Other Readers Needed

Thanks to a recent bout of insomnia and to a slow work week, Puntitas has been putting a lot of time into revising her narrative essay. She was surprised to read it today and discover that minor changes would fill in a lot of gaps, hint at back-story, support themes, unify apparently disparate elements, and address many of the evils she had worried about last night. She was satisfied enough with the day’s revisions to send the draft on to a friend for feedback.

Puntitas really needs an outside reader for this piece since her emotional response to it on first reading tells her she’s still too close to the subject to gauge the work objectively. The person she sent it to isn’t an ideal reader in that she shares a characteristic with Puntitas that is likely to filter her interpretation, but Puntitas wants to hear what she has to say anyway because Puntitas values her skills as a reader and because their shared characteristic makes her a good person to discuss the subject with. After their conversation, Puntitas plans to go through another round of revision. Then she may ask another friend, who does not share the characteristic, to comment as well, but that will depend on how she’s feeling about the piece at the time.

Inviting others to experience a foreign world is a hard task. Puntitas hadn’t thought about how hard until recently, when she read Dry by Augusten Burroughs, a memoir about a gay man going through rehab and trying to maintain sobriety despite the illness and death of a friend and former lover.

Puntitas was able to identify with much of the book. The narrator’s friendships reminded her of her own friendships. His experiences with addiction and recovery connected her with the people she knows who are in their addictions or recoveries as well as with aspects of her job. Specific scenes and moods evoked parallel episodes in Puntitas own life and in that of her friends’.

One part of the book, however, that she was less able to connect to was a certain portion of the gay story line. Puntitas isn’t gay or particularly oriented to finding a life partner of any type, so love stories are generally interesting as curiosities (hence Puntitas’ fascination with formula romances). This one was more interesting than usual in that it was about someone who has to “fall out of love” and maintain a friendship with a person who doesn’t reciprocate. The story drew Puntitas less when the former lover develops AIDS and dies, prompting turmoil in the narrator, which eventually leads to relapse.

Stories about terminal illness are generally hard to pull off because they tend toward the sentimental or sensationalistic, because characters’ reactions follow a few expected paths, and because the death, which comes at or right before the climax, leads to a handful of predictable events. Puntitas has an especially hard time with stories about women with cancer and (A) big families or (B) close friends.

The few books Puntitas has read by contemporary gay writers have tended to figure a character (major or minor) with AIDS (often in its more advanced stage). For Puntitas, who is an outside reader, this feels like a cliché, but she suspects that, for the gay writers and readers, the AIDS character is an acknowledgement of someone who is part of their landscape and that other characters’ responses to him are significant markers within the community.

Puntitas’ own narrative essay risks the same kind of resistance that characterized her reading of Burroughs AIDS story line. The piece is about exclusion. That will be clear to anyone who reads it. But because so much memoir about this topic centers on exclusion, readers may not bother to tease out the subtleties of the type of exclusion being described. The nuances aren’t buried enough to actually need teasing out. But the readers’ expectation and lack of direct experience or real empathy dull their perceptions. This is why it will be important for Puntitas to have outside readers.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Random Thoughts

Puntitas has been wrestling with random writerly thoughts, most of them negative since she’s also at an inauspicious curve in her cycle. She’s already gotten rejections for two batches of poems from her most recent mailings. The letters themselves have been blandly inoffensive, and the quick turn-around has been a pleasant and liberating change. Still, rejections are rejections, objective reminders of the statistical probability that publishing one book, multiple books, is not high.

Another burst of reality along these same lines came when Puntitas was enjoying one of her favorite television shows, knitting needles in hand, of course. Prolific song writer and producer Kara DioGuardi was asked why she didn’t have a career as a performer since she sang well. She said that it just hadn’t worked out. She’d had contracts with recording studios twice, but neither had turned into an actual album. Puntitas’ mind went immediately to her own fledgling writing career (it’s all about Puntitas). If DioGuardi, who possesses singing ability, a successful complementary career, relevant contacts, and inside knowledge about her industry, hasn’t been able to put herself at the mike and on the CD cover, what makes Puntitas think she can go from half-ass writing to the Nobel committee?

Other random thoughts in no particular order:
 In The Friendly Young Ladies by Mary Renault, two of the important characters are writers. One of them, a formula fictionist, thinks about what her characters are doing when she stops writing. X spends the night in a burning shack while the writer sleeps, or Y goes to bed and lies there all weekend long till the writer has time to get back to her manuscript. I think of my characters that way, and those moments of suspended tension help me write more.
 In the afterward to the same book, Renault claims (a little too insistently) that she never censored herself as she wrote. On the subject of explicitly rendered sex, she says that it’s not necessary to describe people making love since the reader will know how a given character makes love if s/he is drawn well. I like this idea—that, without being told outright, the reader knows what a well developed character is likely to do and is capable of doing even in situations that aren’t spelled out on the page. This is not a new idea, to be sure, but put this way, it gives me a more concrete way of thinking about the kinds of details that go into developing the individual.
 In a recent revision session, one of those tinker-before-submitting-rushes, a series of vastly improved poetic lines came to me as did a handful of minor but vital changes. My long poem starts with a short section that is thematically important, but clunky to read. I remember reading and rereading it to smooth out the language, but the line breaks remained pretty hopeless. This time, the fixes were obvious, bluntly so. As I revised, I wondered why they hadn’t been previously. Distance? The powers of mental percolation? Whichever the case, it’s interesting (miraculous).
 In an interview, John le Carre said he didn’t like to spend a lot of time with the literati. He would rather spend the day talking to a wood cutter than a writer because he likes being around the primary sources (i.e., the people he’s likely to write about). I agree with this. I stood under my fig tree three days ago and felt the sparks of a poem, one I’ve tried to write before. The images were clear. So were the details I’ll need. So were the biblical references I spent several hours researching last year. So were surprising new thoughts based on the real experience. I could have written my poem without the real tree, but I needed the tree to write the real poem. This doesn’t mean that a writer must die to write about death or become a drug addict to write about that experience. It means that the writer renders a richer, more significant experience if she or he has had an encounter with death or observed the encounters of others.
 In its mission statement, a literary journal, which is preparing for its inaugural issue, calls for literary work that is lyrical and explores Christian themes without darkness. My initial reaction was typical of someone with a secular education: how limiting. Then when I realized the description applies to some of my work and to some of my favorite reading, I laughed. Joyous does not equate with cliché or platitude. Literary writers and those who aspire to that forget.

Puntitas reads _The Stone Flower Garden_ by D. Smith, _Eve: a Novel of the First Woman_ by E. Elliott, _Constantine: the Man and His Times_, by M. Grant, and _In This House of Brede_ by R. Godden.

Back to the Mail

Puntitas is in the throes of much writerliness and knitting. About the latter, she’s making a long and flowy cape, probably the longest and flowiest of her collection. Currently rows are about 650 stitches long. By the time she finishes, they’ll be at a thousand.

About the former, she has sent out five more batches of poems. She has reread the individual pieces before printing or emailing. In half the cases, she has been satisfied with the poem and sent it out as is. In the rest, she has revised, cutting or reworking an awkward line or word in some instances, moving or adding whole stanzas in others. Rather than frustrating her as it has previously, the process has felt reassuring, proof that she can read her work objectively and that she does generally like it.

When she reread her Miltonian sonnet, the one that responds to “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” she decided it needed much work. The images she had been most concerned about were the most effective; the ones she’s been comfortable with needed the most work. The conceit in the first two stanzas wasn’t clear enough on a literal level, so she changed it to one that had seemed trite when she was drafting, but now efficient (more expected by the reader) and apt (appropriately descriptive). Initially, she thought that going with the familiar meant falling into cliché, but now she thinks that clichés can be revived with original details and that they can shortcut readers to a frame of mind that is the first step to the ending of the poem, which will hopefully not be cliché.

Now the greatest amount of work is needed in the sestet. Puntitas read both Milton’s sonnet and the passage in Matthew that it eludes to many times while writing her response, and for other readers to make sense of Puntitas’ sonnet, they would need to read both many times as well. Without that background, the octet and the sestet don’t make sense together and her comeback to his last line sounds like a digression. All in all, she can keep half the lines in the last section, but will probably need to do a lot of reshaping.

Oh, and another rejection arrived last week, an optimistic form letter from the North American Review. . Puntitas thought she had exhausted her supply of pending rejections from the previous mailing.

Puntitas reads _The Friendly Young Ladies_ by M. Renault.

Real Adventures Versus Sham Ones

Thanks to bad seasonal allergies, which some health insurance companies that Puntitas has applied to consider an incurable disease and reason for charging higher premiums (incidentally, , one of Puntitas’ friends says the same of that dreaded preexisting condition menopause), and insomnia (hello, Insomnia, my old friend), Puntitas has read an entire book by Victoria Alexander. The book didn’t actually grab Puntitas very much from the beginning, but she read it all the way through because she read an article last year citing Amanda Quick and Victoria Alexander as queen’s of what she thinks of as “the sparkling period romance,” the more-or-less Regency era love story with repartee, intrigue, and a handful of scenes involving extraordinary impropriety.

Puntitas likes Amanda Quick for her smart, spunky heroines and for her tension, both sexual and suspenseful, though the plots themselves, especially the mystery component are flawed and underdeveloped, even as subplots: pivotal events just sort of happen without an abundance of preparation or explanation, and one event doesn’t necessarily follow clearly from another.

So Puntitas decided to try Victoria Alexander, and the conclusions she has come to are (1) that there’s no pressing need to read more by the same author right away and (2) that Puntitas’ problem with the adventure genre is the concept of adventure for its own sake.

The book Puntitas just read is about a foreign princess who seeks out her estranged English husband, claiming to need his help to research the life of a self-exiled great aunt. The princess’ story, which fails to convince either her husband or the reader, covers a more sinister plot—restoring her country’s crown jewels to their rightful place despite the efforts of a distant cousin, also hoping to recover them in order to gain the throne, a chain of events as probable, intrinsically compelling, and realistic as the ones on General Hospital, the soap Puntitas follows while getting her nails done.

But she digresses.

Being a person of depth and numerous emotional demons, Alexander’s heroine distrusts, omits, and lies every chance she gets, inadvertently and advertently bringing more adventure and sexual tension upon herself and Hubby, neither of which does much for Puntitas, who has been wondering from Page One why the princess doesn’t just take the more direct route of laying the matter out before her great aunt’s English descendents, who have proven themselves loyal to her father but who figure no where in her scheme until ….

Yes, as luck would have it, the climactic scene takes place in the home of the great aunt’s descendents, where the jewels have been waiting for the heroine simply to come and get ‘em. Well, it would have been that simple if she’d done that in the first place. What happens instead is that all her intrigue has led the rival distant cousin to the jewels, so the princess must confront a pistol toting virago in a private sitting room and choose between duty and love in a ballroom filled with gala clad Nobility.

Of course, the princess’ motives are as layered and complex as her lies are convincing. She wants to restore the jewels to her country both to serve her royal house and people and to gain personal autonomy. She wants to involve her estranged husband (this is a sequel to another book in which the princess escapes her minders, falls in love, gets married, and goes back home a la Roman Holiday, the 1953 film starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn) in order to regain his love, and she repeatedly justifies both courses of action by saying she wants to have an adventure.

This last is the reason Puntitas hasn’t been able to make much headway in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The plot of that work is simple too: take the ring and leave it where it belongs. The characters so charged don’t know where that is, so they must ask around to find out where that place may be or who may know more about how to find it. Puntitas understands all that and is willing to play along as difficulties arise on the way to the next clue or informant, but she loses all sympathy for everyone as characters are asked, “Do you want to take the shortcut, or would you rather go the long way and have adventures?” and reply, “Oh, I want adventures.”

Life offers complications aplenty without needlessly manufacturing drama and adventures that put people and relationships at risk. Puntitas supposes that for those who enjoy adventure for its own sake (and drama too—The Tempest is an utter mystery to Puntitas), there’s probably a high in activity even when the activity is purposeless in general (as in The Tempest) or purposeless to achieving a goal (for Alexander’s princess, lying to her estranged husband doesn’t actually win him back, one reported goal, and not-visiting the great aunt’s descendents prevents her from going to the most likely source of information about the jewels, another reported goal). But for Puntitas, the high lies in knowing what is to be accomplished and in doing what needs to be done, two things that are difficult and adventurous enough on their own.

To be genuinely exciting, adventures need to be meaningful for the characters and for the world they live in. Having characters create them simply to test their metal is like attempting suicide to understand how important life is or doing drugs or booze to get a sense of happiness or relief. The events are almost always meaningless, and the insights they produce are unsatisfying counterfeits of real thought. An adventure story is particularly meaningless if, as in this case, there would be no story (in its present form) had the character taken the most obvious course of action, given her realistic options, in the first place.

Puntitas reads _Her Highness, My Wife_ by V. Alexander, which is less exciting than Puntitas made it sound.

Puntitas and the Ignorance of Others

After a computer calamity, Puntitas has been working on her big, ugly translation project, which she has had to start over because of said event. She has finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, which she dislikes for a number of reasons, the easiest to sum up being that responding to a metaphor (i.e., the eyes are the windows of the soul) is ignorance and masturbation if the response isn’t informed by active inquiry (i.e. interrogation of the assumptions that underlie the metaphor, observation of the literal components of the image, experimentation that leads to deeper reflection on the subject). Puntitas’ appreciation of the novel has suffered further after a consultation with an oral surgeon who thinks it’s amazing that blind people can walk and impossible for them to participate in a routine doctor-patient encounter. (The surgeon kept talking about having someone translate for Puntitas and was bothered when Puntitas asked why that would be necessary as both were speaking the same language. Puntitas almost … skin-of-the-teeth almost … added, “I mean you’re speaking in Stupid, but since I hear that language quite often, I’ve learned to puzzle it out.”) Puntitas believes that this surgeon very probably shares Saramago’s perception of the blind as a helpless collective of shit covered needs–alegories about alienation, blah-blah notwithstanding. No, Puntitas hasn’t gotten over either the awful surgeon or the fact that the only characters in the novel who have ordinary rational thoughts are sighted. But Puntitas leaves all that for another day.

In the realm of Puntitas the emerging writer–another rejection arrived today. It came from the Missouri Review, a typical form letter on a half sheet of paper. Someone wrote a note, thanking me and telling me to try the magazine again some time. I would have taken it for a generic kindness, like Howard Junker’s “onward,” except that the person who wrote it actually used my name. That almost made up for the writer’s not wanting some of my best work.

I’ll need to send more batches of poems out soon.

Puntitas reads _Maridos_ by A. Mastreta.

Books and Plots

I spent a little time on the computer yesterday, prowling the Library of Congress website. I went to the Book Festival page and listened to one of this year’s podcasts, an interview with Peter Robinson, of Inspector Banks fame.

The first point of interest is that our good friend Robinson, whose mysteries I like, started life as a poet. Food for thought, to be sure. That it comes as I’m about to launch my manuscripts into the world is … well … not satisfying.

The next is that one piece of advice he gives to fledgling crime writers (or any other kind of writer) is that the back story doesn’t all need to be at the beginning. That’s one of those things I know, but hearing it came as a revelation, probably because it’s easy to forget. Knowing the back story often helps the writer plan and organize, but dropping it all on the reader’s lap, especially at the beginning, is rarely necessary. My favorite example of this is an Anne Rivers Siddons novel I read years ago. The first fourth was all back story introducing a character. I remember thinking that the point had been made and that, if she didn’t actually start going somewhere, I would stop reading at the end of the next chapter. Fortunately, the next chapter included plot, and when I finished the novel, I reflected that most of the first fourth of the book could have been condensed to an early chapter or two plus one really telling scene that appears near the end of that introductory fourth. I think I also noticed the comment because two of my prose pieces suffer from the curse of too much back story at the beginning.

Another piece of advice is that writers don’t need to know the whole story when they start writing. This I know for a fact. Generally, I know key moments in the story, certain aspects of the character, and the central question (conflict) addressed by the narrative. The rest emerges as I go. I was surprised to find out that the same happens in a crime novel because I assumed the crime had to be well understood for a story to be built around it, but that kind of writing involves the same process of discovery and revision as any other, so … Why not?

On the subject of books and their impact on my writing, I just finished the Navarro book. It’s a sci-fi version of James Patterson: lots of action, suspense, archetypes, and cliché, which combine well to keep the reader going. The book does a couple of things that are unusual and worked well for me.

One is that it holds off on physical descriptions of the characters until two thirds of the way through the novel. When the characters are introduced, they’re described in terms of their personalities, habits, and the things in their work areas. Later they’re all described in terms of height, weight, dress, and hair color when characters from a different plot line review dossiers compiled about them. It was interesting both to compare my conception of them with the writer’s and to meet them yet again through the filter of other characters. I also noticed the writer tends to notice people’s hands, which I think are very telling.

Another is that the writer handles distrust realistically. In one of the plot lines, two characters, who don’t know each other, are put in a situation of having to work together. Over time, they learn that they have reason to mistrust the people they work for. What happens in most genre fiction is one of two outcomes: (1) they reveal their mutual mistrust and snipe at each other, each trying to save his own skin, or (2) they form a precarious bond that turns into collaboration as their mistrust of external forces compels them to rely on each other for survival. More often, both scenarios take place, 1 followed by 2. In this novel, however, characters act as they would outside of fiction: each man harbors his own mistrust, conceals it, and acts for his own best interest. That self-containment creates interesting tension and great plot turns.

Finally, the writer brings two plots together in ways that complicate the action. She develops two plot lines, each with its own protagonist. The expectation is that the point of convergence is a meeting of the two protagonists, but it isn’t. The story lines converge when each protagonist encounters a supporting character from the other plot. In fact, the story teeters on the edge of farce at this juncture as the action hinges on sexual union between a man who thinks of sex as something one does when necessary and a frigid woman. The effect of coupling a protagonist with a supporting character is that, instead of one point of convergence, there are two, complicating the action unpredictably for characters in both story lines.

Over all, the novel was an enjoyable read without much lasting value, but I did learn a lot from it, and I did recognize seeds of something that could have been great.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood.

Closer and Closer

Still on email hiatus, I’m also still working on my books. When I added page length numbers to my list of poems, I realized I’d miscounted somewhere along the way. As of now, I have ninety-four pages of finished work. Yesterday, I still had only ninety-two.

I spent most of my day writing since my appointments either got canceled or no showed. I made my page discovery about halfway through the afternoon and have to admit I got pretty discouraged.

The feeling grew when I received an urgent request for a translation, which has to be done by Tuesday morning. Of course, no one else is available, and of course, it’s really, really important. It’s also long (ten pages), hard to read (faded faxes of poor copies), and full of the sorts of details that need to be checked and double checked as one goes. Why these documents weren’t sent to the translator a week ago is a mystery. The fact that my contract with this particular agency compensates far below the national average and makes no allowances for pay increases when dealing with rush jobs and poor copy is a definite frustration. Yes, I know I could have said no, but official ethics aside, I think that translators and interpreters have a certain obligation to provide their services even when they’re not being paid to do so, like off-duty doctors and nurses. These documents are affidavits needed for court. Their presence or absence can make a material difference in the life of another person, so the mechanism of obligation falls into place for me.

Anyway, when I went down town to pick up the job and actually counted the pages, I had a moment of weepy frustration on the sidewalk especially when I juxtaposed that with the fact that I was still four pages short of finishing my books. I kept myself together by deciding to give myself an extra day on the poetry, putting off the translation for Saturday afternoon. At that point, I had completed one page of the new poem, the one that will include three or four other poems, but I was still no where near finishing and am now exactly where I was then.

I came home to open my iffy folder and think about what could be salvaged. I deleted one poem that is just hopeless, and I pulled up another, which I like but which I know isn’t very good. On rereading it, it was much better than I remembered, so I decided that iffy poem was good after all.

I moved it to the main poetry folder and wondered about my judgment. Had I been too harsh before, or was I too forgiving now? A friend called just then to ask if I wanted to go out. We went to the bookstore to sip coffee, read snippets of books, and find fixes for the economy and the environment in magazines.

At the end of the evening, I returned to the poem and did some tweaking here and there. At first, the poem sounded just fine, save for a couple of awkward sentences and an odd turn of phrase. The more I worked on it, however, the more I found to fix, and the more serious the problems.
Though the need to fix added to the whole day-of-discouragement theme, I did feel vindicated about having judged the poem correctly the day I put it into the iffy folder.

By the time I finished with it last night, I felt fairly satisfied with what I’d done. It’s not a particularly good poem, a series of connected vignettes that build on one another to make a point that is neither original nor surprising, , but I like it because the poem reminds me of my work as a community college tutor, because the events in the poem happened all in one day exactly as described (pretty unusual), and because I’d like to honor the artistic rewards of that work and that student population.

I haven’t read the poem again today. I’m a little afraid I won’t like it. I’m trying to remind myself that books are made up of stronger poems and weaker ones. I’m also debating whether to start on the translation now or this evening, and I’m trying to decide how much time I should devote to that other poem.

Puntitas reads _The River Wife_ by J. Agee.

The Henry James Dichotomy

One of my goals lately has been to become smarter about the theater, so I’ve started attending performances. This year, I’ve been to Jesus Christ Superstar, Rent, Urine Town, Rough Crossing, The Slaughter of the Innocents, and tonight Shiloh Rules. The last two have been at the university. The lineup sounded good, so a friend and I bought season tickets.

Rules was funny and dramatic. A group of Civil War reenactors is forced to examine the ramifications of each of the roles being played out. Naturally, “appearance versus reality” and “the play within a play” were part of the package, and so was the idea that life is to be lived fully, whatever the consequences.

I’m not being clear about this last. Most of the characters (all except one that I recall) talked to some degree or other about their reasons for going to the reenactments or about the experience of taking part. One actor says that, in modern life, she sits at a computer all day, tracking packages for a parcel delivery service. She decided to participate in the reenactment after reading another actor’s blog posts on period cooking, cosmetics, and attire. Among other things, she says she knew the reenactment would be real, more real than the life she had at home.

This theme reminded me of what I think of as the Henry James question, the one that comes up sooner or later in most discussions of his life or writing: “Is it better to live life or observe it?” The people who pose it invariably think that living life is the better option, but as one whose work brings her into regular contact with people who do just that, much to their own detriment, I can’t say that there’s any real benefit. A careful observer finds much in a life that may seem humdrum to others, and a careful observer learns limits from the excesses of those who seize the day—an oversimplification, but not an inaccuracy.

I’ve probably written about this before here. I’m writing again because it’s been on my mind. One of the books I read during my seven weeks of silence was a pornographic novel about a novice who leaves her community and eventually becomes a willing sex slave to a mysterious millionaire and his mistress. The plot is common enough, not just to the porn industry, but to the fantasy lives of many ordinary women as well. Letting go of inhibitions and experiencing something–anything—fully with the senses sound thrilling, but if brought to reality, much of what happens in that novel and in that line of fantasy, is degrading and abusive both physically and psychologically. To observers, people used to living in the mind, the well told story provides stimulus comparable to the “reality” of those who prefer to live in the senses.

As a contented observer, I don’t really understand the appeal of living fully. I don’t get why all experiences must be had or why some key experiences (like sex) confer special authority or wisdom. My characters tend to be observers too. I’m thinking now that some of the distance between them and people who have read my fiction is caused by a fundamental disconnect between observers and doers.

Puntitas reads _The River Wife_ by J. Agee.

Out of the Head and on to the Paper

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.

Having a Story Read

I had a story workshopped today, and the experience was positive. The piece (about a translator who goes blind) is one I like, but I haven’t felt certain about it. it doesn’t follow a tidy chronological order, and it’s approach to meaning is Ondaatjean, gaps that suggest but not explain, blah, blah.

Yes, the Ondaatje connection didn’t come to me till now, and it’s a good thing I didn’t start reading him until recently. My manuscript would have been more chaotic if I had. But I digress.

Ten years ago, when I submitted the story to workshop, I thought the unusual content was what made it hard for my classmates to talk about, but lucky for me, the person who commented on it this afternoon was meticulous about telling me where she had trouble and why.

In typical writer style, I had to work to keep my ego under control. My impulse, at the beginning of the session, was to dismiss her as needling and unimaginative, but I followed the same procedure I used in grad school: I wrote down each comment without saying a word. As we went through the piece, I started noticing a pattern in her remarks, cobbling a sense of how she read the story, how certain elements came across, what techniques I wasn’t handling well, and where the suggestive gaps got in the reader’s way.

From her observations, I realized I gave my reader all of the elements needed to get her to my point, but I didn’t give her enough of a map for traveling there, and I realized (what I secretly knew but was unwilling to admit) that I’m not completely clear about where the story is trying to end up. It’s about translation, changing from one form to another, but in not myself understanding its value for the protagonist, I’ve not only made the story obscure but also perpetuated a motif I’d hoped to explode.

That my reader was so astute is fortunate. Mostly, she did what Peter Elbow calls, “movies in the reader’s mind,” telling me what she thought, felt, or wondered about as she read the piece. She was detailed enough to give me a very specific notion of where (at what points) the confusion lay, and her verbal comments were long enough to help me understand her reading, but not long enough to overwhelm or smother.

I’m supposed to read one of her pieces next. I hope I’m as helpful to her as she was to me.

Puntitas reads _El penacho de Moctezuma_ by Mario Moya Palencia.