Pretty in Black and White

            I spent much of today taping poems to the walls of my little office. It’s the kind of thing that you do when you’re in possession of two chief requirements: a book manuscript that is going nowhere and at least four blank walls painted a grim, institutional hue.

            My book manuscript has been making the rounds for a while now without catching an editor’s eye, with one exception. I recently switched some things around and added some new work, to good effect—I’m currently a finalist in a book contest with the slightly revised version.

            The way I see it, if a few small additions and deletions of poems can make me a finalist, well, then overhauling that sucker will surely result in a book. And a prize. Great reviews. A National Book Award or Pulitzer or two ....

            But I digress. The manuscript is older than my artistic vision, and it’s time for more of the sorts of changes that seemed to help it a bit in the contest I mentioned. And just like Andie (the Mollie Ringwald character) in Pretty in Pink, you need to do something that’s just right for you with the material you have, even if it requires getting out the seam ripper and the pinking shears and going to town on the original.

            (I’m sorry. I can’t let the reference to the Pretty in Pink dress go by without mentioning how incredibly ugly Andie’s finished product actually was—like a cross between a mother-of-the-bride dress and a toilet paper roll. It is, quite simply, one of the worst dresses I have ever seen. One of the benefits of blogging is that you may bring everything to a grinding halt so that you can offer a strong opinion about a twenty-nine-year-old movie.)

            Allow me to return to my manuscript, which is now thoroughly deconstructed and lining every inch of the walls of a small office. I even maximized space by taping poems into a bookcase, on sides, back, bottom, and underside of each visible shelf.

            The result of my effort is that I can sit in my chair and steeple my fingers under my chin like a don—love poems to the left of me, mom poems to the right, body poems behind me, uncategorized work out in front. The ceiling is bare. I’m not out of poems; I just don’t have a ladder to put them there, much as I’d like to lie on the floor and mentally rearrange them.

            In a previous post, I recommended poetry projects—that is, I recommended that busy writers have an ongoing topic or exercise so that they can cut out the time they might otherwise spend wondering what to write about. While this plan is effective for time saving, and is artistically energizing, my mess of a manuscript reveals a flaw in the idea. The reason my poems won’t fall into a tidy line is that when I look at them, I don’t see a book—I see a dozen chapbooks and a bunch of strays.

            I suspect that the problem isn’t the poems. After all, they spring from the same consciousness; they reveal my idiosyncratic rhetoric and lineation and imagery and form. I feel as though one could pick any two from the walls or the remaining stack (ceiling material!) and recognize that the same woman wrote them. (That could also be the problem—that woman, bless her heart, may not be any good! But that’s an issue for another day.) The poems work together, and each one shores up the efforts of the others.

            When it comes time to make a book, I realize that I may be locked within a project-driven mindset, and I have a hard time sticking several sets of poems together. While I appreciate my imagination—quirky and flexible and vivid—in the composition of the poems, my vision totally fails when I try to use it to find a path through my own book.

            The imagination that is willing to get into the kind of trouble that yields a poem is lodged in a mind that struggles to bring order from chaos. I am not the first poet to feel flummoxed by the organizational aspect of the publishing task. And when I look across my messy home desk, positioned in a chaotic room of a disorganized house, this is especially clear.

            This is really just a long way of inviting you to my office. Tucked away in a deserted corner of an academic building, it’s a good place to sit and think. And if you have a moment, could you eyeball the poems all around you, maybe shift a few from one wall to another?

            There’s a roll of tape in the drawer. Please turn out the lights when you leave.

Using the Archipelagos

            It’s a new month, and a short one—a perfect time to embark on a poetry project.

            I’ve mentioned before that I like working in projects, as doing so eliminates the need to spend time pondering over a subject or messing around with a false start.

            This month, I’m sort of feeling my age—not my physical age, which seems to range from twelve to about eighty, but my poetry age. I’m late getting a full-length book published, and it sometimes feels as though time is passing me by. I’m twenty-one years older than John Keats when he died, and, come to think of it, thirteen years past Jesus. It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that anyone will ever name a city after me, or even, for that matter, a dog.

            So no fiddle-farting around for me—I am feeling an urgent need to make my writing count, and a poetry project results in poems of greater depth, or at least greater breadth (a good fake for depth). Good poetry requires good thinking, and I find it mighty hard to think on most days. If I set the alarm to get up early so I can stare off into space, chances are good that a kid will get up, too, and thinking time becomes breakfast time. If I stay up late (not my best time for functioning, as a morning person), chances are good that someone, somewhere, will barf—probably on me.

            A few times a year I take a writing retreat—I have one coming up in a few weeks, in fact—and those long weekends out of town—and alone—have proven to be critically important to my progress as a poet. Keats didn’t have kids. Neither, for that matter, did Jesus, although he was more a storyteller than a writer.

            On my writing retreats, I write poems, but I do other things, too, like shuffle the manuscript around and spend long, fuzzy moments over a cup of tea. It’s all part of the work of poetry.

            But in the mean time, I have to make my spots of time work—the minutes that open up between feeding and playing and cleaning and paper-grading. There are actually a lot of free minutes in the day, if we’re being honest about it (thank you, Xbox); they’re just not contiguous. A poetry project makes it easier to get down to business in those archipelagos of time we do have.

            Throughout February, I’ll be operating from a word bank that I’m still finalizing. This means that each poem will contain words from a list—not all of the words, but some. The trick is to pick interesting words—words that aren’t obvious, but that still evoke some kind of response when I look at them. One of my February words is “litter.” I like how it suggests things—anything—strewn across my path, and I like the sound of it, like dried leaves skittering across the bricks. I don’t know where “litter” is going to take me, but I’m eager to find out.

            My word bank, ultimately, will have twelve to twenty words that anchor my thinking. I have no other plans in mind; it is my hope (and my experience) that the words I choose will want to play together, and that each day they will suggest a subject for rumination.

            I’ll let you know how it goes.