Rethinking the Tables of Contents

Puntitas’ single writerly act of the day has been to move two poems in one of the books to reflect the change she made to the chapbook. As she read over one of the tables of contents to make sure it had updated properly, she realized that some sections make more sense than others, so one possible mission this evening is to rearrange the poems in the books.

She may put it off, however, because she’d like to add at least two new pages to each book. She’s got a couple of drafts, but she isn’t sure whether/where they’d really fit in, and she’s had one idea (complete with closing) that has been eager to get out on the page, but she hasn’t settled on the tone or the beginning. She also has a long poem that is more finished than not, which would really pad out the pages, but she isn’t sure that it will be ready enough by next week, which is when she wants to send manuscripts out. Whatever she does, Puntitas needs to hurry up and decide.

Oh, yes, there was one other writerly event. Puntitas noticed that one poem was one page and two lines long. She tinkered with the line spacing around the epigram, and now that poem and the book it’s in are both one page shorter, Making each collection fifty pages in length.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. tudge and _What Was Lost_ by C. O’Flynn.

Puntitas Has a Writerly Moment

Puntitas engaged in some writerliness today without planning to. She thinks the secret is that she’s starting to obsess about her big interpreter exam, and being writerly is a lovely and justifiable way of avoiding test preparation so as to undermine herself as usual. Really is a pity that Puntitas isn’t better able to turn self-awareness into self-improvement.

Anyway, she was reading a list of calls for submissions to get a general idea about how to organize herself for her next mailing extravaganza. One of the calls for short travel narratives prompted Puntitas to submit four poems that fit most of the criteria, but since she’s well aware (there’s that word again) that long poems and short narratives don’t really overlap for most people, she decided to submit there and then, before common sense killed her delusion.

So Puntitas submitted a batch of poems to a publication that is looking for narratives. She also made a few minor, but necessary revisions to two of the poems in the batch. That meant she had to copy the revised parts of the poems to the official master copy of each and to the book-length manuscripts.

While she was in the manuscript files, she got rid of the dedication pages, which no perspective publisher seems to want to read, added her latest publication to the acknowledgements page of one ms, updated both tables of contents, which took way longer than she expected, and corrected one or two formatting glitches that she noticed.

The other writerly thing she did was compare the recent publication to its unpublished revision. She kept the ending of the published version because it was emotionally stronger than the revision. But she kept the rest of the revision because it made more literal sense and because all of the words in it pointed to the ending, where in the original some words just sort of sounded clever. The problem was that the middle section didn’t point to anything remotely connected to the original ending, so Puntitas had to rework it and tinker with a few details in the final section. She is happy with the poem as it stands now, and since it is officially in print, she will no longer mess with it.

Reading the poems of the batch she submitted today made her feel happy with her work, even though she did have some revising to do. She’s decided she’ll read her book-length manuscripts cover to cover to catch any additional problems. She thinks she’d like to add a few more poems to each (maybe five pages per book), so she’s thinking of drafts and ideas that have been floating around since she officially finished them.

And yes, Puntitas has now accepted that she’s need to make new photocopies of the books, even though she has lots and lots of hard copies left, because lots and lots of poems have undergone minor changes since the big trip to Kinko’s. The lesson learned is that the next time, she will ask for fifteen to twenty copies, not fifty.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Perez-Revertte.

Less Is More

On the recommendations of friends, I’ve been reading more formula fiction than usual. The realization I think I’m coming to is that less is definitely more as far as plot twists and social issues go. The last two books I’ve read serve nicely as case in point.

Both are mystery series, revolving around unconventional women. The Spencer-Fleming (written currently) is about a female Episcopal priest who serves in a small Midwestern town, has a relationship with the police chief, and manages to get herself mixed up in high profile crimes. The Forrest (written 20 years ago) is about a lesbian police officer who works homicide in the city of Los Angeles and keeps her sexual orientation to herself (more don’t-ask-don’t-tell than actually closeted).

The latter is about half the length of the former. It’s plotline is relatively simple, focusing on one crime, dispensing with secundary crimes and red herrings relatively quickly, and organizing the personal subplot around a clear central idea, how one gets over a past relationship. For me, this simplicity makes both the story and the characters more compelling and the plot twists and red herrings more surprising and effective.

In the former, so much is happening that I find myself spending as much energy trying to figure out how characters and subplots go together (not because the writing isn’t clear) as I do on following the action, and I notice myself thinking, “How clever” and “of course,” rather than “Oh, wow” or “Oh, no.” I also find myself making evaluative comments about how the social issues are dealt with: illegal aliens, age differences in romantic relationships, old guard vs. new guard, intercultural/interfaith relationships, public vs. private. While the story was well crafted, more of the characters were flat, relying on the series, not the individual story, to give them depth.

Now that I’m starting to think more about writing and revising prose, I realize that I felt insecure about keeping plotlines simple, but lately, I’ve been thinking I shouldn’t worry.

Puntitas reads _The Diary of a Nobody_ by G. and W. Grossmith, _I Shall Not Want_ by J. Spencer-Fleming, and _Murder at the Nightwood Bar_ by K. V. Forrest.

Puntitas Has an Interlude with the Muse

A friend and I went to hear Naomi Shihab Nye read her work tonight. She was great. Her poetry is accessible, vivid, and compelling, using ordinary things to talk about profound truths.

I came home feeling poetical and wishing I could write something as simple and meaningful as her work. Then I sat down at my computer to check my email, startled by a lovely message from a yarn craft list about knitting hexagons and all the wondrous possibilities in such a simple form. I experienced that writerly burst of energy that turns to restlessness or … crime (it’s a real possibility) … if it isn’t channeled into some aspect of a manuscript. I typed out a rough draft of a poem (my first in months) about knitting (a subject I’ve wanted to take on for the longest time). I’m so excited that I would spend the next couple of weeks revising if I didn’t have my translation due.

I’ve written as much as I can now to get the general structure of the poem down and to create toe holes for the expositional details that give the knitting meaning beyond the literal. The actual knitting part needs little revision. Most of those details are concrete and clear. But the other parts (the thing I’m comparing to knitting) need lots of work. I plan to do some knitting to refine some of the images and details that connect the knitting and nonknitting elements of the piece, but the bulk of the revision involves developing the thing for which knitting hexagons is a conceit and whithout which I’d just have a set of rambling instructions.

I really enjoy the discussion list that gave me the idea for the poem. We talk yarn and drift off into other realms. When I told them about my book rejection, one person commiserated with me by saying something like, “That’s awful. It’s like being told you have an ugly child.” that felt so exactly right that it made me laugh and went a long way toward cheering me up.

Puntitas reads _the Abduction_ by M. Gimenes.

The Muse Is a Flirt

Puntitas has been visited by the muse twice this week. The first time was when she read someone else’s blog. The post begged to be recast into a poem, so Puntitas requested permission from the blogger, and having gotten it, has been Googling her stubby little fingers to the bone to learn more about a couple of the concepts. She is pondering the possibility of other types of research because she thinks the poem would benefit from it, but thus far, she has limited her creative efforts to copying the triggering post, trimming most of the prose elements, asking the blogger about an important detail, and identifying the kind of information she wants to know more about. She had considered one direction for the poem, the same point and direction taken by the blogger, but as she has been reading, she feels her mind moving somewhere else, though she will need time to figure out where that is.

The second visitation came last night. Puntitas was editing a very short text for a friend, when she had one of those mental hiccups that leads to confusion about uncomplicated things, like which preposition to use after the word connect. Puntitas’ own spasm concerned which Spanish verb to associate with the making of compost, so she Googled around for blogs and videos that might help.

Puntitas learned lots of fascinating things about gardening, so many and so fascinating that she didn’t get back to the blurb for at least an hour. The thing that stayed with her most was this:

People spend lots of money on expensive activating agents to make their compost piles start composting, but there is no need as human urine is an effective activator.

This is a quote, and the woman who imparted it was muy de la high, pausing ever so slightly before and after “human urine,” as one would expect from a lady who knows herself to possess the highest sensibilities but knows, nonetheless, when she must needs take her skillet by the handle.

Well, need I say it?

Puntitas had a sudden and nearly uncontrollable urge to find a compost pile and … well … activate it. The thought of gathering the leaves and paper into a heap or barrel, squatting over it, urinating into it, and revisiting the garden over the days and months to spread the compost and eventually to eat the produce it fed had Puntitas-poem written all over it. Puntitas got as far as going through her list of friends and accomplices to identify one or two she be willing to piss on a pile with, but she couldn’t actually name one she could really squat with. Plus she started thinking about the mechanics of keeping her jeans dry while crouching, which led to a review of all Puntitas’ skirts and other minutiae.

Of course, Puntitas will not start this poem or continue to work on the other any time soon since she is certain that all this poetic activity (or activation) has been prompted by her realization that the big translation she is also working on has progressed slowly this week, so Puntitas will probably not post much over the next two weeks, by which time the muse will have chosen to visit someone else.

Puntitas reads _La sombra del templario_ by N. Masot.

Building Two Tables of Contents 2

This blog is a good thing. Without it, Puntitas would be mired in her perpetual sluggishness. Still on email hiatus, I substituted my hours of email with hours of web surfing. Bad, bad, bad. The only reason I stopped is that I remembered I was supposed to come back today to talk about Phase II of the table of contents. Who knew this would be so involved?

My first appointment of the day got cancelled, so I spent part of my morning with my note cards. I laid them out on the bed again, first one stack, then the other, and sorted through the individual sections to put the poems in an artistic order.

When I was in the M. F. A. program, this step was so overwhelming and awful (mostly because I had no awareness of my poetic voice) that I wound up organizing the pieces by the speakers approximate age. I thought about that yesterday when I was dividing the titles into sections and the sections into books, and stopped before going further because I was afraid of hitting that same brick wall. That same anxiety prompted a two-hour GoldWave session this morning and all the web surfing I did tonight.

But my morning session with the cards went really well. One book organized itself, the order of the poems suggesting itself almost as soon as I started flipping through the cards for each section, and the order of the sections fell into place pretty organically too. I was satisfied and only had a tiny bit of panic when I noticed I was two pages short. I pulled a three-page poem out of the other stack, and when I realized I now had a page to spare, I thought about removing a one-page tribute to Emily Dickenson that isn’t very good. I’m still undecided, but the present inclination is to cut.

The second book was a little harder, the poems themselves seeming more disconnected than in the first. The project got close to stalling because the first stack of cards I picked up was the most disconnected of all. I put it aside after a few minutes, and picked up an easy stack. That got things moving again, a couple of poems migrating to different sections and three of the sections settling into place. The fourth section was still disconnected. I returned to the other sections to try adding or swapping out other poems. Then suddenly I came across one that talks about balance, a concept that not only unifies that section, but the rest as well.

I was so excited that I hurried over to my office to enter the list into my computer. I got the first book done and got halfway through the second when it was time to go to work. I just finished typing up the second table of contents, making one or two more changes.

Tomorrow’s mission is either to compile the actual books or to come up with titles for the sections.
The book titles are clear to me, but the sections … I’m not sure. I think one book will be easier because the sections titles will probably be poem titles, but the other book will need to help the reader make sense of the sections.

Puntitas reads _Blood Ties Book Three: Ashes to Ashes_ by J. Armintrout.

Retolling the Bell

I’m reading Hemingway after ten or fifteen years of being away, and it’s like reading a writer who is new to me.

I read a lot of his short stories in my teens and early twenties and a couple of his novels in my mid twenties. I remember enjoying his work very much, acknowledging that I was reading a master, but what I remember of his style is that it was austere and of his content is that it was too masculine for me to fully understand. For those reasons, I’ve ignored For Whom the Bell Tolls for two or three years. Now I’m reading it, and I can’t put it down.

The first thing that struck me is that the writing is lush and lyrical. It would have been called poetic if people had had today’s sensitivity about what a poem is. Parts, especially the stories characters tell, cry out for line breaks, and I hear elements of my own writing in so many places.

The next surprise is the stark contemporariness of the story. The protagonist is an American dynamiter sent by the Communists to a guerrilla band in the mountains. It’s set in Spain in the 1930’s, but may as well be set in Iraq or Afghanistan at the turn of the twenty-first century. The environment; the psychology of tension, fear, loyalty to causes, and disloyalty to the past; the bad language; the sex; the fierceness and tenuousness of the link between the native and the outsider—all of these are probably as true of current military incursions as of that one.

The final and most amazing discovery about reading the novel is that I don’t feel the same disconnect from Hemingway’s characters I once did. He does write about what it is to be a man (or a woman) and what a man (or a woman) wants, but I don’t feel cut off from the protagonist because mostly he’s struggling with the problem of how to continue to be who he has been taught to be while being something different. The hunter and the soldier are two well respected models of manhood, but both hide the aberration of a taker of life; likewise, the woman is a comforter and supporter, but during war, her comfort and support lead to the same aberration of life taking. It’s a problem of pushing a virtue to its extreme only to discover that it is really a weakness or an evil.

I don’t know how to explain it except in how it relates to myself. As someone educated in the late twentieth century, I prize objectivity and impartiality. One who commands both has a clear head to think with. Problems can be worked through and good decisions can be made. In my work as a community interpreter, a small amount of empathy is necessary toward rendering the subtext of what is being said, but objectivity and impartiality are essential toward precision and fairness. The problem is that a high level of objectivity and impartiality also makes the interpreter unresponsive and largely indifferent to the pain of so many of the people s/he works with, an it is uncomfortable to realize that one can routinely suppress one’s feelings to a degree that is considered aberrant and inhuman, so uncomfortable that Puntitas could not use the word I in that statement.

On a less serious note, the hammer-and-nails part of my brain has been fascinated by Hemingway’s handling of profanity, Spanish, and sex.

I’ve heard myself say things like, “Obscenity thyself,” “Muck you,” “Unprintable son of an unprintable whore,” “Fornicator,” and perhaps my favorite “What a chicken-crut hormonal cycle” (yes, Puntitas is premenstrual). Interesting that very strong words like “joder,” “cabrón,” and “carajo” are included either in full or as recognizable shadows. I guess too few Spanish speakers worked at American publishing houses of the day to realize they were unprintable.

I find myself reading the transliterations of Spanish as if they were Spanish. “He has suffered much” becomes “He’s had lots of painful experiences” or “he carries around a lot of pain,” and “milk” becomes “cum.” Often I find myself disagreeing with Hemingway’s translations of things, but I’m not sure whether the discrepancies are due to time and dialect or his misunderstanding of the language. One example is in what he renders as “why not?” At one point he puts it beside “Como no,” which I would render as “of course” or “sure.” There’s a difference. The commitment of a “why not?” is half hearted while a “sure” is firm.

The sex goes farther than I expected for a book of the era, even given that it was written during one of the more liberal periods of the early twentieth century. The sex scenes contain a lot about what people are thinking and feeling while they’re coupling, but they include a few concrete details that leave no doubt and a few good mental Polaroids about what is going on.

All of this is very instructive.

Puntitas reads _Bonk_ by M. Roach, _Sailing from Byzantium_ by C. Wells, and _For Whom the Bell Tolls_ by E. Hemingway.

Counting Down

After much wasteful procrastination, Puntitas has had a productive weekend. She wrote a new poem last night, one of those poems that come of themselves with a little prodding, the kind that can stand and walk and speak in telegraphic sentences when they’re born so they can go into the mail with minimal nurturing at home, and today she has gotten over the last of the hideous hurdles in the damn poem she’s been working on forever—well, off and on since Easter more or less.

Both poems have been interesting experiences. The one I wrote last night was inspired by the Independence Day celebration, which has always struck me as far more Dionysian in nature than Halloween or even Carnival. I’ve never quite been able to explain why that is, but eight years ago, when the good home schooling Mennonite neighbors argued over whether to let their screaming five-year-old go ahead and light a Fountain (Mom was for allowing her in order to teach a lesson about obedience and parental judgment while Dad objected on the grounds that the resulting emergency room trip would ruin the party and spoil all the food), I came close to putting it into words. This year, with all the forest fires and talk of global warming, I found the perfect context. I didn’t write it out there and then because my mother and I were having such a nice time laughing at the neighbor’s silliness and munching on big pieces of fresh fruit, that getting up for the note taker only to tune her out seemed crass. Later, of course, the moment was gone, and I didn’t know if I could recreate the piece.

Sunday night, when I did write it out, the poem was different from what I had imagined. While I remembered the general movement of the piece, I didn’t remember all of the elements that got me from the opening image to the climactic ending. I also didn’t know how to prepare for the final image and overall conceit without giving it away or making the poem feel like a riddle. What I did instead was to suggest the conceit in two places and organize the details to do the rest of the work. I won’t know whether I pulled it off until I read the thing relatively fresh.

One pleasant surprise was the closing image. I couldn’t use the one I had planned and was floundering around for a direction to take the poem when I read what I had and realized it was already somewhere. I did a little tweaking to make the ending less abrupt and went back to work on making the conceit stand out enough. Then I was done.

I hope it’s as complete as I think it is the next time I work on it. There is one image I really like, but I’m nervous about it not quite blending in with the rest of the poem. I can tie it into the general conceit, but that may be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll just have to wait to decide.

The other poem has been a struggle. I’ve stuck with it because I really like its potential. I like the idea, the images, and the general narrative arc. Done right, it can turn out to be an excellent piece, but maintaining a balance between exposition and metaphor, resisting bathos, keeping two ideas separate while using one as a conceit for the other—all have been extremely difficult for me. On top of all of that, I’m not sure that I have the right life experience to write it. It’s about marriage, and I’ve based it on conversations with and observations of some of my married friends, but having never been married or involved with anyone for a long period of time, I’m nervous that I may not be true to the speaker’s feelings.

During our last tussle, I did some rearranging. That made for a stronger draft, but it also created a massive gap that called for the speaker’s history and a link to both the present situation and the metaphor for her marriage. Since then, I’ve been researching the linking details and thinking about how to integrate them into the details of her history.

Today’s mission was to fill in that gap even if the work was far from polished. The gap has definitely been filled. Again, it’s a matter of waiting a few days to read the poem fresh and have a more objective sense of how to direct my revisions. At this point, I’m thinking it would be helpful to have someone read and comment on it. I’ve got one or possibly two people in mind, and depending on the next round of revision, I may ask them.

I think the next time I work on my book, I want to read the really long poem. The last time I read it, I thought it was just about done. The changes I made involved cutting out excess in the final section. I was only concerned about an important transitional point, where too much snipping could affect pacing.

Puntitas reads _Quiller Salamander_ by A. Hall and _The Zookeeper’s Wife_ by D. Ackerman.

This Ending or That

I’ve done very little writing since last post. The main reason is that I’ve had an unusually busy work week. Other reasons are that I’ve been dealing with an upper respiratory thing and that the weather is warming up to slightly beyond comfortable. We do have air conditioning (and it is definitely a beautiful thing), but deciding to finally accept that it is hot and that the A. C. must be switched on (for the next four months) is a psychological process that involves several days.

I was good most of the week, revising one of the new poems even when I wasn’t in the mood. The one I worked on is long, going on eight pages. At first, I was having trouble just revising because I wasn’t able to keep the whole thing in my head in the right way. I’d start reading from the beginning, stop to change something, continue reading, stop to change something else, stop a third time, change some more, go back to the beginning to get a sense of how the revisions were affecting the whole, change something different, etc., without ever getting very far into the poem. Finally, I realized I could focus on one section at a time. That went much better. I could keep a sense of the entire part in my head, work on it, and not move on until I was satisfied.

The third section has been the hardest to revise. Harkening to a very fine cliché, the pieces are all there—events, chronology, major details, connections—but (abandoning my metaphor altogether) the little things–language, transitions, and minor details–are often not helping. The last time I worked on the poem was Tuesday, and by then I felt that the section was finally “right.” I have, naturally, to read it again cold to make sure.

The interesting thing is that I found myself torn between two endings. I wrote the partial draft a year or two ago. When I came back to it, I was set on the original ending, but after I started working on it, I thought it should end in another way. The first was more dramatic and more fitting with the poem. The second is more consistent with my thoughts and feelings about the situation now. I wrestled with the problem for a while: to write the poem I had conceived then or the one I had conceived now. Could I really replicate a state of mind I was no longer in? Would I have even begun the poem with the feelings I have at this time?

Oddly enough, my first flip decision turned out to be the one that felt right. I heard my self say, “Why, Puntitas, let’s have two endings, one for Part 3, which I have written, and one for Part 4, which you will write.” I liked that answer because it met my smart-ass quota for the day and because an additional section meant more pages in the book, so I began. As soon as I did, I understood that the approach would give me not only the satisfaction of using both endings but also the opportunity to write about ambivalence and about the mystery revealed when time or life does its work. I’m hoping this fourth part is short, half a page or so, but I don’t know.

Puntitas reads _The Twentieth Wife_ by I. Sundaresan.

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.