All in a day’s work

It seems a poet’s work is never done. Poets are always analyzing everything, searching for the exact right word or phrase to describe things. For example, driving down the road this blustery morning, I saw something luff and waft in the breeze. Thinking it was a bird, I slowed down, only to realize it was a branch, but it wasn’t a branch, it was the tip of a branch. And in that moment I realized how much we keep searching to get closer and closer to that moment when we have the aha, the moment of Epiphany. That moment when you know that you have chosen the exact right word to describe what it is you’re seeing or feeling. Or include the philosophical level when you go back to layer or imbue a poem with meaning. But you can’t kill the baby in the process. 

Sometimes, stacking image after image after image creates meaning in the reader, but other times we have to strife with, or settle for artifice to ensure that it is understood by all. Well not maybe by all, but by the reader—whoever the reader is. Take care of the reader. Something I always tell my students. It was so funny to hear one student saying it back to me when I was teaching. If we get a new student in the classroom, I will sometimes have students catch the other students up by explaining what it is we do. In this way I can tell if I am reaching the students and if they are retaining the information. 

It is rare that I get a chance to dictate to my iPad. Because usually I do not have the clarity of mind to focus in that way. And I think of how poetry has a home in my brain making it much more pliable, making it possible for me to talk to a machine, in order to write a poem. Truly, poetry is the mother of all arts. And then some.

Back in October, 2017 while driving to Sonoma County to meet or friend, Kathleen Carr, I was broadsided by a jumble of words tumbling fourth, and having no paper and having no iPad, I grabbed a marker and on the side of a zucchini box, I scrawled the poem as it came, fast and furious. But I waited too long to transcribe it, and couldn’t read some of it. The juxtaposition, the leap from idea to idea is interesting. I have no idea what the poem was about, or what prompted it. I just know that sometimes when driving down wild backroads, words speak through me. And I am merely the scribe.

I scribe, scribble, scribe. A scribe rights, a child scribbles, scrawls poems.

Just playing with the relationship between words that are related and have become unmoored, no longer anchored to the origin. I never know what exactly will be coming out. I just know that when the words do come, I need to be ready to grab them. I always think that I will remember, and write them down later. Later never comes. Like dreams, poems—call it dictation of the gods—if you don’t catch the stream, they are gone forever.

The other day, I was writing one of the props for a poem a day, and forgot to save it thinking that the computer would, as it usually does. The inevitable happened and I was looking at a blank slate after having written two poems. I tried to resurrect them and got nowhere. I wrote two replacement poems for them that mentioned them. They weren’t the same, perhaps they were better because the art form I was using called nonnets is a strange form that starts with one starts with nine syllables, then 87654321 syllables, making strange obtuse angles on the page in print.

One of the reasons why I like to do the April Poetry Month challenge, is that the prompts challenge my own writing style. I don’t necessarily write the prompts on the day they are given. However, I do try to go in and backfill some of the prompts—because I never know if it’s actually going to gell.

At home I tend to leave them in the master file, to get back to later, but I am terrible at going back and revising work and wind up abandoning them. So it’s not an easy journey between the writing process and the finished product. 

I think of all the writing workshops I’ve taken. Sometimes I feel sorry for myself that I don’t have a real book, or that no one ever asks me to read anymore. And I think of all those workshops I took, and all the readings I produced. My whole adult life has been about poetry. I know I’m a good poet and yet we measure success in the number of books, and the number of prizes and all I do is fill my blog with more and more poems, because that’s what I do best. I’m verbose my metaphors are sometimes slovenly. I’m very good at imagery, having come from the visual arts realm. 

Ultimately, what difference does it make if I don’t publish a book or if I don’t do readings? Poetry for poetry’s sake. For someone’s sake. Think of Emily alone in her room filled with plants, and cats draped over armchairs. Think of her as she bent over her small poems like cat prints on the windshield and how she must’ve held them up and polish them like fine glass until they shown with a brilliance that has never been matched.

What survives us always becomes the larger question that we are afraid to ask, let alone, answer.