Poetic Stress

Puntitas had a small but important revelation concerning the almond poem and her poetry in general. While she’s liked the idea and the overall shape of the piece, she’s had trouble finishing it. The problem hasn’t been trouble moving from Point A to Point B or trouble resolving a technical issue. It’s been lack of motivation, which is odd since Puntitas is generally interested in writing this poem.

She’s noticed that this lack of enthusiasm is sometimes overcome by a little formal poetry, either reading or writing it, so she started writing another sonnet, and she spent some time on the web Googling around for other forms and for articles on forms.

Two stayed with her, and now that she wants to cite them properly, she can’t find them. Ah, well …. One was an interview, and the other was the forward for an anthology of formal poems. Both talked a lot about sound.

The first said that a poem is different from prose in that the former seeks to create an emotional effect, which is reinforced by the sound of the language, sibilants for soft soothing poems and plosives for capturing terse, harder pieces. He used many of the terms high school English teachers quiz their students on: assonance, alliteration, caesura.

The other said that the problem with free verse is that much of it is actually prose with arbitrary line breaks, prose and poetry being distinguished thus: prose is stressed roughly every ten syllables while poetry is stressed roughly every four. He talked about other things as well, most especially the line break and the need for concreteness not only in the imagery but also in the experience or moment described. But he returned to the sound of the piece, echoing the first writer’s thoughts about the connection between the emotional impact and the aural experience.

Puntitas’ first revelation was that her almond poem was stressed like prose. When she went back into the text to stress it more poeticly, she discovered that she was more motivated about working on it because the piece sounded like a poem again, and she realized that she is very aware of the way her work sounds. This is in part because of her writerly esthetic, having grown up on formal poetry, lived around songs, and listened to, officially studied, and worked around the rhythms of speech, but it is also due to the way Puntitas writes, typing to the echo of a robotic synthetic voice and considering a piece to be finished when she stops being aware of that voice. When a draft isn’t working or when it contains lots of research, she gets stuck, and she often finds that what produces her stuckedness is a prosaic rhythm, which she either modifies to something more poetic or emphasizes for something prosy.

Her second revelation was that she isn’t clear about how important sound should be in her own work. Some of her poems are rich in sound, working hard to reinforce the content aurally. Others strive for a starker soundscape, letting the content carry the burden of impact. Puntitas own impulses are toward valuing sound, but she wonders whether that isn’t an old-fashion tendency, since much of the poetry she reads has a prosier feel.

Puntitas reads _The Elegance of the Hedgehog_ by M. Barbery, _Dirty_ by M. Hart, _Hell House_ by R. Matheson, _siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Perez, and _The Link_ By C. Tudge. She has decided to finish books she’s started. Three or four are left on the metaphorical stack.

Dusting Off After a Stumble

A rejection sure can take the wind out of the old sails. Puntitas was feeling very writerly and accomplished all week. She revised, pondered, experimented. She had a positive workshop with a friend, who really liked her narrative essay and gave her helpful suggestions. She had an idea for a new poem. Then she received yesterday’s rejection, which was especially disappointing because she thought it was the most likely of the journals to take her work.

Today Puntitas caught up on email, had lunch with a friend, floated around the house doing very little of consequence, spoke to two other friends on the phone, finished the fudge in the kitchen. She thought about working on the essay, thought about working on her tables of contents, thought about revising her resume for a couple of possible jobs. But she didn’t do any of those things, and she didn’t turn off her computer because the week’s activity had gotten her into the habit of writing, and not writing was making her restless.

So Puntitas decided she’d do a little writing anyway–start that poem that had been rolling around in her head, the one with the ending, but no beginning or sense of voice. She wrote a few short lines that didn’t grab her, a vague description that didn’t do much even on the literal level. She thought about them to figure out what to do next, And she realized that the items she described were nested, like Russian dolls. That was the first metaphor she came up with—Russian nesting dolls, which is physical enough and universally understood, but not really part of Puntitas’ experience, more a literary cliche. She asked herself what other mundane thing nested or stacked naturally, and she thought about the almond tree she grew up with, the nut inside a woody shell inside a suede-like hull. She added that to her draft, only she didn’t know the name of the hull, So she went to Wikipedia to read about almonds.

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing.

Puntitas learned lots of interesting things about almonds. They’re native to the Middle East and Mediterranean. The wild varieties have pink blossoms and are poisonous, even lethal in large enough amounts. the domesticated varieties have white flowers and are safe to eat. The almonds themselves are technically not nuts, but a drupe. If the shell has been removed, they’re shelled, and if the shell is present, they’re unshelled—the most amusing part of the entry hands down. They’re related to the apricot, And forty-two percent of the world’s production is cultivated in Puntitas’ home state.

She read the entire entry mostly as an avoidance mechanism, but when she returned to her draft to properly name the shell and hull, she discovered she could use these details to shape the poem, to develop the speaker and set up the conceit. She wrote two expository stanzas and thought about what images and information they would lead to. Then she stopped, with the plan that she would continue tomorrow. She doesn’t think this poem will draft itself, but she does think that it will allow her to discover its rhythm and help her write it.

Puntitas is sleepy now. It is time for bed.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _first Comes Love_ by M. Balogh.

the Difference a Line Break Makes

In her many wanderings on the web, Puntitas found a journal that publishes Senryu and kyoka. Since she didn’t know what the forms were, Puntitas did some Googling:

Senryu is a haiku that comments on society rather than nature. In English, the form is a three-line poem divided into five, seven, and five syllables. It does not contain a nature word, and the tone is reminiscent of the grumpy old guys on The Muppets or of any gathering of Puntitas and her collection of displaced friends.

Kyoka is a tanka with senryu convictions, the English form having five lines divided into five, seven, five, seven, and seven syllables.

Since Puntitas still isn’t comfortable with very short forms or capable of saying anything succinctly, she decided to turn both of her twenty-five-word short shorts into tanka. Surprisingly, having a line break to organize ideas around was really freeing. Puntitas was able to cut words and set up images more easily than when she had nothing but punctuation to work with. She likes both poems (which are even shorter now) better than she did before though she is not confident enough about them yet to make firm decisions about including them in her books.

She did submit them to the senryu and kyoka journal. If the work is rejected as favorably as before, she will probably add them to the books. If not, she will keep working on them, possibly expanding them though only a little. What Puntitas thinks she did well is to pick subjects small enough for the form.

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

Back to Thinning the Herd

Puntitas deleted half of the contents of her nonfiction prose folder. This was hard. In page-length alone, she was two thirds of the way to a collection, and in terms of quality, the pieces she deleted weren’t bad. She deleted them anyway because

 they were incomplete.
 they needed a lot of work.
 the style/voice was so annoying that Puntitas couldn’t stand the thought of working on them even to fix that.
 They covered the same couple of themes and handled them in the same way.
 The settings and characters were so uniformly the same that the pieces blended even for Puntitas.
 No unifying theme suggested itself in terms of how the individual pieces can be combined into a collection.
 Nothing jumped out as far as how to reshape the individual pieces if they were to be revised.

Of the six pieces left, only two will definitely remain essays. A third, the one she has been working on, will most likely also continue to be an essay. The last three, however, will likely evolve into short stories though one of these last can go either way.
Though Puntitas understands that essays are about ideas while stories are about characters, the distinction gets harder for her to sort through when she considers the memoir with the hammer-and-nails part of her brain. One piece is clearly about an idea, which is really only described in the current draft, so that piece will continue to be an essay. Two other pieces cover both characters and ideas, but because Puntitas wants readers to know the experiences actually happened to at least one person and probably others, those pieces will also almost certainly continue to be essays. The other three pieces can be revised to emphasize either the character or the idea, each type of revision calling for more or less the same amount of work.

What she finally does with the pieces will depend on more pragmatic factors. In part it will be based on what the material suggests once she settles down to work on it. In part it will depend on how many pages she needs to complete her fiction anthology. In part it will depend on whether a piece is published as a particular genre. Puntitas is not above sending prose out as fiction if it can pass for it. She doesn’t expect to do the opposite because she doesn’t believe in claiming an experience that isn’t hers, But she also knows that we don’t behave according to our ethics as consistently as we would like to think.

Puntitas reads _the Link_ by C. Tudge.

The Remembered Self

Puntitas has begun to reinvent herself. At least that was the subject of today’s unexpected meditation.

For the first thirty years of her life, Puntitas was anally tidy (books alphabetized and arranged by subject; clothing hung by season, type, and such details as long-sleeve vs. short-sleeve; drawers discretely compartmentalized, even the undies drawer in which all items were folded). Then one day around the time she started teaching, Puntitas decided she’d put something away haphazardly because she had a stack of papers to grade or a class to prepare for, but her intension was that she’d get back to that minor chaos in a few hours or the next day at most.

Teaching kept her busy. Interpreting and translating also took up her time. She kept thinking she really would get to that now handful of troubled spots later.

Twelve years down the road, Puntitas is no longer teaching or doing the same type of interpreting work, and she realizes she’s been living in the sort of chaos that mirrors how she felt about both work experiences. It isn’t that they were bad, by any means. Though there were rough patches, she mostly enjoyed both jobs and learned a great deal from them. It’s that, to a large degree, they were learn-as-you-go situations, so Puntitas associates them with feelings of muddling-through or of also-having-to-deal-with-unpleasant-peripherals. By comparison, the newness factor of her current work is very small, so she only feels uncertain for short lengths of time.

The concept of reinvention came to Puntitas this morning when she decided she’d tidy up the messy zones of her bedroom, one disaster at a time. The first area was the top of her dresser, a pile of partially finished knitting projects, Christmas and birthday gifts, knickknacks, cosmetics, and the remnants of several colds past. She tossed out most of the knitting (all bad projects she finally accepted were beyond saving), redistributed the gifts, added most of the knickknacks to the garbage box, heaped in most of the cosmetics (unused) and cold debris as well, and discovered jewelry, perfume, and a few other mementos of the sort of person Puntitas had been before the chaos set in. Twelve years ago, Puntitas wore dresses at least half the time. She wore nice perfume, and sometimes she wore discrete jewelry. While she was a fashion devotee only for a year or two in her early twenties, when she was thin and young enough to think she might not be plain, she did bother about her appearance for a few years around the time she started her official working life because she felt generally good about herself and hopeful about her future.

Finding all the things she once used felt like finding someone else’s possessions and reconstructing that life from those things. It was the sort of exercise Puntitas does when constructing a character, asking herself what such a person wears, eats, does for a living, does when not working. She actually did all of that, stopping only when she discovered she was constructing a memory of herself. Perhaps it is time for Puntitas to reinvent a more life savvy version of who she was.

And two more rejections arrive today. Too bad such an interesting meditation had to end thusly. Ah, well.

Puntitas reads _Dry_ by A. Burroughs and _Siete años secuestrado por las FARC_ by L. E. Pérez.

Ups and Downs

Fortune is a fickle force. The day after Puntitas’ cartwheels of celebration, she received a rejection (form email with her name), and she received news that she did not get very far in the selection process of a job she’d expected to interview for. Then today she received birthday flowers though her birthday was several weeks ago. Ups, downs, and ups again—good thing chocolate is both a reveler and a consolation.

Puntitas has been knitting socks, Three pairs in a two-week period. She wasn’t feeling particularly poetic, so she couldn’t get up the nerve to read her latest set of revisions. Today, in a moment of heel annoyance, she pulled up a file and discovered a burst of poetic mojo.

The incoherent poem she’s been revising is pretty much done now, after more brutal trimming and lots of editing. She used the search-and-replace feature to strip out the hard returns and put pipes in their places. Then she edited as if she were reading prose, and used search-and-replace to turn the pipes into hard returns again. The poem is still one or two readings away from official “finished” status, but Puntitas doesn’t think the future changes will be significant. In fact, she went ahead and put today’s version into the book-length manuscript.

She also read another poem, the one she recently added to one of the books. She made a few minor changes, more editing than revision, and one change that is significant indeed. The literal situation described is one person helping another. Puntitas has worried that, given other details, the person being helped will be perceived as helpless, an interpretation which can obscure the point of the piece. Today Puntitas found a way of redirecting the reader’s perception. She named the character after a well-known literary figure, a truly inspired decision since the character in the poem is doing the sorts of things the literary character is known for. She’s feeling much better about that poem now too.

There’s only one more poem (already in the books) that Puntitas wants to reread and significantly revise, and there’s one draft and one idea she’d like to develop for these books, but she’s feeling comfortable about sending the manuscripts out as they are.

Puntitas reads _The Shadow Wife_ by D. Eden and more of _The Art of Setting Stones_ by M. P. Keane, which is beautiful, but too slow for someone who is often sleepy.

Celebration and Perplexity

Puntitas sent out her first chapbook in years and got a prompt rejection the following day. That same day, of the five hours spent submitting, she also sent out two poems she really likes and hopes to find homes for. The day after the chapbook rejection, she got a nibble from the journal that received the two poems:

The editor liked the language in both, but found the line breaks distracting. If Puntitas would be open to resubmitting them as prose poems, the editor would love to reconsider them.

Puntitas does not know what a prose poem is. She’s read a few, and she knows they’re all the rage, but the hammer-and-nails part of her brain doesn’t know what to do to a piece of writing to make it a prose poem.

The news was frustrating for Puntitas, so in typical Puntitas style, she sulked, whined to a friend, sat inertly at her keyboard, had absolutely no idea. Then admitting herself desperate for publications and further admitting that she especially wanted these two pieces to thrive, Puntitas pulled up the documents and used the find-and-replace-all command to brutally substitute hard and soft line breaks with regular spaces (after copying the file in case some other editor liked the work as Puntitas meant it).

Sans line breaks, Puntitas read the poems again, only this time she did it the way she reads prose, and what she discovered is that a few of her long, involved sentences collapsed in their own complexity. She fiddled here and there, nothing that anyone would notice, and she put a blank line in whenever she started a new idea. She didn’t think the pieces were any more or less comprehensible, but she did resolve to go back to other poems to read them this way for editing.

When she finished, she resubmitted both pieces. A day or two later, the editor wrote back to say she was prepared to accept one of the poems if Puntitas agreed to a few changes. CHANGES? Who dare talk to a writer about CHANGES? Puntitas read on with a mixture of anger, fear, and shame (not really sure why).

The changes were surprisingly … great. As Puntitas wrote it, the poem is a long fragment, a series of gerundives that suggest a nonstatic moment. Each idea is separated from its neighbor by a semicolon and developed and expanded with commas. There were also lots of and’s to create a rhythm. The editor, got rid of most of the commas, replaced the semicolons with commas, and stripped most of the and’s. The experience of reading suddenly reflected what Puntitas had been trying to do in the language, and Puntitas moved one step closer to understanding what a prose poem is. She’ll have to think about how another one of her pieces may benefit from this form of decluttering.

The other thing that happened when Puntitas read the final version—still no line breaks—is that she was disoriented and unmoored from her own concept of poetry writing. Puntitas wondered, not for the first time, what a line break is supposed to do. Her understanding is that it should create a subtext of its own; draw attention to words, images, and relationships; and make the reading easier. She wondered what other poets think line breaks should be or do, And she wondered whether the line breaks have been a deciding factor for other editors.

For Puntitas personally, one of the functions of the line break is to establish that what she is doing is writing poetry. For her the distinction among creative nonfiction prose, fiction, and poetry is nebulous, and the distinction between such forms as prose poem and flash fiction is too confusing to ponder. So writing in line breaks and attending to their meaning makes her mindful of the need to compress language and convey abstract meaning through sensory experience, evocative action, and physical contour—what the sighted world summarizes in the visual metaphor of the image. Hence her reluctance to instantly do away with all the line breaks she’s worked so hard to develop).

One or two days later still, Puntitas received another acceptance. This one was in the form of a letter that was both sharp and funny, the sort of missives cranky old nuns fire off in novels and on TV. This editor was also inclined to accept a piece if Puntitas allowed her to make changes, like capitalize a proper noun, correct a spelling mistake, and remove a lone parenthesis. Puntitas actually fought the urge to bow her head and whisper ma’am when replying to the message to agree to the changes and apologize for her slovenliness.

She’s contacted the other journals about the acceptances, but she’s a little nervous about it since the pieces aren’t actually in print yet.

Puntitas reads _Garden of Lies_ by E. Goudge plus the two knitting books. She’s found a couple more knitting books that she can’t wait to get through.

Acting Like a Writer

Puntitas has had quite the writerly week. It began last Friday with an acceptance, which felt amazingly good. It involved submitting a digital photograph and an audio or video recording of the two poems. Puntitas doesn’t like having her picture taken, so she asked a friend for a copy of a photograph that was taken last summer on a weekend trip to the coast.

Then she contended with the recording process. Not adept with Goldwave, which is neither generally difficult nor stupid-friendly enough for Puntitas’ limited skill set, she decided to try her mp3 player-recorder. That worked surprisingly well, even the file conversion process.

The hard part was actually reading the poems so that they sounded out loud the way they do in her head. Though she practiced for half an hour, her trial readings sounded like an insomniac counting sheep. She next opted for memorizing the text so that she could pretend to act them out on stage. Though the poems were short, memorization took a long time, and so did working on the delivery. When Puntitas felt ready, she paced up and down the hall, recorder in hand, and eight or nine restarts later per poem, she was ready to move the files to her desktop. If Puntitas were more ambitious, she would have tried again to get a better delivery, but having spent the entire day on less than three minutes of simple voice performance, she had concluded that she was definitely done.

The next writerly activity was revision. While she was preparing for her recording, she noticed a poem had one of those shrieking minor problems that should have been corrected within days of its composition. Halfway through the piece, all the plurals mysteriously turned singular. Why has Puntitas never noticed this in the ten years she’s tinkered with the damn thing? Once that was corrected, Puntitas went back to other things that needed work, like the Miltonian sonnet, completely reworking the sestet, using only a line and a half from the original. She made noticeable changes to three other poems; she reshaped some rough drafts to get them closer to intermediate drafts; and she read two others to get a sense of how much revision they would need after all.

The third writerly event of the week was experimentation. Puntitas read a call for submission for an anthology of hint fiction, the ultimate in short shorts that evokes a scene and situation, but includes enough ambiguity to suggest several interpretations. Since Puntitas’ fiction tends to run longer than most journals read, she didn’t seriously consider visiting the web page for guidelines, but then again, she was bored and uninterested in getting back to work, So she clicked anyway. The entries had to be twenty-five words or less. The examples sounded like compressed poetry fragments, Some more poem-stanza and others more cliff-hanger in tone. Puntitas wrote two, one based on a poem draft and the other based on a completely new idea. While both sound incomplete as poems, they do sound like good drafts, and the experience of compression has really been a learning opportunity in that it makes the writer conscious of what is most important and how that concept is most succinctly and concretely conveyed. Puntitas will probably try to flesh the pieces out to make them into short poems.

Finally, Puntitas sent out a couple of submissions. There are two or possibly three more she wants to mail out by Tuesday. She’s trying to be more organized in that she’s collecting e-copies of the submissions in one email folder and emailing herself the postal submissions to store in the same place. Her wake up call came when she visited one journal’s submission manager, remembering that she’d submited once, but discovering that she’d submitted twice, each batch including two poems.

Puntitas reads _Scandalous Deception_ by R. Rogers, _Milagro en los Andes_ by N. Parrado, and _The Knitting Goddess_ by D. Bergman.

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.