Gardening 101 with Mom

68º  ~ stormy skies, a brief respite from the storms, luckily no tornadoes


Just a brief pictorial of the work Mom and I accomplished on Sunday, with a few finishing touches today.  Quite a few older, established plants with a few new annuals (purslane, angelonia, caladiums, wave petunias, henna coleus). The pansies are what we planted at Thanksgiving and have survived well into a second blooming, which makes them super tall and prone to fall over.  Painting the old terra cotta pots was my idea!

Preparations are Being Made

73º ~ all muggy, heavy air still replete with yesterday's dousing, the heat coming on


Friends, I shall be away from the desk of the kangaroo for a few days.  Tomorrow is graduation in the afternoon and the arrival of my parents in the evening.  That means today will be spent getting the house is some kind of order and doing some major grocery shopping. 

Once the folks arrive, we will embark on our twice yearly front yard gardening (my mother loves to garden!).  I shall return on Wednesday.

Until then...happy reading/happy writing!

Draft Process: The Angry Sisters Experience Their Conversion

65º ~ a soft, gentle, & constant rain, just above a drizzle


Today's draft is in part a result of my frustration with our internet provider and a conflict entering its fifth day.  We are waiting on a new modem, which should arrive tomorrow and will magically make everything better. (Excuse my skepticism.)

In any case, normally, I take care of email, check in on FB, and read the blogs before I move my mind to that more concentrated space required of reading or drafting.  So far, I've been successful during those periods at ignoring said internet distractions, as long as I've cleared the path first.  Well, today, my attempts to do so were stymied by dial-up speeds instead of my lightning fast wi-fi modem/router combination.  In frustration, I turned to my journal.

Last night, a couple of lines came to me in the wake of reading Malinda Markham's book earlier in the week.  I thought I might return to those.  Instead, four small, white sheets of paper fluttered out of the journal.  Aha!  Notes I'd taken during Christian Wiman's reading at the Arkansas Literary Festival.  (I'm not going to link back to previous entries for Markham and Wiman given the internet difficulties, but feel free to use the search feature to find them.)

As many of you know, Wiman has experienced a return to faith after many years away from it.  He grew up in a household of religious fervor, spent time as an atheist, and has returned to explore his faith in the wake of a serious illness.  I say all of this to set the stage; my notes are mostly religious words I captured during Wiman's talk.  On the first page of those is a fragment: "feeling through the sounds of words to the form of poetry," something Wiman said about the difference between poetry and prose, since he was reading from both.  Then, there are a half a dozen religious words, and then this, "The Angry Sisters Experience Their Conversion," which I knew even then would be the title of a poem.  This knowing the title first is incredibly rare for me.  The rest of the pages of notes are mostly words, and then there is this: "Poetry = being @ the mercy of language ~ Prose which can always be written," more on how Wiman sees the two genres.

Today's poem grew from these notes and a memory from my childhood.  The family across the street from us must have been evangelical, although I don't remember that word being used at the time.  In any case, for a brief time, my sisters and I went to the neighbor's after school, probably on Wednesdays, with a ton of other neighborhood kids for what was essentially a Christian youth group.  I only have fragments of memories from this time, but those fragments found their way into the poem, which begins:

In a neighbor's basement, their ears
were at the mercy of language

The poem goes on to describe the way some children can get caught up in the fervor of religion; however, the angry sisters' conversion is not at all what the neighbor thought it would be.  In other words, that fervor becomes a match to the kindling they've laid in their quest for vengeance.

In today's draft, I have two squat stanzas (one of 9 lines, one of 10).  I'm not sure where my beloved couplets have gone, or where my sprawling, white-space-laced drafts are.  Interesting.

What I'm Reading: Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart

79º ~ bright sun, slight breeze, birdsong, pretty much a perfect spring day


Some years ago, before I started posting my mini-personal responses to books here, I read Markham's first book, Ninety-five Nights of Listening, which won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Mariner Books.  I fell in love with Markham's work, I fell hard.  So, when I saw that she had a new book coming out in 2010 from New Issues, I was thrilled, and I put it on my list.  Somehow, I never got around to ordering it.  When I was at AWP 2012, I meant to get a copy and forgot, so this year at AWP, I made the New Issues table my first stop in the book fair and bought a copy of Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart.

Markham's book has been on the top of my to-read pile since I returned from Boston in March.  Yesterday and today, I sank into this amazing collection.

Having Cut the Sparrow's Heart, like Ninety-five Nights of Listening, is hugely influenced by Markham's experiences living in Japan and her studying and translating of Japanese poetry.  Sparrow's Heart is a book of fairy tales of Markham's own invention, weaving together strands and themes of Eastern traditional tales (that I know only slightly) with themes of the modern, fragile, global community.  This is a book of danger and a search for comfort that isn't always found.  The speaker always remains separate, foreign, at odds with both the natural world and the people, flora, & fauna found in it.

Here is an example from the opening of "Having Overheard Talk of the Fates, the Clearest Answer is Silence."

Low voices carry on wind.  One of the children
will burst into luck, the other will curl
into ash.  That year, the solstice-flower
unfolded red petals all at once,
over grass so sharp you could slice
fingers on it.

And here, another passage, this time from the middle of "The Outing."

                Night birds
Stitch the leaves shut with their cries.
Sing once, and the dolls go to sleep.
The teapot falls off a rock and bursts
Into stars.  See, there is light now.
We tell all the stories we know.

This is an urgent book, but it is a quiet, tragic urgency.  I had a feeling it would become a touchstone for me, and that feeling gathers strength, now, in the aftermath of the first reading.

Draft Process: Little One's Provocation

62º ~ an "arctic" cool down for Mother's Day, which makes me laugh ~ feeling sorry for my mom who really wants to get in the garden but Iowa is all cold & wet this year, even a frost advisory for this morning


Well, that was unexpected.  I wasn't even thinking about drafting this morning.  I was thinking about reading, and I did start the day by finishing up a book of poetry that had been sitting on my desk for about a month.  I'm not quite ready to comment on the book yet, so I'll leave it at that.  After closing the book, I started sorting through more of the endless papers that seem to breed on my desk.  At the same time, I was on FB taking care of a Heron Tree posting.

In that space of time, I read three poems that all conspired to send me to my journal, setting off one singular voice from the angry sisters trio, in this case "Little One."

Here are the three poems.  First, I read Lisa Fay Coutley's brutally honest poem "On Home." While I'm not a mother, this poem sliced something open inside me.  Then, among my papers, I found that I'd torn out the following two poems from their journals.  Roger Reeves' "The Sun Was Like a Gold Body" from The Cincinnati Review and Marcus Wicker's "Shibboleth" from The Journal.  (Neither appears to be available online.)  Both of these last two poems are litanies, and maybe there is a better word for the form.  Both poems use the repetition of the phrase "Say" or "Say it," beseeching, prodding, goading the reader.  I know exactly why I tore out these two poems, as I've long been a lover of this type of repetition/litany.

Well, I re-read "Shibboleth" in full and only made it through the first three lines of Reeves' poem, when the youngest of the angry sisters started a full-on rant.  Boom, I had to go to the journal and start writing.  What arrived on the page is nearly exactly what made it onto the computer screen, which is a bit unusual for me.  Usually, once I get to the computer with the kernel of the poem, things expand and contract and change shape to a great extent.  Instead, what I wound up with is a highly combustible, 8-line nugget of anger that matches almost exactly what I scribbled in my journal, thus the title including the word "provocation." 

Without even really thinking about it, Little One's litany is not directed at the reader.  Instead, she implores her sisters, opening with "Say it, sisters."  And yes, there are a LOT of esses bouncing around in her angry poem.

Feeling a bit stunned by it all, I'm grateful to the three poets named above for the spark & shove.

All Giddy with Summer Tidings (and a little codeine laced cough syrup)

70º ~ a blissfully perfect spring day if a bit cloudy, all the windows thrown open, both cats and humans basking in the sweet breezes


Helloooooooo?

Helooooooooo?

Is anyone still out there?  I hope so.  I confess it's been a bit too long, but you all know the drill: end of the semester brouhaha.  Plus, my end of the semester cold.  I made it all the way to the last day of classes and then I lost it, coming down with a serious head cold.  Luckily, when the cough sank into my chest and kept me from sleeping the last two nights, I discovered that I had two nights worth of codeine-laced cough syrup left.  When I looked at the date on the pharmacy label, it turned out I had the same cold almost exactly one year ago.  Hmmmmmm.  Silly germs!

With great fanfare (or at least what serves as great fanfare here at the desk of the Kangaroo), I punched in my final set of grades this morning, and like magic, I felt like I lost 10 lbs.  Happens every semester.  Wahooooooooooo!

I spent the rest of the morning working through the piles of papers that had accumulated over the last couple of weeks.  One priority task was to revise the poem I drafted way, way back at the end of February for The Book of Scented Things, an anthology of poems inspired by perfume samples.  As the official deadline for poems is coming up rapidly, I am so, so thankful that I drafted what I did back then.  I know I'd be panicking if I had to start from scratch today, as my poems really do need to sit for a bit.  In fact, I re-read the draft yesterday and knew immediately that the ending didn't work.  I fumbled around and came up with an "idea" for how I wanted the ending to function, but I couldn't find the words.  Today, with some time and some silence, I worked it out.

I think the anthology is supposed to be out in fall of 2014, which seems an interminable wait.  I am so curious to find out what the other poets came up with and what scents they got to use.  Wouldn't it be cool if the book had a scratch-n-sniff feature for each poem?  (Probably cost prohibitive, but a girl can dream.)

So, what plans for the summer?
1. Deal with manuscript #2.  Break it down into two chapbooks. 
2. Give manuscript #3 (fever book) a thorough going over and keep sending out.
3. Read and read and read from the towering stack beside me.
4. Write and write and write and see if the angry sisters are still angry or if it is time to move on to other voices.
5.  Submit some poems.

Let me just say it one more time:  Wahooooooooooooooooo!

Poetry Readings and The VIDA Count

58º ~ thick white cloud cover after last night's rain, storms a possibility though only the tiniest of tiny breezes for now

Last weekend, we had the Arkansas Literary Festival here in Little Rock, and it was fantastic.  This was the 10th year for the festival, and I'm thrilled that so many folks continue to attend.  There are always a few events, panels, or workshops on Thursday and Friday, but things really kick off with the author party on Friday night, at which I had a great time circulating with Martha Silano and Hope Coulter. 

Saturday, I managed to attend two readings. The first featured Christi Shannon Kline and Steve Kistulentz.  I was stunned to realize that Steve and I know tons of the same people and have published in several of the same journals, and yet, I'd neither read his two books nor befriended him on Facebook yet.  Both Christi and Steve did a wonderful job reading; however, sadly, they were at the first time slot and the audience was sparse.  I'm sad for the folks of central Arkansas who missed this one.

I had intended to move on to hear C.D. Wright, whom I've heard read several times before, but then fate intervened and Steve and I ended up having a cup of coffee.  The weather had warmed just enough that we were able to sit outside and people watch as we exchanged poetry stories and talked teaching.  I felt a bit like AWP had descended on Little Rock, as these are the kinds of chance encounters I long for and look forward to as AWP approaches each year.  Needless to say, I've added Steve's work to my towering stack, just begging for the end of the semester!  (I have a hard time mustering the focus that a poetry collection requires during these last few weeks.)

You might spy, Christian Wiman's My Bright Abyss there toward the top as well.  Having learned many a lesson about pacing myself at AWP, I went home and took a rest mid afternoon before returning for Wiman's session.  I had the great fortune to be introduced to him prior to the reading and was charmed by his authenticity.  Having known his name as the big cheese at Poetry for the last decade, I wasn't sure what to expect.  I confess, I was also a bit hesitant about his latest book, having been on the receiving end of one too many overly-evangelical people who have found their way back to Christianity after a health scare.  In the end, all of my reservations were silly. The reading was fantastic as Wiman wove passages from My Bright Abyss, a memoir of his journey back to faith, and poems from Every Riven Thing.  In the end, I bought both books, which should tell you how completely Wiman won me over.

Still, I left that reading with the VIDA count ringing in my ears.  This is not an indictment of Wiman but of the larger institutionalized gender bias at play in the world of literature.  To explain: Inevitably at these readings, when there is a Q & A, the question of influences and admiration for other writers comes up.  As Wiman rattled off a list of poets, I watched someone in the row with me scribble down all the names, and all the names were male, and all the names were white. 

Again, I do not mean to throw a judgment down on Wiman.  His prose and his poetry thrilled me, infused as they were with a joy for language and a stunning craft.  If these are his influences, these are his influences.  Instead, I was saddened by the lack of women and people of color.  Instead, I was reminded again of how fortunate I was to have the undergraduate instructors I had at the College of St. Benedict and St. John's University who were intent on breaking the canon wide open.  Yes, we studied Hopkins, Yeats, and Keats, Pound and Eliot, Heaney and Lowell; however, I was also exposed to Joy Harjo, Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton (these first three live and in person on campus), Quincey Troupe, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, let alone Plath and Sexton and all hail Emily Dickinson!

The one resounding fact that remains with me is that when a poet has the good fortune to read in front of a captive audience made up of energetic readers of poetry and people aspiring to become poets, there is a power in the names we list.  There are people out there writing down the names, and who knows, some of them may even go and check out the poetry of those we name.  Isn't this how institutionalized perceptions change, by the names we name, the books and lit mags we recommend, the ever-expanding web of writers we nurture?

*I spy a personal "project" for AWP 2014...keeping a list of the names discussed during readings and panel discussions.

Where I'll Be on Sunday Evening: No Place in Particular: White Water Tavern

53º ~ temps inching back toward "normal" ~ the one word that has not applied at all this spring, trees 75% leafed out, storms in the offing


Via the amazing & talented Al Maginnes, I've become acquainted with R.J. Looney, an Arkansas poet I hadn't met before.  All hail, Al Maginnes! 

Through that connection, R.J. invited me to be part of the lineup for "No Place in Particular," a poetry & music fest on Sunday (April 28), starting at 5:00 p.m. at White Water Tavern in Little Rock.  Here's a link to the event description on Facebook.  According to that description, the poets will take the mic first from 5 - 7:30ish, and then the musicians will follow.  Should be a stomping good time.  If you're in Central Arkansas, y'all come! 

Brief Note

44º ~ cold, cold rain, cloudcover, etc, a lapse

Yes, I'm still here, holding on by fingertips.  Rest assured, when the semester wraps up and I've had a chance to sleep a bit, I'll return in full force.

Until then, I hope to make sporadic appearance.  Until then, I'm dreaming of long uninterrupted mornings of reading and writing and blog sharing.

I do apologize to those of you who post regularly, as I've had to sacrifice most of my blog reading time to meetings on campus, spring chores, and grading/grading/grading. 

Until then...

Coming Attractions

59º ~ beautiful spring weather, if a bit cloudy today, all the leaves are in the process of unfurling, the view is fairly neon with them, the Thanksgiving pansies continue to thrive as the temps have remained below normal

Life is scattered and fragmented, friends.  And this, this is April.  I offer you a view of my week in case I fail to appear here.

At the top of the priority list are my students and my grading of their third major essay of the semester.  Given that we only have about three weeks of school left, and they have one more essay to write, they need me to stay on task so my comments on this paper can aid them in their last. We are finishing up workshop in creative writing and then I'll spend a week having individual conferences with each of my 18 students in that class as they polish their portfolios.  In the last class days after conferences, we'll talk about the profession of writing and publishing.  (The end is in sight!)

Monday, after teaching and office hours, we have a department meeting at one of our satellite campuses. 

Tuesday, I head down to Hot Springs to visit a creative writing class at the Arkansas School for Math, Science, and the Arts (ASMSA).  I love, love, love these visits and am really looking forward to it!

Wednesday & Thursday, teaching and see note above about grading.  My goal is to have all essays returned by Thursday afternoon, because...

Friday - Sunday = the Arkansas Literary Festival

Friday, the Big Rock Reading Series, which I coordinate, will partner with the festival to host Martha Silano and Johnathon Williams, and I am super psyched about this reading.  Having heard both Martha and Johnathon read, I know this is going to be fantastic.  Our reading is during the day, and then, Friday night is the author party for the festival.  Good times!

Saturday will be festival city from 10 a.m. until the cows come home.  This year I'm delighted by the schedule as there will be poets in nearly every time slot.  Here's who I'm hoping to see/hear:
Steve Kistulentz & Christi Shannon Kline (both new to me)
C.D. Wright
Frank X. Walker (although his session is up against Richard Ford...hmmmm)
Christian Wiman

Then, Saturday night I'm participating in "Pub or Perish."  This began as a pub crawl with poetry readings at each bar.  Now, it is in one location and features scheduled readers from 7 - 9 before an open mic.

Sunday will be a true day of rest so that I can hit the ground running the following Monday as we sprint to the finish line of the semester with the last two full weeks of classes and then the grading extravaganza that is finals week.  The school calendar says that commencement commenceth on May 18.  Wahooo!

Draft Process: After the Hope of a Happy Ending Passes

44º ~ tornadoes and high winds last night heralded a cold front returning us to cooler temps, wild skies remain


Wow.  A draft!  Let me tell you, Dear Reader, I was sitting at my desk this morning, following my routine, knowing that as it was a Thursday, I would go into work an hour later than I do on MWF, but not really conscious of why.  As I read through the blogs and saw a lot of NaPoWrMo posts, a wee bit of lightning struck me upside the head: "It's Thursday!  That's drafting day."

And this is what I mean about courting the muse and not waiting for her.  I have put a pattern in place, and usually, I focus consciously on that pattern so that I'm thinking "draft a poem, draft a poem, draft a poem" on Wednesday night and early Thursday morning.  At this point in the semester, things are starting to fall apart, the gyre is definitely widening (check out Yeats' "The Second Coming" if that's a new one for you).  But, despite the chaos, the pattern remained.

As I stated on Monday, I've been haunted by the news of a missing girl in Arkansas, and she keeps coming up in drafts, but I'm uncomfortable about two things: 1) the ungainly narrative/clumsy prose nature of what I drafted, and 2) telling a story not mine to tell.  This morning, the angry sisters returned and said, "We've got this.  We're mad as hell, and we're going to take over."  So, the new draft begins:

In the woods,
           the angry sisters search

That's the line that sent me spinning to my journal.  I hadn't done any of my normal routine of clearing the desk, reading poetry by others, etc.  I was simply looking at blogs and Facebook and Boom!  The lines also came out in ragged indents, short, compressed, clipped.  All that I'd been longing for in that burdensome earlier draft.

I owe Traci Brimhall yet another debt of gratitude because her work reminds me that there can be brutality and ugliness in poems, and I mean that in the best way possible.  So, when the angry sisters wanted to get ugly about bodily rape and emotional violation (which sadly, is very often the story when young girls and boys go missing and stay missing like this), I took a deep breath and didn't turn away, as I have in the past.  It definitely helped that the angry sisters were speaking.  Their persona allowed me to say what I had been struggling to say in that earlier draft.  Their persona also allowed me to fictionalize the situation beyond this specific case in Arkansas right now.

I have often wanted to write what might be considered political poems, but I've never been able to put those ears on the table as Carolyn Forche does in "The Colonel." (And she does it with the most limber, gymnastic prose poetry ever.  Damn.)  "The Colonel" is one of those foundational poems that rocked me to the core as a young undergrad and made me want to write.   Perhaps I shied from the overtly political, though, because I didn't understand my own need for persona to do so.  Who knows?  Maybe this is just another angry sister poem or maybe the angry sisters just discovered their mission.

Draft Process: An Alternate End to the Story

65º ~ hello spring

Just a quick note to say that even though I tried to draft over the weekend, nothing came of it except a bunch of terrible lines more prose than poetry.  And then, this morning, I was reading my blog feed and stumbled on Verbatim's post of "Four Trees Quartet."  Verbatim is a site for found poems, in this case, a set of poems built from lines in a field guide to trees.  Of course, this was right up my alley.  As I read, I kept coming back to the last line of "Eastern Hemlock," "as fuel, the wood throws sparks."  Eventually, I had to copy that line into my journal, and then more lines followed of my own.

This weekend, I kept trying to draft about the fact that there is a girl missing here in Arkansas.  Her stepfather was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound but so far, she has not been found.  At the beginning, the searches met daily; now it is on the weekends and holidays.  Let me say this: I do not want to write about this girl, this tragedy, but she keeps turning up.  I've seen too many of these stories unfold to hold out much hope for a happy ending, so I kept wanting to write her an alternate ending, an ending of power.

That's what happened this morning.

Still, I do not know if this poem will go beyond this draft.  I do not know if this is my story to tell.  I do not know if this is exploiting the girl in question.  I only know the draft had to be written.

No Draft: There's Hope for Saturday, Though

44º ~ the saddest drizzle ever, one more day of shivery temps and then perhaps, perhaps, a wee glimpse of spring before Arkansas runs headfirst into heat & humidity


T.S. Eliot and I are not friends.  I can tolerate Prufrock, although I find myself hearing his voice now as a whine rather than a lament.  I dutifully read and annotated The Waste Land and probably learned a lot I should be thankful for, although the memory of the work still reeks with the scent of heavy labor with little pay off for me.  Judge me not.  I'm a firm believer that we all find our poetry kin in different places.

All this to say that this week, I really do believe this (the opening of said Waste Land):

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

I knew it would be a tough month, but an unexpected disappointment has added to the difficulty of April.

~~~~~

On another poetry note, it turns out that if one stops submitting poems, one stops receiving acceptances (and rejections).  So, two sides of the coin go missing at once.

~~~~~

And because she is my hero, here's a recording of Lucille Clifton reading her untitled poem "won't you celebrate with me," a poem I've tried to adopt as my own personal theme song.

Chalk the Walk 2013

43º ~ beautiful day Monday and now in the midst of a three day cold, cold rain


To celebrate National Poetry Month at PTC, we chalk the walk with excerpts from poems.  Here are some pics of the results.  Luckily, the weather was beautiful Monday.  After last night's rain, all of these words will have been washed away, but that's the nature of the project.

 

Draft Process: In Our Time of Trial, Our Wounds Resisted

55º ~ spring storms have settled in, gully washing away the morning, all gray and wet


Well, praise be!  My hope from Thursday materialized, and I did find time this morning to draft a new poem.  There's not a lot to tell about today's process that is new.  I sat with my journal and a book and a little instrumental music on soft, soft, soft.  I had my cup of coffee.  I listened to it rain.  I caught hold of a line from the book I was reading and thought I had a beginning.

After scratching through some hard-won lines, I feared that maybe I was pushing this angry sisters thing too much.  Maybe they only had a handful of poems in them.  Maybe I've grown addicted to the idea of a persona leading me through an entire book. 

Then, I remembered that earlier Eduardo Corral had put out a call for favorite words on his Facebook page, hoping to use some of those words given to him by others in a draft of his own.  My word was "cauterize."  Remembering it snapped today's draft into focus.  I confess there's a bit of fever in it (ah, you sickly speaker, haunting, haunting).  The angry sisters seem to also have a thread of burning/fire/ashes underlying many of the drafts so far. 

Oh, I forgot.  Before I started drafting today, I read over last week's draft and realized that I had to cut an entire stanza, which contained one of my favorite phrases.  Guess what?  Most of that stanza worked to make the last stanza of today's draft.  This rarely happens for me.  In this case, I kept trying to use that left-over stanza as a beginning, and then gradually realized that it had to be the end.  Again, I rarely begin working on a poem knowing the ending, but there you go. 

As for the title, it began as the first line at some point in the draft, and when I realized that I needed to add a bit of information to the first stanza, something had to give.  Cutting the first line created an instant title. 

In the end, I'm still not sure about the angry sisters and if I'm pigeon-holing myself or forcing too much, but I do know that April looks to be an insane month and I'm happy to have this draft in case I'm derailed for the next few weeks.