Tag Archives: gleaning

Useful avoidance

Trapped inside with the air conditioner on for over a week, I sat by my bookshelves going through the poetry books in my library. I’m re-reading, assessing which books I truly want to keep because I turn to them often or learn something each time I read them, which books I keep for sentimental reasons (maybe I know the author personally), which ones to keep because they are signed copies, which ones are long out of print and I would never be able to replace them. Some of them remind me strongly of places or eras in my life: I bought this one in a small bookshop in Grand Rapids MI, or this one at Barnes & Noble when it was just one store on a NYC street corner, or these at the storied and much-mourned Gotham Book Mart or St. Mark’s Bookshop. What are good reasons to keep books when I really have to downsize? It’s not an easy task, and the first of many in the process of getting rid of stuff so my kids won’t be stuck doing it. Besides, I enjoy re-reading these books. My children are not as enthusiastic about poetry as I am, so it makes sense that someone who loves the works on the shelves be the one who makes such decisions. It feels good to be surrounded by the words of wonderful writers when the outdoors is brutally hot and humid, and every joint in my body aches.

Surrounding myself with other people’s books also acted as one more way of avoiding my own creative work. Sometimes, though, waiting around and doing nothing on a project ends up bringing clarification or new ideas. It can prove useful. I have been stalled on my in-progress manuscript, so a month or so back I asked someone to take a look at it–and then I got caught up in doing other things. Like getting cataract surgery and having covid, and then it was gardening in full swing under sweltering weather, and then the bookshelves… I wasn’t exactly procrastinating, but neither was I actively working on, or even thinking about, the collection.

Acquired when I was much younger, and cool bookshops abounded.

And one night recently–during a much-needed rainstorm–I got a brainstorm! I realized I was trying to pack too many topics into what really should be a manuscript more closely focused on how people who love one another vary in their relationships to old age and death, and on how the contemporary social and medical aspects of the aging process pull us in uncomfortable directions, often distancing us from those relationships. So yes, there should be family poems, hospice poems, biblically-influenced poems, and dealing-with-everyday observation poems. Also some poems of hope and love, poems reminding me (and readers) of the need for compassion in all dealings. But the draft had 92 poems in it, far too many; and some were there just because I like them or they’d been published in a good journal. Which are actually not good enough reasons to include a poem in a collection, according to most of the editors I know.

I am back to thinking about the manuscript and digging up potatoes–a nice crop this year–instead of culling the poetry books because, thank goodness, the heat wave’s subsided a bit. But in the process of this non-routine summer I have allowed numerous weeds to flourish and set seed; all the more work for NEXT year’s gardening, but it’s been too hot to deal with said interlopers. I like to believe the weeds and I are reaching a sort of understanding, but it is not really a compromise. All the concessions have been on my part. [Note: weeding a personal library is less physically taxing but not really any easier.]

Other forms of gleaning

Of the many tasks that lie before me as I work toward restructuring my routine, the past drafts pile must be the most engaging long-term project. Other kinds of odd jobs can be done in brief segments; it doesn’t take more than half an hour to clean out a drawer or closet, throw laundry in the washing machine, or cut back the ornamental grass for the season. Even a big job, like uncluttering the attic, can be done bit by bit once we get the motivation. Those tasks don’t require much critical thinking, no analysis beyond “Do I need this anymore? Can I get rid of it? Can I consolidate it with other items of its kind? What will take this stain off?”

While I can’t say I love organizing and clearing out stuff, it is not really taxing work. Just tedious.

Sorting through the drafts pile isn’t tedious, but it’s monumental and a bit intimidating. The pile of poems dates back as far as 2001 and is made up of probably two reams of paper. It includes hundreds of fairly terrible poems and, if I am lucky, maybe 80-100 poems that have the potential to be meaningful, beautiful, or at least not embarrassingly bad. This pile’s the result of 20 years of procrastination, lack of time, lack of motivation, and generalized disorganization. I admit it! Now I must roll up the proverbial shirtsleeves and get to work: work which requires analysis, criticism, revision, sorting, culling, and–that precious commodity–time. I find I’m unable to accomplish much if I attempt the work in small bits, (though I do break it up into sections, more or less). If I don’t spend at least two hours at a go, I get distracted and indecisive. I read each draft carefully, several times, to assess.

So we’re looking at weeks and weeks here. Maybe months and months, though I hope not.

The way I choose to understand the process is as a type of gleaning and sifting. I’ve got the harvest in–a big pile of poem drafts, maybe ur-poems, maybe seeds of poems, maybe crap. My efforts help me to decide which ideas are interesting, even if the poems themselves are not pulling the weight of an intriguing possibility; which lines and images are worthwhile, even if they don’t operate too well in their current context; which pieces suffer from thoughtless lineation, weird syntax, clunky form, form that doesn’t suit the content, and the like; which poems are far too wordy or else missing vital words for clarity; and which poems are basically not worth putting any effort into because: Boring! Obscure! Derivative! Sentimental! Awkward! Meh! What was I thinking?!

And then, every once in awhile, I find a poem I like and had forgotten about, one that only needs a bit of appropriate tweaking. Eureka moments while wading through my own creative work.

Yes, I should have been doing this sort of gleaning and sifting all along, the way I did when I was first starting out as a poet, 45 years ago. It probably would have made things easier. I notice myself noticing myself, though…noticing my changes as a writer, my little obsessions and my past enthusiasms glimmering in the work, noticing the different ways I have approached Big Themes and smaller ones. There may be something useful in that offshoot of my major poetry drafts excavation. Who can tell?

~

The Gleaners, Jean-François Millet, 1857; image, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Murmurings

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Center Valley, PA, USA

On a crisp, abundantly clear day (for a change!), I opened the car windows to listen to the corn stalks rattling in the breeze. After an unusually wet year, the fields have been too wet to bring out heavy farm equipment, like gleaners. They would get stuck in mud. So the corn stands and, finally, dries in the rapidly-cooling air.

And rustles and swishes, and produces the susurration associated with tree foliage, only louder, harsher. The November sun heightens the contrast between the grassy-looking stalks and the crowd of shadows below the strap-shaped leaves. Zea mays: one of the incredibly numerous poaceae monocots. Field corn, in this case. It surrounds two sides of the campus where I work. On windy days, I can hear it murmuring. It has a wistful sound to it, each plant crackling softly against its many neighbors.

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Ascribing human emotions to non-human things is something poets often do and for which they have been occasionally excoriated (see the pathetic fallacy). It is really I, not the field corn, who’s feeling wistful. There’s no reason not to occasionally explore things such as the pathetic fallacy, anthropomorphism, or clichés in poems, though. Poems can be places for play, puns, irony, and over-the-top expressiveness…where else but in art do we have so much possibility for free rein and experiment?

With that in mind, what came to mind is a decade-old poem I played with long ago. I thought of it, located it in my files, and realized how well it suits this year’s rainy weather. It has never seen print, so this is its first public “share” to the small world of readers. Just to be wistful, and to listen to murmurings.

Fallacy Pathétique

Awful, the sobbing breast of the nearby hill
draped in funereal rain,
moping trees with bedraggled leaves
under dolorous skies.

How coarse and crass the indigent crows
mocking day’s solemnity
over pleading calls for mercy, compassion
from the myriad finches.

Do not quench sorrow but be drenched in it,
small streamlets fast-running
down ratty embankments dull with mud.
O, morning, mourning,

lease your grief to field and gravel and
the huddled owl’s
damp-pinioned back hunched in sleep.
Be terrible and bleak,

stained with the nouns and adjectives of despair,
run down the mountain
with a mouse carcass on your swift spine,
meet the road in a reeking ditch.

Familiarity & awe

The region I live in is not known for dramatic landscapes–no big sky, no ragged peaks or ocean shoreline, no palms, grand flora, impressive architecture. Nonetheless, there are days such as this one when my familiar commute fairly glows with beauty. In the long slant of mid-autumn morning sun, the half-harvested soybean fields shimmer under frost: beige never looked so glorious. Even the big agricultural gleaner glimmers with ice crystals. The sky’s washed with upswept cirrus clouds, and backlit dogwood leaves cling like maroon pennants to silhouetted branches.

Perhaps my aesthetic appreciation of the view is due to a neural release of dopamine responding to images processed through my eyes’ rods and cones; that understanding, if true, in no way lessens my awe.

As I head toward the campus building, the clamorous urgency of wild geese momentarily catches me by surprise. Welcome.

Gleaning

Glean.

I love this word and its related agricultural cohort, winnow.

Driving to work this morning, I ended up behind a gleaner moving from one soybean field to another situated slightly south on the same road. The link below, thanks to Flickr, takes you to a nice photo of a soybean gleaner at work.

Photo of a gleaner.

Glean: to gather grain or other produce left by reapers. Or, to gather information or material bit by bit.

Winnow: to remove (as chaff) by a current of air. Or, to get rid of, remove (as of something unwanted); to sift or separate. [Merriam-Webster].

Wonderful words for writers, useful as metaphorical or concrete actions, these terms have etymological roots going back to that ancient and particularly human business–agriculture. Lately, I’ve been working on revising some poems, and winnowing is part of that process.

I’ve also been helping my parents to “downsize” as they move from the house they’ve lived in for years into a much smaller apartment. Significant winnowing was involved in several aspects of the word: we got rid of, we sifted through, and we separated. We did a bit more vacuuming than allowing currents of air to sweep away the dust that lingered in the closets, however.

But we also gleaned. Or, shall I speak for myself here--I gleaned. Sorting through books and photo albums and drawers full of things we feel we should save for some reason offers a means of gathering information bit by bit. What for my parents was likely a review of life was, occasionally, revelatory for my siblings and me.

(Etymological aside: review and revelatory have different sources, the latter being much older).

My father’s sermon file and his school ribbons for elocution or winning debates and the books he just couldn’t bear to part with vs. the books he reluctantly let go–these are gleanings.

My mother’s elementary school report cards, her childhood drawings of Japanese ladies with parasols (I never knew she used to draw), faded photos of the high school trip to Washington D.C., the prom invitation, the letters we wrote from college–also gleanings.

From these gleanings I have reaped more than I expected.

So we reap and then we glean and then we winnow and, from that winnowing, we glean again and reap again. Sounds like what I do in my garden annually. Sounds like what the farmer does every year, too, though these days the reaping and gleaning, and much of the winnowing, are done in one go with a very large piece of farm equipment…such as the one which slowed me on my commute to work this morning and which led to this digression.