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.

Riding the Revision Trail

After many days or weeks of writerly slovenliness, Puntitas has done some revision. Last night, she worked on one of the poems she’s been revising lately, the one she discovered to be absolutely incoherent ten years after it was finished. The changes are still more than surface-level editing, but they’re no longer about changing the whole direction of the piece. After last night’s session, Puntitas thinks the poem will change very little from now on.

Today she also worked on a nonfiction prose piece she considered done. Its “done”-ness was determined ten years ago, so Puntitas believed it prudent to read it before launching it into the world.

As far as revisions go, most of what Puntitas did was surface-level, cutting wordiness, getting details to match up, clarifying vagueness, and removing repetition. While she’s happy with that work, she’s not willing to say the piece is done. Her plan had been to read the piece from beginning to end without tinkering, but she started to notice the sort of little glitches that are easy to forget, so she tinkered as she went along, losing all sense of the voice and tension of the piece. She’ll need to read it again in a day or two because she isn’t sure that the narrator’s central problem is clearly set up, explained, or resolved. The sections that are supposed to do that may not do enough and may commit the additional sin of interfering with pacing.

On a personal level, the piece made Puntitas cry, not that her writing is particularly moving, rather that the problem is still unresolved for her, a state of things which she knows, but was not expecting to react to so strongly. The piece may require an objective reader after some revision.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge.

Revising at This Late Stage

After a couple of months of not thinking about her book-length manuscripts, Puntitas woke up last week with the thought that one of her poems would benefit from the addition of two details. She spent most of the rest of the week distracting herself with other thoughts because, well, the manuscripts are done, but then yesterday, she paused in her distraction to add the details, put the entire poem into the present tense, tinker with the ending, and prune some of the prosier language.

She did hear the sentence, “That’s why it hasn’t been published,” cross her consciousness, and after inserting the revised poem into the manuscript itself (Puntitas revises the individual poem file first and then goes to the book to remove the old version and insert the new), she was glad she’s been too lazy to make new copies of the book.

Puntitas also had the sobering realization last night that save for one or two journals, which escape her at present, she’s pretty sure she’s received rejections from everyone she submitted to in February, so she must send out more poems.

A poet’s suffering is never done.

Puntitas reads _Blood and Guts: a Short History of [Western] Medicine_ by R. Porter, a book which, though readable, informative, and interesting, is nonetheless not as entertaining as the title suggests. In fact, Puntitas might have skimmed and fizzled if she were not reading it for an editing project she’s working on.

When Even the Muse of Awakening Is Away

Puntitas is having an especially unproductive day. She had one appointment this morning, which was neither taxing nor long, but she’s made minimal progress on her big, ugly translation because she keeps falling asleep while reading the endless pages of research, parallel texts that are dreamy examples of fine, dry insurance prose. Even the coverage and exclusions that involve genitalia sound like A/c filter options.

So Puntitas has been reading small chunks while surfing the web for knitting patterns, historical factoids, and audio book downloads. Where these last are concerned, she’s filled her hard drive with the sort of mindless crap that features “strong language,” “violence,” and “explicit descriptions of sex.” Let’s hear it for genitalia that sounds like genitalia.

I’ve been meaning to post here about several writerly things: a talk that a friend and I attended on the humor of Mark Twain, my plans for sending more poems and book manuscripts out, one or two observations on technique from some of the stuff I’ve been reading, general giggling and happiness over my humble acceptance.

But what keeps coming back to me is the conversation I had with my accountant—well, mostly his observation that the writing has to generate an income for it to be an official profession. This is obvious, to be sure, and it’s something I know, but somehow I hadn’t really faced the fact that I still don’t treat it like one. More and more, I ask myself how to find jobs that will turn writing into pay and what I can do to squeeze revenue out of my sad collection of poems and close-to-ready short stories. Definitely food for thought, and once I get the translation finished, I will try to come up with a plan.

Puntitas reads _La Reina del Sur_ by A. Perez-Reverte and _The Yosemite Murders_ by D. McDougal.

The Poetry Reading

The friend who was in Korea during my post office crisis has returned with the news that she’s accepted a job offer there. She doesn’t leave till the end of the month, but we met tonight for our last or second to last evening. Though I’m really excited for her, I will miss her very much because she is one of my closest friends. She is also the person with whom I spend most time at the bookstore, and she has a knack for turning metaphors into disconcerting social events. Today, for instance, Puntitas learned that writing a dissertation is like a bowel impaction that requires much time at the toilet, a considerable amount of grunting and groaning, sundry medical consultations, more straining, sweat, pushing, heaving, fiber therapy, enema therapy, and a final surging-tearing-thrusting-expelling passing through. Puntitas learned too that she didn’t have to eat all of her refried beans and that she’d lost her craving for a dessert of flan.

After dinner and coffee, we came back to my house to talk more about my friend’s new job and all the packing, selling, and storing she’d have to do before the move. As we were sitting in my study, where my manuscripts live in their yard-tall Federal Express boxes, she asked if she could read my work. This wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time I said yes (except for the one time I showed her something in progress [after much begging on her part] and got annoyed at her lack of workshop skills). Today the experience was very different.

Initially, it was boring because my friend just read silently, giggling or making the odd Hmm or huh.

Then it was mildly annoying when my friend suddenly started commenting on one of the poems, a sonnet. A word was misspelled. The final image didn’t make sense. The speaker wasn’t very sympathetic. The annoyance was not about the feedback itself, which was useful. It was about the insistence. Puntitas was done with the poem. Yes, she’d revised it the weekend before. Still, she was done, and she had finished, and the only thing she had any interest in doing with it was putting it in the mail. Then that indifference was its own revelation, and Puntitas sat back to let time keep on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future.

Several hours or minutes (depending on the specific time continuum) later, my friend went back to reading, and the experience got interesting. As she read, my friend announced the title of each poem. She giggled or grunted as before. This time, however, she also read lines or images out loud, or she made brief comments at certain points. In other words, she did what people do when they’re reading a book for pleasure. Those comments, brief and spontaneous though they were, provided lots of helpful information about how the work was coming through to her. Her other observation—that, if she didn’t know Puntitas personally, she would assume Puntitas to be a lesbian—went into the same mental compartment as the dissertation-as-bowel-impaction image.

After my friend had left, I thought more about the sonnet. It wasn’t the usual obsessive thinking that belongs to a work in progress, rather the indifferent consideration of someone who has no stake in the outcome. My friend was right about the ending. It includes an image that explains the speaker’s attitude, but the image doesn’t make sense because it can’t literally be true. I opened the file and began by tackling the misspelling. The changes came relatively quickly—all in the final sestet. The finished poem reads more like natural speech; the rhyme scheme is less slant; and the closing image works on a literal and poetic level. I think both the temporal and emotional distance were what made the revisions easy.

Puntitas reads _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

His Hand Was Steady, But His Eye Was Odd.

Puntitas has had very few writerly thoughts since last post. Mostly this is because I’ve had a flu, mild from Sunday through Thursday, severe from Thursday through Saturday night, and finally back to mild. I will be ready for work tomorrow. Knock on wood.

A friend and I did go to a traveling production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Were she building her blog today, Puntitas’ tag line would definitely read: “Her hand is steady, but her eye is odd.” For some unknown reason that line (okay, a slight variation thereof), which is repeated throughout the musical as a refrain, drew giggles from both my friend and me, even when it was sung after a tragic moment. Yes, the show was fabulous, the highlights being the scene in which Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd cook up the pie scheme and the scene in which she reveals her feelings for him, but the line, which was written to rhyme with “Sweeney Todd,” sung on a sonorously descending string of notes, prompted the catty observations that even great writers put out dubious lines and that repeating said lines doesn’t make them any better, this last being an especially important lesson for Puntitas to learn.

I’ve been reading several books at once, the latest (my relaxing fever read) being Your Heart Belongs to Me, a Dean Koontz thriller about a man who undergoes a heart transplant only to have the heart’s previous owner want it back. This is how the publisher’s summary describes it. I’m halfway through the book, and the protagonist is only now going in to surgery.

I’ve read a lot of Koontz’ work, probably half of his bibliography, and I fall on the Koontz side of the King-vs.-Koontz debate, but I’m having trouble getting into this book. The most obvious reason is that the prose is a lot more purple than I remember. The last line of Part 1, which is the last line I read this morning, is a good example: “And the darkness darkled into something darker, then mere dark.” Yes, the rhythm is lovely, and used sparingly, lines like it can work, but the same rhythm and image can be evoked without calling self-conscious attention to the language : “The darkness deepened into something darker, then spread into a hollow dark.”

The other reason is probably that it’s taking a while to get to the story I was expecting. Having read the publisher’s summary, I was expecting to be at the heart transplant by a fourth of the way through the novel. When I got to that point in the book but not in the story, I realized that the plot was more complicated and that I should just go along with it.

Still another reason is that I’m not sure what to make of all the Edgar Allan Poe allusions. The protagonist has several episodes that sound like panic attacks, described in language that comes from “The Raven.” He also has anxiety dreams, which are evocative of Poe landscapes, and he’s plagued by the sort of paranoia and secretiveness that characterize Poe protagonists. The allusions seem heavy handed, especially when combined with the excessive language, so I find myself wondering what I’m supposed to make of it (unreliable narrator?) rather than just letting it draw me in and persuade or mislead me as is required by the story.

At this point, I’m reading as much to find out how the book ends as to track the doings of the protagonist. Sometimes the ending pulls everything together so as to make all the prior muddling worth it.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood, _A Sense of the World_ by J. Roberts, and _Your Heart Belongs to Me_ by D. Koontz.