At 50, there's a little less shame in my poetry game

At this point, I’ve been writing seriously for almost three decades, and one part of my process has  changed very little in all that time.

It’s the shame.

Nearly every poem I’ve ever written has started like a train wreck, but not a small one — one dainty wheel off the track. Instead it’s been a chemical spill in a cypress swamp, the poison of foolishness spreading up roots and into trunks and limbs and bleeding across the landscape.

I draft by hand — it’s something about that flow of blood from the heart down the brachial artery and into my hand and fingers; this seems significant as the words spill onto the page. I revise on the computer; it’s just easier to see how the lines are setting up — the places where they jut way out, the places where they stop too soon.

The first lines I write are almost always a report about my immediate situation — what I’m seeing or hearing, what’s bugging me. I just wrote a draft of a poem, in fact, and it begins with the line “I’m always anonymous here.” I was in a coffee shop and feeling completely invisible in the good leather chair in the center of the room. That line didn’t make the cut — my first line almost never makes the cut; it’s just a way for me to mosey in to the real start of the poem, which may come on line two or line twenty or line never-ever, give up, take a nap, try again tomorrow.

This poem turned out to be about the death of a loved one. It had almost nothing to do with me, except the fact that it broke me. That original first line reflects how I almost always feel when I’m out and about in my city. I’m accustomed to small towns — places where you always run into someone you know, and you dare not go out without sprucing yourself up a little. Here, I may as well be wrapped in a blanket with my hair on fire. I don’t know anyone, and none of the strangers around me seem to see me. (Turn 50. You’ll see what I’m talking about.) So I’m a little lonely, a little invisible, a little blue. That’s the song that’s playing on my spiritual sound system, and I’ll be honest — it’s not a bad track to write by. I just have to find the pulse of the pain, to return to that arterial notion.

When I started out with poetry, I used to write this first line or two (or ten) and then furiously obliterate them. I felt ashamed of that raw, unartful honesty. It didn’t rise to the level of poetry; it was a diary entry, and if I didn’t blacken it out, someone might see it. I wouldn’t want that.

I seldom had people over to my house when I was growing up, partly because I lived out of the way in the woods and partly because my house was always messy and chaotic. But one day I did, and I remember the four friends in my bedroom with their heads bent together over my journal. I recall that I had some pretty personal thoughts in there. One entry was about my butt and how flat it was, and how I wished I had a nice, round butt like my friend S., who was present and read every word. I was suffused with shame. One doesn’t write about one’s friend’s butt.

My false starts used to make me feel that way — like I was caught imagining a more callipygian self, constructed from the better spare parts of my friends. I wouldn’t just cross through these lines; I’d go over them again and again, scribbling Xs and angles and curlicues so that there was no chance anyone could make out the letters beneath. I guess the Xing motion was a contemplative process for me, because eventually I’d make my way to the real poem on the page, and sometimes I’d end up with something deeply satisfying, or at least promising.

I guess I came to feel that truth and maybe beauty lie just past the shame. The trick is to get to them.

These days, I write with a little more abandon. My shame is drying up — it’s like an emotional perimenopause, and the eggs of embarrassment are few and far between, and the ones that do drop defy fertilization. Love me, love my board-straight arse, along with all of my complicated feelings about it.

If I could time-travel, I might want to visit that girl on her bed, her friends gone silent around her with the weight of her revelation. I might try to tell her to give up her shame — no one in that circle was satisfied with her cushions; everyone there understood.

But I wonder if taking away my shame would take away my power. Just as in comic books and on TV, anger turned the Hulk green and unstoppable, my shame made me rose red and transcendent. Maybe shame was exactly what I needed to reach my full poetic potency — and now that I’m a grownup poet, I can skip the shame, or at least nod to it in greeting like an old friend.

Making the most of pockets of time

I’m finding myself pressed for time these days—and “pressed” is a perfect word for it. When you press down hard on something, something has to give. Something goops out the side. When the hours of my day are packed full, what goops out for me is my writing.

Why writing? I think it may be because it’s something I’m not rewarded for, and no one is depending on it. There’s no paycheck linked to my completion of a sonnet. My short stories don’t need homework help. I’m not married to my essays.

And there’s another, bigger reason, too: Writing is hard. It has its technical challenges, obviously, but I’m talking about something a little different here. Good writing, even if it’s the wildest, most impersonal fiction, gets down into our messy inner places. If it’s good, it digs into us, and that’s uncomfortable—even painful at times.

It becomes easy to avoid our writing when our time is limited. We may continue to make time for social media or TV shows, but isn’t it true that writing well requires more time than that? We can passively poke around the digital world while doing other things, but writing requires our whole selves, and it’s not something we can easily hop in and out of.

In most days, I find that I have brief windows of time that no one has a claim on. I’m talking about the ten minutes in the school pickup line or the five minutes on hold with the cable company. As an instructor, maybe it’s the fifteen minutes of in-class writing time I assign my students, or five minutes in the parking lot after work.

These windows aren’t enough for me to write something. Even a small poem requires time for reflection; I’m not just putting down words. But they are useful for keeping the pump primed, the flow going. Lately, I’ve been trying to make the most of my pockets of time, so that when I do have an hour or more of writing time, I’m not empty. There’s something right there at the surface I can draw on to begin.

For those in the same position I am, here are a few five-minute jump-starts I’ve found useful:

Listing. Listing is such a powerful creative technique. A quickly generated list is weird and associative, and it’s practically self-propelling. One item flows into the next. When our inner censor is turned off, we can make surprising connections—the same kinds of connections I love to make in poetry. A journaling type of list is one possibility (“Ways to make more of my time”), but we can also go in a more creative direction (“Ten things I didn’t expect to find on Mars,” or “Reasons I choke on water”). The more fanciful, the more I like them.

Character sketches. This seems like a fiction exercise, but writers in any genre can stay limber by writing a character sketch, or even a description of a real person. I wrote a poem not long ago about my junior high government teacher, who sexually harassed me and treated me very cruelly (#MeToo). Before I wrote about him, I worked to remember him—the sheen of sweat on his upper lip, his nipple-high trousers. My character sketch didn’t end up in my poem, but the vivid memory of this man prepared me to tell my (tardy) truth.

Word associations. This is just what it sounds like. I start with a word, and then I write a new word that the first word calls to mind. I try to avoid forming any kind of narrative; writing in columns down the page instead of in paragraph form is a helpful strategy. I think it must be a characteristic of our minds that we try to make meaning and build associations. What looks like a list of words often tells a secret story, usually about ourselves.

Haiku. If we wanted to write a worthy haiku, we would need much more than a brief window of time in which to do it. This is far from a throwaway form, and I have a great deal of respect for it. But when we’ve pulled forward at the fast-food drive-thru to wait for our fries, we can bust out a quick three lines based on whatever is visible through our windshield. Not everything we write is for posterity, or even for publication, and a pocket-of-time haiku keeps our observational powers honed.

Create a prompt. This idea comes from fiction writer Michael Czyzniejewski, who says he often uses moments when he’s on the run, walking from here to there or standing in the grocery line, to think of a way he can be creative later. When writing time becomes available and we hit the page with a prompt in mind, we save some time that we might otherwise spend trying to decide what to write about.

Envision a revision. I suspect all writers have memories of good ideas that didn’t take off, or any number of failed drafts. Why not take five minutes to apply a new perspective to those pieces? I’ve always found time and distance useful to solving my composition problems.

Read. We can always benefit by sticking a book in our bag to provide inspiration. I also love reading short pieces online. A great place to read the best flash fiction around is SmokeLong Quarterly, and for nonfiction, I love the essays and brief craft pieces in Brevity. I also like to read a poem and noodle over it for a bit, just to see where it might transport me.

Give a lecture. This is embarrassing, OK, but I’m going to put it out there. Sometimes I like to give little lectures to imaginary classrooms about some aspect of writing. It’s just a thing I do when I’m by myself, maybe driving a long distance. The thing about lecturing is that the lecturer is forced to clarify her own thoughts before communicating them with others. The faux lecture, an apparent act of foolishness, can actually be very instructive.

Even the busiest person can eventually carve out an hour or two. These five-minute exercises can keep us limber enough to make the most of our time when our lives allow it.

Sometimes an exercise is just an exercise

I was reading submissions for a publication recently, and I came across a poem with a distinctive and unusual title. Below it, in the epigraph position, was the attribution line—something along the lines of “After Pablo Neruda,” only a different poet was named.

On a hunch, I looked up the poet and the title together, and what I suspected proved to be true: One word of the title had been replaced with another, and the poem itself enacted this Mad Libs substitution strategy throughout.

Imagine, as an example of this, if we were to start with a widely anthologized contemporary poem, maybe Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons,” and change each persimmon to a kumquat. That poem is based on confusion between the words “persimmon” and “precision,” so I suppose we’d need a comparable word to stumble upon, like, I dunno, “ketchup.” 

When the speaker is punished for confusing “kumquat” and “ketchup” by a teacher—not Mrs. Walker, of course, but Mrs. Stalker or Caulker or something—what we find is not a poem that grows more and more original with each substitution; instead, it’s a poem that is increasingly beholden to the original.

The important question is this: Whose poem is our new “Kumquat”? And the answer should be obvious: It is Lee’s.

Imitations provide important lessons for any artist, and not just literary ones. Whenever I visit a major art museum, I see students sketching important works into their notebooks with their pencils. There is much we can learn from our creative forebears.

In almost any creative writing classroom, the imitation poem or story is a standard exercise, and such a transformative one. I don’t recommend eliminating this exercise any time soon. 

But students do need to know the difference between an exercise and an original creative work. I wish more writers would embrace the notion that it’s OK to do exercises, and that not everything we commit to the page needs an expanded life in a literary magazine.

Musicians understand this idea. They might begin their practice session with scales and arpeggios, but these are intended as warm-ups. Mere finger exercises don’t merit a trip to the recording studio. They’re just a precursor for what comes next.

Likewise, visual artists and designers often start with sketches. These might go somewhere and they might not, but they serve as a way to keep the fingers limber and the ideas coming.

Playing around with scales might suggest a pleasing progression of notes, and sketches might suggest a viable work of art—that’s often the hope. The exercises are an important step in the process, but the actual artifacts—pages of initial sketches, perhaps—are not usually seen as work that requires saving.

We writers are a different story. When we put effort into a piece, we tend to want it to go somewhere. We’ve worked hard and made some discoveries—writing always seems to lead to insight; that’s just the nature of it. Sometimes there’s an idea, an image, a turn of phrase that isn’t easy to re-house in a new piece, so we’re left with scraps. Often, our scraps remain scraps; an occasion to use our discards may never arise, and we’re left holding the most brilliant unattached sentence or phrase the world has never seen.

That imitation poem I encountered in a submission file had some nice moves in it, and many of these were the poet’s own. While it had a copied structure—both formal and rhetorical—it had some original flourishes. I get why the writer wanted it to find an audience, and the attribution line shows an admirable desire to honor the original writer. (By the way, I do believe a poem can start as an imitation and rise to the level of original art, but it has to involve much more than substitution to do so.)

I just wish we writers were more willing to let exercises be exercises. It feels important to publish, but there have been many occasions when I’ve gone off half-cocked, publishing a poem before its time, or publishing a poem that, in a more sober mindset, would never have come into its time—a poem that was meant to start and end its life as an exercise.

In writing this, I may seem elitist or stodgy. What I’m really trying to do is to make a case for play. What would the state of poetry look like if we writers let ourselves goof off more? Taking off the pressure to publish—taking away those expectations and stakes—gives us freedom to have fun. 

There’s no reason an office can’t be a playroom from time to time.

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When the poems don't come

Lately, I’ve been finding it hard to write poems.

With a second full-length collection coming out this summer, I should be hitting my poetic stride. Yet I can’t shake the sense that each time I write, I’m writing the very same poem—and that I’ve written the same poem over and over for years.

Sure, I alter bits—focus, diction, syntax, rhetoric, form—but what drives each poem feels inalterably the same. Each one stands as its own tiny chapter in an ongoing treatise on loss.

Poetry is my preferred genre—my “genre of choice” is another way of phrasing it, although poetry seems to have chosen me, rather than the other way around. I write what demands to be written, even if sometimes I first try to chase it away, like skunks from a garbage can, with noise and blue light. 

I find—I’ve always found—that I get very little pleasure from writing poems. I like it when they’re done—I’m proud of the artifacts—but pushing them out into the world is hard and painful work. When the writing isn’t hard, what comes out tends to be something other than a poem, or at least something besides a good one.

I’m decades in to being a poet, but it continues to hurt to write them. On those occasions when they don’t hurt, they read to me as either slick or incomplete. Maybe it’s that I have no skin in the game. Maybe I’m operating from the surface, the top of the head, rather than deeper down inside.

That’s a really apt metaphor, by the way. The intellect operates in a place beyond hurt. Things that come into poems as the product of active reasoning have little capacity for aching. Stitching together a logical if-then series of arguments isn’t a bruising strategy. Even the physical manifestations of mental gymnastics are mild. Maybe we squint a little.

In writing these deeper poems I’m referring to, I’ve found myself doubled over, rocking, clutching my gut. There can be physical pain with deep revelation. When the poetry is good, I’m convinced a higher power is talking to and through me. The only catch is that God speaks in a language of acid.

Let’s be clear: As I stated, this is, in fact, a metaphor. All thinking comes from the brain; we have no other organ with the capacity to reason or even to feel. We think we feel gravel with our feet until we sever our spine and feel nothing.

So this gut talk? That’s still referencing a cerebral process—but as is so often the case, the metaphor feels truer than anything we know about physiology. It is at once physiologically nonsensical and absolutely true that good poetry comes from the gut, and almost anyone who writes understands this to be true.

Throw in some spiritual talk about connecting with a higher intelligence (a god, a muse, the collective unconscious) to get at the heart of a poem, and you’re proving yourself to be willfully ignorant and beyond help—but there’s the voice again, teaching me things I didn’t consciously know.

If we concede that writing must go deeper than the intellect to reach the truths we’re hoping to find (and there’s no reason to believe this—I know plenty of poets who are heady and marvelous), and if we concede that going deep is generally painful, it’s clear why it’s so hard to sit at the writing desk some days.

I have a few methods I use to sneak up on myself, poetically, intellectually, and spiritually:

• Writing upon waking. When we write while fresh out of bed, we’re closer to that storehouse of dream images, and to that profound intelligence that visits us when we sleep. Making writing the first thing we do provides a welcome shortcut into the mystical woods.

• Relying on chance. Most insight I have comes when two unrelated things are ratcheted and bound together. These “things” can be images that play together in a fascinating, new way, or they can be words that I hadn’t associated with one another previously. Which cards does the fortune-teller throw down, order and direction random? Which words does the thesaurus pull up? (Fortune-teller, soothsayer, augur, diviner, clairvoyant ….)

• Chanting. There are a lot of online videos of people chanting, including those offered in long syllables or those in different languages, like Latin or Sanskrit. I find that using my actual voice to chant warms up my poetic voice so that I’m more ready to meet the page.

• Walking. In “On Walking,” Henry David Thoreau wrote of the value of walking in the wilderness, an activity he called sauntering, for shaking off the village and its cares. “What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?” he penned. I benefit greatly from being in the woods, and my writing thrives on the storehouse of images I see on even a short walk.

• Taking political action. There’s a lot to contend with in the world, and thoughts of the environment being harmed, or of people being subjected to pain, can keep me from wanting to focus on my (selfish) thoughts. But a writer has to be self-ish. The self is the one who does the work, and it must be given rein. I find that if I spend a little time involved in action—letters to legislators, since writing is the way I know to have an impact on the world—I can give myself permission to do my private musing. One caveat: I wouldn’t write a letter to a senator immediately before writing. That’s pointing our consciousness in the wrong direction.

• Jotting. Sometimes I like to write Jane Austen style—quickly jotting a few notes to chew on and then hiding them from view when someone enters the room. It’s a skill any parent-writer develops naturally, but it’s an excellent way to keep the consciousness alert and ready for when it’s time to approach the page.

Another good strategy is to write a blog post, I think—so now I’m off to write. We’ll see how it goes.

Against dailiness: Time and attention in poetry

Lately, I’ve been trying to make some changes.

I’m trying to be kinder. Trying to watch less news. Trying to be more giving, more contemplative, more focused. Trying to soften.

I’m also trying to change the way I write, and to be gentle with myself as I do. I recently lost my friend and mentor Michelle Boisseau, a superb poet and an incomparable teacher of poetry. I was lucky enough to have her in my life for almost three decades, having met her when I was an undergraduate at Morehead State University. The first poem I handed her then was about rainbows. She handed back instruction in how to be deeply authentic—to live observantly well below any rainbow—and I was instantly hooked. That was how I began my life as a poet.

Michelle’s last advice to me had to do with my habit of writing daily poems—a practice that has been important to me, almost like meditation, for years. But a few months ago, she asked me why I was so keen on poem-a-day projects. Why didn’t I invest more time—go further in?

It had been years since my mentor had offered direction about my poems, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this guidance. Daily writing was how I worked. I specialized in small poems, sonnet-sized or below, and I labored over the page, putting hours into crafting each piece. There was nothing light about my labor, nothing throwaway about my poems, and I stand by the work. Still, I couldn’t deny it—there was something to what Michelle was telling me.

I’m realizing more and more that I have trained myself to pay big attention to small things—status updates and tweets. Magazine articles. Songs and sitcoms. Nothing in my daily life prepares me for sustained thought, and very seldom do I return today to an idea that was percolating yesterday. Each day brings some new cynosure.

Of course, we can think of many important poems that were substantively completed in a day. The Romantics offer plenty of examples. Think of William Wordsworth, practically running as he approached his door after a ramble, “Tintern Abbey” ready to spill from his head. Or think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, frantic to record “Kubla Khan” in the moments between waking from an opium-enhanced dream and the unfortunate knock on the door by that damnable Porlockian.

But my little poems about my life aren’t the same as these. Maybe they have more in common with Emily Dickinson’s work—her poems born complete on the back flaps of envelopes. I know I flatter myself with any of these comparisons, but I’m thinking about process as much as product, and of that part of writing that occurs far from the page, as we noodle and observe.

I should note that I see my friend’s advice as very targeted—a suggestion meant specifically for me, a midlife poet with a book under her belt and another on the way. This probably isn’t something she would have said to a beginner, for whom experimentation and variety can be richly instructive and rewarding. I think she was offering particular advice from a mature poet to a maturing one, and it had to do with allowing myself to follow my thoughts well into their depths, rather than staying at or near the surface.

When I first knew Michelle, she advised our university literary journal, called Inscape. It is not lost on me that the concept of inscape, that term coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is in back of her suggestion. I don’t think Michelle was telling me to labor more over prosody (although that’s not a bad idea, either). I think she was seeing the potential in me to explore the inscape of me and everything around me, and she was giving me permission, in a life built of student compositions and editing projects and PTA meetings, to probe the thingness of things, the instress.

It feels incomparably fine to be recognized as someone whose insights might matter. When I sit at my desk, though, this new challenge is a bit of a burden. I’d like to tell you the astonishing thing my young son said in his sleep, or maybe describe what the sun did to the remnants of the ice storm in the trees. These are not new thoughts, but they’re beautiful ones, and I’d like to nudge them around a bit, see where they take me. But I have something big to say, and I can’t be sure that ice-coated branches will get me there.

Of course they can. What I mean is that I’m not sure how to get to a big there from my very modest here. There’s no map, and the way is not direct. And that’s the real poetic challenge, and one I hope I’m up to—my new job is to lay down that path.

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A Writers' Spirit: Risk and return with language

Language has value. It has been the source of most things of value in my life, and I lean hard on it to help me make meaning and memories and to give something of value to the world.

Language is a vehicle that conveys meaning from a source to an audience. It’s part of a circulatory system; we send it out and we anticipate a response. Most of the pain I’ve known in my life has come from a breakdown of that circulatory system—that river. My “I love you” has been unreturned; my “Goodbye” served as a terminus for the flow; my inability to say “Goodbye” left me parched and wanting.

I have several defined roles in the world, outside of home and family, and these all have language as their core. I teach composition to college students. I do freelance writing and editing for all kinds of people, literary and otherwise. I blog, obviously. And I score standardized writing tests. 

I love language; it’s the most stalwart, constant thing in my life. And I get along with it. Most of the time, it pretty much does what I ask it to, and in return, I frequently set aside time to do what it tells me to do. Sometimes I just have to trust it, but when I do—when I’m wise—it comes bearing gifts. I can read what I’ve written and find surprises inside—beauty in its structures, meaning beneath its surface.

But I don’t think you have to love language for it to operate in this holy way—part mirror, part gazing globe, part oracle.

The fact is, we all lean on the sacred staff of language sometimes. We take a knee, a ring pinched between our fingers; we stand up to be counted or to testify. We sing or we pray or we ask for a raise. We breathe simple syllables toward a baby. We whisper goodbye into the whorls of an ear. 

Sometimes words are just what we need. We’ve all seen the struggle of a couple’s friend to offer the perfect wedding toast, or of a son or daughter who has one shot to sum up the life of a loved one in a eulogy. There are songs common to these occasions, and some are chosen for their words—their perfect words, it seems to the chooser. I know few people of a Christian faith who don’t respond on a cellular level to the lyrics of “Amazing Grace,” and that’s true for me, too, even though I have some deep theological issues with the song. (“Wretch?” Nah. Not me.)

I think of language as a means of exchange, almost exactly like money, an enduring poetic topic for me. Money holds steady unless we pass it along through investment or, to a lesser extent, through banking, which offers interest payments. We see ourselves as depleting money through spending it, but really, we get products or services we desire, and that’s just the money in a different form. The most useless thing we can do with money is keep it in our pocket, where it doesn’t work for us and it doesn’t grow.

Language is like that. We have to risk it for return—and writers take this risk all the time. But you don’t have to be a writer to understand risk and return. Put yourself in high school; just try to procure that prom date without language. You could avoid the risk, but that means staying home in your sweat pants on the big night. A proposal (or a response to it) is a function of language. So is an interview. These are the risks most of us come to know.

I always remind myself that being a writer—having an intimate relationship with language—gives me power that some just don’t have. I’m fortunate in that way, but I remind myself that all power is to be used with generosity and love. I’m not one to mock a misspelling on a menu, for instance, because I’m a terrible cook, and I take pleasure and relief from the fact that someone else has a handle on it. I know many writers who glory in others’ errors. I am not above a good laugh at a goof—spelling “tap” with two Ps, say—when the error goes hand in hand with a larger ugliness or evil. I don’t think this tendency speaks well of me, though. An intentionally or carelessly false accusation is an evil act; mockery of the spelling of the accusation is a wrong.

When I teach students, I have no trouble approaching language with love. Their best attempts aren’t always successful, but there is always success in them somewhere. It’s an honor to help them get insight into their words and find a better way to arrange them.

When I edit, I channel the writer and try to help the work to reflect the writer even better. Grammar and mechanics take a back seat to voice sometimes in a creative work, and when I correct these errors, I find a new way to say the words with the same personality shining through.

When I score standardized tests, I focus on rewarding the good instead of penalizing the bad. These, in fact, are the instructions under which I operate—one of the only kindnesses in the whole endeavor.

In the past week, I’ve witnessed a situation that has hurt a lot of people who love words as much as I do. The closure of a press has left several books abandoned before ever being published, and others orphaned with the prospect of being out of print at the end of the year. Everyone who was involved with the press on either side—writer or editor—is feeling real pain.

I wonder what words, if any, can help the wordsmiths? I think they need to be gentle, humble ones. Risk doesn’t always pay off, but there is much grace in the effort.

Simultaneous submissions: A horserace

It’s time someone attempted to explain the ethical horserace of simultaneous submitting.

I am a big believer in simultaneous submitting—that is, submitting the same work to multiple outlets at the same time. It’s the only reasonable way for a writer to operate in today’s publishing environment. Thirty years ago, a few dozen journals considered postal submissions from a much smaller pool of writers, but today, new journals are created all the time, and all typically receive thousands or even thousands of submissions per year.

It’s hard to swim to the top of a submission pile when dealing with those numbers. Response times are frequently slow, if responses are offered at all—more and more journals seem to be adopting the “no news is bad news” model of submission responses—and serial, rather than simultaneous, submissions could mean a lot of wait time.

But there are right ways and wrong ways to simultaneously submit, and there is a cardinal rule that ethical writers must follow: The first journal to accept a piece wins.

To a savvy submitter, this cardinal rule should suggest a few practices for sending out work. 

* First and foremost, aim high. The only practical place to start with a submission is the top. I guess the top varies from writer to writer, but when I invoke the term, I mean to reach up, over our own head. I’ve been in Poetry, which is an excellent journal and a publication I’m very proud of, so for me the top is higher than that—maybe The New Yorker, if the top is determined by the number of readers.

* Also, aim equally. It would be the height of folly to submit simultaneously to The New Yorker and a brand-new, unknown journal. Submitting should be a patient practice, governed by the idea that we’re trying to get each piece into the best possible journal, and for my money, that means the journal with the biggest readership. With all else being equal, I want my poems, stories, and essays to be widely read.

* Aim reasonably. When I was first starting to submit, it made sense to send the same work to, say, eight different journals. I made progress quickly; at first there were more rejections than acceptances, but then my success turned—with a few good credits in my bio, probably, but also with more experience and growth as a writer and submitter. I gradually lowered my simultaneous submission rates to six or four or three journals, and I must confess that these days, I’m pretty lucky with poetry submissions, and I no simultaneously submit in this genre. (Fiction, my weakest genre, is a different story—I still simultaneously submit those few stories I send out because these aren’t as readily accepted by journals.)

* Remember, it’s a horserace. If we submit to multiple journals, and we were careful to aim high and to target journals of similar prominence, we should be prepared to allow the first journal to accept our work to print it. This is one of the main reasons we submit to similarly tiered journals; in the example above, if The Podunk Journal accepts our work on Monday morning and Poetry accepts it on Monday night, we’re honor-bound to go with Podunk. That’s the journal that won the race. Acknowledgement of any acceptance should be immediate, and so should withdrawal from other journals. We must drop everything to take care of this crucial piece of business, mainly so that editors won’t waste time on unavailable work.

* Know the journals you submit to. It’s best to obtain or view a full issue, but most journals have sample contents online. A lot of precious time can be wasted by writers who send poems to fiction journals or traditional work to experimental journals. Investigating the market helps writers to submit respectfully.

* Thank an editor. Respect should be the name of the game when submitting. Editing a journal is hard work, and most of the time editors are either uncompensated or poorly paid. I definitely think the respect should go both ways, and I have a dim view of disrespectful correspondence from editors. But both parties have to make an effort to achieve a positive atmosphere in publishing. No one wants an antagonistic relationship among people who operate within our field.

* Follow journal guidelines to a T. A journal announces its rules and intentions, and writers should abide by them or avoid them. There are enough journals that we don’t have to submit to journals whose policies we dislike. This is especially true for simultaneous submissions. Some old-guard journals don’t allow simulsubs, and that’s their prerogative, to an extent. (They don’t actually have a right to tell writers what to do with their work, but it’s the principle of the thing. There’s no reason to send to a journal with policies we don’t like.)

Beyond all of these rules and best practices, the most important part of submitting is the writing part. One reason I gave up simultaneous submissions for poetry is that it prompted me to finish and refine more work and to keep my creativity going.

Submitting should be a deliberate and thoughtful process, but it’s not a writer’s main job. When publishing is our primary focus, our writing suffers, and we become something other than an artist.

Writers write. And then, in their non-writing time, they work to find an audience—the largest and best one they can.

On finding time to write

Most mornings, my writing session ends with a drumroll.

That’s how it seems, anyway, as small feet make their careful way down the stairs and then run—pat, pat, pat, pat, pat—to my spot on the couch.

When my little one comes to claim his morning hug, the writing day is over—so the trick is to get up early enough to accomplish what I need to do. The hug is the most important thing, but the writing matters a lot to me, too, so it’s always a difficult balance.

What gives, usually, is sleep—and I don’t see any way around that. Ambitious writing means earlier start times, and with a family, there’s very little wiggle-room on when the day ends. I can’t easily go to bed at 9 p.m. when there is a need for homework supervision and bedtime stories and my own work of course planning and paper grading.

Sometimes the issue resolves itself in a midday nap, when time allows for it. I’m not as effective as a writer as my day progresses, so morning time feels crucial. I like to write when I’m fresh from dreaming and my ideas are not polluted by media of any type (including social). 

There is some writing work I can tackle effectively in the afternoon. That’s a great time for administrative work, like submitting to journals or refining the order and contents of a book manuscript. I need my dreamy, contemplative self for composing, but my alert, midday consciousness is capable of getting work done.

An ideal writing day for me doesn’t happen at home. I need a retreat, and that’s something I do every two months or so—I escape for full days of writing and noodling and snoozing and writing some more. The best retreats involve at least three nights in some private lodging away from home and family, and I work hard to ensure that I’m all caught up with professional responsibilities before I go. Otherwise, the opportunity is wasted.

While home life doesn’t allow for ideal writing days, if I configure each day carefully, writing can happen. Here’s how:

The night before:

* Charge my laptop.

* Get the coffee pot ready to go. (I have a very sweet partner who does this for me every single day.)

* Get to bed as early as possible.

* Jot down those good ideas that come as I’m drifting off to sleep. It’s OK that I won’t be able to read my dark-room handwriting the next day; there’s something about the act of writing that cements ideas for me.

First thing in the morning:

* While still in bed, remember what I can of my dreams overnight—something I find very difficult, usually. My trick: Focus on the feet, and tense and flex the muscles there; then work my way up the legs, to the torso, the hands and arms, the shoulders, the neck, the head. Sometimes I can squeeze a dream out like toothpaste from a tube.

* Get up, press “on” on the coffeepot, and start writing by hand to maximize the mind-body connection.

* At some point, switch to the computer to get down the hand work while I can still read it, and to massage form, especially lineation.

* Welcome the cat’s intrusion. He’ll want a can of food, but then he’ll curl up beside me.

* Write a blog post.

* Get interrupted by kid feet. Cuddle the kid. Watch the news. Get everyone ready for the day.

After everyone leaves:

* Now it’s time for paid work—editing, teaching, grading. No matter how much of this I do, there is always lots more I can get to.

* Absently pet the cat from time to time.

* Grow drowsy and curl up for an hourlong nap, or be too busy to allow myself to get drowsy and curl up for an hourlong nap.

* If I reach a point where I’m caught up and focused, try the administrative work of being a writer and literary citizen.

* Do something political—make a phone call or write an e-mail to a legislator, for instance.

* Read a book. Take notes in the margins of a poetry collection in preparation for a review.

When everyone gets home:

* Do home stuff. Tickle people. Eat things. Wrestle with the cat, who will go too far and bite my wrist and get yelled at for it. Repeat.

* Jot notes as ideas occur for blog topics, poem snippets, essay ideas, submission opportunities, etc.—doing this keeps writing central, and writers have to have writing at the center to be effective.

* Equip kids with devices to buy some time for writing a book review and preparing for the next day.

* Avoid housework. Artists don’t do housework.

* Tackle “The night before” list, above.

It’s readily apparent that this is not how one writes an enduring literary masterpiece. Rather, this is a recipe for modest pieces, and these accrue, obviously—they become a larger whole.

Perhaps in a future post we can explore how the U.S. economy doesn’t allow people to live an artist’s life, which must include long interludes of navel gazing and cloud examination to be fully effective. My schedule here reflects a typical artist’s life—having to be very calculated to fit everything in, when “everything” includes hours of poorly compensated adjunct teaching labor, for me, or underpaid full-time teaching labor, or a job on the clock, or a salaried position that claims more than its fair share of would-be private time.

The good news is that we can get a lot of work done in the time that is available to us, if we look carefully at how our days are configured. A writer’s life is generally incompatible with a sitcom-watching life or an hourlong-pedicure life or a darn-your-own-socks life or a take-up-the-flugelhorn life. But nothing is off the table if we approach life deliberately and treat time like the holy and limited commodity that it is.

Poetry makes everything happen

Art by Mark Davis

It’s not true that poetry makes nothing happen. Not even Auden believed that.

When W.H. Auden wrote those famous words in his elegy, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” he meant something very different than that truncated pull-quote suggests. We need to hear him out:

          Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.

Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still.,

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.

Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden says—instead, it is the means by which change occurs. In this same way, a highway doesn’t transport you, but try getting anywhere without it. It’s essential.

And poetry still has an effect—as do fiction, essays, raps, lyrics, chants, screams. We can be quiet as unacceptable actions happen around us, or we can use our voices. We can call out and fight the power. And we can be a voice for compassion and dignity, too.

In my lifetime, there has never been since an urgent need for it.

Time to make time

I made a bold start today on a big writing project that I plan to tackle every day until it’s done.

It’s a prose thing, a work of some size, and I’ve had it on the back burner for a long time—after mothering, teaching, writing poems, and blogging.

Since my semester started today and I had to teach at 7 a.m., I got up at 5 a.m. to write for an hour and a half. I live less than a mile from the college, and I’m extremely low-maintenance, to an almost troubling degree, so this is very doable for me. In fact, I was so excited to get started that I woke up naturally at 4:30 a.m. and cleared the electronic decks of social media, e-mail, and the like. Once the coffee was done, I was ready to write.

Yep. I was ready to write … a very big book.

It’s hard to start a haiku. After seventy minutes of false starts, I am here to report that it is nearly impossible start anything of size in a small window of time.

I’m always harping on this—the great barrier our capitalistic society places on the artist, who has to fit creative work in on the side. It’s incredibly affirming and powerful to foreground our art instead, putting the act of creation first and tucking the minutes we need for everything else into the spaces around it.

But there’s a problem with my plan, and it is that the time I’ve allotted myself isn’t sufficient for thinking deeply about anything. That means we sometimes produce surface work that stays at the surface—and often beautifully so—but the surface is not the place of discovery.

A new president will be inaugurated this week, and now is a good time to think about the ways in which our political and economical systems put pressure on our art. This problem is unlikely to be relieved any time soon, if it ever will in the United States.

What can artists do, if putting aside a block of time isn’t sufficient?

Well, we could put aside larger blocks of time. But that means letting some things go—volunteer positions, enjoyable distractions, connection with friends.

Some things are more easily set aside than others. I have a very energetic social media presence, but I have cut back significantly since November of 2016. It helps that I don’t care to read much of what people are posting and discussing.

Likewise, I’ve been a huge newshound most of my life, but these days I don’t watch news shows on TV, and I take it in small doses on the radio. If it’s not on my hour or so of listening to Morning Edition, I allow myself not to know it, for the most part—although I still end up reading lots of newspapers and media posts online. Knowing is important, and staying informed is a hard habit to break.

I also have some hobbies that don’t much serve my art. For instance, I really love cheesy mystery novels—but I’ve been working on Feliz Navidead since Advent. I don’t even remember who navi-DIED, and I’m not sure I care anymore.

Our time has value, and almost every day we have to give it up for some form of commerce. In the next administration, wherever possible, I plan to hold on to it. I plan to keep my time, to maintain my focus, and, when possible and practical, to say no.