In the Details

When is a piece of writing ever done? That’s the question I struggle with most. I think things are done. Then I read them again months or years later, and I realize they’re not. That more than anything keeps me from feeling like an accomplished writer.

Real writers know. Real writers read their work years later, say, “I would write that better now,” but feel satisfied that the poem or story was written well. I write, and when I read the piece again from a stranger’s distance, I think, “This is the work of an amateur.”

Most often, the devil for me is in the details. Without much trouble, I catch gaps in the logic or the plot, and I catch inconsistencies in images or characters,. Where I’m likely to find problems is in the nuance suggested by all the little details: the gesture a character makes at a key point in the dialog, the shape or size of an object on a table, the length and rhythm of a paragraph or line. Sometimes they contradict me. Sometimes they distract. Sometimes they do nothing. Sometimes they do too much. The frustration is that, when they’re working, I know God is in the details.

Last Sunday, I reread my two sonnets and another one of the poems I’ve been working on relatively recently. Over all, I like the sonnets. They’re clear, detailed, and easy to read. The endings, which had been my great concern, hit the right notes in both what they say and how they leave the reader feeling. On the Shakespearean sonnet, I unchanged most of what I’d changed the last time I worked on it. That realization was what ultimately decided me to call the poem finished.

When I read the Miltonian sonnet, I discovered it read much better than I expected. I spent most of my energy changing details in the octave to develop the image in the title. The bony whore seems more out of place than ever, but she was too helpful in the writing and is too precise about the nature of the wait for me to let go of her yet, so I may send the poem out a few times before I can get up the nerve to replace her with some other story.

The third poem is one I’ve never mentioned here. I like it for lots of different reasons. It was well received in workshop. It’s got a solid build. It’s a tribute to the power of art. It made me feel close to the friend who inspired it. I’ve sent it out a few times, but it hasn’t been picked up. Each time I read it, I notice some of the details “aren’t there yet,” a wonderful expression I heard to describe a lack of readiness to understand or articulate, and though more of the details are contributing to the wholeness of the poem now, many of them still are not. How long will I have to wait? How long?

Starting with the Image

I’ve had very little inspiration where writing is concerned. Too many other things are cluttering my head this week, most of them work related, something I’ll probably write about sooner or later. I did have one tiny tremor of an idea one morning, one of those thoughts that flits into the consciousness while I lay in bed waiting for the alarm clock to ring. Three images—a child’s ball suspended in the sky at sundown, the optical illusion of a foot next to a cloud, a woman standing at the foot of some stairs with her spine arched completely back, her hands on the lower steps—came to me, starting with the last and ending with the second. There was another image, a reaching or scooping hand. At first, I thought it was random. Then it helped me gather the other images together, developing the cloud image into a playground swing, the bar overhead and the chains that attach the seat.

Before the fingers enclosed the images into a beginning, the memories just floated around in my head, shuffling like snapshots into different orders, revealing more details, fading, growing again. Each reminded me of having wanted to center a poem around it, but until the hand caught each up and held it against its palm, nothing united them, gave them meaning.

In bed, out of nowhere, I started to feel the peculiar lightness and energy of a piece of writing clamoring to make it to the hard drive, that flaring of experience. If I teach a poetry class, I will probably tell my students that images are pictures or sensory experiences evoked or elaborated to explain what something means for the speaker or why it is important. But images are more mysterious. They’re the nut of a poem, the originating impulse, the supporting detail. They tell narratives in layers, In my case, each image told the same story, but it had something different to say about that story.

As I lay there, the images became more defined. The hand came clearly and fully into focus, and I understood immediately that it was the story all the other images were telling. Part of me knew that I’d need to hang on tight to whatever was developing because I’d have to get up in five minutes to get ready for an early appointment. Part of me wanted to tell the appointment to screw itself so I could let the images play out.

What made the images a moment, rather than the draft of a poem, was that the vast descending hand suddenly seemed cliché, and the narrative, one that I’ve written about before. I know that, as with the Shakespearean sonnet, some narratives are worth telling more than once, but all at once, this one didn’t seem worth retelling at all.

That realization turned all the airiness into flat, dense disappointment. I thought about the seeds of two other poems I’ve been carrying around. They’re images and general thoughts, but something—the right detail, perhaps?—is missing. I wish I knew what would make them bloom. Maybe I can use the ball, the swing, and the arching woman to figure it out.

When I consider How My Light Is Spent (Some more)

Ah, the post partal effluvia has receded. I read my Miltonian sonnet last night, and it has ceased to be the quintessential Miltonian sonnet, the one he would have written if his sensibilities were mine.

Fortunately, I still like it. I revised, of course, more editing than real revision, and I haven’t changed my mind about sending it out soon.

Most of the changes involved adding more periods. The poem was basically two long sentences, and while grammatical and perfectly clear, they made the whole thing overly dense. I broke it up, not easy when meter and rhyme need to be taken into account. The effect is to make the tone more anxious, angrier. That wasn’t quite what I was going for, but I think it works, so I’ll probably leave it alone.

The most significant changes, the ones that were real revisions, happened in the last line. It sounded very cryptic to me sans post partal effluvia, so I spent over an hour writing and rewriting it. Now its sense is clearer, but I’m not sure that it will have any meaning to the general reader.

What does that mean?

I made the mistake of Googling the sonnet. The blog entries I read discuss it in very conventional terms: the speaker wonders if he will be judged by God for not exercising his gifts to the fullest, then realizes (1) that God, the giver of all gifts, doesn’t need humans to do His work for Him and (2) that standing and waiting is work enough. Of course, the bloggers emphasize the tragedy of blindness, which is what prompts the speaker’s musings in the first place.

For the general reader, a sighted reader, that tragedy is one of the assumptions of the poem. For the speaker, blindness is a fact, and it’s a hardship, but its tragedy is that it may be a possible obstacle to salvation. My own reading of the situation, not the poem, is that what impedes the speaker from exercising his gifts is not his blindness, but the small mindedness of others, who, in not recognizing that he can be an instrument of God as well as they, fail to exercise the gift/responsibility of loving their neighbors as themselves. Saying all of this in a few short lines is hard. It’s even harder when the reader is unwilling to rethink the nature of the tragedy and his or her roll in it.

Another thing I noticed about my response to Milton’s sonnet is that one of the images (the bony whore) that was key during the writing seems to be unimportant now. It isn’t altogether irrelevant. It suggests by analogy. But what I’ll have to decide is whether that analogy or another will work best.

I should reread other poems now that I’m sitting in the arid glare of reality.

Catching a Spark

Avoidance seems to work for me. Last night, I thought the weekend would be about Ursula and her knitting, but today that seemed too hard to think through, so I pulled up a poem that was almost done last time we met.

Again, who picked out the brilliance to leave all the crap?

I wrote it the semester I took a class on form. The only real rule on this one is seven syllables to the line. As with the sonnet, I noticed a lot of flab (irrelevant detail, needless repetition, pacing issues). I was going for a feeling of frantic chaos that encircles a core of overwhelming isolation.

Emotionally, the poem is successful, but on a literal level the action is hard to follow. The language is vague; the images develop the mood, not the actual situation; and the lack of substance weakens the impact of the close.

The second I stopped reading, I started to revise. First it was fairly superficial stuff, cutting flabby words to fuse lines, but quickly I discovered I was adding detail, filling out the story of the poem, giving it the life of setting and of character motivation. The biggest thing is that I rediscovered it’s about the significance of losing a poem that wrote itself. I remember starting with that idea, but somewhere along the way, I lost it.

The changes go into the major overhaul category: whole stanzas will disappear to be replaced by others, and new characters and a new sense of what is missing will be added.

What does work well in the version of the poem as it stands is the use of nonflab related repetition. A few of the images and lines come up two or three times, evoking some of the circular unease of a villanelle. I’ll try to keep that aspect of the poem. I’m excited.

Getting to Know the Book

The working title is Fat Girl. Yeah, I know, it’s awful and politically incorrect. At the time I started, I needed a title that would help me keep track of the book’s controlling idea. When I was a student taking first- and third-year comp, I wrote papers called “Abortion” and “Sex Education: Why It’s So Important” for the same reason. Now that I read and write a lot more than I did then (and now that I’ve read ten years worth of student essays as stunning [and that really is the word] as my own), I know that the title and the controlling idea are two separate entities and that getting the former to express the latter takes a great deal of thought and experience. I also know that titles can be changed, so I’ll leave mine alone for now and deal with it later.

The plot is simple:

Amanda, the plain and plump, and Hernan have grown up together. She’s madly in love with him, but she knows he’s got a crush on her beautiful but disdainful sister Gabriela.

Those really are the only characters in the novel. A few other people (their parents, Gabriela’s boyfriend, some of the people who work with them) wander through the text from time to time, but they’re not well developed, serving as window dressing, as one of my professors would say.

The setting is a spacious house in an upscale neighborhood and an equally upscale boutique. Having just skimmed the first chapter, I think I’ll tone the upscale down. Most likely, I was going through my Danielle-Steel-diamond-cage phase.

The point of view is first person singular: Amanda. I remember that at one time it was third person, but I think I may have gone through the text and changed that twice.

The first paragraph is this. I’m not sure that I like it:

I stood on the landing above the great room surrounded by potted plants and cooking smells, looking myself over in the mirror beside the fanlight, and wondering if the dress I’d tried on in Hernan’s shop would really help. Hernan had said it would, and they always did. But scanning the homely face and the plump body in the oversized T-shirt with baggy jeans, I reminded myself that Illusions could only do so much.

The third paragraph may be a better start:

I shook my hips in the landing mirror, remembering the feel of the dress: the gauzy fabric, the dark background, the discrete white bouquet print. It had taken at least twenty pounds off me, and if I kept my back straight and my chin up, it actually gave me breasts, a waist, and hips.

Or deciding now may be premature.