Drafting: “Lapis”

Over the past week, I’ve been thinking to myself, “I should write a poem. That would be a super nice thing to do for myself.” When the stress of writing study guides and exams for my students worked its way into my chest and started squeezing my lungs, I’d think, “Write a poem, fool! It’ll help you breathe!” Still, like any good sabotager, I’d yell back, “NO! Must finish this study guide! Must unload the dishwasher! Must dust the clematis blooms out front with Sevin dust!”

This morning as I was sitting at my kitchen table with my journal in front of me, the thought came back to me, and I finally let go to that voice and wrote a poem. It’s amazing how wonderful it feels to let go, but how often I struggle against doing just that.

I was in a myth kind of mood, and Apollo jumped easily to my mind, so I looked him up. Scrolling through his background story, I got focused on a picture of his statue, and there arose the poem idea: a god that lords over stone (Hephaestus/Vulcan is really the god of stone/masonry, but who’s counting?).

It begins,

“To be a god of stone is to remember
hunger and desire lie in what moves,

& nothing moves in a stone body.”

The rest of the poem focuses on what a god of stone would know and understand vs. what he would miss (touch, movement, seeing in color). It’s sort of a weird hodgepodge of details at the moment, but it has enough potential to be reworked into something a bit more fun. I’ll say too that I’ve been able to breathe a little better since I wrote it!

The summer is nearly here, folks. Let us all be kind to ourselves during it!

fighting against stasis

I feel like I’m in the middle of a drought, but when I really get down to it, I’m not. I’ve been writing, but each act of putting words on paper feels like trudging through muck. Yesterday, I felt a little uplifted when I saw that my poem “Love Fevers” (draft notes here) is up at Waccamaw and shares space with some fantastic writers. This year, I’ve only had two poetry acceptances and plenty more rejections, so it was very nice to see my work up again.

It might be too that I’m in a period of waiting, and waiting sometimes feels like mourning. I’m waiting to hear back from two jobs (both I should hear back from by May 1st), a book contest which is the last one my book is currently at, and several journals that have had my work for a very long time (the most being 342 days!).

On April 14th, I decided to start doing another poem-a-day thing to try to push myself into action. The first day, I randomly chose to write a prose poem that started with the tagline, “In this poem, I’m…”, so the past ten poems have had that same form and opening. What I’ve liked about this exercise is it’s given me some space to imagine: I’ve been a Latin teacher, a gifted carpenter, a perilously thin woman, an obese man.

The thing I love about doing a poem-a-day thing is I can’t rely on the old go-tos: dark farm, myths, whatever; I have to come up with new stuff because  it’s easy for the old wells to run dry if I draw from them every time. It also gives me new work to play with when, for whatever reason, I start to hate that I wrote older than a month ago (which is about where I’m at now).

My real life interjects itself into these poems more and more too when before I always kept a carefully crafted wall between it and my poems. For example, I’ve been keeping track of the April 16th disappearance of a Memphis teacher. Today her body has been discovered and her estranged husband arrested. As a teacher, especially one in Memphis, I hate to read these kind of stories, and in my “In this poem, I’m…” poem from today, I’m a woman who wakes up at the bottom of a pond after being left for dead by her husband.

Things I need to think about in no certain order:

• My book. (After I hear back from the last contest it’s currently at (the sixth it’s been sent to), I can immediately send it off to some contests with a due date of April 30th/May 1st, send it through another round of edits, or let it hibernate until the summer months when I might feel a little more inclined to look at it again. Book contests are hard. I take the contest results a little harder than normal submissions because it’s not just a packet of 3-5 poems, but 50! Maybe I just need to keep sending it out and the pain will lessen??) 
• These new poems. (Work toward a second book? a chapbook? Cut my full-length down into a chapbook and start sending it out?)
• These essays. (Two of my CNF essays have been published so far this year, and I’ve got another out right now, but what to do with them? A friend of mine suggested I think about expanding one into a book, but yikes! Maybe I’ll just keep writing and see what happens.)

I’m slogging and whining. I think I probably just need a hug…

All of you stay well.

Withdrawal for Spring

January 30th ended my 30 poems in 30 days, and though I’d love to say I pushed and bled and pushed some more and now have 30 little drafts, I can only say I have 25. Various things came between me and writing poetry (and some days I just plumb forgot), but I’m glad to have a batch of 25 poem drafts saved for when I feel fortified enough to return to them.

After expending so much energy to draft and draft and draft, I’m tired. Emotionally, artistically, physically, metaphysically… Four days after completing the last draft, I got the most sick I’ve been in a while, and I’m still recovering. Ample napping and asking myself, “Does this make me feel even the teensiest bit stressed out?” (if the answer is “yes,” I do something else.) have been go-tos. Because of all of this, I’m behind on a lot of things: responding to personal e-mails, responding to all of your kind comments, editing some work, submitting some work; unfortunately, all of these tasks have gone under the “Does this make me feel…” spotlight and been given up for gentler options.

I think a hiatus is in store, so after this post and one more that’s going up tomorrow, I’m going to take a break for some indefinite length of time. I’ve been thinking a lot about Molly Spencer’s idea of neutral tasks. For me, even reading a poem–even a perfectly lovely, soul-caressing poem–sets my stress alarm off, and I have to retreat to wash the dishes. There’s something about expending that sort of artistic energy that left me depleted, so I think the kindest things I could do for myself would not be related to poetry directly (since everything in life is connected to poetry, it’s hard to imagine finding something not related!).

I’m thinking of

• baking
• fashioning a headboard out of window shutters
• listening to music
• reading a magazine
• taking a walk
• making and sending postcards to friends
• dancing
• giving clothes to Good Will

Don’t those things sound wonderful?? ( I know, try to hide your enthusiasm).

May you all enjoy an abundance of whatever you need: rest, creativity, affirmations, love.

~

P.S. I got an acceptance for my poem “Mother” (draft notes here) from Bayou Magazine. Some 25+ rejections, and I finally got a poem acceptance! 

P.S.S. I applied for the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowships in poetry. It’s incredibly competitive, and some amazing poets have come out of that program (like Traci Brimhall), but I’m going to try for it. What have I got to lose? I handled 25+ rejections in a month and a half’s time! I think I can handle the potential for one more! 

P.S.S. My husband and I are celebrating Valentine’s Day on the 15th, the same day my short story, “The Last Hurrah,” comes out in the February issue of PANK. I’m looking forward to a day of romantic and writing love. 

Drafting #17-23

I am currently behind four poems on this whole 30 poems in 30 days thing. I’m trying not to be hard on myself and just celebrate the fact that I’ve never done anything like this ever ever ever! and now I’ve done 23 poems in 27 days! whatevs it’s not 27 in 27!

I’m also still trudging through the rejections (thank you for all of your well-wishes! I love knowing that I’m not alone and that we all can help each other through times like these!). After I wrote a poem on Friday, I just knew that I would come home to a rejection in my mailbox, and, lo and behold, there it was. 22 rejections since January 3rd. Yeesh.

I did receive news of an acceptance for a short creative nonfiction essay of mine which will appear sometime soon up at Punchnel’s. This knocks out one of my goals (“Get one of my creative nonfiction essays accepted for publication”) for 2013. Woohoo! Speaking of that, I’ve also knocked out the “Do something special just for my writing” goal by doing this whole 30-in-30 poem thing AND The Artist’s Way. I’m also 23 poems into a 50 poem goal. Wow. It’s not even February yet! Go me!

Let’s get to the draft processes (taken from my journal, the computer, as well as a writing app on my phone):

Draft Seventeen (“Your Throat a Bare Wing”): For this poem, I took two words from Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Rome”  and a couple from a reading I did on the nature of memoir. I used “mimicry,” “starling,” “memory,” and “throat.” This poem, like many of the other ones is about a relationship. Some lines: “the owl we caught and cooked its feet…the tendril of my hair striking your cheek.”

Draft Eighteen (“The Nature of Knowing”): This one was also inspired by the line, “possessed…of a great stillness” in “Rome.”  I applied it to a man watching a woman and thinking that of her, though those words never appear in my poem. “…the places of soft tissue and of bone, the intricate interiors of her that he knows he will never know.”

Draft Nineteen (“Longing”): A woman longs to have a child. “…with an emptiness inside her/she can’t name.” This is my first non-prose poem in a while.

Draft Twenty (“Blindness”): For this poem, I took a bunch of starter words (“saint,” “blind,” “silence,” “flowering,” and “blood”) and just went with it. It ended up being a poem about a woman saint going blind and someone else plotting her death for some…reason that maybe I’ll think of later?

Draft Twenty-One (“Night”): This one is a mess of sentences that make very little sense together, but I like the last line (“I watch my face as it moves from desperation to silence.”) and I might scavenge it to put in another poem.

Draft Twenty-Two (“Weave Kindling in My Hair”): People build boats, put their complaints in them that fill the space like liquid in a container, and then set them on fire. They “…watch the smoke rise like prayers.” This probably means something symbolically, but…I don’t what that would be. That’s just what came out. Isn’t writing weird sometimes?

Draft Twenty-Three (“Love Makes Her Fingers”): Now these are getting more and more surreal. This one has a man and woman trading parts of each other’s bodies for items (like her molars for a stronger door lock) and also being pretty violent in their possession of these items. This violence later becomes not just about taking, but about “giving” and ends with “…how much sweeter his lips taste bruised.”

 

Speaking of drafting, I’m doing a week of “reading deprivation,” so I’m sincerely limiting how much I read this week. More often than not, I get inspired to write a poem by reading the work of someone else first, and this week I’m going to have to change that habit.

Drafting poems #10-16 & Rejections

This next round of draft processes has been a muddled mess. Since I’m journaling regularly in the morning, sometimes I’ve written these drafts out in longhand; other times, on the computer. I’m also behind one day, so I need to write two one day this month in order to make sure I’m getting 30 in 30 (because I’ve also made this official. I’m going to try to get over my commitment-phobic issues and just commit to 30 poems in 30 days).

Journaling every morning has left me feeling like a raw nerve this whole week. Lots of insecurities and self-doubt have risen to the surface, and on top of that, I’ve received the largest number of rejections in a short amount of time in my entire submitting career. Since January 3rd, I’ve received 16. One form for my poetry manuscript. One form for a fiction story. Three form for a creative nonfiction essay. Four form and seven personalized for poetry. So, if anything, I’m learning perseverance and working through discomfort and the importance of positive action (journaling, writing, & submitting, in spite of self-doubt).

Here are processes for each of these. While several of my other drafts seemed to be building toward a story, these are going in very different directions.

Draft Ten (“White Breath”): Molly Spencer talks about collecting “scraps,” and one thing I frequently try to do is when I’m struck by a word, a line, or an image is to write it down. The important thing is to come back to these to see what comes out of them. The scraps for this particular poem were “hoarfrost,” “skylark,” and “Katherine.” Since I’m usually writing these poems on a time-constraint, I really try to throw whatever comes into my mind onto the page, so few of these make sense at this stage. An example: “The frost on her hair, the ice shed of her fingers, the skylarks, the skylarks…”

Draft Eleven (“This is a poem”): “Metapoetry” is when someone specifically states in the poem that it’s a poem. Poems like these immediately repel me: I don’t want you to tell me it’s a poem; I’m not dumb! I know what I’m reading! But, like the typical hypocrite, I wrote my own metapoem because that’s the poem that needed to be told. “Innocents are in this poem. Ones who build a fort, ash their cigarette into a potted plant.”

Draft Twelve (“Fingerprint”): A while ago, a poet-friend of mine gave me the idea of writing “opposite” poems, taking a poem you’ve already written or someone else’s and changing every word to its opposite while still trying to make logical sense. It’s a hard exercise, and not something I’ve used very often, but it became a good exercise for me to use when figuring out how to incite  a new draft. I took this lovely poem up on LineBreak and started trying to shape it into its opposite. For example, I started with the first line, “I robbed the ceramicist of his clay” and changed it to “We shouldered the mortician from her laboratory.” While that’s not particularly lovely, it did give me enough of a springboard to begin writing about a couple and also pull in some words in from the original, like “electrified” and “fingerprint.”

Draft Thirteen (“Darling”): A poet-friend of mine (who will one day get a blog so I can start linking to him regularly) wrote some poems I liked that were all about sexy dancing. I don’t write about sexy dancing. My poems are in no way sexy (people dying or hurting other people is not sexy) or dancing to begin with, but I wanted to write about dancing for this draft, and I was hoping maybe it could be sexy dancing. I tried. This one needs some tucking and pinching and prodding, but it was an admirable first attempt at some sexiness when my writing-sexiness is…nil.

Draft Fourteen (“This Cave”): This poem started out as an idea, “Two bodies form an echoing chamber,” that turned into a sort of mess of images. The image was so clear and solid in my head, but once I got it on paper, it sort of fell apart. I couldn’t figure out how to piece it together, and it just wasn’t coming together. This might be one of those poems that becomes scraps for future poems, but I’m hopeful the idea will come together at some point.

Draft Fifteen (Two Step”"): Another attempt at a sexy dancing poem. This one was better. The images are a little clearer. The language felt a little fresher. I had a clearer idea in my head that translated better to the page. “Her ribs against his palms, blood in her cheeks.” I don’t think this one’s any closer to being for-real-sexy, but maybe one day I’ll be able to do?

Draft Sixteen (“Apologies”): This one made all of the other fifteen poems worth it. If I needed to write fifteen bad poems to get one good one, I’m okay with that. This one was even fun to write(!). It didn’t feel like a chore, didn’t feel like “I need to get this over with to say that I did it.” It felt like a real, “I’m inspired! Words on the page! I love them! Ooo! Those words are cool together! Let’s do that again! And again!” This returned to another couple. A line I like: “Kiss me and lick splinters from your lips.”

Drafting: “If I Loved Her,” “Shadows,” & “If I Were A Compass

Despite the fact that I’ve been writing three pages a day in the morning for The Artist’s Way, I’ve still been able to write a poem draft everyday for this unofficial-poem-a-day-for-some-length-of-time thing I’m doing.

These drafts are starting to develop a story I’m really interested in. The last seven have been about a man and his complicated relationship with a woman who is either physically or emotionally absent. I’ve never written so many poems that seem to have the same characters, so I’m really excited to see how these could work together and if this means (!) a new project. These also have the same form (prose) and style (lyrical), but I wonder if both those things will keep after I go back and edit.

Draft Seven (“I Loved Her”): This poem works as both an introduction to the man and how deeply he felt for this woman, who is no longer living. My favorite line: “…she came washed in smoke, her hair braided with ash twigs.”

Draft Eight (“Shadows”): This poem started from the prompt, “Write a poem using the words: honey, snake, and thaw,”  and while those words were a great place to start, I had trouble finding a story to connect them together, so I just started writing whatever came to mind from those words. For that reason, the poem doesn’t have any grounding until the last couple of lines when I was finally like, “OH!” My favorite line: “Watch her comb her hair with her teeth.”

Draft Nine (“If I Were A Compass”): This poem started from the prompt, “If I Were_____.” Like all of the other poems, this one’s very lyrical and makes some strange jumps. For example, “Let us burrow where the dark turns indigo, where your hair grows on me like moss.” This one was harder to keep working through. I wanted to stick to the comparison of the speaker to a compass, but my writing self kept being like, “But compasses are BORING! Let’s do THIS! or THIS!” and my other, more logical self was like, “No! That doesn’t sound like a compass at all! Compasses point and are metal and stuff!” And then my writing self threw in some ankles and winter branches and animal blood and was like, “HA! COMPASS THAT!”

It’s still going, folks. Woo hoo!

Doing Something Special for My Writing

One of my goals for the new year was to do something special just for my writing, whether it be writing a poem a day for a specific length of time or attending a conference or retreat.

As of January 1st, I’ve done an unofficial poem-a-day thing and it’s produced results: 6 days, 6 poems. After day three, the writing became a little easier. It was easier for me to dash words onto the page, and I was able to think of scenarios and leaps more, but it also became something I had to actively remember to do, like a chore. Then, on day four, I completely forgot I was supposed to write one until 10 o’clock at night (as evidenced here). I’ve also agreed to do a process thingy that might be too much, but might also be exactly what I need.

Here are the next three draft processes:

Draft Four (“Resolve”): A man is in love with a woman who he doesn’t trust and who also doesn’t love him back. This is my 11 o’clock at night omgwhydidntiremembertowritethisearlier? poem. It came out in prose form, and I left it that way. This one doesn’t really develop the real story until the end of the poem, so it’d need some re-working to make sense.

Draft Five (“Measures”): Another poem about a man loving a woman. And a prose poem too. This one was a lot easier to write and I really dig the story. A guy keeps a collection of compasses to navigate the plane of his lover’s body (“how far from her thumb to her nipple, her eye to her heart?”). It’s also very lyrical, which I don’t normally write, but I like in this instance. This is definitely one I’ll come back to.

Draft Six (“Gathering”): A mother tries to understand why her daughter is the way she is: angry, insolent, mournful. Another prose poem. This piece went really lyrical too. This might just be where these are going right now.

Another thing for my writing I’ve agreed to do is work through The Artist’s Way for twelve weeks. I really don’t quite know what I’ve signed up for, but I’ve purchased the book and I’m set to start the first journaling exercise later today. This book and the whole process has been recommended to me by a couple of creative types, and when a fellow poet e-mailed me yesterday to asked me if I’d be a part of the group, I nearly immediately said yes. My unofficial poem-a-day may come to an end since, I’ve read, I’ll need to hand-write three pages every day, but we’ll see. Maybe they’ll both work well together. Maybe I’ll give up writing and focus on The Artist’s Way and come out more amazing than ever after. Maybe I’ll flake out on doing both. Who knows? Let’s see what this new year brings.

Want to join The Artist’s Way group or do an unofficial poem-a-day thing with me? Any takers welcome!

How to draft a poem when you’re doing an unofficial poem-a-day thing

1. Forget you’re supposed to write a poem until it’s 10 o’clock at night and you’re driving home from a dinner with friends.

2. Dictate a poem about a chic with curled snake hair using an app on your phone.

3. Read what you’ve written so far while you’re at a stop light. See that it turned “her fists” to “Hurfus,” “lied” to “delighted” and “branch” to “ranch home.”  Don’t be amused or inspired by these changes. Also, don’t let anyone think you’re texting; that’s illegal.

4. Get home and open your computer to type up your poem.

5. Get on Facebook instead.

6. Watch a youtube video of a choreographed father-daughter wedding dance.

7. Read something that makes you embarrassingly weepy.

8. After an hour passes by, open up Word on your computer.

9. Write about a guy named Hurfus.

10. Write about Medusa. 

11. Go to a website where they have prompts. 

12. Start to write a poem based on one of the prompts.

13. Write this blog post instead.

14. Write a poem about a guy who loves a woman who doesn’t love him back.

15. Add in a bear somewhere.

16. Use the word “resolve” multiple times.

17.  Select a dramatic last word to close out the poem. “Pity” or “terror” would be appropriate.

18. Think of a title that plays on a word or words you’ve used in the poem and opens up the poem to speculative meanings. Example: “Revolution.”

19. Worry or don’t worry about line breaks.

20. Finito!

An Unofficial Poem-A-Day Thing & Drafting: “After the Dragging,” “Wrapping,” & “Bobby Pins”

One of my 2013 goals was to “do something special just for my writing.” I decided, very unofficially, to start a poem-a-day thing for some length of time on January 1st.

Three days in, and I’ve got three little drafts. They feel little because their stories seem somehow incomplete and very poorly told.

Just for my sake, I will include draft processes here for a bunch at a time, but I’m pretty embarrassed by these. I don’t even really want to say that I’m writing a poem-a-day for some length of time because the should committee goes off on my head: “these little drafts should be MASTERFUL WORKS OF ART!” “these little drafts should have better inspirational processes!” “these little drafts should have structure and form…” (I know, ugh.)

As I’m drafting, I’m just grabbing at inspirations as I go along. One started from lines I wrote down over a month ago that I wanted to fold into a poem. One is just a scenario. Another is something taken from my own life that itches me as being “too intimate.” But, I’m writing (this requires a closed fist pushed into the air)!

Here are the processes and descriptions. They don’t currently have titles, so I’m making these up on the fly.

Draft One (“After the Dragging”): The last poem I drafted was about a woman who gets dragged behind a wagon. This poem used that as a starting point of what it would be like to attend someone’s funeral after they’d been dragged to death and wonder how the mortician was able to fix some of the…ahem…damage done by being dragged. Most of the poem now is a musing about her body and remembering how her body looked right after being dragged vs. how she now looks in a coffin. I ended up not knowing where to go once the musing was up, like who’d be so morbid and awful to stand at someone’s open coffin and think these things? So then I decided to make the voice be that of the townspeople and maybe she was a witch or something, so they felt justified in murdering her…I don’t know. That’s just where it went. Maybe it’ll make more sense once I come back to it…

Draft Two (“Wrapping”): This poem I started writing after watching part of the movie Brave. I really wasn’t expecting that movie to be so focused on a mother-daughter relationship, so this poem became about that. I translated the mother into a more physically violent one and made the daughter older. The daughter is now trying to take care of her elderly mother when they had a pretty messed-up past. I also ended up using the word “bulb” quite frequently because I think I liked how it sounded at that moment.

Draft Three (“Bobby Pins”): This poem is mostly a scene: a man helping a woman take out the bobby pins in her hair. Then it goes all sentimental and philosophical talking about how relationships are built generally the same way: some parts are hidden as the hair is hidden and placed and coaxed with the bobby pins and you have to reveal the truth just as reveal each strand of hair a bobby pin at a time…Ugh. I try to avoid these kind of poems, but what can I say? It’s what came out.

On to more poem-ing tomorrow (maybe?).

The Numbers

I did this same post last year, and I’d like to continue it as a tradition. It helps me look at what, in terms of writing and submitting, I’ve been doing well, what I’ve been doing poorly, and what I can do to change for the better.

Here are the numbers (in descending order):

117 submissions sent ~ 82 for poetry, 26 for fiction, 6 for my manuscript Swallow Tongue, and 3 for creative nonfiction. 104 electronic. 13 postal.

65 rejections ~ 43 for poetry, 19 for fiction, 2 for creative nonfiction, and 1 for my manuscript, Swallow Tongue.

28 new pieces ~ 25 poems, 3 nonfiction essays, 0 short stories. This should also include a heavily revised manuscript! Last year, I wrote 36 new pieces (33 poems, 3 short stories, 0 nonfiction essays), but I did have a lot going on this year: getting sick, having surgery, postponing my graduation with my MFA from May to August, spending a month in Spain, finally graduating, returning to work full-time, buying a house. I’m thankful I wrote anyway. I also finished cleaning up my writing room (which, since early November, has been the area where I’ve painted furniture), so I can start using that soon enough!

13 acceptances ~ a total of 15 poems and 1 short story.

5-7 hours per week ~ my average time drafting, revising, submitting, reading, and blogging. Down from 15+ last year.

Conclusion: Statistically (based on dividing the number of acceptances by the number of rejections received), my poetry odds are at 28% (12/43) and fiction at 5% (1/19).  Creative nonfiction and my manuscript are at 0%.

Improvements over last year:

1. I kept a more accurate log of my submissions. Before, I kept no log of my hard copy submissions and only e-mail exchanges for the electronic ones. Really bad process. Duotrope was and is a life-saver. 

2. I submitted more hard copy submissions. That’s a feat in and of itself. I submitted to some dream journals which only accept hard copy subs.

Things I can do in 2013:

1. Keep up the accurate log.

2. Write.

3. Submit.

4. Repeat.

Hope you all do your own numbers game and see where you stand. Let’s all be kinder to ourselves and others this year!