April is the Cruelest Month: A Poem a Day #1

Though I feel as if my creative juices are at 8% (and I'm getting warning messages from the operating system), I'm going to slog through the poem a day challenge with the hope that the exercises, sterile as they might be, will re-energize that part of me. Think of it as battery recharging.

I'm going to use prompts to get me going. Friend Steve Oka has promised to post an exercise a day (bless his heart) and I might draw from his repository on Facebook. On the other hand, since I've made my students create or find their own exercises this semester, I might take my own advice and do the same.  What else is the internet for -- except for doing my thinking for me?

I just found this exercise online at http://poetryprompts.tumblr.com/: Write a piece that contains a shark and/or bear.  Seems fitting, since there was one legendary Fiction Workshop semester where we became obsessed with the inclusion of bears.

*

On Bears

Pandas on YouTube climb over each other
Mother over cub, cub over Mother
a moiling
black and white Rorschach I imagine
as hot soft dust and can taste like morning cat fur
springing me into orange violet light
the dregs of a confused happiness trailing away
its unremembered dream

Roll winter's stone away from the tomb
and from the dark mouth watch the black bear shamble
blinking
into pine tree shadows, a breezy dance tight with
sharp evergreen to shrink the nostrils and
the muddy ground's unfurling into fecund rot
like a strangely delicate hug from those
crushing arms

Long ago we woke when the bear strolled through
our campsite, all shiny muscle and animal disregard
for our burling tents and the small smoke of someone's
fire
That was when our child was just forming
her humanity, becoming
The Most Important Girl Ever
spinning together from unimaginable atoms
our fragile lives
our joint story

The pandas on YouTube
cuff each other to the ground
roll over and under each other, Mother and child
a blur of movement, of potential violence
their love a celebration of force
withheld, of disaster
deliberately averted

Game of Shame: Emerson

When I was in graduate school, studying American and English literature and dreaming of being a "professor," my best friends' father was one of my professors (there's a tangled sentence), and he told us about a game that he and his friends used to play in the good old days at Johns Hopkins, where he was a graduate student -- the Game of Shame.

The rule for the game is simple: confess the "great" literature that you're supposed to have read that you haven't.

I can't remember what this professor said he'd never read (he did confess it to us, again), but I can confess that I've never read the entire Inferno (sorry, Dante) but only the parts that Eliot referenced in The Waste Land, and everything that Tomas Mann ever wrote made my brain freeze.

And now one of you (who shall remain nameless in this open space -- but you know who you are) has assigned us "The Conservative," by Ralph Waldo Emerson.  And I will confess that I've read about zero of the man ... and, it turns out, with good reason: he also makes my brain freeze, and my eyes roll back into my head, and my senses dig into the darkness.

I just can't really make sense of the guy. I find myself wondering who he's addressing -- this is a speech, after all -- and on what occasion.  And, finally, what's the slippery point that he's trying to make (or, as the case may be, avoiding to make)?

Here's a random passage from the essay in question:

In nature, each of these elements being always present, each theory has a natural support. As we take our stand on Necessity, or on Ethics, shall we go for the conservative, or for the reformer. If we read the world historically, we shall say, Of all the ages, the present hour and circumstance is the cumulative result; this is the best throw of the dice of nature that has yet been, or that is yet possible. If we see it from the side of Will, or the Moral Sentiment, we shall accuse the Past and the Present, and require the impossible of the Future.

Okay. So let's close read this fucker.  "Each of these elements" no doubt refers to the central ideas of the essay -- conservatism and idealism/reform.  So, Emerson seems to be saying something like: In nature, the impulse to stay the same (conservatism) and the impulse to change (reform, or evolution) is always present at the same time.  If we want to take a stand in this natural debate, we either side with the conservative (leave things alone)  or the reformer (change things).

Then Emerson loses me. "If we read the world historically," he says, and I wonder what he means by that?  Does he mean: if we look at things the way an historian would, we say "this present moment is the cumulative result of the past"?  And what does it mean to see the world "from the side of Will" -- is that the same as saying "if we see the world from the side of the innovator or the dreamer"?

Sigh. This is one reason why I've never really read Emerson (I win the Game of Shame here).  My husband, when he wasn't my husband, came home from some seminar in American Lit (taught by the Great Professor Father of my Friends) talking about Emerson's transparent eyeball, which he proceeded to explain to me (at length).  Yes, dear readers, I still married him ... but what I gleaned from that second hand lecture and exposure to the Big E was that I was in no way shape or form a Transcendentalist (except in the fact that I love Whitman).  I think my vision of "reality" or "what matters" is perhaps the modernist's or the existentialist's -- which can perhaps be boiled down to "isn't it pretty to think so?" or "so you think you're all that?  well, shithead, you'll die too one day."

I should thank the young man who assigned this essay to me for the humbling posture it's put me in. Once again, I'm reminded of all that I don't know, and how insignificant I am in the so-called design of this random universe. There's something to be said for this RESET button; for the down-low feeling of the student, reminding me to keep learning and reading. And maybe there's a fire and energy to the abstract language of the Romantics that I could benefit from ... with the right training, and translation.

Reading Angela Carter

Thanks, first of all, to Sam K. for bringing my attention back to Angela Carter.  (Here's the story she assigned us to read, if you're interested: "The Lady of the House of Love".)

I was first introduced to Carter in graduate school, when I took a 20th Century Brit Lit course and we read through her collection of short stories, The Bloody Chamber, which this story comes from. I remember clearly how much I liked (in theory?) her retelling of Bluebeard and her story devoted to Lizzie Borden.  Angela Carter's style is lush, overstated, even baroque: she reminds me of Edgar Allen Poe, building phrase upon phrase over the gothic ruins of a horror house.  And "The Lady of the House of Love" doesn't disappoint (or depart from) this model -- it's soaked with gothic flourishes, with rotting wood and spider webs, with Tarot cards and eerie bloated beauty -- plus, it's about a vampire, which should draw me in.

I'm a fan, that is, of monster stories, and of fairy tales. I like the way that horror shows us what we fear and loathe paired with what we most desire; the discomfort that such reading or viewing arouses in us feels, physically, like forbidden desire ... because it is forbidden desire, according to most literary and social/psychological theorists. Our disgust = inverted lust.

Once upon a time, I liked the literary flourishes that Victorian prudery built up around these base longings. Looking back, I could read Poe's swirling sentences as evidence of his adolescent (stunted? arrested?) sexuality, as nascent (shuddering) horniness (for lack of a blunter term); I could assign over-writing as a symptom of perverse "binding," and suggest that the (young? arrested?) writer wraps language around and around the bloated rose he's avoiding.

The older I get, the further away from that time in my life when sexuality, the sex act, both fascinated and repelled me, the more I avoid such linguistic crenellations.

I have no ending for this.

What are short stories good for?

I was driving home yesterday and listening to NPR when a little segment about Rick Bass came on. Bass is a fiction writer who I seem to recall dominated the contemporary literature scene when I was taking MFA courses in fiction writing (in the late 80s, in other words).

Here's the bit, if you want to read it or listen to it:  Rick Bass on the art of the short story

Bass says that "The short story is a beautiful reservoir that you enter. You learn something, and you get out. It fits our brain. It's a unique package, a lozenge, a lens that helps us process all kinds of information. The classic short story form with that elegant, tapered shape - it's not formulaic. It's organic, and it fits who we are as a species."

I'm not sure what he means by this, frankly, but it sounds pretty beautiful and hits me in the poetry center of my brain, a part of it that doesn't really need to make complete sense of a stimulus but instead experiences it physically. All I know is that, driving down Ashland past the thawing parks by the train tracks toward downtown Green Bay, I liked (in the pit of my stomach) the idea that short stories fit our brains like lozenges.

A lovely sentiment, like the BOOM epiphany of a poem about spring arriving at last.  But is it true?

Are short stories "organic" or are they in fact artificial?  Really, how many of us crave short stories?  How many of us read them?  How many of us write them when they're not assigned by circumstances?

I'll be the first to admit that I crave, instead, serial narratives -- family sagas, soap-operatic works in the tradition of Downtown Abbey (but on the page, of course), series of novels devoted to the same detectives, TV shows that follow the same characters through 8+ seasons of personal life.  Short stories, even if they're "linked," don't give me the same thrill.

I just finished reading and listening to all of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series. He started this cycle of novels as a serial entry in a newspaper and then branched out into the sphere of novels. All 8 of these books had me gripped in a set of characters living and working and making their strange ways in San Fransisco, beginning in the 70s and moving slowly into the first decade of this new century. His characters are richly drawn and intricately connected to each other -- gay and transgender and "straight" in a time of social upheaval that's still going on. I lived with those characters for weeks. They became part of me, their worlds overlaid on mine as I walked the dog around the frozen block, as I drove from home to school to home in the routine of an ordinary life.  And their presence made that ordinary life take on a kind of wonder and richness that I needed.

I think I'd like to argue, then, that the serial narrative is more organic to the species.  The epic poem, the series of novels, the long family history, then, are all more organic than the short story, which seems (frankly) like an amputation.

But, hell, I'll take a short story over silence any day.

A Poem a Day, Parenthesis, and ... wait ... what?

In April, this thing happens -- poets are challenged to write a poem a day (April is poetry month) and to publish those poems on a public forum (ie, the internet).

For the last three years now, I've done that. I've written a poem a day and published them in a blog. (You can find 2015 right here, if you scroll down long enough.)  Some of those poems have been pretty good, if I do say so myself. Some of them have struggled to reach meh level.

I'm already getting some nods on Facebook and other places about 2016's poetry challenge. My fanbase, such as it is, is waiting.

And I'm conflicted about that. I'm conflicted about having to write a poem a day. I'm confused and also amused by having a few fans out there, waiting for me to deliver. I'm afraid that the well might be dry (at first I typed "will" instead of well -- and that might be a more accurate comparison ... my will might have dried up).  I'm tired, too, and my body hurts a lot of the time, so I'm wondering if all of my poetry might be part of a long and semi-amorphous complaint about aging.

On the other hand, I've already started to compose little poetry snippets in my head. I think something occurred to me this morning while I was blowdrying what's left of my hair. (That something is already gone. See above about wills and wells.) I even contemplated, for a bit, writing a bunch of the daily poems beforehand, as in now, today, and even though I knew it was cheating I made some sort of firm plan to do it when I got to campus today that I totally forgot about as soon as I left the bathroom.

That's another thing. How can I write a poem a day when I can't keep a random thought in my brain for longer than it takes to blow out my bangs (that's what we used to call that part of your hair that hangs into your eyes, and it's so much more poetic than "fringe" or whatever else you kids are calling it these days)?

I just lost, again, the flow of thought, thinking as I was about the fact that my last sentence took the parenthesis to a new level of distraction, and then after that riffing in my head on the idea of poetry falling into parenthesis, as if into cracks in the ground, or old disgusting weeks old snow. (Poetry.)

See?

(I'll just have to decide what I'm going to do later.)

Here's another reason why writing workshops are the bomb

If you're like me, you were trained to write a whipping five-paragraph essay in the 9th grade and the format inscribed itself on your DNA by the time you graduated from high school.

And then, if you're like me, you became a writer (of sorts) and started to teach writing, and began to loathe the cockroach almost as much a string of adverbs.

Here's a great post about the subject: "Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay".  I agree with John Warner that the verminous essay has oh so many flaws to it, not the least of which is the fact that no one can really communicate anything to anyone in those 5 robotic paragraphs. The form breeds superficial compliance, that is. Rote thinking.  Rote lack of thinking, I mean. It's a factory for generality and banality. Further, as Warner suggests, it's a form that doesn't think at all about audience or purpose ... and forget about methods.

What we learn, eventually, those of us who read a lot and write a lot, is that writing for an audience is key.  You have to imagine just WHO you're writing for, and then what you want to say or do for that reader.  Only then can you figure out the best way to do that.

I think that's what a good writing workshop can do for you: if you're constantly sharing what you write, then you're forced to think about your audience every time you sit down with pen/pencil and paper (please note the "old school" methodology here, and realize my hypocrisy as I tap this out on my MacBook). You have to imagine what will catch that reader's attention, and hold it. You have to think about the conversations you've been having with them (lately) and how you're going to add to one of them. You have to think about the best way to organize your thoughts or ideas or examples, and (the best part) you usually have to have some crunchy examples to keep their attention.  You have to turn blah blah blah bullshit into an actual steaming pile of steer dung, in other words, complete with the fragrant waft of spring, 3D stink lines marring the crisp air.

A picture vs. my 20 words

So even if you're not going to be a professional writer, or scribble best-selling novels in your laundry room like Stephen King, you can learn how important it is to write coherently, concretely, and compellingly for any given situation (even that freaking essay on Henry James that you've been putting off til the last minute) -- if you take the writing workshop and get over the fear of actual communication.

Ah, the fear of actual communication. That, kiddies, is a topic for another day.

Practicing What I Preach

Someone said in class the other day: "I hate to blog!" -- kind of in the same tone that I might say "I hate to pick up my dog's poop!"

Sorry, I wanted to say. Female apology mode (ugh).

I know how that student feels.  As soon as someone assigns me something, it loses at least a bit of its luster. Thus, when writing poems became a defacto expectation of my job, sitting down to compose one took on some of the same dread-of-the-slog feeling that the thought of having to crank out a seminar paper on Walt Whitman created in grad school. Ugh. Head>>desk.

So I can understand the feeling of squeamish reluctance my students might have for writing a blog entry (or six) about reading as a writer, or reading in general, or writing in general, or writing in their very own particular. Not only is it homework, but it's "out there" in the public realm. Who might read it? Who might stumble across it and use it in some way ... some dark, nefarious way ... (?)  [Like, is someone from the CIA reading this right now and adding it my file?]

Writing in the open is scary. Writing in general is scary. Writing "to spec" (on demand, that is, and according to a laundry-list of requirements) is not only scary, it can also be annoying, frustrating, and paranoid-inducing. Now the writer has to worry not only about the professor's opinion, but also about classmates's opinions, and rogue readers's opinions.

And then there's the real fact of my own hypocrisy to acknowledge.  "Hey, ya'll, write a blog. Write every day. Write two exercises per week and share them with the rest of the class. Read those puppies aloud in front of everyone and let us discuss them while you squirm in your seat, happy/appalled to be the center of our concentrated attention. Do everything I say. What am I going to do?  Nothing. No. I will not write my own blog. I will not write (creative stuff, in any case) every day. I will never write two exercises per week, no, and, furthermore, I will not share them with you. Why? Because I'm the teacher. Because I hate having to prove that I have ideas or skillz or whatever all the time. Because I'm lazy/blocked/busy/important/old/empty/dull/lazy. What are you looking at me for? Go write your thing and stop bothering me."

This morning, I had a stern conversation with myself in the bathroom.  "You better catch up on your blog writing," I told myself. "You've let it go for a long time."  I reminded myself that when I write regularly, I feel better. I remember things more easily. I dream better dreams. I wake up with energy and enthusiasm, rather than with a vague headache and unfocused disgruntlement.

And when I write in the open, online, here, in a blog, I have a much more muscular sense of an audience. That's scary, yes. You're probably judging me right now (admit it, you are). You might even be saying something like: She's not all that.

Well, yeah. I'm not all that. But somehow I've made good on that bathroom promise and, word by word, sentence by sentence, strung this sucker together. Do I hate it on some level? Perhaps. But I love how I feel when I'm finished.