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.

Committing to It, Baby!

So I was knitting a sock (one of my obsessions) and listening to an audio book (don’t rumple your face: words were meant to be spoken), and it occurred to me that I finished my M. F. A. six years ago, and yet again, the Nobel Prize committee hadn’t bothered the AT&T operator for my phone number.

 

The main reason is that committee members don’t have  access to my hard drive. The second and third are laziness and lack of motivation—from my end, of course.

 

The drive does have lots for the interested: a novel, a novella, a  collection of stories, a collection of poems, and a couple of essays. A few of the poems have made it to print, about half in respectable journals. Still, I haven’t worked much on my writing until recently, and the process feels unfamiliar.

 

What I’ve done with my six years away from school … nothing for the first three or four years. The thought of reading another book that didn’t include the word smoldering or homicidal maniac or of having another pretentious conversation made me twitch. Eventually, I came back to reading again, and later still, to writing. Now I work in spurts, accomplishing a lot in short periods, with vacant voids of idleness in between.

 

Lately, I’ve decided to be more serious, and I’ve decided to approach the business of writing in a whole new way. Rediscovering a craft after absence isn’t a bad thing. Bad habits are lost. Good habits are nurtured. I came back to knitting after a fifteen-year break, and I’m a much better knitter than I ever dreamed I could be.

 

The first thing I’ll do is adopt some of the habits of a writer. I’ll write, research, or plan at least two or three days a week. I’ll work from ideas and material to encourage the muse, rather than wait around for it to come to me. I’ll post to this blog at least once a week to keep myself accountable.

 

My pet project–the one I’ll work on with small interruptions for poems, stories, and longer pieces–is a formula romance, not the novel of my official oeuvre. I started it before I thought of writing as something one can major in. It taught me a lot about developing characters, managing a plot line, and doing background work, but it’s about three chapters away from being finished, and it’s at an intermediate draft stage.

 

This is my pledge, and this is my beginning.