Struck by the Cold

Last weekend, I was knitting and listening to a formula romance, a Regency tale very similar to the sort of stuff I read as a teen, when I was struck by a description of the cold. The scene was the one where the heroine is forced by inclement weather to take refuge in a shelter with the hero, much steaminess ensuing. In this variation, a looming storm causes her to take a shortcut across thin ice (bringing in the damsel in distress motif), which breaks, providing him the perfect opportunity to save her (heroic action leading to indebtedness), take her into the hunting shack, strip her clothes off in front of a blazing fire, and … well, the rest can be surmised (passion aroused or rekindled through circumstances beyond control—though why that isn’t a form of psychological abuse is a subject for a novel I plan to write after I finish the manuscripts on my hard drive).

I don’t remember what detail struck me, but it was one or maybe two that put the cold on my skin and into my hands. Two things happened:

1. I marveled at the power of language. I was fine one minute, knitting cozily in a well heated house. A few sentences later, I was tucking my fingertips under my legs to warm them, noticing they weren’t cold only after I pressed them on my palms.

2. I got an idea for a poem. I spent the rest of the weekend surfing the web for information on hypothermia, exposure, and other topics connected to my idea. I haven’t written anything. In fact, the idea as inspiration (as physical lightness) is gone, but I’m interested enough in it to try writing anyway. I’m not sure of the point of view. I had one notion of that when the idea first came to me, but as I read, that changed, and now it’s going back to the original.

My plan for the weekend is to update my NOTE TAKER in order to write a draft. I have other things I need to do (get a writing sample sent off and get some manuscripts ready for the mail), so I may not get to the draft by Monday. I don’t normally write anywhere except at this computer, Pax, a sturdy desktop in my office at home), but since I want to start writing on Chulo, the NOTE TAKER, I’m going to experiment drafting this poem on it.

Old habits are hard to break. The transition from writing by hand to typing into a keyboard was not easy. I’m expecting the transition from qwerty to Perkins to be rough too.

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.

the ends and the Means

I’m back to the syllabic poem. It’s two pages long. The last time I worked on it, I revised the first fourth or maybe third. When I reread it tonight, I noticed the changes helped a lot.

With more of a reason for the mood of the poem, the middle section (of the villanelle-like repetitions) feels necessary, the obvious outcome of what comes before. On initial reading, I thought I’d leave it alone, but as I went through it line by line, I decided it can do more and should to make the significance of the lost poem resonate. Once I add to that middle section, I should be able to cut most of the final fourth.

I have to be careful about the way I write, pushing myself past the desire to quit, but not so hard that I don’t want to return. So far, I’ve managed to make myself write for at least an hour at a time.

The old habit, the one I’m trying to avoid, is to write myself into a panic attack, obsessing over word choice, punctuation, syntax, decisions about what comes next. I’ve written so little over the last six years because I’ve wanted to think and feel differently as I write.

My first step was patience. Relying on the muse, I’ve written a story, revised three others, drafted a couple of poems, and revised half a dozen. I’ve put no real pressure on myself to publish or even declare a piece to be done, though once or twice a year, I’ve sent out a stack of envelopes to wait for the rejections.

After that, I started writing regularly. I tried for a, but the medium that’s worked best for me is the discussion list: hitting the send button is about as final as a thing gets. If I put myself in the roll of explainer, I can create opportunities for myself to produce thorough messages about things and send them off, learning to become clearer and less self-conscious at the same time.

I’ve learned so much about writing and about trusting myself from the lists. They’ve helped me do what I’m trying now: keeping the blog and writing several times a week.

It isn’t easy. As I stumble over an image or decision, a physical pressure moves slowly up my arms, settling on my shoulders, and wrapping over the center of my chest, lightly, but definitely, like the subtlest of threats. At those times, I make decisions, and I ignore, drawing on the hours of fast and careful writing I’ve learned to do. After all, one of the many things I’ve learned from sitting in on hundreds of hours of other people’s therapy for a living is that the memory of a positive experience can encourage other positive experiences. Other lessons are less profound, like positive self-talk should not include words like “asshole” and “dumb fuck,” but the minor lessons have their uses too.

One of the current topics of my knitting list is the difference between process knitters and project knitters. The latter decide on a specific item, gather their materials, research or experiment with new techniques, and get to work. The former experiment or research new techniques, gather materials, find interesting projects, start them, get side tracked, return, frog or continue as the spirit guides. The point for one group is to meet a goal; for the other, it’s simply to knit.

I’m very much a process knitter. I’ve got three or four projects going at one time, hate them all during the endless middle third, and complete them only by popping a juicy book into the player days or hours before they have to be done.

I realized, as I was thinking about my knitting, that I’m not a very goal oriented writer either. Well, yes, the Nobel is the fantasy, and having a book in print in order to get a nice secure job is also a concern, but if writing were a real goal, I’d have to invest a lot more time and emotional energy into (a) writing, (b) submitting, and (c) keeping up with the field. I’ve always been afraid of approaching writing in those terms because of the severity of the writing anxiety that plagued me throughout my entire education, but I’m thinking now that, if writing became a series of practical steps and reasonable goals, it might also become less terrifying. This may be how I need to reframe the process for myself in order to make writing a profession, not a hobby.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent (continued)

My Miltonian sonnet has a title now, and excerpt from the original. At the moment, I think it’s hot stuff, but right now I have no judgment.

I’m bathing in the post partal effluvia of my own brilliance. Not arrogance: the cherished delusion that evaporates all too quickly. Why is it that whatever we write is perfect for about a month and only that all too fleeting month? After that, public bathroom graffiti is a goal to strive for. Alas, alack.

I read the sonnet again two days ago. I did a little tinkering, substituting words that don’t conjure images with those that do (harried whore to bony whore) and snipping a few function words (mostly articles) to help the images roll into one another. I spent a while on the last line, which sounded about as meaningful as the cryptic writing on the stall.

When I reread the poem just now, I’d forgotten about the last line. The changes seem to work though the image is different from what I had been going for. For my original idea to make sense, the reader would have to know what a talent is (a unit of measure in money) in order to get a really bad pun that isn’t particularly clever even at the most superficial level. The line as it actually reads, however, draws on the image of the houses like tombs and does something more complex.

Were I not floating in my own effluvia, I could never admit that poems really do write themselves. It’s a matter of getting the tool at the word processor to let them.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

Tonight I wrote a poem: a whole poem from beginning to end. I haven’t done that since graduate school. It took about two and a half hours to write.

Mostly it wrote itself, not quite dictation. I had to stop to look up the parable of the talents, and I had to stop to reread one of Milton’s sonnets, and I almost shut down during the sestet, but the write image came into my head (empty houses like tombs),,. With that, I was able to compress it from a line in order to push on to the end, where I now had more syllable space for the clincher, another image (digging in a field).

Yes, it’s another sonnet (Miltonian no less). It’s a response to Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” which I’ve always wanted to rail against. In many ways, his final image is perfect: servants spend a lot of time standing and waiting, and having done a lot of that myself, there’s something to be said for the strength required to do it. But there’s little comfort in accepting the fate of living on perpetual hold until one is acknowledged to be human.

I think my response is clear, but this may be one of those situations where point of view gets in the reader’s way. I can’t really explain what I mean without going into detail about the poem, and I’m not ready to do that. The only thing I can really say is that we all have biases, some so deep we don’t know we have them. When we encounter an idea that goes against one of these biases, our response is incomprehension or anticlimax. Knowing how to write for that biased reader is really difficult because the risks are obscurity and dogma. For now, I want the poem to sit for a week or two so I can read it fresh.

The writing was amazingly fast, and I’m excited. It feels good, a little weird, a little hard to believe.

It still doesn’t have a title, except maybe “To Milton,” but that’s pretty sucky.

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.

The Blog Does Its Work: WDG Complete

I think I finished my Shakespearean sonnet—again. Tonight I read it without planning to, and I liked it.

Yes, the blog is doing its work: I pulled up the file only because I was feeling guilty about not having posted anything manuscript related this week.

Like last time, I picked at a word or two, knowing exactly which ones and why and knowing exactly what their substitutes or additions would be. This time, I wasn’t bothered by the movement from unusual to ordinary because the imagery at the start (unusual) evokes a lulling mood that shatters in the last few lines (ordinary). The final couplet is still not the embodiment of originality, but it’s one of those old truths that unsettles us every time we are reminded of it, so like anyone who’s ever written about seizing the day, I can live with the heard-before.

By my third rereading, I was thinking the details that were necessary for the turn to work were “clever devices,” not integral parts of the poem. I was tempted to tinker, but I’ve decided to trust they are fine, and I’ve decided to send the poem out next week in my first mass mailing since March.

And I’m a Knitter Too

We may as well get the unpleasantness out of the way once and for all. I’m a knitter, and knitting is part of my writing process, so knitting will appear here from time to time.

First, I’m usually listening to audio books while I’m knitting, so I’m thinking about how a piece of writing is put together while I’m also thinking about how a piece of knitting is constructed. If I don’t have anything to listen to, I plan my next piece of writing or work out the kinks in a current project.

Second, knitting has taught me to think differently about how to accomplish a goal. When I knit, I think about what it is I want to achieve. Then I think about all of the little tricks and techniques that can theoretically help me do that. Most of the time, I’m dead wrong, but every once in a while I pull it off. In the knitting realm, two no-hole sock patterns are my major accomplishment, It was also the project that helped me realize I can do the same with writing and other things. My most recent application of the principle has been in the sonnet: I’m giving myself the task of figuring out what I want the ending to do.

Third, since most of what I know about knitting comes from the web, I’ve learned to research and enjoy it. Now I actually stop in the middle of a piece of writing to look things up or—stunner of all stunners—to read a book or two on the subject. With the Shakespearean sonnet, I looked up information about root systems. Almost none of it made it into the poem, but I did move some details around to be consistent with reality. A newer poem started entirely as research, and turning facts to poetry has been quite the task.

SO I’ll post patterns from time to time, and if I can talk someone into taking pictures for me, I’ll post them too.