I had several possible topics in mind for today:
• A pretentious interview at the end of the Chelsea Cain audiobook I just finished and a reflection on people who try way too hard to seem worldly. )Plus a discussion of the word “unpack,” as in to detail or draw out for the senses and to contextualize, which appears to crop up frequently in her workshop group.)
• A totally groovy Juanes concert I went to last night and a reflection on the brilliance of song lyrics (and poetry) that manage to sound like natural speech. (Plus my friend’s amazing use of the word “grape fruits” to refer to hotties with highly exposed large, round breasts.)
• A recap of some of the Knopf Poem-of-the-Day selections for this year and a reflection on their definite East-Coast slant. (Plus some whining about how I just couldn’t connect with many of them.)
• An afternoon spent reading a lot more of the Popol Vuh than I had planned and a reflection on the atavistic sense of knowing the images and psychology of the text. (Plus much grumbling about how all that reading would amount to only a couple of lines or stanzas in the poem that prompted such a feat.)
• A sardonic anecdote in which I use most of my poetic energy to disassociate from a work related meeting and a reflection on how I spend far too much time stewing and plotting evil when I’m not channeling my energies into my manuscript. (Plus a fully unpacked description of vaguely anthropomorphic turds that might have attended the meeting with me.)
But my focus will fall on the crushing fact that the most obvious problems with a piece of writing are the least evident to one enamored of it.
I reread one of the “done” poems yesterday to make sure it really was ready to go out into the mail. The first half describes what happens physically when someone dies, the details having come from a vet on the day I had my dog put to sleep. The second half describes a breakfast table. The language is clear and crisp, most of the meaning of the poem coming from the mere juxtaposition of the two scenes.
When I read it, I was very pleased with myself, thinking the piece was as fabulous as I remembered, save for a line in the middle that struck me as out of place. I tweaked it, felt mostly satisfied, and figured something would come to me soon enough.
Then this morning I was at work. I was sitting around waiting for my parties to connect and letting my mind wander. I thought about people I know: a woman who passed out in the shower without warning, her face badly bruised from the fall; a man who died of a heart attack in his kitchen, his face similarly bruised. My mind lingered on the man, preparing a snack or reaching for a glass of water, then collapsing. The woman described her own fall as unusual in that it had no premonitory dizziness, weakness, or symptoms of any kind. I thought the man’s fall must have been that way, too sudden for the hands to go out and break the fall, and then the part of my brain that stores the details of his death (a year and a half ago) and the part of my brain that stores details of my poem (written at least seven years before) came together, and I realized that the poem covered that moment wrong and that the poem itself was incomplete, really just a fragment.
The scene I’d developed around the poem was mostly in my head, not on the page. The relationship between the first half and the second was not at all clear, and the line I’d been struggling over had nothing to do with anything. The poem sounded really good to me because I knew what it was about, but it’s been rejected by editor after editor because most of the poem is still in my head.
The mistake is typical of inexperienced writers. It’s what the expressivists call “private writing” or what one of my undergrad nonfiction prose writing teachers called “masturbation.” That writing must make sense to the reader is a proposition as basic as “Food must be palatable to the eater.” My offering was a half made concoction of favorite ingredients imagined into the final sumptuous dish.
The realization winded me–physically. How is it that someone with so much experience writing can fail to notice such an obvious flaw? The next thought that came to me was: “How many other ‘done’ poems have the same problem?” Certainly most of the revision I’ve done over the last few months has involved cutting rhetorical passages and adding more information to clarify the literal and contextualize it. I started reading the Popol Vuh, in fact, because I realized that another one of my poems would have less meaning to readers not familiar with the Mesoamerican creation myths that say humans come from corn. But having this revelation so far into the process is unsettling in the extreme.
The one bright spot is that I am now torn between revising this poem for this collection or recasting it (to focus on the hands) for the next, which I’m thinking may focus on the parts of the body.
Puntitas reads _The Almost Moon_ by A. Sebold.
