spine was for the poems I'm working on right now. Still working…

The book includes much more. I recommend it, and I'm confident that I'll return to it.

And then, wealth

I've been working on trying to let my poems explore more, to give them a wider range, to let them pull in images from my past--especially places.

Combing through these images reminds me what a rich life I've led. And these days, that's what wealth means to me--having a pond to stand by and reflect, and the time to stand by it in the afternoon, to walk by the pond or walk along the beach.

I think about the wealth I have and have had. The dead tree outside my window is a part of my wealth. The travels I've taken are part of my wealth--the drive up to Boulder, the drive from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, the swans on the beach at Lake Geneva, train stations, Venice, and that vague moment in the afternoon after we descended the Duomo to the hectic Florentine streets. My memory bank is my wealth, and each day I have a chance to add to it, even if I'm here on my sofa or walking to the bus.

Shelter and health for my family and me--that is wealth. Sure, there are the hard memories, the grief and anger, the bad slap that's also a part of living. But beyond that, to uncover, recover, and savor the good memories, even the fleeting ones, to pull them into my poems, to allow my poems to grow richer through the connections of instances that might seem disparate on the surface but are connected under the surface--that's a bliss.

Saturnalia crash and the cold truth

I haven't been writing much--partly because I've been cooking and then because I've been tired, and also I've been noodling around with some poems--tinkering with the forms and the images. But I feel like I haven't been making any progress with them.

Do you every feel like you're barking up the wrong tree? Folding the wrong laundry? Writing around all the edges--and not in a good way?

Then, this morning, I realized that I don't like them. In fact, I vehemently don't like them, which is why I feel like they're going nowhere (and bringing me right along). Yet I've also felt compelled to write them. Or something that's hidden inside there--or at least in proximity--but I'm not even close yet.

And it feels cagily self-confessional and passively self-indulgent. Yuck.

Realizing that I didn't even like these poems was a relief. Now I feel ready to tear them apart all over again, to explore and excavate, try to find that it that's driving me. But there is that feeling of feeling lost.

What do I do when I start to feel lost? Apply any one of a number of various vices and/or read Lynda Hull. Tonight, I'm going for the Hull--and first, I'm going to the Picasso show.

If that doesn't cure what ails me...

Write-O-Rama!

It's coming this Saturday, December 4!

From the Hugo House website:

Write-O-Rama is a full day of more than 30 one-hour workshops offered by Hugo House's writing teachers. Sample Hugo classes, dabble in different forms and genres and share your fresh, new writing before the ink even dries at two open mics.

I'll be doing a fragment-inspired Break It Up: Short-Burst Writing workshop at 10:00 and at 2:00—and you can read about loads of other workshops on the Hugo House website.

Come, and come ready to write!

What kind of poetry do you write?

How do you answer this question?

It came up again last week at a dinner party. I hem and haw, never sure what to say.

And it depends who's asking. If it's another poet, do I say lyrical or narrative? I'm still trying to wrap my head around those two, because at one end we have the Iliad and the Odyssey, and at the other hand we have postmodern lyrics (and probably post-postmodern lyrics), and I fall somewhere in the vast middle.

If it isn't a poet, I want to say "accessible," because that's true. Even my new, more fragmented poems are still pretty accessible. And I don't want to get into explaining how I'm exploring with more nonlinear poems, trying to break up the narrative in longer poems that are divided into sections. How dry. (Although I'm having a blast writing them.)

Often, I try to answer the question by saying what I write about. The stock answer: gardening and death. Except that my forthcoming manuscript is about illness and healing. And the poems I'm working on right now are mostly about middle age, set in the Pacific Northwest landscape. Except for a few more poems about death and grief. And then I'm toying around from time to time with the messy confessional poem.

Clearly, I need a succinct answer that is generous and--yes--accessible.

How do you answer this question?

A problem with prose poems

They look short.

Not in a book or a publication, but when I print one of my prose poems out on my 8 1/2 x 11-inch sheet of paper with 1-inch margins, it just looks short. So much of the page is left.

(I'm typing this with one hand while I sit on the basement bathroom floor and hold my cat. This makes him happy and provides plenty of time to ponder things.)

It's not that I want to write longer prose poems. I just feel a little sheepish about all that left-over space.

Do you write in more compressed forms? (Haiku and haibun come to mind.)

Do you ever feel that, visually, the page should look fuller?

Dipping my toes into prose

I've started a serial blogging project (I think that's what it is). Maybe I'm trying to nurture my inner novelist, but really because I want to follow this idea of sun hunters.

My own antidote to the gray months ahead.

The story starts here.

I've been working on a poem that I've wanted to write for a couple of years. I got a little bit of it out and wrote that down. Later, pulling weeds in the garden, I thought of a bit more, a couple of images—and then I realized that I didn't need to rush in and save them. I could get them later.

Yeah, right, you're thinking. I've tried that before.

So have I—and it never works.

But this time, I had a feeling that the poem had become a place I could visit, like going to my friend Laurie's house in Queens. I could look in the poem's different rooms, hang out in the kitchen, listen and write. When I left, the poem would still be there.

Maybe I'm not explaining this well—but that thought reminded me of Mark Doty saying that a poem is like a house—you don't need to take the reader into all the rooms, but you need to know what's in them.

(I like to imagine Indonesian parasols or Victorian wash basins—and I guess it's different for each poem. This one has red dirt and scents of cumin in the hallway and worn bus seats and it's almost always dark outside.)

This was new for me, and I hope the feeling returns for other poems. Meanwhile, I have this one to explore.

Little Bee

I love that feeling when I open a book and know before the end of the first page that I'm in good hands. The hands of a storyteller, with life lines and heart lines. The hands that shape the air. The hands that speak with confidence. The hands and voice of someone who knows how to pull the poetry out of the language—without it all falling in a heap on the ground.

I get that feeling when I begin to read a novel by Margaret Atwood. She might frighten me for decades, but she will write a good story well. I trust her.

This week, I've had that same feeling reading Little Bee, by Chris Cleave.

I know right away the story will have sharp edges and horror. Say Nigerian girl refugee and it's easy to know that dots will be connected. But Mr. Cleave opens the story with a narrator and a voice that tell me clearly I don't know how those dots will touch.

The voice—so important—sounds like a real person. I can hear her speaking. And when he changes the point of view (No! Don't change the point of view), this new narrator sounds just as authentic in her very different person.

Then we have the poetry—striking images that make the language bloom without turning purple, without suffocating either story or voice.

Here is one I can't get out of my head, in which the narrator describes an Indian woman trying to make a telephone call from a detention center outside of London:

"She was whispering into it some language that sounded like butterflies drowning in honey."

Like butterflies drowning in honey.

When I read that, I want to write like that. When I read prose like that, I want to write poetry.

It's such a gift to be able to write like that, and I feel lucky for the gift of reading it.

What books send you to writing?

More [frag] ments

I've been finding this approach helpful.

Taking old poems that weren't quite working,
deconstructing them,
using images,
writing in the margins

writing more
in the margins

over several days,

pulling it all together then,
looking at what fits,
paring and pruning

not just for fragment poems
but for regular poems, too
(I need a name for those…).

What works: I write over days.

I don't require a 20-minute continuous effort.
I don't require the zone.

But I keep looking at images,
looking at everything from the days before,
and images come,
images fly out of the darkness,
then quiet

another image, maybe
while I'm walking from the bus (maybe
in the middle of the night).

Also, because I know
I'll be gathering this poem
over time, I feel less pressure
to write something good

to choose whether it works now
or discard it.

I just keep writing
in the margins

and loving it.

Have you tried this?

What ways do you push
or stretch
your edges, your known?

A bit more about fragments

I've been having a wonderful time exploring this approach on another poem—and I've remembered a couple more things:

1.

white

space is

important

The white space emphasizes (or creates?) the more fractured experience, but it also allows the reader to make his or her own leaps from word to word, line to line, stanza to stanza. That happens in any poem, but with a lot of white space, the reader has more time, more room. Or that's my theory.

2.

One lusciously ethereal example that helped inform our work in Sarah Vap's class was Anne Carson's translations of Sappho. Because so much of Sappho's work was lost, it has become fragmented, and so it leaves the reader openings.

I confess that I sometimes I have trouble reading some of the more broken-up poems. I'm a narrative woman at heart, and I want it all to make sense. Buttoned-up and tied with a bow.

But I'm trying to let go of things, and maybe my old ideas about sense can loosen up a little. In the meantime, it's fun.

New [fragment]

How do you break

[

up

] the narrative?

How do you loosen into the nonlinear?

How do you let go?

In April, I took a class on short poems with Sarah Vap at Richard Hugo House—and last night, I took the poem I'd been working on from that afternoon to my poetry group.

They asked, "What was your process?"

The best answer is: "Take a class from Sarah."

I stand by that.

But in the interim, here's how I approached my poem.

(This is the reduced version. For the full experience, again, take a class from Sarah.)

1. Print out a copy of a poem that speaks to you. (In class, we looked at many examples of different shorter-form lyric poets.)




2. From a stack of images (old pictures or postcards, thoughts you've jotted down, anything that sticks—although I do think that the more visual and foreign, the better), choose a few and then write images in the margins of that printed poem. Short images. One or two words. Riff, but don't force anything.




3. Pick a number (x). From the poem you chose and the images you wrote, write a poem in x number of sections.




4. Choose the word that speaks to you. Circle it. (This word will become a theme that runs through your poem.)




5. Start a new page, and choose a different word (so many choices!). Write a new poem that uses the new word over and over and over again—as much as possible.




6. Start a new page, and write one line. Turn the page.




7. Whatever you want to do: short bursts, anything goes, turn the page each time. A lot of fresh pages.




8. Now, take a little rest.




9. The next day, in the margins of each page that you wrote, write more images that come to you. These are not whole poems or even whole poems. These are bursts.




10. Repeat as many times as you want.
    
    This is fun. This is play.




11. Repeat this again over several days. The margins will be one Hell of a mess.




12. Pull everything together into one place—a page in OneNote, another file in your computer, more pages in your notebook.




13. Highlight the lines or images that still feel important to you.




14. Write or type those images onto a new page or file.




15. Take a good look, or wait. Take out anything you don't need.
    
    Maybe, take out more.

This experience took me way outside of my comfort zone. I like narrative, I like all the blanks filled in, and I feel a little edgy around fragments. But learning to write, however uneasily, with the fragments was good. It was even fun.

A place for everything?

I'm always fascinated by type boxes and toolboxes, like that amazing toolbox in Toy Story 2. Such organization—everything needed is in its place and easy to find—a mastery of gadgets.

I need a toolbox like that for ideas—a place to stow all the little sayings I try to say to myself when I'm about to make a bad choice or slip into depression or self-pity or general whining, and a place to stow all the good writing tips I've heard or read—like the image of the rooms in a house from Mark Doty's workshop last Saturday or the idea that creating a poem can be like playing a game of concentration—and a place to store all the things that I want to write about.

Sure, I can put all these ideas on my computer, and most of them are here (and some are in spiral-bound notebooks, to be found in the future or not). But I love the idea of a box that I can open, shelves and compartments, and a way to pick up each thought, hold it for a while, turn it over until it becomes something new or goes back into the box—where I’ll be able to find it again when I’m ready.

Photo and box by Jane Chang.

A few thoughts from the sofa

I finally posted a couple of essays (I'll call them essays) on the sofa:

• Hunting the Wild Series



• Ride That Metaphor: Training for Poetry

I love a list!

Lately, I've seen some doozies.

Kelli provides an insightful list of why your work might not get accepted.

Martha offers helpful lists on how to help editors accept your poems and how to help your poems hula!

Earlier, while thinking about first lines, I came up with my own (yet another) list for polishing my poems. I'll admit that I've come up with lists before and then been too, ahem, lazy or, ahem eager to get right down and use them.

But I'm getting ready to take another turn through the Manuscript, and I'm committing to using this list, this time, to help make these poems the best that they can be.

1. Where does the poem begin, really?


2. Can those earlier lines or images be folded in later? (Will they add or distract?)


3. Where are the trap doors, the places where the poem might want to leap somewhere else? Where will they lead?


4. Where is the end of the poem?


5. What are the end words and beginning words of the poem and of each line? Do they add strength?


6. What about the first line? Can it hook the reader in?

I could add music and truth, but they seem too big—like they need a list of their own. This list is for after the music and truth.

Now, on to the poems!

The Big E (on the Big Island)

When I arrive here, I think of a week of writing--and then I don't write nearly as much as I want to (or I don't like what I write nearly as much as I want to).

Last year, I wrote more than usual--but not poetry. The poems remained as elusive as shadows at noon. Instead, I wrote essays (or what I thought were essays). It was my fantasy of becoming a professional vacationer by writing essays about traveling and writing--connecting the experience of a place to the experience of writing.

Yes, I sound deluded--but it was a nice thought while it lasted, and at least I wrote something.

This morning, I finally admitted that when I'm brimming with anticipation for adventure and writing (and reading novels by the pool), I'm hobbled by my own Expectations--my Big E. I'm expecting to write wonderful things about this wonderful place in this unusual bounty of time--much more time than I have in my usual everyday living.

Those expectations muffle me.

How do you conquer or mollify or dismiss your own expectations? Can you stay awasy from them, and from the fear of failing them? Relax, and just be?

Voice adhesion

That isn't a technical term, although it sounds technical. Maybe you know the correct technical term?

I'm talking about the way a voice that you're reading sticks to you, the that you begin to speak in that voice.

This can be an advantage. Or not.

I recently finished reading The Anthologist--and partway through the book I realized that I was thinking in the narrator's rambling, digressing voice. Anything I wrote, I'd have to fight that voice or agree to it.

I think this is why reading poems--aside from the immediate experience and the rippling after--can be such a delectable guide to writing poems. When I find a poet who speaks to me in that way--the way that gets into my own voice--it opens doors.

I don't worry about imitating, because I'm not those other poets, and my poems are not their poems. Lynda Hull's voice gets into my voice. Louise Gluck, James Galvin, Roberta Spear get can get into my voice--and my work sounds nothing like any of theirs. But their voices help open my voice, open doors of image and thought. I read their work for a while, and then I can't not write.

I couldn't find my copy of Lynda Hull's collected poems when I was packing (a fast panic), so I brought a book by a different poet. Richly textured poems that are a delight to read and that offer layers, but their voice does not get into my head, does not speak to me in that way.

Do you find voices sticking to you? Do you have favorites you return to for just that reason?

Begin with a bang

Last time, I talked about lopping off the end of the poem--a way to avoid that temptation to come full circle and tie it all up neatly with a shiny satin bow. Although we almost never have ribbon in the house, I am drawn to a good knot at the end of a poem.

Now, I'd like to take a look at the beginning--that first line. Often, good advice says to lose the first line or the first stanza, or it says, "The poem really starst for me here." Good to listen to that.

But on January 20, I read on the Verse Daily and Poetry Daily two poems that had knock-out first lines, the kind of first lines that make you read to the second line.

Then, it isn't just about where you start or when you start, but how you start--and trusting that a dynamite first line will lead to fireworks in the second line (even if they are subtle, whispering fireworks) and that the poem will charge forward from there.

It's a theory. Will it work?

I don't know, but I'm already paying close attention to end words and beginning words and the end of the poem and titles (so much time and agony on titles). Now, I'm going to spend a lot more time on that first line.

P.S. I hope to have pictures, including party pictures, posted soon.

P.P.S. I'm reading The Anthologist, and I hope to post more on that soon, too.

Wrapped up or hanging?

Where have I been?

Apologies for the long absence. Work has been a study in stress (although I might get one or two more poems out of it), and last week was Reading Deprivation week in the Artist's Way. (Okay, reading deprivation three and a half days, which is how long I was able to last.)

Reading deprivation doesn't mean writing deprivation, but somehow it worked out that way. Time to get my game on again.

When I did start reading, I read a lot of poems. And I noticed that many of them try to create closure. Back when I started this blog, I talked about coming full circle, admitting I had a weakness for that. I wanted to wrap up the poem, maybe with a cymbal clash.

Then I think of all that advice to lop off the last few lines.

Do you prefer to bring the poem home, or do you like to leave the reader hanging?