Making the most of the times we can't write

OK, yeah, sure. April’s a cruel month. As an academic, though, I’m not especially enamored of early May, either.

May is when I’m schlepping not one, but two tote bags from classroom to classroom. My fingers are inky and my schedule is full. Ideas for stories, poems, and essays come—they always come—but there is never time to write them, or even, I find, to think about them. Inevitably, some good but overwhelmed student is hanging by a thread, and it falls upon me to stitch him or her back into the fabric of college life. A poem can feel like a luxury in times like these.

The problem is that I am in the habit of writing daily, usually upon waking. I almost never spend less than an hour writing in the morning, except when grading commands my time and students command my attention. The end of the spring semester is the most difficult time of the year.

To be clear, I have not always practiced daily writing. There was a period of several years when I couldn’t bring myself to write at all. My confidence had been shaken by unkind words from trusted people. And those non-writing years were deeply painful to me, and I promised myself not to repeat them.

As a result, not writing for even a few consecutive days fills me with dread. Today is May 4. My thoughts will be fully mine again around May 16. Until then, I have no time and no mental space for the act of writing, but I retain the desire. There are a few strategies I employ at times like this, just to keep the pump primed.

First, I acquire a little notebook, and not just any notebook—a beautiful one. I have used handmade booklets or a colorful Moleskine, but it’s always something that feels good in the palm and seems special. I understand that this may sound hokey, but a special notebook can be a small offering to the words I don’t have time for.

What goes in the notebook? Starts. I fill the bank with ideas I can use later to get things going. Here are some of the things I collect:

• Overheard words. If I’m grading at a coffee shop or taking a break with my kid at the playground, I always catch snippets that interest me—phrases flying loose that want to be tethered to a poem.
• Character sketches. Even my students can provide inspiration for a character in a story. There is a great deal of daylight between my actual student and Johnny Fictionguy, but aspects of a person’s unusual job or avocation can providing food for fiction thought. Writing it down preserves it for when time does appear.
• Images. I can be walking down the university hallway and challenge myself to come up with a simile for how I’m feeling at that very moment, or a perfect description for the feeling of my mother’s cheek when I kiss it. When I hit the elevator, I take a moment and jot it down.
• Puzzles. Sometimes writing, particularly poems and essays, begins with a conundrum. It doesn’t have to be A Study in Scarlet. The mystery can be much more fundamental. Right now the biggest mystery in my life is to wonder why a trusted friend let me down in a profoundly devastating way. I can noodle around with that kind of brain-teaser for as long as doing so feels healthy, and the question will never grow less vexing. This is the stuff of poetry, though—and pinning down a few words in the midst of real suffering can preserve the memory of that feeling until I can address it on the page.
• Anaphorae or listsicles. I may not have time to write a complete piece in a sitting, but I can generate sections—lines or paragraphs—that I can assemble and order later. I don’t even need to overthink it. It’s enough to write the words “I want” and then track my desires so that I can pretty them up later. I want a tin roof sundae. I want Sunday. I want my son today. I want the sun to stay. It’s just a more structured way of noodling, and it may come to nothing at all. It keeps the hand and the brain moving, though, and that’s worth a lot in these forced dry spells.

There are a few other good strategies, too. If I can’t write a draft of an essay, I can still do a little freewriting (this, for me, in a larger notebook or legal pad), if only for a minute or two. In general, freewriting has the most value when we can jump on it early and make something of it, but even when we can’t, it still keeps, to some extent; it can be a shortcut from a cold start.

I also enjoy found poetry—those snippets of menus and signs and articles and mailings that capture our attention for their strangeness or double meaning. These are best captured with the camera on my phone, although there’s no reason they can’t be jotted in that notebook, too, to keep it all together.

In a little over a week, don’t bother calling because I’m not going to answer. Instead, I’m going to cozy up somewhere and write until I can’t feel my fingers. These little starts will make the job easier, and I’ll have a sense that my time away from writing has not been wasted. In reality, it hasn’t even been away.

Theory, schmeory

            

            I got into a friendly debate with a writer acquaintance the other day.

            The person is very invested in creative writing theory. She teaches writing, and focuses almost exclusively on theory with her students and when doing her own writing.

            Like my associate, I love to read about craft and theory. I particularly enjoy reading writers’ accounts of their own processes in a very personal way, like I’m attempting right now. Scholarly essays are also great, though, and I read (and write) those, too. For any serious discussion of writing, in any genre or style, count me fully in.

            But there is a time and place for everything, and the time to apply theory is near the end of the process—not the beginning.

            It is all well and good for graduate students to debate the veracity of Frank Kermode or Longinus or Wayne C. Booth. That’s what grad students do; they have the luxury of time to talk about fascinating and non-essential things.

            I’m mostly kidding. Sometimes a guy like Frank Kermode has exactly the answer we need; he certainly has much to say, some of it worthwhile. But students have stories and poems and essays to write, and having Frank Kermode in one’s head isn’t helpful to that process.

            I’m not sure why I’m picking on poor dead Frank Kermode. Maybe it’s because he specialized in endings. But the logic applies to all theorists. If we’re serious about writing, our reading of theory should be vast and varied and deep.

            It should also be separate.

For beginning writers, it’s a mistake to be too thinky. A poem or story is an artifact of the spirit, best felt and honored and marveled at. I love to hear about where work came from—the inspiration, the source of images, the personal connection even an emerging writer has to the art. Dredging up what the spirit has to offer is not a particularly intellectual pursuit, in my experience. It shares much more with the breath and the blood and the spine than it does with the noodle.

Once a draft is down on the page, there are almost always problems to fix—logical gaps, missing information, rocky language. It’s time to get thinky then, when the body and the spirit have brought us as far as they can. But even this initial revisionary thought comes from a personal source, rather than the ghost of Jacques Derrida.

So, then—when do we consider Derrida?

Look, I have no beef with theorists. They just have very little to do with writing, and time spent talking about theory in a creative writing classroom is time spent not talking about writing. As we go along in our writing education, we find less and less that we need to say about our writing anyhow. The very first time I workshopped with my MFA cohort, they all laid down their preferences immediately, and I spent two years hearing N say I needed to play more with form and F say that he liked the sexy parts and B calling for more imagination. They were all right, but there wasn’t a great deal of value to hearing it every single week.

Enter Derrida. When basic problems are in the rear-view mirror and workshops have become a predictable litany of likes and dislikes, it’s extremely useful to have outside viewpoints to consider and theories to hold our work up to. Ideally, we would have been introduced to some theory along the way, but too much of a focus on other people’s ideas about writing can distract us from our purpose: writing.

Mind you, we can also have too much theory in graduate workshops. The further along we get in our study, the more we regard our “products” as, well, products: widgets from the poem factory, doodads from the story plant. We become fixated on fixing, without much regard for the fact that these artifacts represent our deepest, truest selves.

Some of us can grow very calculated in our approach to our art, and our poems and essays and stories become artifacts of the noodle instead of our spirit. I get to this point regularly in my creative life. My writing habits become predictable and my rhetoric becomes repetitive. I lose the freshness. With discipline, though, and with the bravery to try something new, we can get back to the wonder that led us down this path to begin with.

I’m sorry to report that Alain Robbe-Grillet probably won’t get us there—not on his own, anyway. Art really does start and end in the artist. Critical reading can inform the artist, and that’s all to the good. But art happens on its own, and there’s not a single word of critical theory that is essential to the practice.

National Poetry Life

            We’ve arrived at the last day of National Poetry Month (happy NaPoMo, belatedly!), and another 30/30 project has come and gone.

The 2016 edition was no different than any other year for me. I took on too many projects, both writing poems and reviewing poetry releases. All across the Internet, poetry publishers offered fascinating daily features and prompts, but there were so many that I had a hard time keeping up with them. Add in an urgent family medical crisis, some unexpected travel, and a bout of depression, and the picture comes clear. I didn’t quite manage to do all that I set out to accomplish.

            Each year, I make grand plans to honor and promote poetry during the month of April. Among those plans is the writing of a daily poem, and that is a personal commitment I really enjoy. When I’m living life the way I want to, rather than working too hard in order to make ends meet, I do have a daily writing habit, and if I’m not working on a larger project, it’s not unusual for a small poem to result from each day’s efforts.

            A 30/30 project—that is, dedicating oneself to writing a poem per day for thirty straight days—can be invigorating for an artist, and it’s definitely fun to look back on a successful effort and mark the accomplishment. In recent years, I completed two 30/30 projects for Tupelo Press as part of their ongoing fundraising series, and work from those two very productive months is included in both of my soon-to-be-published poetry collections. Creatively, this small, pleasurable source of pressure is good for me.

            But as a way of celebrating National Poetry Month, I wonder if we would be better served to turn our attention outward, instead of inward, and to celebrate other poets’ work, rather than generating more of our own.

            This is the twentieth year for National Poetry Month, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. On its website, the Academy offers a list of goals for the month-long celebration, and I notice that all of them seem to focus on reading, instead of writing, poetry.

Lord knows poetry needs a little help. Even I find myself reaching more often for the comparative ease of fiction, and most readers avoid poetry altogether, and perhaps never even encounter verse at all, whether online or on a shelf.

            In recent days, I’ve heard a few 30/30 participants seek clarification about whether their poems from the project should be regarded as published if they’ve been posted on a website or in social media. It’s a tricky question, and the answer has a lot to do with scope.

            If you post your poem on your Facebook page for your five hundred friends to see, you could probably regard the work as unpublished. If you have five thousand friends (the maximum number allowed), and you’re trying to be published in a print journal with a print run of eight hundred or a thousand, it is awfully hard to make the case that you have not already had your work made public for an audience—a larger audience than most print journals could hope to provide.

            When a literary organization posts your work on a website, as some do, that work is published. Sometimes the organization removes the posts after a period of time—maybe after the month is through—and the evidence disappears. But if you are asked later by a journal to sign a contract declaring the work to be unpublished, you face a bit of a conundrum. The work was indeed published—from the Latin publicare, “made public”—even if it later disappeared.

            My philosophy? We should write more poems and not fret about the status of a month’s work. We have more months.

            A lot of people throw their heart and soul into daily poetry projects during National Poetry Month. I love reading each day’s poem, and I enjoy sharing mine. Sometimes I look back at poems I’ve produced and I wonder what I was thinking, writing or sharing such a mess. This, though, is what makes every April crackle and buzz with energy. It can be fun to put ego aside and just share in the creative process for a bit.

            To reach this goal of building a readership for poetry, though, I’ll bet we can do better. We can share those poems we love and that move us so that perhaps other readers will catch the bug and begin to look for meaning in poems, too. There is nothing more stunning than that poem that speaks directly to us and reminds us we’re all connected.

It’s so strange to offer up a single month to something that is the driving force in my life every single day. I love the communal nature of National Poetry Month, and I will always jump in with both feet. But I am living a National Poetry Life, and I cherish the work and company of fellow poets every day of the year.

Are you with me? If so, here is our challenge for NaPoLife: Let’s continue to be dedicated to, or even obsessed by, poetry. Perhaps we might write something longer—apply days or even weeks of concentration to a single poem and see where it takes us. And we can read poetry, and share poems, and promote the work of poets we admire.

We can build audiences for poetry every day of the year, and in doing so, we can transform the lives and spirits of people we love. It’s a profoundly worthy lifelong mission.

An Appreciation of GREENHOUSE by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet

I like what Bob Hicok says in his blurb on the back cover of Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s Greenhouse (Durham, NC: Bull City Press, 2014): “These poems make a basic fact palpable—when a child is born, a mother is born.”

In this collection, winner of the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Competition, Stonestreet provides an honest look into the life of a mother—our daily frustrations, our special powers, the random grossness of it all.

The very first lines in the book, in the poem “Like That,” offer a view of motherhood that is instantly familiar to this mom, but one like I’ve never seen in a book of poetry:

The first time

                        I leaned over and swept the tip of my smallest fingernail down into

the whorl of your ear (bigger than your elbow­), and you yelped

in violation:

                                                                                    forgive me

it is no longer my ear

                                    (little boat, little shell I carved)

flushing pink, even now, at the embarrassment, the satisfaction—

sliver-moon of yellow wax:

                                                                        tiny victory.

Let’s face it—the parent in the room is easy to spot. When that little person starts to barf, nearly everyone turns away in revulsion. It’s the parent who sweeps in with cupped hands, just as it's the parent who retrieves the wax, who wipes the nose.

Stonestreet gets this, and remarkably, she gets the beauty in this, as her “sliver-moon of yellow wax” suggests. And there is beauty in the humanness children present us with. A friend of mine would frequently bemoan the fact that her husband refused to change diapers. My response? “If you don’t change diapers, you don’t get to change diapers”—meaning that you miss out on the bonding and the intimacy and the humanity of those moments.

I mention this because Stonestreet’s poems resonate so perfectly with my feelings on parenthood. It’s true that she had me at earwax, but she kept me on every page, with every perfect observation. She writes about the too-muchness of parenting so beautifully, as in her poem “Baby/Honey,” about the proscription against feeding honey to infants, and other frightening things we learn online. Stonestreet writes, “when it feels like too much, my friend says, I try to remember to look at their hands”—and I recognize this, a strategy I used, too, gazing in wonder at those two little starfish.

Stonestreet also depicts the crisis of confidence that parents can feel when the main concern of their lives is regarded as trivial by most. It’s a problem writing parents may take more deeply to heart than others. She does this very effectively in “More, Again (Poppies)”:

There is popcorn all over the rug. Do you want

me to tell that story? Because almost guaranteed you will find

it boring

            (domestic) (female) (too much) (too little, too small)

Check one. Move on. Too bad: You will find

pieces for weeks, in the couch, constellation

of explosion, brittle gold against the blue, glint and scatter

visible only in the light of the screen, another night with the same bowl, another way

to make it from 6 to 8, 7 to 9,

the schedules, the negotiation, teeth brushed or un-,

clean sheets, a quick pass over everything

                                                                        good enough: or maybe it’s enough

to make you want a night of your own, everyone

piled cozily in among the crumbs—

When you’re a parent, there is always plenty to read, most of it laden with advice or keening for commiseration. Parent poetry is frequently rewarding to encounter, but it’s hit or miss with me—sometimes too beautiful, sometimes too visceral.

Never have I found a collection so spot-on with my own experiences and feelings. And when a poet captures any part of the human condition with such stunning originality and truth, she deserves to be widely read.

The lesson to the poet-reviewer: Maybe because most of us have a mother, we fail to recognize the weird wisdom of motherhood—the specialized outlook on love. But all of this, even a baby’s earwax on our finger, is the divine stuff of poetry.

Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse, winner of the Frost Place Prize, was published by Bull City Press in 2014; Tulips, Water, Ash, was awarded the 2009 Morse Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Plume, Zyzzyva, The Collagist, Blackbird, and Kenyon Review Online. She writes, edits, and teaches in Oakland, California, where she lives with her husband and son. (www.lisagluskinstonestreet.com)

An Interview with Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet:

1.     What did you want to be when you grew up, and why?

The usual, and obvious, response: writer, from about age seven. Second choice: whoever it is at publishing houses who writes the descriptions on the back covers, because that meant they're paid to read books. (Many years later, I was asked to write the description on the back of my first book. God laughs.)

2.     What is the very best word in this collection? Explain.

Good question. I’m not one of those poets who focus on strange or novel words—I like to find the strangeness in how ordinary words bump up against each other. Words that in some way represent the heart of this book: triage, crucible, rabbithole, thrum. Words most likely to appear in few books of poetry other than this one: milk-dream, doggies, botulism.

3.     Describe your worst poetic habit.

I like to think of bad poetic habits as tics. They show up whenever you get tired or lazy, and they’re hard-wired directly to what makes your poems distinct and yours. I have one where I default to a particular rhythm at the end of a poem: da-dum, da-dum, DUM. I also have a highly functional addiction to punctuation, and occasionally go on a (metaphorical, parenthetical) bender. Also, unhyphenated compounds; see “rabbithole” above. Now you know all my secrets.

4.     It’s time someone put out an anthology of poems about ___. Explain your reasoning.

Punctuation. Not about punctuation per se—but poems that use punctuation to interesting effect. Though poems about punctuation could be good, too. I’d call it Parse Poetica.

5.     It’s your poetic obituary! Sum up your writing life with an essential (past-tense) statement about your poetry. Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet was a poet who …

Was a poet. Who wrote poems. That attempted to convey what it is to think and feel, to inhabit a particular consciousness. OK, which of us does that not describe? I think that’s enough; that's the essential thing for a poem to do.

Would you like to have your book considered for an Appreciation feature? It is eligible if it is no more than two years old or, better yet, forthcoming. You may send finished books or advanced reader copies to me at Karen Craigo, 723 S. McCann Ave., Springfield MO 65804. You may query at karen.craigo@gmail.com.