Smokin’ August Poetry Postcard Fest Wrap-Up

The postcards I've received so far.
Way to go, group 4! If more arrive,
I'll update the photo.

Yesterday, August 31st, I dropped a postcard with a poem on it into my favorite mailbox* here in Ashland, and I was done—that was my last card for this year’s August Poetry Postcard Fest. This was my sixth year participating in the Fest, a month-long writing marathon founded by Paul Nelson and Lana Hechtman Ayers, in which people around the world write original poems onto postcards and send them off to other Fest participants. This year I managed to hit a personal best, writing 33 poems in the month of August.

As I’ve said in this blog before, the Postcard Fest is an unusually intimate writing marathon because only one person, the recipient, might ever see that poem. And with about 300 Fest participants this year, the recipient might be in Schenectady or Seattle or County Wexford, Ireland. So along with that intimacy, paradoxically, there’s a pleasant anonymity to the Fest—since the recipient usually doesn’t know me, in my mind, that means that absolutely anything goes. That person doesn’t care if I’m writing about ants or tacos or Trump, so I tend to give my postcard poems a very loose rein. 

This year I wrote almost all of the poems on the same theme, something I’ve never managed to do before. I can’t say I really planned that, but as we got toward the end of July, my region of southern Oregon was suffering from a hellacious, early fire season—several forest fires raged nearby, and we were choking with smoke that settled into our valley and didn’t budge for weeks. Like a lot of people in the area, I became obsessed with the Air Quality Index; several times a day I was checking two apps on my phone, plus a website, to see how bad the air was. Several days we got up into the maroon “hazardous” readings (over 300, the chart's highest range), days of a strange, omnipresent white fog that felt almost moist in the lungs. People got sick, people fled town for the coast, people actually moved away, it was so bad.

Left. What my town normally looks like.
Right: How it looked through most of August.

And like my house, car, office, lungs, and very cells, my poems were permeated by smoke as I began writing them for the Postcard Fest. It seemed pointless to write about anything else, it was so pervasive, so all-encompassing. We are a mountain town, and we literally could not see the mountains around us; it looked like we were living in some kind of flat war zone. After a couple of sputtering starts at smoke/fire poems, I got into a groove one night and wrote one that ended up too long for a postcard. But I just went with it, spent a couple of days polishing it up, and ended up sending it to Rattle’s Poets Respond, since it was about a news story that had gone viral, a photo of five firefighters sleeping in a yard in Redding, California, two hours south of here, during the Carr Fire. Rattle published it on their site the following Tuesday, and to my astonishment, it was shared more than 1,000 times from their web page.

Still, the fires burned on and the smoke blanketed us with its netherworld. So I just stuck with it, writing poems about smoke and fire, each with that day’s air quality index noted on it. There were poems about angry meteorologists, weary berry pickers, finding ash inside the car, the language of evacuation orders, and fashion-forward smoke masks. It was like a bottomless well; writing them was almost effortless. Out of the 33 poems I wrote in August, only 4 weren’t about smoke or fire. And then, late in the month, we suddenly got a clear day, and then one that wasn’t too bad. A few days later, we got two incredibly beautiful, clear days in a row. Now we’ve had about a week of good air. And either I was sick of writing about smoke or the muse had finally blown away, because the fire poems didn't come as easily without that smoke right in front of my face, right in my nose**. One of the last poems of the month was about a horse. Just a horse, not a horse breathing smoke or running from fire.

So now I have to figure out if all these poems add up to anything, a chapbook or section in a full-length collection. I’m not sure how they hold together on their own; I feel like they need a few longer poems (like “To the Firefighters Sleeping in the Yard”) to anchor them, or hang them from, or some other awkward metaphor***.

As for the mechanics of the writing, I wrote poems mostly in batches this year, two or three every few days, rather than one per day. I’ve found that with these short postcard poems, I don’t get my engine running hot enough with just one poem. If I can sit down long enough to write two or three, the second and third are usually better poems than the first one. Also, this was the first year that I wrote every single poem on a keyboard, none by hand. Right at the start I made the decision to write on my Bluetooth keyboard that talks to my iPad. It was partly a practical decision to make sure the poems would all be in one place and backed up (via my Notes app); I got a little sloppy last year and have never gathered all of that year’s poems and typed them up, although I think I know which notebooks they’re in. It was also an aesthetic choice; I tend to write more heedlessly and intuitively on a keyboard because I can write faster on it than by hand, and I was curious how that would affect the poems. I think the experiment worked; that voice seems to be flowing better than the handwritten voice. (Who knew such things could have their own voice?)

Linocut, Mt. Ashland Cabin. Note that in the
smoky photos above, that's Grizzly Peak,
our other iconic mountain.

And this year I again printed up my own postcards to be sure that each had plenty of writing room, which is an issue for me because apparently I blather on. This year I decided to use one of my own linocuts, a landscape called Mt. Ashland Cabin that has a swirling shape on the left that was based on a wisteria trunk, but came out looking like—sorta—fire. I got those cards printed long before I knew I was going to be writing about fire and smoke; it just worked out that way. Now it looks more ominous than I’d planned.

As always, the August PoPoFest was great fun, and remarkably productive artistically. And I got some wonderful work from the other participants—some even hand-make their cards with amazing visual art. I highly recommend it.

* Ask any writer over 50 about their “lucky mailbox,” and they’ll probably have one even though we rarely send out submissions by mail anymore.

** On pretty bad days, it smelled like somebody had built a campfire in my living room. On the really bad days, it was like someone had built a campfire in my nose. There’s no other way to describe it.

*** I am poemed out. Fresh out of metaphors.

Being Erma Bombeck

Recently I was thrilled to have a couple of memoir essays published, “Steal This Bull” in the beautifully eclectic print journal Gulf Coast, and the other called “Cigarettes: It’s What’s for Dinner” published in Longridge Review, an online journal specializing in creative nonfiction about childhood experiences.

Those two essays, about shoplifting and my mom’s strange cooking experiments, respectively, had been kicking around in my “not quite finished” essay file for a few years. Every now and then I’d pull them out and make more revisions, but something about them didn’t feel right. About a year ago, I figured out the problem: The voice wasn’t me. Well, it was me, but it was me desperately trying to be someone else. And I knew who that someone was: Erma Bombeck.

Erma Bombeck was a huge deal in our house when I was a kid. My mom loved Bombeck and read her newspaper columns out loud before dinner, followed by Art Buchwald, another of our idols. We had all of Bombeck’s books—paperbacks with titles like The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank and I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression—lined up in a little shelf-shrine in our spare room, which was crammed full of books*.

I grew up with that hallowed Bombeck voice in my head, her wry one-liners the gold standard of humor writing (“I’ve exercised with women so thin that buzzards followed them to their cars”). So when I started to write essays and memoir pieces years ago, naturally I tried to make them funny. The trouble was, as soon as I thought “humor,” the card-catalog librarian in my brain immediately went and fetched the Erma Bombeck voice. But my version of it came out in a weird, over-the-top voicey-voice**, a sort of quack that was trying way too hard to sound funny. 

 

For a long time I didn’t see anything wrong with that voice, but I did notice that my nonfiction got rejected a lot. (Probably one reason why I turned to poetry.) Then somewhere in the past few years, I was reading one of my old essays and could hear how awful that ersatz-Bombeck voice was, a new clang that I hadn’t noticed before. I suppose my ear had become tuned differently. I’d been steeping myself in Gay Talese, Eula Biss, John Berendt, and other masters of nonfiction, and I could see that they didn’t resort to any sort of voicey-voice to be engaging and even funny. I’d also been working as an editor at a book publisher that specialized in trivia and humor books, where we constantly had to warn freelance writers against using the “comedy voice”—an overstrained style that tried to make everything sound funny, when the key was writing about things that were funny (though a deft could writer make a funny story funnier).

This is not to say that I am now a master of comedy. In fact, I think I’ve stumbled onto the fact that I don’t have to be a master of comedy; after writing a lot more nonfiction these past few years, I see that my natural territory lies closer to seriocomedy. And I reserve the right to veer off into other territories. And as much as I still love and admire Erma Bombeck, I see that I’m not her; I don’t have whatever that magical thing was in her voice. All I have is my own voice, my own stories. I’m kind of chagrined that it took me 40 years to realize that. But it’s been fun going back through some old essays and de-voicing them, finding what’s beneath the quack. I’ve still got a pile of them to go through. Who knows what’s under there? 

Here are links to some other recent creative nonfiction pieces:

“Always Eat the Ugly Things First” in the Medford Mail Tribune

“It’s Good Just to Show Up: One Writer’s First (Terrifying) Public Reading” in The Review Review (soon to be reprinted in Far Villages, an anthology of essays for poets from Black Lawrence Press)

“Open Mikes: The Best of Times, the Worst of Times” on trishhopkinson.com

 

*As if to further prove that we were a strange family—the very point of the “Cigarettes” essay—we had so many books that my mother turned our spare room into a lending library for our neighbors. Each book had a slip of paper in it, and the neighbor would check out the book by handing us the slip, which we'd keep in a folder until they brought the book back. It was a minor hit for a few months, and then interest fell off and we went back to just having a crapload of books.

**Technical term.

Liner Notes: Two Poems in Willawaw Journal

Are there any sweeter words to a poet than “Please send me some poems,” spoken to you by a literary journal editor after a reading? Yep, pretty much nothing beats it, other than “Here’s your Pulitzer.” That’s how I happened to get two poems in the new online magazine Willawaw Journal, helmed by editors Rachel Barton (who spoke those words to me at the Springfield Poetry Series this past October) and Jade Rosina McCutcheon. I respect that in an editor, that thing where they go see the poet and inspect the goods, as it were, before committing to a purchase.

Here’s a link to the two poems, “My Ex, the Surgeon” and “Balloon Payment.”

“My Ex, the Surgeon” is about a real person. The entry point for the poem was the sound his knuckles made, that little crack, which I remember distinctly all these years later. We were both vegetarians at the time, and we cooked together a lot—usually meals of steamed artichokes, brown rice, and sautéed bean sprouts with mushrooms. I hate mushrooms, hate, hate, hate them*, but for some reason I liked the way he cooked them. Might have been all the butter. We cooked those foods so often that we called that a “standard dinner,” a joke we’ve had for years. (We’re still friends**.) Secret poetic-license fact: He isn’t actually a surgeon; he’s a mathematician.

“Balloon Payment” was originally written for the August Poetry Postcard Fest, which I’ve written a lot about on this blog. The poem is a direct reaction to the mortgage crisis, which some say peaked a few years ago but is really still reverberating. It’s also about the kind of hierarchy that's too common in the political landscape right now, the desire to always look down on someone else no matter how hard life has smacked you down. I usually try to write compassionately, but I was not feeling charitable that day; I was seeing close-up that bigotry and fearmongering reign in small houses as well as large ones. The one element in the poem that's not from that xenophobic landscape is the neighbor rigging his sailboat; that’s actually my very sweet neighbor Ron, who often unfurls the sail on his beautiful little wooden boat in his driveway when he’s cleaning and fixing it. The mast is a bit higher than his roofline, so it’s pretty spectacular. I see the boat out the kitchen window and think, “There's Ron, sailing again!”










* Is that a genetic thing, like cilantro? All mushrooms taste like dirt to me.

** I’m friends with a lot of my exes. Some people find that odd.

This Old Blog (and All the Pans)

A few weeks ago, poets Donna Vorreyer and Kelli Russell Agodon had a Twitter conversation about a strange phenomenon they’ve noticed in the poetry world. A few years back, they noted, there were lots of poets writing blogs about poetry, their creative process, and their writing lives. But with the rise of social media the past few years, many poets let their blogs go fallow, turning instead to the smaller-byte writing environs of Facebook and Twitter. As Donna and Kelli said, that was kind of a shame; in the days before social media, they both had formed strong relationships with fellow poet bloggers, and they missed those blogs, that sense of shared community and slightly-longer-form news, thoughts, and quirkiness. So they decided to fire up a Poet Bloggers Revival Tour—a new network of poetry bloggers, all committed to posting each week in 2018 and reigniting some community and conversations.

Reading about this on Donna’s website, I realized that that same thing had happened to me: I still maintain this blog, which you (bless you) are reading right now, but I’ve got to admit, I don’t post here as much as I used to. Partly it’s because of time constraints; my day job gets hellishly hectic (I know, whose doesn’t?), and as I get older I find that the nighttime isn’t necessarily the right time for writing anymore, with my brain battered from workday emergencies. Some nights it’s all I can do to pick up the remote and turn on The Great British Baking Show*. 

Another reason why I haven’t blogged as much the past couple of years is because I’m getting more nonfiction published in literary journals—and, wonder of wonders, nonfiction pays (which poetry largely doesn’t). So I started to listen to those people who had long complained that bloggers were wasting their writing on their own blogs, when they could be earning money with it elsewhere. I had to give that some thought; I am, after all, 55 years old and looking over the horizon at retirement, a time which I hope to spend eating burritos and not cat food. My conclusion is that, though I disagree that all blogging is a pointless waste of writing material, I do see that there are some nonfiction/essay/memoir pieces that I should shop around to journals (and other blogs that have large followings) rather than posting them on my own blog. And I’ve done that, and they’re actually getting published, and that makes me write more of those, and that’s all good. 

But I do still love this blog, because it’s still the only place where I can write anything I damn well please and publish it with no gatekeeper. So I am committing to writing a bit more on this blog in the coming year. And I’ll at least occasionally try writing on the shorter side**, like some expert bloggers say you’re supposed to do. And I can’t imagine that every post will be about poetry, because this is my blog, so you know Star Trek and lists of entertaining street names and wistful musings about horses will inevitably sneak into it. 

Last year I really upped my writing-submission game***. I sent out so many submissions****, in so many genres, that I came up with a writing mantra for myself: “All the pans, in all the fires, all the time.” So here’s another pan.

* That show, I swear, is the cure for everything. Talented people making beautiful and delicious baked goods, talking in cute accents, winning abashedly and losing gracefully? It’s the perfect antidote to bad workdays, crazy relatives, and our current American nightmare.

** No guarantees about that. 

*** Hey, that’s an idea for a blog post.

**** How many? I honestly don't know, because I have the world's most Luddite submission-tracking system. Another idea for a blog post!