My year has begun with half a dozen literary journals declining my poems, but it has also begun with a proliferation of new poems–which makes me happy. There are several reasons for a prolific spurt, some of which involve sad events that have turned me toward reflection. While sorrow isn’t a reliable prod for writing in my case, reflection almost always is. Also, attending a workshop is generative for me.

In last week’s session, we read Lisel Mueller’s “Curriculum Vitae,” and Anita asked us to emulate the poem for our own life story. I encourage you to read Mueller’s poem if you are not familiar with it; it’s full of lovely imagery and is so concise and evocative that it stands as autobiography–quite an amazing piece. Also daunting: how to use that poem as a writing prompt? I needed a strategy, so to keep myself as brief and non-narrative as possible, I limited my version to 15 points instead of 20. Then I edited it down several times, taking out as much as possible while leaving things that feel “true.”

What I realized after this practice in form, and after revising it and tightening it up, is that if I were to start again rather than revise–and were to focus on different aspects of my life experience–I could write a completely different, but still true, poem. I could write a dozen completely true and completely different CV poems! I could have used national events that occurred during my life and had greater or lesser impact on me–the Kennedy assassination, the March on Montgomery, Viet Nam War on television, etc. all the way to 9/11 and since then; or I could have focused on friends and family, their appearances and disappearances from my life; or places I lived or traveled…easily a dozen CVs, curated to present a lifetime.

So while the piece I wrote isn’t a “keeper,” not something I would send out to literary journals, the practice of writing and revising it has been remarkably useful (thank you, Anita Skeen!); I’m more aware than ever of how perspective, focus, and image affect narrative. And of how many ways there are to “tell” an experience, which of course is something poets often do: revisit, re-frame, re-imagine an experience, loss/trauma, or relationship using numerous forms, images, perspectives, speakers, and so on.

Which is certainly one reason Anita asked us to try this exercise.

I did not manage to be as lyrical and concise as Mueller, but then I didn’t expect to; she was an amazing poet. From her poem cited above, I especially relate to the line: “At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.” It felt like that at my parents’ house, too.

I’ll be brave and post the practice poem, one of many versions of my autobiography.

~

CV, after Lisel Mueller

1.	Three weeks before summer solstice, I enter the world. My father considers me the first perfect thing in his life.
2.	Underfoot, meadow grass and church aisles. 
3.	We move from the manse to the city, where my sister goes twice to the hospital and I walk two blocks to school.
4.	Suburban house, square and white as a die. We learn to ride bicycles in the street.
5.	Bussing and gas shortage, algebra, barefoot girls in summer. My embarrassment at growing too tall, too thin, too bookish, too moody.
6.	Early entry into college. When the only thing I wanted was to get away.
7.	In Michigan, snow like I had never seen before.
8.	Some years of misery, tedious, purposely omitted. But I meet the people who most encourage me to write.
9.	Back to my parents’ kind embrace. Celibacy, recalibration, writing.
10.	We meet one summer. I write you so many letters. It might be love.
11.	Two children 18 months apart, vegetables in the backyard: it is love.
12.	Autodidact in the garden, in the world of literature, in child-rearing. There are cats, chickens, guinea pigs, a beloved dog, but I need to return to study and poems.
13.	Loss and joy keep me writing, teaching keeps me busy, children grow and travel far. My books see print.
14.	Pandemic. 
15.	My father dies, my mother loses her power of speech, friends start failing, there are dark weeks. Many hours in the garden, growing and grieving. We hold on, uncertain, but whole. 

~