Folowing the Yellow Brick Road

Puntitas seems to be in congress with her muse—a beautiful thing, to be sure. Yesterday afternoon, she started a poem, which she finished lunchtime today. It didn’t just flow from her fingers to the keyboard. Much sitting around and engaging in the typical web surfing, email reading, kitchen snacking, telephone talking pursuits took place, as did some thoughts about how the poem wasn’t really worth continuing, but Puntitas kept on keeping on, and she’s now got a very solid draft on the hard drive.

As she researched the exact spelling of the title and did a little reading to make sure the term was appropriate, she learned a few more details that may help her give the poem a specific structure. The title refers to a dance concept. Puntitas thought its meaning was more general than it actually is: it isn’t X, but a specific type of X with a particular sequence of elements. When Puntitas next reads the draft (in a few days or a week), she will think about whether the poem works as it is or would be more effective if it paralleled that sequence.

Today’s poem and one of the two she finished recently are part of Puntitas’ campaign to write less depressing work. She decided to try Uplifting after attending a Naomi Shihab Nye reading, which featured lots of optimistic poetry and a few comments about using the art form to offer hope. Puntitas has written a handful of pieces that end on a positive note, most of them being ecstatic romps in odd places, but the romps tend not to go anywhere. That was Puntitas revelation of the day:

She doesn’t write optimistic poetry because she’s afraid of doing what her first-year composition students do–write complex narratives about interesting events that end on clichés, which have little to do with the text as a whole.

The key is to follow a journey that ends in a good place or in the possibility of a good place. These two poems go, in one case, from depressing to comforting and, in the other, from humorous to serene. Puntitas thinks both make the journey from A to B, with B serving as a plausible destination. Puntitas is considering revisiting two of her “finished” poems to make those romps more of a journey. She’s also got two other ideas she’d like to draft. One will definitely end on a cheery note. The other one is still undecided.

Not that Puntitas will stop writing her trademark grim poems. The one using the almond research is a downer and will stay that way. The idea for the other piece starts grim and gets grimmer, but Puntitas doesn’t have a clear idea of where the journey will end. She’s had the idea in her head for almost a year, and her assumption has been that the ending will be grim too, but pondering the idea in terms of a journey that ends in hope may be more productive. Who knows? This broadening of Puntitas horizons makes her feel like something of a beginner again. Definitely a sign of necessary growth.

Puntitas reads _The Other Daughter_ by L. Gardner and _Child of God_ by C. McCarthy. _La hija del canibal_ is temporarily on hold: Puntitas has low tolerance for post modern touches.

the Value of Experience

Puntitas has organized her favorites into four nice neat folders, one of which is “Writing,” so she feels very accomplished. She has also set up her kitchen cum postage scale, and after some experimentation, she has discovered that she can accurately weigh her manuscripts, provided she paperclips the top and bottom edges so that most of the physical document is on the weighing platform. If she lays the document flat, like a leggy damsel with limbs aloft, the weight is off by one to two ounces.

The other thing Puntitas discovered is that she’s been putting way too much postage on her manuscripts. After using slide rule and graphing calculator (okay, Puntitas exaggerates, but only a little) combined with new scale and USPS website, Puntitas has determined that six forty-four-cent stamps are more than sufficient for her fifty-five-page document, plus cover letter, plus SASE, plus post card, plus entry form where applicable.

The other literary activity Puntitas engaged in (minimal writing has occurred since last post) is that Puntitas and a friend went to an experimental theater production yesterday. It was fun, four Poe selections partially read, partially dramatized in various rooms of the university library. The first was “The Raven—all screams and hurling self onto floor–which was Puntitas’ least favorite performance, as she imagines the speaker of the poem to be crumbling in a fidgety quiet. The rest of the pieces—“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—were more low-key, but there too, the performances tended to characterize “madness” with the hysteria of someone who has never actually been around people with delusions and other mental illnesses. The interpretations also lacked the nuance that only comes of having ten or twenty years worth of experiences with people and life. In “Amontillado,” For instance, the narrator carried herself with a venomous intent, which is how Puntitas imagined the character when she was younger. Now, however, Puntitas imagines the serenity of a decision made and the strain of giving the self courage enough to seize the opportunity. After all, maturity gives one both the tolerance to deal with unpleasantness and the patience to take action when tolerance is exhausted, and Puntitas makes this remark after an especially unpleasant experience at work.

Puntitas also noticed that the productions, which were understandably low on scenery, were also disappointingly low on sound effects. Poe is full of sound, creating much of the tension by describing stillness, the ticking of a clock, the jingling of the bells on someone’s hat. He is so meticulous about sound that Puntitas suspects he was a predominately aural person or that he spent enough time drinking at night to value his hearing. Puntitas thought that greater tension would have been achieved with subtler acting, more sound effects, and greater experience of life.

When Puntitas is being sensible, she thinks that her eight years of percolation between graduation and the present have been good for these reasons, but Puntitas is rarely ever sensible for very long.

Puntitas reads _Reflections in a Golden Eye_ by C. McCullers and _Bridget Jones Diary_ by H. Fielding.

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.

Shifting Focus

Puntitas submitted more work today: One short story and three copies of the poetry chapbook. She may have sent two items out one day past the official deadline, but she’s hoping that the reading fee (in one case) and the general shortage of submissions (in the other) will encourage recipients to … well … receive.

The last time Puntitas read some of her work, she realized that she had not included a thematically related poem in the chapbook, So before printing today, she added it to the manuscript and moved another poem to a different place in the collection. The chapbook feels better now, and Puntitas thinks she should reexamine the order of the poems in the book-length collections in case other changes make sense.

She also read one of her short stories before sending it out. It’s ten pages long, which is flash fiction in the wordy realm of Puntitas’ prose. She had revised it carefully a couple of years ago, spending lots of time researching certain details to make sure she got them right. Today she read the story for the first time since then, and she liked it very much, making only half a dozen surface level changes. The story leads up to a small moment that is nonetheless important, as so many small things are. Puntitas likes it and will start sending it out regularly.

While she plans to continue tweaking a couple of poems, revising some drafts, and drafting new ideas, she will start shifting her focus to the fiction on her hard drive. Puntitas estimates that she has about a hundred pages of finished or nearly finished fiction that should be in the mail by the end of November. Beyond that, she’s got a novella and two stories in intermediate draft phase and another story that’s still pretty rough. Her goal is to shape all of these into a book-length collection by this time next year.

It feels like a realistic goal. The poetry books were officially finished almost a year ago. They’ve undergone so many changes that Puntitas has to toss out her old photocopies and consider making new ones. While she’s not completely satisfied yet, she has enough of a sense of completion to be willing to add to Kinko’s economic stability.

Puntitas reads _Where Are the Children_ by M. Higgins Clark.

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.

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.

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.

First Acceptance in Three Years

Puntitas is a happy, happy person! She’s had an acceptance: one or two (can’t tell from the letter) poems to appear in a chapbook. It’s neither her greatest poem nor the greatest chapbook anthology ever, but both are fine and she’s damn proud. Details will be posted when the chapbook is a reality. For now, the acceptance is reason enough to bust out a few cumbia steps. Be grateful Puntitas does not own a web cam.

The email came at just the right time. Puntitas went to visit her accountant today. Yes, she has one. Originally, he was a low-key verging-on-sixty tax savant, the kind who is so low-key as to be mistaken for unpromising. Then he sold his business to work for the private sector. His replacement is earnest enough, but less wily about what the self-employed can deduct, and Puntitas has not been reassured by his having to interrupt to take a call from the IRS regarding another client’s audit.

Bravely, Puntitas persevered with her interview. Today’s foray into Puntitas’ financial affairs led to a discussion of her delusion that she is a writer. She has claimed to be one for two years now, and because she has made no money at it, he suggests that this claim be downgraded to a hobby. Few things are as shriveling to the ego as the juxtaposition of one’s degree, aspirations, and oeuvre with the government’s thoughts on hobbies and failing businesses. Puntitas supposes that she and the IRS are more likely to reach a happy medium if she were to sell the chapbook in which her poem(s) appears to a recycler for a profit.

In other news, Puntitas is a third of the way through her big, ugly translation. Reading in Spanish, even on something unrelated, while translating such a long document into that language has really been helpful. Puntitas has noticed many improvements in her style, and she has been much more successful at researching terms. She hasn’t been posting here or sending manuscripts out because she’s been so absorbed with that project, but she’ll need to take a day off to do some more mailing.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Perez Reverte and _Say Goodbye_ by L. Gardner.

Puntitas and the Ignorance of Others

After a computer calamity, Puntitas has been working on her big, ugly translation project, which she has had to start over because of said event. She has finished reading Blindness by Jose Saramago, which she dislikes for a number of reasons, the easiest to sum up being that responding to a metaphor (i.e., the eyes are the windows of the soul) is ignorance and masturbation if the response isn’t informed by active inquiry (i.e. interrogation of the assumptions that underlie the metaphor, observation of the literal components of the image, experimentation that leads to deeper reflection on the subject). Puntitas’ appreciation of the novel has suffered further after a consultation with an oral surgeon who thinks it’s amazing that blind people can walk and impossible for them to participate in a routine doctor-patient encounter. (The surgeon kept talking about having someone translate for Puntitas and was bothered when Puntitas asked why that would be necessary as both were speaking the same language. Puntitas almost … skin-of-the-teeth almost … added, “I mean you’re speaking in Stupid, but since I hear that language quite often, I’ve learned to puzzle it out.”) Puntitas believes that this surgeon very probably shares Saramago’s perception of the blind as a helpless collective of shit covered needs–alegories about alienation, blah-blah notwithstanding. No, Puntitas hasn’t gotten over either the awful surgeon or the fact that the only characters in the novel who have ordinary rational thoughts are sighted. But Puntitas leaves all that for another day.

In the realm of Puntitas the emerging writer–another rejection arrived today. It came from the Missouri Review, a typical form letter on a half sheet of paper. Someone wrote a note, thanking me and telling me to try the magazine again some time. I would have taken it for a generic kindness, like Howard Junker’s “onward,” except that the person who wrote it actually used my name. That almost made up for the writer’s not wanting some of my best work.

I’ll need to send more batches of poems out soon.

Puntitas reads _Maridos_ by A. Mastreta.

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.