Promptings

I have mixed feelings about poetry prompts. There have been times when using prompts has really got me writing and feeling inventive about poetry. I’ve had instructors (and read books) whose prompts seemed terrific for me; but maybe I felt already ‘primed’ for writing, anyway, and it was not so much the prompt itself but the circumstances that led to fruitful drafts. At other times, prompts appear useless, or even–dare I say–insipid. My current belief is that, for me, circumstances and instructor matter more than the cleverness of the prompt. Any prompt can be delightful if only I find myself situated in the mood or feel an urgency to write.

The virtual workshop I’m taking with Anita Skeen opened with a discussion of poems (by Roethke, initially) and then moved to some list-making and prompts. This is not unusual for workshops, and lists are a fine way to begin thinking about poems. The prompts we were assigned employed both lists and a method for drafting a poem. So far, I’ve drafted four or five poems in a week: therefore, success (!) even though only one of the drafts seems to have legs.

I think what happens is that after many, many years of writing poetry (or making any kind of art) one begins to feel a rhythm that is almost circadian–as analogy–that informs a person about flow. I ask myself, “Am I ready to write today?” The answer may not be yes. But if it is yes, then I can just write. No expectations, and it’s okay to use a prompt, or re-write an older poem, or just free-write about whatever moment I happen to be in. Usually, in this frame of mind, I don’t get concerned about writing well. I just start on in.

If the am-I-ready answer isn’t a definite yes, then I may procrastinate or distract myself by cleaning the house or reading a book. I can overcome the “maybe” by turning to work by a poet whose work I find interesting or by experimenting with a prompt. Sometimes, it helps to give myself a deadline of some kind–this is why workshops are often useful!

But the answer may simply be, “No, not today.” Sometimes we have those non-creative days. It is alright to have them. Art shouldn’t be about pushing out ideas to get to a “product.” I’m suddenly laughing to myself, thinking of Billy Crystal as Miracle Max in the movie The Princess Bride: “You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.”

At least with writing, one gets a chance to revise.

Carol Kaine & Billy Crystal in The Princess Bride (20th Century Fox, 1987)

If you are a writer, what do you think about the use of prompts?

Breathe

2024 closed with “thundersnow” in my neck of the woods, a weather phenomenon that I find rather thrilling in its strangeness. And the year commenced with the conflagrations in California, not to mention everything else that goes on daily in the cosmos. Oh, the difficulties of life in interesting times.

Photo by Sabian Symbols on Pexels.com

It so happens that I had made plans, and purchased plane tickets, to visit my son in Los Angeles during the week that AWP is holding its annual conference there, in March–that is, assuming the situation in Los Angeles County doesn’t get even worse and assuming his apartment building survives the fires; it hasn’t been easy to keep myself from doom-scrolling and watching updated fire maps. I remind myself that there is not a thing I can do beyond sending money to charities and such, perhaps, and waiting for the winds to change, and that making myself stressed will actually do harm. But I am not one of those Pollyanna types (now termed a “toxic positivity” person, I have recently learned). I’m aware that the world can be hard, and that we may suffer. So, as my yoga and tai chi instructors would tell me:

Breathe.

There’s no point in trying to decide whether this start to the year is auspicious or inauspicious, though if I’m going to go with signs and auguries, I might choose to follow the Chinese year and move my year’s start to January 29, Year of the Wood Snake–and get all this awful stuff (including January 20th) packed into LAST year.

As I noted in my year-end post, a year’s end–or beginning–is arbitrary.

~

As for writing-related resolutions, I make them all the time, not just at the beginning of the year. But in that one respect, the first dozen days of January are going surprisingly well. I’ve been spending more time on revising older–sometimes much older–work, and I have been drafting some new poems. I even submitted just a few things to lit journals and have been making minor progress in the monumental task of culling and organizing my writing files.

Best of all, I enrolled in an online poetry workshop with Anita Skeen through the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation, which starts this week. And I registered for an art class in February, so my plans to focus more on my creative work post-retirement are proceeding more or less apace. We balance fear and misery with art.

~

Cloud sketch in acrylics

Year-end with raven

Last day of the year. Though when the year ends or begins is an arbitrary thing, calendars being a human invention so far as we know, this is my culture’s end date for the approximately 365-day cycle Earth makes around the sun–so I may as well stick with it. Here’s what the close of the year has brought me so far:

A sunny and mild morning post-frost, not uncommon at this time of year.

A Cooper’s hawk calling, hassling the songbirds, as they do. This one’s been hanging about our yard for a week now, sometimes perching right next to the leafless shrubs–it is amazing to watch how they can maneuver through the branches to grab at a finch or sparrow. A lithe and handsome raptor.

A solo Northern mockingbird, boldly eying me as I stood watching it (six feet away) while it gobbled up oriental bittersweet berries.

This surprised-looking tree, framed by horizontal branches–

Mutual disturbance among me and the mourning doves huddled on the ground amid the hedgerow’s vines and leaf-rot. Their sudden flurry startled me as much as I startled them.

Walking along with my Merlin Bird App turned to “sound identification,” I expected to hear the usual characters this time of year: finches, song sparrow, field sparrow, mourning doves, bluejays, crows, starlings, nuthatches, chickadees. Then I heard what sounded like…a raven? Indeed! The app noted “Common Raven,” with the little icon that indicates the bird is a vagrant or may be misidentified. I watched it fly north, over the house. Solo, (whereas early in my walk there was an entire “murder” of crows and they tend to hang about in groups this time of year). This bird was also very large, but too far off to see its beak or the color of its eyes. However, it sounded exactly like the third call recording here. I’m gonna call it a raven.

I found some collages the environment made on its own, much more lively and well-composed than any collage I might try to make.

~

The inner environment today has been focused on yet more revision. I much prefer it to sending poems to journals. It’s playful and creative, if occasionally irritating when a poem refuses my attempted improvements. At present I’m wrestling with a sonnet. Not a bad way to end the year, I reckon.

Post-exertion malaise

This year, my holiday plans are less busy than usual. I don’t have to cook a large meal, wrap a lot of gifts, travel much (or far), or attend a bunch of parties or festivities. There is a quiet joy in this low-key schedule, though it means the season possesses a slightly different character. I thought that the lack of holiday stress would mean I had more time to write, revise, maybe even to submit work to literary journals. The rain and chilly humidity have enervated me more than I expected, though, and some days even an hour of serious concentration seems to wipe me out.

I believe this weird exhaustion for no apparent reason is a kind of post-exertion malaise.

Post-exertion malaise (PEM) is not uncommon among people with chronic conditions such as chronic fatigue syndrome, Epstein-Barr, long covid, fibromyalgia and the like. Its key features are that the fatigue seems far out of proportion to the exercise or other exertion that preceded it, and that it is delayed–the exhaustion may set in two hours or even two days after the experience. I have had PEM, for example, after spending a lovely and high-energy day of hiking or wandering for hours around a city or museum and suddenly, without warning, “crashing” into bone weariness two hours later, or a day later (I have fibromyalgia). I’ve learned to manage the physical aspects of PEM, however. It does not happen all the time, and often I can plan for it.

Post-exertion malaise: it sounds like the title of a contemporary novel.

I’ve read studies that speculate PEM results from a sort of communications snafu among the many complex body systems: nerves, synapses, gut microbes, spine, brain, and probably processes science has yet to discover. What I wasn’t aware of until recently is that PEM can appear after mental or social “exertions” as well. Mental exertion such as submitting to journals; social exertion such as attending poetry readings, parties, family gatherings. It explains why I had to lie down for a nap at 5 pm every day the last few years I was working full-time, even though my job was a desk job. And why shopping has become such a tiring task for me.

Shopping, when you think about it, involves: 1) being in a public or social space; 2) attention to details; 3) frequent decision-making; 4) stress about finances, parking, and whether said decisions were the right ones; 5) unexpected stuff like long lines, a credit card that refuses to work, bad weather, and not finding what you were shopping for. Even if you shop online, some of these processes are involved. Yes, our brains are bombarded; and our brains are designed to filter and make efficient work of the bombarding, but perhaps that’s part of what goes awry with long covid and chronic fatigue. The filter may clog, so to speak. Brain fog and fatigue.

Similar micro-decisions go on when I send out poems to journals. Should this poem be sent to that publication? Do I like the other poems in this magazine, the editorial bent? Is this poem finished, and is it any good? Do they require a fee? Do I want to pay the fee? Are they okay with simultaneous submissions? Do they use Submittable, email, or some other method? Such analysis goes on constantly, as well as lots of even smaller decisions. I have to read the submissions guidelines carefully and, sometimes, re-format my work to suit. And then there’s the cover letter if required, and the bio–though I have a “boilerplate bio,” often it seems wrong for the journal; if they’ve asked for a personal touch or want me to stress place or background, I have to tweak the bio…and on and on. The task was never my favorite, but it didn’t exhaust me.

Because my PEM is intermittent, often I can send out a good deal of work in one sitting with no fallout, just as sometimes I can hike or walk for hours without pain or fatigue. I had almost no trouble when I was in Spain earlier this year. But this week in drizzly-snowy eastern Pennsylvania, I’m having to take too many rests after doing what seems like almost no real work. Frankly, it’s disheartening. So I’ve decided not to expect to get much done during the next two weeks and to appreciate the time I can spend reading a novel, decorating the tree, sitting by the fire, talking to loved ones by phone. No need to be disheartened.

Whatever works

My last post (here) generated some intriguing feedback and was cause for further reflection about revisions, at least on my part. Because I was writing a poem for a specific person–my son–I got useful information from his response, as well as responses from other readers; so I had the chance to hear back from my audience, however small, and to compare reactions. My son, the “you” in the poem, told me he liked the descriptions and that the piece did a good job evoking the atmosphere of the experience he’d had. He liked the closing lines, too. However, he said that while he had some moments of anxiety during his stint on the military ship, his overwhelming feelings cantered more toward frustration and an almost-constant irritation. He thought I had focused over-much on the anxiety aspect. “Though a person certainly could be feeling exactly that way in those conditions,” he added.

And that’s fascinating, because in earlier drafts I did not work toward evoking anxiety; I was trying to get the details right and to create a sense of annoyance, even anger, at the situation. (Apparently, that is closer to how he responded.) Here’s the “BUT”–but those revisions weren’t making the poem work any better. This is a challenge for many of us writers: when the impetus for writing the poem, and the initial intentions of the writer, don’t resolve into a good poem…and then some alterations–some “fictionalization”–make a better poem, but maybe not the poem the poet set out to write. Do we stay with our initial idea and keep whaling away to make it work as we initially imagined, or do we let the poem move into new territory somewhat removed from initial inspiration if the resultant revisions are more powerful, more believable?

I’m inclined to go with whatever works to make a stronger poem, most of the time. There are other options, though. Sometimes I end up with two or more poems stemming from the same initial idea. A bonus! One prompt I have occasionally used for myself is to re-write an earlier, less-satisfactory poem from a different viewpoint or to focus on a different aspect of the experience. This practice has been awfully helpful, and it keeps me from getting over-invested in the more obscure, personal components of a writing piece.

Photo by Leon Ardho on Pexels.com

Strengthening one’s work takes practice, and possibly a kind of discipline–not to suggest that I am a very disciplined poet, although I wish I were. I do take my practice seriously, though, and revision is a major aspect of my practice, always has been, even when I was a “baby poet” starting out. I never could quite agree with Ginsberg’s famous “first thought best thought,” since my first thoughts are seldom deep, reflective, or in any way excellent; and my first words set on paper are generally equally weak. For me, writing is thinking, in the way of E. M. Forster’s famous quote “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Thinking is often flawed, so analysis and critique and revision? They’re required.

Finally, whatever makes the poem better as a poem is worth doing. That’s my opinion: whatever works.

Revising for the personal

I’ve been working on the poem below for 11 months now, and the process has made me think about the purpose(s) of revision, the why of why artists and writers do it. In the case of this poem, I’m revising for entirely personal reasons. My revisions have little to do with creating a stand-out poem that strangers will read and appreciate; I want to tell a particular story about someone I love in a way that might demonstrate, to that person, compassion and some understanding of his feelings. I believe this is a valid purpose for making art, even if it is subjectively personal–ie, not “universal,” not groundbreaking, not timeless.

Certainly, the classic lyric poem, and many narrative lyrical poems, often are addressed to a particular someone. It seems to me that the classic lyrical poem is less based in context, however, and can therefore be read, aesthetically, as more universal. The narrative poem by nature relates its story in a time or place, using contextual descriptions that can become obscure in different eras or locations.

Such is the poem below; it may benefit from some backstory, which I will supply afterward. But read the poem first and maybe let me know if I’m correct. Maybe it will “work” for other readers, maybe not; but it is something I have been wanting to write for my son for awhile now. And he “gets it,” so my purpose has been achieved. 🙂

~

In the Warship’s Belly

How you hated those five days in harbor,
amid steel and cable, fearful each minute but
constrained from showing it.

You prefer to see shoreline and sky.
Discomfort pervaded every hour you spent
on board, walking through hazards,

noting construction, rewiring, repairs;
how you hated the low-ceilinged passages 
through which you half-crawled,

wearing neoprene-soled boots and a hard
hat, as anxiety, hyper-alert, worked its 
wormy way through your body.

There were power outages that canceled
light completely for unexpected
seconds deep below decks,

then generators’ earthquake roars would
rumble and shake so every wall threatened,
sparks lit up and light returned—

your breath rapid and near wheezing,
tremulous, you inhaled the stale, acrid
diesel-fumed air pushed by industrial fans

through that beast’s belly, that machine 
of men’s work, war’s work. Built to threaten 
and combat, it felt nothing like a boat, nothing

like the small wooden dinghy of your heart 
that sailed the cove, with your little sister,
one summer years ago. 
~

Context: When my son was employed doing navigational software de-bugging for a US Navy contractor, the job required a week on board a military ship that was being retrofitted and overhauled in drydock. The assignment took place during covid. He hated almost every minute of the experience and left the job soon after the on-board stint. Due to non-disclosure agreements and national security stuff, he couldn’t really tell us much about why he was so miserable; but he described the circumstances and gave us some idea of how anxiety-producing the tasks were, given the environment and his temperament (which does lean toward the anxious). He was a grown man and quite responsible for himself, so this poem is really about my feelings for him. When those we love are going through unpleasant things, we feel for them.

And here is the dinghy, though it is technically a pram–poetic license.

Chastened & learning

The temperature got wintry this past week, and now I feel inclined to make chili or giambatta, or savory stews with ingredients such as butternut squash, potatoes, beets, eggplant, cannellini beans. Or polenta, maybe–anything that takes awhile to cook, sending up steam and warming the kitchen so it feels toasty when I come in from a walk. I admit to being a wimp about walking in cold weather. I do it; I know walking in any weather is good for me and I bundle up, but my walks are decidedly shorter. Even on sunny days.

Today was not a sunny day.

And to my dismay, the downy woodpeckers are back again, hammering at the wood on our house. The one on the left banged into a window, but generally they cling to the boards. I wish they would drill at the many dead trees along our property line; they’d have more luck, too, if they’re seeking food. By the way, this photo is 10 years old. Now I would know not to handle a wild bird with bare hands because the oils on human skin are not good for feathers. (Three decades of educating myself about my own environment have chastened me–there’s so much I don’t know.)

I also don’t know which of my own poems are any good, or which ones to send to which journals, or whether I should care. It’s oddly heartening–and honestly, NOT schadenfreude! (because I get no pleasure from it, merely a sense of community)–to read in my colleagues’ social media posts that “rejection season” is here. I am not the only one whose poems have returned lately. Lesley Wheeler writes: “Magazine rejections have been trickling in, too, although mostly the please-try-us-again kind, and I know enough about editing now to really appreciate those.” I have had a number of those, too. And I’ve been an editor, so I get it, and I am appreciative. But I am mystified nonetheless–after 40 years, why am I so clueless at this sort of critical analysis? When I sit myself down to submit poems, I tend to find all my work lousy or, looking at the poems I think may be good, realize I lack any idea of where to send them–even though I am a frequent and avid reader of online and print literary journals. You’d think I’d have gleaned something about poetry the way I have learned about my geological region, its seasons, critters, viruses, predators, bloom times, pruning times, sowing/planting times and such.

Equally chastened by poetry’s landscape, I guess!

Re-assessing

Another clear day; we finally got an inch or so of rain on Friday, which was much needed, and since then the temperature has cooled a little. This late in November, it finally feels like autumn. On my morning walk today, I was happy to see this handsome creature airing its wings in the sunshine. Our local turkey buzzards have been active lately. I’m fairly certain that the snag this one’s perched on is a green ash tree, clearly well-visited by woodpeckers.

My low mood seems to have abated, at least temporarily, and I wrote a few poems and revised a few others during the past three days. I’m trying to accept the fact that this year, we will see neither our son nor our daughter for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. So I’m trying to get creative about things to do that we might not have done if we were preparing for family celebrations. Yet we miss the concept of family celebrations. I guess that’s a socio-cultural thing, right? I may need to reassess what value “the holidays” have for me these days.

~

I have also kept myself busy re-assessing a chapbook manuscript I’ve worked on forever (it seems) and am now looking for the sort of small, independent publisher that might consider a hybrid poetry-journalistic/historical work influenced by Muriel Rukeyser‘s long-poem The Book of the Dead. My poem is about a Korean War veteran tried as a traitor upon his return to the USA, a man who was my friend David Dunn’s father. It has been a real creative challenge to figure out how to tell his story, and the resulting text is definitely “hybrid,” with footnotes, magazine articles, military court proceedings, letters, and poems. People who believe that poems simply flow from some internal inspiration would probably take issue with a poem-ish thing like this, but I keep feeling compelled to find a way to tell this man’s story. The unfairness of it, the long-term damage, the people who used him as a scapegoat, his short life (he died at his mother’s, age 39, discouraged and unwell from physical wounds that never healed, divorced, unable to overcome the dishonorable discharge that kept him from gainful employment). David kept losing his father over and over: to prison, to PTSD, to divorce, to death. It’s an all-too-common narrative, but each tale is also deeply and profoundly individual. Hence the need to write it.

Drying up

….and the drought continues into mid-November. This is a very long stretch of dry weather, and the rivers I’ve crossed recently–the Delaware, the Schuylkill, the Lehigh, the Susquehanna–are looking mighty low. Little islands are showing up in the center of the riverbeds. Tree roots visible along the banks. I found this government website that filled me in concerning the current situation. Looking at the charts, wow.

My low mood continues, for a number of reasons: the recent political news, the continuing wars, my mother’s consistent decline, the drought, my physical distance from my grown children on the other side of the continent, a friend’s death, a bunch of recent poetry rejections, the fact that I can’t go into a store without hearing Christmas music…granted, some of these reasons are not earth-shattering but the effect is, well, cumulative. Han VanderHart’s recent blog post speaks to the rejection, reminding me of things I know and should keep in mind. The challenge is just getting through and occasionally finding delights at which to marvel, for the delights surely endure. Ross Gay’s Book of Delights is my book group’s next selection, a book I’ve read before but which–at this particular moment–will probably benefit me when I re-read it.

I also feel creatively dried-up, and that’s dismaying. Reading novels (see my last post) offers peasant distraction but seldom gets me writing my own work. I’ll never be a novelist. I’ve been reading poetry, online and in books, as I always do; yet right now, the poems I have been reading, no matter how wonderful, have not inspired me to work on my own.

I’m not even revising! This is not my usual self, not my poetry “norm,” not a space in which I feel happy or well-regulated or at least inspired. Perhaps I have encountered the dreaded writer’s block. Or rather, a drought of some kind, an inner sluggishness of the imaginative flow. Despite the glorious stretch of sunny days and moonlit nights, the incessant blue sky reminiscent of those high-altitude desert environments I seem to love, despite these delights, I’m discontented.

How very human of me.

Listen, there’s a trio of redtail hawks along the woodlot. Their nasal “screeee” and their graceful swoops between the bare branches catch my attention. Sunlight on the field tells me, “You could at least get outside and take a walk.” Okay. Can do.

Recuperating

Last week took a lot out of me, many reasons for that, mostly keeping those reasons to myself. I needed some rest from exertion and from social media, so I’m re-reading Les Misérables. In which Hugo seems to be trying hard to convince readers that compassion and goodness can be awakened in the hardest of hearts through the process of gentle persistence and genuine decency. Radical decency, as a friend of mine put it. Well.

I won’t write that off as an impossibility, since lord knows many things that seem impossible are not. But yes, Hugo was writing fiction, and one turns to fiction for escapism but also for reference, and for understanding human actions and feelings, and for perspective, and for information. I just completed Richard Powers’ Overstory, which offers a vast range of perspectives on the above-mentioned and adds ecology and forest infrastructure and the psychology of groups into the mix. Novel-reading has been giving me a sense of overarching historical range that lifts me a bit from my too-close focus on my own small life and my ability to sustain hope and make art. That acts as a form of recuperation, if you’re me.

This week, though, happens to be full of poetry. Tomorrow, I’m attending a reading at a nearby public library, where I’ll see many poetry colleagues, the sorts of folks who create a community of local writers. Friday, I’ll be reading with Montgomery County’s Poet Laureate, my friend Lisa DeVuono, at the retirement community where my mother resides. Saturday, I’m heading down to Philadelphia to read with another long-time poetry community in celebration of Philadelphia Poets, a long-running zine established decades ago by the late Rosemary Cappello.

It is good I have had some reading-novels time, and it is good I’ll be having some reading-with-poets time ahead. Both are nourishing to my soul. I haven’t been writing much lately, but I will be eventually. Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for the drought to break…we got a fraction of an inch of rain a couple days ago, and I really hope there is more ahead.

Whatever you happen to need to nourish your own soul, make time for it.