#FinishUrBookFall - Oct. Update

This year instead of NaNoWriMo I’m taking part in a new challenge, #FinishUrBookFall. Since the summer I’ve been alternating between two projects (described here) and at some point I realized that I maybe had enough material for the first to start thinking about it as a collection. Possibly a book? Certainly a chapbook. Then the #FinishUrBookFall challenge came along and I figured this would be a good way to focus my attention and really get some work done on this.

What can I say, I like challenges.

And it’s been working. I have more energy and direction around this project than I’ve had before, I’m seeing things come together. At the same time, of course, I’m visited by doubt. I’m repeating myself (ideas, themes, words) – I have nothing new or worthy to say – my writing is obvious, trite…

Then at the same time I read other people’s collections, ones that are meaningful to me, that have given me inspiration or encouragement, and I see ideas, themes, words repeated… only in their work I see it as resonance, or echoes, or other ways of describing the ways that coming back to something again & again strengthens it, or turns it, or fragments it in ways that allow you to put things back together in new and insightful ways. So maybe mine will be useful to someone else in the same way.

(Of course there are the works I read that are so virtuoso that there isn’t any expectation of approaching, I’m content to merely kneel at their feet…)

I was blessed to see Ada Limón recently at the poetry book club I go to (author of Bright Dead Things, The Carrying). Among the questions she answered were ones on how she forms her collections. So I was blessed not only with her presence overall but also with very specific notes on exactly what I’m curious about right now, resonating with thoughts I’ve had about this. Her process isn’t mine, of course, but I think it’s similar enough in ways that I can get guidance from her words.

I currently have about 20 in close to final form, or if not finished, at least ready for other eyes, and another 20 or so in larval form. Not everything will go in so yes, I think chapbook is the right answer. Though I’ve also been wondering about what is missing, what needs still to be written, so who knows… I think perhaps quite a lot. It looks like I will come to the end of #FinishUrBookFall and see I have at least another year’s writing in front of me, let alone revision. But that’s okay. Already this exercise of thinking about putting together a book has led to good questions and new determination. And I find the more I write the more endurance I have for it, the more drive I have. The more ideas. The more I want to study as well…

Sometimes it feels my body can’t contain all I want to do. I remember this feeling from other times in my life and back then I got overwhelmed, more than once… I know better now how to ride it out, the rhythm of pushing forward and then, maybe not quite pulling back but allowing myself not to push for a while. To rest in the other rhythms of my life, the other things that need doing. It helps also that I’m working with all of me these days too, in fact, that’s the only way I could do this.

So onward I go!

S.A.

Committing to Poetry at Age 47

On the one hand it’s daunting, how little I know about the craft of writing poetry, or even of reading it. I go to these workshops and people speak with such knowledge, sometimes clearly pulling on years of study. Oodles of poets, of theory, of schools of thought. Of their own experience. I’m reading Robert Haas’s book on form and when I do understand what is being talked about it’s clear how much can go into it. Every word, every line. Antecedents and parallels and responses to other people’s work. And I’m stumbling through, a workshop here, book club there, reading an essay about form or craft here and there, there’s so much I don’t know and never can catch up to. And it’s really daunting.

…And at the same time I’m so glad I didn’t have that kind of education, I think I would have gotten myself twisted up and turned away, frozen completely, unable to go on. I’m glad I wrote a lot that wasn’t poetry but somewhat adjacent to it, read a lot just because. I feel I have developed, or am well on my way to developing, my own style – punctuation, line length, rhythm, etc. And I think it would have been a lot harder if I’d been taking classes or doing lots of workshops, trying to take in a hundred pieces of advice. Why? Because I did not stand solid in myself and would have wanted too much to find my way through others’ paths. But I feel solid in myself as a writer now, thanks to hundreds of blog posts and tens of devotions and even tweets, as I try to distill thoughts into 280 characters that don’t offend my ear. And also through my failures: attempting to write/draw children’s books or comics, and then novels. Only to come back to poems, again and again.

I recently received some excellent critical feedback of a few of them – and I can take it now, in a way I couldn’t have five, ten years ago, or even six months ago. It means a lot that I can take it in – disagree in places – and am strong enough in myself for it. This is only possible now that I am living closer to my true self to begin with. I think I might be ready now to take an actual class or commit to a workshop series at some point.

I’m currently working on two projects. The first is a collection of contemporary poems, spanning the last 20 years and set in the U.S. On nature & fear & the city & wonder & the work of figuring things out. Then the second is a new work, set in Bavaria, of a witch and his dragon, or a dragon and xyr witch. I wanted to try my hand at a longer narrative framework with fantastical elements and this is where I was led… It feels way beyond my abilities at the moment but it will also take years to write, I imagine, and I’ll learn what I need to along the way.

Poetically yours,
S.A.

Crocodile & Cat

So this is a wee bit of something I don't know how to characterize - not a story, exactly, not a poem either, akin to a devotion but not something I'd write for work. But I'm fond of it and thought it should be out there (it originally had a home in my masters thesis).

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The crocodile called out to the cat. He was in the river, the cat on the bank, slowly walking, lifting one paw up and putting it down. “You walk carefully,” said the crocodile.

            “With each step I pray.”

            “To whom do you pray?” asked the crocodile.

            “To the god that made me.”

            The moon watched them pass beneath her and breathed out to the stars. The air was cool and bright. The crocodile sank under the water and watched fish dart in front of him. He came up and called to the cat.

            “Cat, what does your god say?”

            The cat pulled his feet beneath him and sat, eyes closed. His whiskers stretched in the moonlight, he lifted his chin to the moonbreeze. “It is all our god, yours and mine.”

            The crocodile ducked under water, embarrassed. The cat sat. The moon watched.

Under water, the crocodile rested his chin in the mud and counted reeds. At fifty he came up, saw the cat, and went back under. He counted frogs. That took longer. At fifty he came up. The cat’s eyes were closed and he said, “It is god who made that water and these reeds and those frogs. You were born of mud, I was born of dust.” The crocodile sank under and counted his teeth, ten times over. When he came up, the cat had tucked his paws under and slept.

The crocodile crept up the bank and lowered his head to the cat. His breath tickled the grass. His eyes were gold. The cat opened his eyes. His eyes were gold. The cat said, “Tell me.”

The crocodile closed his eyes. “What do I say?” he asked.

The cat closed his eyes. “I give thanks for the sun and the rain. I praise the sweet smell of the mud. I dance to the moon and I sing to the wind. When the wind is still, I hum to the earth. I enjoy the frogs. I chant to the trees. All this is god, and I am glad.” He opened his eyes. “What do you do?” he asked.

The crocodile sank low. “I count,” he said.

“What do you count?”

“I count the waterbugs,” he said. “I count the currents. I count the hippos and the frogs and the reeds.” The cat closed his eyes. “I count the raindrops. I count the stones. I count the winds.” The cat sat up and stretched his ears. “I count,” the crocodile said.

“The egret,” the cat said, “names things. She sings these in her sleep.”

“The elephant dreams,” he said, “and whispers these to the ibex.”

He said, “The ibex listens.”

The crocodile raised his chin to the wind. “It is good to pray,” he said.

“It is good to pray,” the cat agreed.

The crocodile slid down to the river and under the water. The cat stood up, stretched his tail, and walked, lifting one foot up and putting it down.

**********

Devotedly yours,

S.A.