Monthly Archives: July 2023

Mindlessly

There are some necessary but mindless tasks that I’m good at and don’t mind doing. Weeding, for example (unless it’s raining, or disgustingly hot), or cleaning a bathroom. My morning chore today entailed removing staples that fastened carpet underlayment to the floor. There are dozens of these staples stuck in the subfloor, and most of them have bits of foam-like fabric wedged in them. The edges of the room are studded with tacking strips–annoying to remove when one is not a professional. Best Beloved and I did consider hiring someone to replace the floor, but since it is a job we can do ourselves…well, we have the time and are doing it.

There’s a difference between the mindless and the tedious. I don’t care for tedium; but a task I can mindlessly manage–something physical, but not too demanding, without a lot of surprises I need to problem-solve–those projects can be almost relaxing. When weeding, my thoughts can wander. The job is so familiar and repetitive that there is no need to devote much brainpower to it. Ideas, reflections, observations, images can float aimlessly in my mind. I can think about poems while weeding. Taking a walk in a woods or quiet countryside offers me the same sort of internal/external environment.

Proofreading was like that for me, back when I was a proofreader (when there were such things as proofreaders in every newspaper, type or print shop, publishing house, ad agency, and legal department). Editing takes some thought; but the less engaged a proofreader is with the text, the better. I was employed as a proofreader when I first recognized that I was truly serious about writing poetry, and I found value in the ’empty mind’ that my workaday job fostered. There was a bonus in that sometimes I did glean new information from the materials I read.

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Composing this post, it strikes me that “mindless” is the wrong word, or not an accurate word to convey what it’s like to feel internally occupied while the physical body’s doing something else. “Reflection” implies more stillness. Something more akin to walking meditation?

At any rate, I can hope that the weeding and staple-removing might eventually get my poetry mojo re-booted. I have to work on my next manuscript and continue to promote my latest book, too. In the meantime at least I’m accomplishing something.

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Aloft at last

https://www.amazon.com/Red-Queen-Hypothesis-other-poems/dp/B0C9SNKGJZ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2VSSIOETPZQDW&keywords=ann+e.+michael&qid=1689466800&s=books&sprefix=ann+e.+michael%2Cstripbooks%2C104&sr=1-1

My second full-length poetry collection is finally available. Whew! It took a good bit of patience, some frustration, and considerable persistence to get here, but I believed that this was a manuscript worth plugging away on. And thank you to Highland Park Poetry and to judge Cynthia Gallaher for choosing RQH as a prizewinner.

Persistence doesn’t always pay off, but when it does, we tend to focus on how important it is to keep on keeping on. However, I’m not sure I wholly believe in the process of sticking-to-it no matter what; there are times when you do need to let go of an unattainable goal or the pursuit of a not-terrific idea, and just–well, fail. I have let go of quite a few goals, plans, and previous manuscripts when I honestly evaluated my feelings about them and their possibilities for becoming realized. It’s okay to fail. You learn more from failure than from success. I have gained quite an education that way myself.

But I wanted this book to get into print. I like the poems in it. I like the things I learned as I played with meter and form and (mostly slant) rhyme. It was fun to find a range of topics that managed, one way or another, to work together. Mostly, I wanted an audience, to find out whether readers find it thought-provoking or entertaining or interesting. Also, I was starting to sense that it was getting in the way of my next manuscript. Yes, of course I have the next manuscript…

Do I wish the book had come out four or five years ago? Yes. My first collection, Water-Rites, came out way back in 2012; RQH was supposed to have followed more rapidly on that book’s appearance. Am I glad it has appeared at last? Also yes, very glad!

I am grateful to so many people for this book. And I will be grateful to anyone who buys it, reads it, and doesn’t find it a complete waste of time. Meanwhile, I’m working on getting some readings lined up. I know I will appear at the book launch September 9, 2023 in Highland Park, IL! I’d love to read at other venues, so if you know of one let me know.

And if you have a manuscript you really believe in–keep trying.

Transitions of one kind or another

Transitions require reflection and, quite often, reorganizing–and certainly that seems the case at present. I decided back in April to take a hiatus on submitting while I wound down at my college job, also recognizing that I need to put in some work on promoting my book (the cover should appear on my next post!). Besides, before I can send out poetry again, I need to assess what I have that might actually be worth sending out. It’s possible that much of the pile of not-yet self-evaluated poetry exists in unfinished form. That means further revision. While revising is an enjoyable task for me, at this point I confess to feeling overwhelmed. The first task, then, is one of organizing…which I admit I like a lot less than revision.

It was therefore with considerable resignation I faced the drawers, folders, computer files, and index cards that more or less make up my, uh, creative output. The project is nowhere near complete, but I got some cheer by realizing that I have been writing and revising more than I thought, a little at a time. The pile of papers on the chair pictured to the right is 16 months of revisions.

I would pat myself on the back more heartily if that stack had resulted in several damned fine pieces of poetry, but at least it means I’m doing the work that writers do and that I was doing it even when feeling taxed by situations not entirely within my control. Which is also what writers do. Sometimes you need to give yourself a little boost of validation.

A bigger boost of validation for writers is the publication of a book, and that ought to keep me buoyant for awhile even if I do dislike the promotional aspect of book publication (which falls more and more on the writer these days as the book industry contracts). My publisher says the book should be available in August– “Watch this space” –as advertisers used to urge.

Meanwhile, the anthology of contemporary Ukrainian literature published by Vogue Ukraine is now in print and available; it’s full of passionate creative work and includes some internationally notable writers, the best-known of whom is Oksana Zabuzhko, who wrote a reflection about the appearance of her debut novel 25 years ago; one of the most shattering pieces is an extremely current non-fiction text by Olia Rusina written, diary-form, as the assault began on Kyiv. Info here.

Wet, dry

The rain we needed in April and May and early June finally got here; my corn is getting tall, and the beans are producing like crazy (as is their wont). My musing about allowing the garden to be all-volunteer this year was a bit of an imaginative stretch, but I did permit the veg patch to do its own thing a bit more than I usually do. I revised my initial garden plan to let the amaranth, nicotiana, cosmos, Thai basil, bee balm, agastache, dill, cilantro, and some of the tomato seedlings stay where they emerged. Then I planted around them. Oh, and a cantaloupe vine, too. And some garlic and tatsoi greens that sprouted on their own in odd places.

The weather’s gone from dry to wet–we are experiencing the region’s much more typical summer now, humid and hot with frequent rainstorms. As for my writing, it’s gone the other direction…I am in a dry spell. Garden gets prolific; I get, well, not prolific. The heat takes motivation and inspiration right out of my body, it seems!

But I’m accomplishing tasks of other types which may, eventually, lead to drafting poems and revising work again before too long. Tackling my “office” at home (it is actually a book-lined hallway) means that I’m finding forgotten drafts and ideas, folders of possible inspirations, old letters and cards, and lots of duplicated documents I can happily discard. The challenge is to remove what’s no longer necessary while at the same time figuring out a simple and easy-to-recall strategy for organizing what I want to keep.

I have even managed to give away a couple of cartons of books. Not so many that my existing collection actually fits on my current shelf space, but hey–it’s a start! Getting rid of books is hard. It is much easier to give away zucchinis….

Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Pexels.com

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Meanwhile, I am trying to be patient while my brain re-calibrates: summer, retirement, climate change, frail mother, house maintenance, yard work, gardens, revisions, submissions, promoting my forthcoming book (the proof copy arrived last week!!), and just trying to consolidate the rampantly-reproducing STUFF of contemporary life. There is nothing here to complain about. What is dry now will be moist & fertile in the future, and what overwhelms now will eventually abate or decrease in priority. It’s not a wet/dry binary. It’s a whole cline or spectrum, changing every atom and molecule of the way.

Autobiographical?

Although poems can be anything–philosophies, arguments, histories, internal monologues, passions, information, invention, dreamscapes, jokes, narratives, parodies, you name it–poems sometimes parallel a writer’s individual experiences in the world in a way that would, in prose, be termed memoir. When readers think of poems that are “from the heart,” they usually mean work that authentically describes what appears to be personal acquaintance with environments and behaviors: something autobiographical, or “true.” I have tussled with this perception in some of my own work, for example, my chapbook Barefoot Girls, in which the poems describe fictional experiences that in many cases were not my own but those I heard as a teen; and yet, some of them are memoir-ish.

How to decide what categorizes memoir-ish poetry collections? On the one hand, maybe everything ever written by any poet, since connecting the personal with the so-called universal has long been considered the job of poetry. Even narrative and heroic epics, when they are lasting and successful in their aims, contain some aspects we might call personal (motives and emotional responses to a situation, for example), though the writer’s life and its events may be obscured by centuries.

But memoir is not autobiography; readers should keep that in mind. Maybe it’s Vivian Gornick who said that autobiography is what happened and memoir is how it felt–I’m sure I am misremembering, so don’t quote me on that. In a past interview in the New York Times, Sharon Olds derided her own poems as narratives–even personal narratives–but sidestepped the term autobiography; she still refers to the first-person in her own work as “the speaker.”

…even though her poems have been called
diaries, “I don’t think of it as personal,”
she said. “These are not messages in a
bottle about me,” said Ms. Olds.

“The Examined Life, Without Punctuation” by Dinitia Smith, 1999 (New York Times)

Where does that leave us as readers? I don’t know–and I think it’s okay not to know. That said, I have recently read a number of poetry collections that fall decidedly on the memoir side of the continuum and found them interesting, informative, well-written, at times beautiful and also at times hard to read (i.e., profoundly sad). If you, my reader, are intrigued by the challenge of what is or is not memoir in poetic form and are open to experiencing the circumstances and knowledge of other lives and perspectives that such work offers, here are a few books you might investigate. There are many, many more–this list is just from my more recent perusals. Not one of them is anything like the others.

Edward Hirsch, Gabriel, a poem; Jeannine Hall Gailey, Flare, Corona; Emily Rose Cole, Thunderhead; Daisy Fried, The Year the City Emptied; Sean Hanrahan, Ghost Signs; Lisa DeVuono, This Time Roots, Next Time Wings.

is or isn’t is memoir?