NaPoWriMo, Day 14: The Dreaded Ending

So here’s what I’ve discovered, two weeks into NaPoWriMo: It’s not hard to write a poem every day. The hard part is finishing one every day.

I have no particular routine about this poem-a-day thing. Sometimes I’m up at 3 a.m., writing that day’s poem already; sometimes I start it at breakfast or lunch. Occasionally I don’t get underway until the evening, when I panic and make myself turn off Top Gear and for God’s sake write something because I have to post it by midnight and I’ve been a lazy slug and time is running out.

But no matter when I start the poem, the rest of it goes more or less the same: After a fair amount of staring into space and thinking that I’ll never come up with an idea, a few words find their way onto the page. And then the writing snowballs and seems to take on a life of its own. For a while, things are going pretty well—lines are coming and life is good and the radio station of the cosmos is transmitting loud and clear.

And then I start feeling like it’s time to end the poem, and the whole thing screeches to a halt. My Great Thought has petered out like a semi that can’t quite make it to the summit. I get out and pop the hood and stand there and stare at it. This goes on for a long, long time—often twice as long as it took to write the rest of the poem. I tinker with it and back it down the hill a ways—cut some lines to see if I can get a running start from someplace else. Sometimes I take parts out and rearrange them. Sometimes I have to unscrew entire stanzas and chuck them to the side of the road. Eventually I manage to get the engine going and drive it over the crest, but I’m not always happy with the ride.

Regardless, it’s done—for now—and off it goes to the Yahoo group, to the showroom where it pulls in alongside the poems of my friends and peers. Whether I ever drive it again remains to be seen.

NaPoWriMo, Day 8: Not So Warm to Your Form

Okay, that’s the last time I’ll attempt to write a sonnet on a workday during NaPoWriMo.

Sonnets just take too damned long. I usually have to hack my way through one over the course of several days. And this one yesterday couldn’t decide if it was funny or poignant or what, and then the last four lines wouldn’t come and wouldn’t come. I had to pick it up and set it down over and over during the day—in between tasks at work, while balancing a sandwich on my lap at lunch—and finally finished it late at night, as the pumpkin hour approached and I was too sleepy to wrestle anymore. 

Still, I love writing sonnets. In the past few years, I’ve been trying take the stereotype of the sonnet (that it is stately, elegant, and usually about one of the Big Three—death, love, or nature) and give it a good smack in the head. Though I have plenty of sonnets from my youth about butterflies and music, lately they’ve veered toward subjects like plumbing and barflies. This one yesterday was about cat litter. It was not a success, except maybe as the dreaded Light Verse. But the wonderful thing about NaPoWriMo is that it doesn’t matter how good it is—you just finish it, and you move on.

I had thought that I might try to do several of the major forms this month—pantoum, sestina, villanelle, etc. But after yesterday I’m rethinking that. A villanelle! Those things take forf***ingever! And I have yet to write a good one.

But then again, didn’t I just say that good doesn’t count? And, to quote The Great One (not Whitman, but Gretzky), “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

NaPoWriMo, Day 6: Heady Optimism

Six days, six poems. So far, more or less so good. I haven’t spent too long staring at the blank page, and I haven’t flat-out forgotten to write a poem yet (though the month is still young). And I haven’t had to rouse myself out of bed at 11:45 p.m. to dash one off and post it. I did have to break out the emergency haiku kit two nights ago, when nothing longer wanted to take root. When backed into a corner, I always say, write a few haikus. They’re short, they’re harder than they look, and they still count as poems.

Yesterday, in the interests of expediency, I even wrote a poem on the computer. I never, ever do that—the process of writing on a keyboard is too fast for my poet brain to work with. I need the slow pace of pen on paper—the extra milliseconds before the thought makes it out the end of the pen give the internal editor time to rewrite the line about to form. Consequently, the poem yesterday on the computer was sort of stream-of-consciousness. It was different. I liked it.

As often happens when I’m writing a lot, I’ve started writing a cycle—this time, it’s poems based on fiddle tunes. I wrote two before I realized it could be a cycle, and then I thought, “Hey, I’ll do that.” It seems like fertile ground, these songs steeped in history and hard times. Cycles are often a good way for me to get out of a writing funk, but it’s hard to find themes. But then, when I’m in mid-cycle, I can think of all kinds of other cycles I’d like to write, such as types of fences, parts of ant anatomy, or names of Caribbean islands.

Meanwhile, my cat Deja is dozing contentedly in his little blue cat tent, which I bought at Ikea about four years ago. He used to venture into it once in a while, but he would never stay. The other day, I finally figured out the key—I put a folded towel in there. I swear, if you put a towel on anything, Deja thinks it’s the best thing ever. So now he’s curled up in there, having claimed the Ikea tent for Dejadom. It’s a small kingdom, but he rules it with the power of snore.

NaPoWriMo: The Case for Every Day

A few years ago at a local open mike, my friends Carol Brockfield and Dave Harvey announced that for April, Poetry Month, they were planning to write a poem every day. Not only that, they would post their new poems each day online where others could see them. It was all part of NaPoWriMo, they said—National Poetry Writing Month, a project where people all around the country sit down and write (and, what’s more, finish) a poem every day, and then thrust it out into the public eye.

I’ll be honest: I thought the idea was nuts. I am not a writing-on-the-fly kind of gal, and I am not prolific. My poems come to me at a maddeningly slow pace, and I don’t like them sashaying outdoors until I’m sure their shirts are buttoned and their faces are clean. And the other thing is, I hate routine. Having to do anything every day, no matter how fun, turns that thing into work—something I have plenty of already, thanks.

But in March of 2009, I was in a bad writing rut. Again, Carol and Dave mentioned this crazy NaPoWriMo thing coming up in April, and I thought, what the hey, I haven’t written diddly in months. Maybe this will at least make me write something. So I screwed up my courage, signed up for their Yahoo group, and embarked on a month of—well, I wasn’t sure what.

At first, it was weird. Every day, I got e-mails with poems—a lot of them from people I didn’t know. Our local group had maybe a dozen poets in it, and the whole thing seemed like a weird mixture of anonymity and publicness—who were these people flashing their poems at me, and where did I fit in? I scribbled down my poems each day and fired them off to the rest of the group. At first, it felt a bit competitive. Was I good? Was I bad? Did it matter? We were like a pack of marathon runners who’d just started a race, jostling each other as we sorted ourselves out and tried to find a rhythm that would take us through the long haul. Before long, that feeling of competitiveness morphed into camaraderie as we began to trade compliments back and forth and started little mini-discussions on the side. By the end of the month, I’d gotten to know and like these people, and I’d read a staggering spectrum of poems—dozens of unexpected topics, takes, styles, and forms.

But perhaps the best thing about NaPoWriMo was that it made me take ideas that had been rattling around in my head and put them to paper. And when I ran out of those ideas, I had to look at everything during the day—work, apple blossoms, frogs, fried eggs, wars, soccer—and think, How will I make this into a poem? Not would, but will—because I had to post a poem that night, good or not, come hell or high water. In the end, I had about 25 new poems (I missed a few days), and seven or eight of them were decent. That’s a very good number for me; normally a month might yield one good poem, maybe none. Bolstered by that first year’s success, I tried it again last year. But the grind of writing a poem every day proved to be too much—it’s an astonishingly hard thing to do, and after a few days it already felt like digging for gold with my fingernails in a deep, spent mine. That time, I flaked out after a week because a deadline at work overwhelmed me. Still, I got maybe five usable poems out of it—again, a good number.

So here I am again, kicking off another NaPoWriMo. This is my third year, and it’s Day 2. Already, two new poems have wandered out of my brain and onto the street, their clothes askew and their hair sticking up. And I see poems incoming from my NaPoWriMo compadres, and our glad conversation has begun. Welcome, spring, with your daffodils braving the rain. Here are some poems to add to all the new.

Open Mikes: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

About once a month, I put on my ears and go to a poetry open mike. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve sipped coffee in countless cafés, fidgeted on innumerable uncomfortable chairs, and pondered art—the visual and the spoken kind—while poets belted out their work at galleries. I even co-hosted an open mike for three years, which was like planning a birthday party every month: I worried whether people would come, and then they did, and we usually had a blast. 

And after all that, I have a confession to make: I hate open mikes.

All right, sometimes I love them. But I hate them, too. I hate open mikes for the same reason most people won’t go to them at all: I don’t want to hear poetry that I don’t like. And what’s more, I don’t want to be bombarded with it while poets blithely motor past the time limit, shout about hand grenades, or torture the audience by demanding that we chant their lines back to them, or ask us to vote on which poem we “want” them to read. As I sit there with a bland smile on my face, pondering whether it’s medically possible to slit my own throat with my car keys, I think, “Why do I keep coming to these things?”

It’s no idle question. It’s something I think about a lot, because, God help me, a month later I’m sitting there, doing it again. Part of the answer is that open mikes have another side: a kind of beauty that comes from randomness. I might, for instance, see an unexpected genius come wandering in off the street, with dog-eared pages clutched in one hand. Or someone might take a form—a sonnet or villanelle—and turn it inside out, exposing a whole new world of possibilities. Or there might be a shy kid who gets up and reads for the first time in her life, and ain’t half bad. Some nights, there are a lot of these moments. Some nights, there are none. But, like flashes of gold that a prospector sees in a muddy creek, they're enough to keep me coming back.

Mostly, though, I go to open mikes because my friends go to them. And the more I go, the more friends I make, and then the whole thing begins to emit a gravitational force of friendship. I also go because I like to see what’s going on with poetry—what’s new and surprising. Poetry is one of those fields where the breakthroughs can happen at any level, to anyone. Some of them flare and die out, but some of them take hold—because someone else was listening, and liked it. Thus the giant life form of poetry grows, cell by cell.

So back I go, full of caffeine so I don’t nod off during the long bits, and armed with a couple of poems in my pocket. God knows who’s nodding off during my five minutes, but they’re kind enough to let me read, and I return the favor. And there we are, once again, throwing our poems in the creek. And hoping a few of them shine.

Poem: When the Aliens Ask of Art

Odd you should ask me,

inclined as I am to offer

a thousand sorrows humans

visit upon each other, but I see

you’ve grown tired of random,

dime-a-dozen litanies,

when you’ve caught the scent

of art. Very well.

Of art:

Here are figure skaters.

A line is left describing

where they’ve been, a cold

cartography. The patterns?

They mean nothing.

They do not commend

one route over any other.

That would not be art.

I see you understand this.

You see how arms can grace

a circle or make you think

of wind on grass. Note

how the female seems

to push her heart out

through the palms of her hands, 

then brings them back empty.

Art is a ladle you offer

to passersby, never asking names.

(appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction)

List: Things that Ayla, Heroine of the Clan of the Cave Bear Series, Did Not Invent

 the Clapper

Count Chocula

letterpress printing

online voter registration

Wii

  

mayonnaise

madrigals

B-2 stealth bomber

the novel

rack-and-pinion steering

Hot Pockets

  

(thanks to Melinda Allman for the idea)