Poem a Day—Talking Back

 One of my favorite books to use in creative writing classes is the short book Talking Back to Poems.  The author takes four of our concerns in writing poetry—sound, imagery, structure, and meaning—and uses them to talk about a collection of poems.  Then he asks the writer to “talk back.”  If the poem uses sound in interesting ways, he invites the reader to respond by writing a poem that uses sound in a similar way. 

Writers do this all the time, consciously and unconsciously, borrowing ideas, forms, and thought progressions from other writers.  That’s one reason why it’s both important and sometimes unnerving to read widely and often as a writer. 

As I’ve been reading lately, I keep noticing a poetic line form that seems somewhat random to me.  Writers would indent every other line, not as a way to indicate that the previous line continued but as an inexplicable (to me) affectation. 

Everywhere I turned, I saw this form.  Like in this poem by Adrien Matejka  

Those Minor Regrets

         We ran Carriage House East

nonstop like a bunch of hungry mouths—

in jacking-jawing & ravenous orbits—

          & the huffing in the throat stack

& double-ply knee cracks as we slid

          Toughskin thick past the dented

        

         buckets on blocks & lover-graffitied

walls, one after another in industrious,

planetary circuitry. All that symmetry. . .

I trusted the poet.  There is control of language, distinct imagery, effective use of couplets and single lines.  But I did not understand the indented lines. 

A truck headed to Garbage Mountain from downtown Cairo.

So I talked back to it.  I was writing a poem about traffic in Cairo (see above) and the form seemed to fit the subject. I tried it.  And, in writing it, I discovered the fun of making one poem hidden in another.  And though it wasn’t a form I’d ever tried, it felt organic to this poem.  It fit in this draft poem tentatively titled “Cairo Road Song.”

            On the road from the airport

the driver will not stay in his lane

            though there is no reason

he aims the car right down the broken yellow line

            it’s late at night

the other traffic bobs and weaves, boxers. . .

The reading of other poets of both enjoying their work and wondering about the choices they make becomes another source of inspiration for my daily work.  What inspires you?

Listening

I spent the day recording people from 11 to 88 as each of them answered the question, "What's your favorite poem?" Every person had an answer, even those who "don't read poetry." Every person knew some of the lines. Everyone knew why they remembered the lines, but my favorite answer was, "It's useful." After I left my impromptu interviewee, I could often hear him or her talking with friends and table mates about other poems and about poets they loved. 

And listening to those 28 voices again on my recordings brought tears to my eyes. I am reminded, again, of the power of the word. And also, today, the power, beauty, and variety of the human voice. Heart, full.

Poem a Day--Drawing Down the Muse

Not a contest winner, but one of my favorite

photos from Cairo, Egypt.  It's the hallway

to an 11th centruy mosque, built so that 

they'd hear any invaders and have time 

to rise from prayer and pick up their weapons.

I taught writing for a long time.  Now that writing is my full time job, I find that living with a writing teacher (me) is a pretty sweet aid.  Comments from friends make it clear to me that not everyone has their own little writing assignment generator living in the same house with them.  But I do.  So I thought I would share some of the recent writing assignments I’ve given myself.

1.  Find a photo contest and study the winners.  I did this with Kolga Tbilisi and Sony photo competitions, but you could do this with any of the big competitions.  Sit down, browse through the images, and when one of them speaks to you, sit with it a little longer.  Then enter into it.  Become a person or a thing already pictured or step into the photograph and experience it from the inside.  Write from the POV of the photographer.  Write about an object.  Imagine the interior life.  Make a list of words from the photograph: nouns, verbs, adjectives.  Write with those.  Use your senses in the photograph. What would it smell like, taste like, feel like?  What’s beyond the frame.  What will happen next. 

I spent nearly two months last year writing every few days from the amazing photos I found on photo contest sites.  In most cases, I didn’t even reference the photograph, just used it to open me up to new images and words.

2.  Write from a news story far away.  Take yourself out of your daily world.  Read BBC and Aljazeera and then make the big story more personal.  Where does that story intersect with your life? 

Here’s the beginning of a poem I wrote recently about a news story I heard on the BBC. 

While we stuff turkey

and sew shut the space

between its thighs

so that the bread and sage

will stay and sweeten flesh

men in Macedonia, at the edges

of the life they fled

and the lives they hoped for,

sew each other’s lips closed

with nylon string.

So much of what we hear in the news moves us because we can see those same impulses, those same actions, those same desires in our own lives.  Take some time and explore those connections.

3.  I talked about this practice in the last post, but it’s worth mentioning here.  Read an earlier poem and chose a word from that poem.  Write that word as the title at the top of a new page.  Then, write a poem using the same form of the earlier poem that earns the title you gave it.  Same general line lengths, same stanza structure, same length.  Let your mind float free in association to the word, but keep it reigned in with an external structure. 

Building the Writing Life I Want

Several years ago, Heather Sellers (in her wonderful book Chapter after Chapter) reminded me to stop training for careers I didn’t want.  And I took that to heart.  When I think of some new venture I’d like to undertake, I ask myself, “Will this help forward my writing goals?”

I love radio, I have a background in journalism, so I’ve looked longingly at the WYSO Community Voices training every year when it comes up but resisted--partly because of my schedule at work and partly because it wasn’t clear to me how that training would help me forward my career as a writer.

But in 2015, I won a little essay contest (thanks TecumsehLand Trust) and part of the prize was to record my essay at WYSO.  Juliet Fromholt was my producer. I read it through in one go, and she said, “You’re good at this.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’m a poet.  So much of what poets do is about reading aloud, I’ve had a lot of practice.”

“Oh,” she said, “I should put you in touch with Conrad. He sometimes needs people to record and produce Conrad’s Corner.”

I could barely maintain my glee.  Conrad’s Corner, whoohoo.  I love that little bright spot of poetry that shines out of my radio every night at 7:59 ish after The World.  But I coolly said, “That would be great.”  Then I rushed home and composed an introductory/application email for Juliet to send to Conrad. 

And since early last year, I’ve been recording poems, sometimes producing the week’s poetry and recording the work of other poets for our little jewel of a poetry program.  When I go into the studio, I regularly lift my head six hours later and think, “Where did the time go?”

So, when this year’s call for applications came out, I asked myself if doing Community Voices would help me prepare for the career I want, the career of a working and published writer.  Would it help me  share my work with the world in hopes that we might all stop and remember the beautiful?  Would it help me communicate so that people could move away from the written word with renewed hope? This year the answer was, yes.  I sent in my application.

And ta, da.  Here was my answer.

I can’t wait to get started.  In the email, Will said, “It’s never too early to start thinking about story ideas,” and I thought, “How many stories will I get to tell?”

Poem a Day—Commitment

Last year, I wrote almost two-hundred poems.  I wrote a poem a day in April, June, and October, and even in months where I didn’t consciously set out to write a poem a day, I wrote between ten and twenty poems.  I took a poetry class online through StoryCircle Network and wrote five or six poems from each weekly prompt. So this year, as I thought about my writing goals, I committed to writing a poem a day.  William Stafford did it.  E.E. Cummings did it from the ages of 8-22.  It’s a practice I’ve always envied, and I’ve toyed with it, spending six months in 2014 writing a haiku a day.

It’s interesting to me how I build up to these habits. I test myself to see if it’s possible, and if it seems possible, I go for it. 

Anyway, on the fourth day of this new year, I hit a wall.  I didn’t write until late.  My son was headed back to college.  My other son was coming home from his fiancee’s family.  My husband was sick.  I wasn’t feeling too good myself.  But the commitment I’d made was important.  

And I’d had practice.  The first month I wrote a poem a day was September 2014 in response to the West Florida Literary Federation’s Poem-A-Day Challenge.  They posted prompts.  I could write from prompts.

A blurry photograph, for your inspiration.  

Last October, I wrote a poem a day from a photograph by one of my favorite photographers.  I could write from images. 

I looked for news' photographs. Blah. None of the photographs inspired, but in one of them, the skier launching from the jump left a blur in his wake.  I’d just gotten new glasses with big lenses that often get dirty.  So, it didn’t take long for me to begin a poem about things not seen clearly, and when I got to the end, I noticed it was fourteen lines, so I went back in and played with the form and turned the draft into a modern sonnet.

Today when I sat down to write, I’d just dropped my son at the airport.  I wasn’t inspired, but that commitment thing nagged.  What if, I thought, I pulled a word out of the last poem and wrote another sonnet.  So I did.  And I love it. 

And I never would have written it if I hadn’t kept my commitment to write a poem a day.  Soon, I’ll post some of the other little tricks I play on myself to find inspiration when it seems elusive.  But now, I’ll give you my two words—smudge and inter.  What will you do with them?

NaNo 15: NaNo All Year: A List

National Novel Writing Month is the magical month when we do impossible things.  You can take the energy and the tools of NaNo to build a writing practice that will help you reach your goals.

1. Write everyday. 100 a day=36,500, 500 a day=182,500, 1000 a day=365,000. It doesn’t have to be a single project. Just sit down everyday with the intention to write and keep track of your words somewhere. Build those muscles.

2. Read good books. Both within your genre and without. Read books on craft. As Jane Kenyon says, “Keep good sentences in your head.”

3. Write with friends. If you loved Write-Ins, create your own weekly Write In. I’ve been writing with friends on Sunday mornings since 2010 (We started in NaNo). There is a power in going it alone, together.

4. Race yourself. Are you a word sprint addict? Do you like the spirit of competition a word spring gives you. Create the adrenaline rush by setting a timer on your phone. Set a goal that’s hard to reach. Feed the muse chocolate if you reach the goal.

5. Create community. There are a number of wonderful online writing communities. On Facebook, on Instagram, on Yahoo groups. Find a group whose spirit meets your aims and check in with them regularly. 10 Minute Novelists and NaNoWriMo on Facebook are current favorites. If you write for Children, SCBWI Blue Boards are great. Don’t let community building eat up all your writing time, but build your community a little bit each day.

6. Visually track goals. My favorite part of NaNo is the wonderful bar graph that shows how many words I’ve done and how well I’ve stuck to goals. I haven’t found an app that does it as well as NaNo, but MyWriteClub is a website (in Beta testing) that allows you to track goals for several projects (it also has a Word Sprint feature). You can write your daily count on a calendar. Make your own bar graph, pile up the pages you’ve finished on your desk.  However you do it, visually tracking your writing goals is a powerful motivator.

7. Believe in yourself. How did you finish NaNo? You believed you could even if you wrote 20,000 words, you wrote just a little over 500 words a day. That’s impressive. If you didn’t complete what you set out to complete, you still built some new habits. You can make those habits last through the year. Give your writing a chance, build your writer’s muscle. Let your writing be a gift you give yourself all year long.