On writing a book (whatever that means)

I’ve been writing a lot lately, so don’t get the wrong idea, but with a first and second book forthcoming, I have a major problem.

What the hell am I supposed to write about now?

I continue to write poems regularly, even daily, and because I’m that kind of poet and thinker, I draw most of my material from my own life. Today, for instance, I wrote a poem about a dream interpretation class I’m taking (maybe I’ll stick it at the end of this post, even though it’s rough, just to prove I’m on the up-and-up, doing the work and all that). Nothing about my creative life has changed, except maybe the pressure to be worthy of my good luck.

But my first book, due out in June, is in the old style of first books—a collection of work that shows my range of interests and styles, rather than the kind of cohesive, thematic or even linked initial collections that we see coming out from most poets today.

Even more disconcerting, my second book, coming in April 2017, is similar—a little more thematic, maybe, in that it offers poems about motherhood, the body, and the spirit. Readers of book one (in other words, my mom and maybe my spouse) will recognize me in book two—both books are from the same consciousness, and they have overlapping concerns, although the books themselves seem quite different from one another.

But writing now, I explore the topics that interest me, and they’re not altogether different from the topics that have always interested me. I fear that I may be in danger of cranking out a third book that is also an old-style first book. In an era of writing programs and carefully conceptualized theses-cum-books, is this even allowable?

I have in mind a weird collection that draws on my kind of extensive reading about vaudeville (it’s a bad idea to say too much—that squashes the muse), and I’ve shaped it a bit in my mind, like all the ways I could intersperse this kind of poem with that kind, and what the final project might look like. The thing is, that sort of cerebral project is not where my spirit is. Writing a thematically driven book sounds like intellectual work, rather than the kind of dreamwork poetry is for me usually. While occasional exercises in form or theme offer intellectual pleasures, an entire book of a poetry project just makes me feel a little bereft. It’s not what I want to do.

It’s enough to make a gal turn to fiction.

There was a certain freedom to not having a book. Before I had a book (and now two!), I was free not to write books, and not even to think about what in the world it means to write books. I’m a poet; I write poems, not books, and so far, they’ve been artifacts of particular moments in particular days, or the cumulative product of long thought on a topic. Do my ruminations on any topics require sixty pages or so? And if so, is it OK for some of those pages to say, “I just don’t know”?

I have to say, I’d rather write about a thing my kid said, or the snake I saw on the path, or the return of wild strawberries in spring. There’s surely a book in that stuff—two, in fact. But will readers put up with a third?

Time to think about plot and arc and character development, clearly, as I blow the dust off Freytag’s pyramid—maybe settle in to write a cozy mystery, a tidy little whodunit.

Poetry has suddenly grown way too serious.

Sadhaka: Dream Interpretation

At last I remember a dream.

I did it the way he told me, wrung,

upon waking, the body as sponge,

starting with the base, moving up,

twisting and squeezing until there

it was, ludicrous, wise: the dream.

There was a basement pool,

sumptuous, its mosaic tiles

ornate, strangely antique

to have survived the fire

(one of those odd histories

dreams bear, things we know

and accept, though they happened

offstage, in the long-ago),

and in the middle of that pool

where a fountain might be,

my soul placed a toy store, me

in it, and all around me, full,

packed shelves that I braced

to keep from falling, and they fell

anyway, all around me in the center

of that pool, nothing even vaguely

my fault, though the store clerks

glared—that’s the only fact

on which I’m clear. This

I can take to my teacher, place

in his hand as if the dream itself

were no more than the princess

playset featuring the fat TV sheriff,

obscenities spelled out in flowers

on the walls of his pretty room.

Here. This is a thing I found

in the toy store in my basement

natatorium, I’ll tell him. Help me

understand what it means.