A Note About Genre

Tonight, I'd like to say a little something about genre. I consider myself a poetess, albeit a poetess-in-progress. Today, though, I'm thinking about my forays into other genres.

I have tried to write fiction, and I have the start and outline of a nifty fantasy novel. The reason it's not finished? Oh, there are lots. I'm lazy and don't like to stick to one story for too long. the thought of a whole novel is completely daunting to me. I have bits and pieces of a story, but not anything I can say is finished in my head. I'd love to write my mother's memoirs, since she has led such a fascinating life. But these are neither here nor there. They don't have deadlines, and they live, happily splintered and half-alive, in my head.

On the other, deadline side, I volunteered to submit some pieces to Milestones for American Women: Our Defining Passages, an anthology scheduled to come out in late 2008 or early 2009. I figured, hey, I've got some important passages. Folks might be interested in reading about them. the editors sent me an enthusiastic "yea," and told me to get the articles in by January 30th.

And here I sit, on January 29th, wondering why I thought that writing was writing, and that if it was my own life, I could probably write it pretty well. Ernk. (That is a buzzer sound, right there.) I feel like it comes off as flat an unimaginative. Perhaps it's just that my life isn't as exciting as I think it is. Maybe I need a ghostwriter. or a few drinks - I hear that worked for Hemingway...

Anyway, my realization for the day is that a writer is not a writer is not a writer. This is probably patently obvious to everyone else, but I'm a little late. Now, I knew I didn't prefer to write fiction or non-fiction, but I figured if you write in one genre, certainly you could tackle the rest with ease. Mea culpa. A mistake I won't make again! Not that i won't attempt to write in another genre, but I'll be sure to have lots of lead time for rewriting, deleting, and revision.

The Writing of a Poem: Stumbling Blocks and Words

Have you ever had the most brilliant idea for a poem, or the most poignant image trapped in your head, and find that when you write it down it just doesn't live up to the grandeur you know you want to convey? You write the poem (or essay, or whatever you write), and it simply doesn't have the shine you know it should. It doesn't speak to you, or hit you in the gut the way it did before you had to wrap it into words. Most writers with lofty goals will know what I'm talking about here...if you don't, write some more. You'll get to this place eventually.

I have been in this place for the better part of two weeks. I catch snippets of images, and when I write them down, they seem stale and empty. I also find, the more I examine my own work from a semi-unbiased position, that I think I am trying to do too many things within a single poem. My better poems (according to both my own preferences and those of my current MFA mentor) are very succinct, focus on a few stark, striking images and wording, and have very short, powerful lines. On the other hand, most of my poetry uses a mid-page lines and have a veritable avalanche of imagery in them. And, much like I just threw in the word "veritable" in the last sentence, when I let the images run away with me and just write, I have a tendency to forget about standardizing my diction, and I just run with the flow of the words. Randomly throwing in elevated diction was one of the big critiques I received on my last packet of MFA work. It's a result of my casting about to find just the right word...and I do love words. I devour them. I savor the good ones. I have the very bad habit of occasionally being struck by a word that is seldom-used, considered high-diction, and tossing it whole into a poem that it likely doesn't sound right in. The problem, I find, is that to me, it does sound right, until someone points out that it probably doesn't belong.

My bad habit of tending to get too verbose is my poetry is one I can relatively easily go back and edit; grading essays and research papers has given me the skill to at least go back and identify where I got carried away, to go back and tauten where I left the poem loose and saggy. Words, on the other hand...I have a harder time with this. I'm going to have to make a conscious effort to beware of random elevated diction, and i often find it difficult to identify in my own work.

Which leads me to the lesson of the day: having outside readers, whether they be related to a writing program, a workshop, or even just a group of friends who are willing to read your work and provide thoughtful critique, is an invaluable resource. They will find meanings you didn't realize were in your work, they will identify weaknesses you are too close to see, and that will make you a better writer, painful as it may be.

In my case, I have decided to restrain myself by focusing on keeping my lines short and my poems tight. I am also consciously working on keeping the verbosity to a minimum, painful as it may be. Interestingly enough, the poems that have resulted are better, as first drafts, than my usual. Working this way also slows my brain, which is usually in a rather fricative state, much the way I imagine meditation does, allowing me to concentrate on minute details, and marinating in a thought until I can tease out exactly what I want to say. A few of my pieces, "Recovery," "Mistress," "A Walk at Dawn," and "A Visit with My Mother After the Divorce," are all poems that I've tried this with, have met with great approval from mentors and readers, and are the ones I hope to place in a well-respected print journal in the coming months.

Best of luck with your writing. If you do happen to be in a rut, I highly recommend setting some uncomfortable rules for yourself, to see how discipline affects your writing. You may not be pleased with the result, and you will have learned something from that, as well, but if it works for you, all the better.

Good Poetry / Bad Poetry

I go into each new book of poetry wanting very much to hear what the author has to say, and wanting to enjoy how they say it. Because of this conscious open-mindedness, I am extremely disappointed if the poetry doesn't "work" for me. I have to admit I'm a bit low-brow in my tastes, by which I mean I prefer poetry I can understand. I don't mind working for it, so long as the author is genuine, but snobbery for snobbery's sake just pisses me off as a reader. Be warned!

The impetus for this particular post comes as I read the review in the November 2007 issue of Library Journal panning Sandra McPherson's Expectation Days. (No snickers about how behind I am in my mag reading from the peanut gallery, please.) Having just read The Spaces Between Birds for my last MFA packet, I have to land on the side of the reviewer. While she has the occasional combination of lines that make me sit up and say, "Wow! I hadn't thought of putting those things together into that image - fantastic!", more often she strikes me as somewhat cold and impersonal, even about the most personal of issues like motherhood and death. Some of this has to do with her odd use of too-strange words that interrupt the flow of a poem, some of it with her unoriginal use of nature imagery. She's not a bad poet, by any means - her images are disjointed in such a way that every reading gives you something new to work with...I just prefer a little more feel to come though, if you understand my meaning. (Other people have other opinions, obviously, since she's published more than one book.) But McPherson doesn't leave me breathless, and I don't find that certain lines or phrases of hers haunt me in my sleep, or at odd waking hours. This is how I judge how much I enjoy poetry: does it come a-haunting me when my mind strays? Do certain liens take up residence and simply stay, squatters in my mindspace?

Everyone has their own tastes, but it leaves me wondering this: what is that spark that captures a reader? And should we worry about whether or not we have it, since there are so many tastes out there, that we're bound to fit someone's idea of good work? Not that we shouldn't constantly be trying to develop and improve, since we should. But should we worry about whether or not we have the spark, or do we let the editors decide? (Remember, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected by 121 publishers before it was finally put into print...) All thoughts welcome.

Poetry Prompt: Two Starting Lines

I am currently enamored of prompts, since lately when i sit down, it is as through my brain is a dessicated lump of clay with nary a writerly thought in it. After the success I felt with that last prompt, "The Seventh," I decided to complete both of the prompts offered by my workshop professor, even though we only needed to finish one. (Truly, it's not that I'm an overachiever...it's just that I've also got work due to another program and a personal commitment to write a little every day, and a prompt is a good way to get my brain casting the line.) It was a good brain-jump exercise, since they weren't lines I would ever start a poem with, and had me working in different directions than my writing path has been this week (which is just as well, because I'm bored with the subjects that keep popping into my head.)

Now, if you're terribly successful, you will be able to either use the prompt as your first line or leave it out completely (for my purposes, I think leaving it out completely is the better bet. They seem a bit clunky, and I'm working on not starting my poetry with exposition, as I am wont to do. I know, surprise, surprise, right? See if you can write a poem that works both with and without the prompt as the first line.

Anyway, here they are. Go forth and write like the wind!

Prompt #1:There wasn’t anything else I could do

Prompt #2: More people came, but I didn't notice

Results of Prompt "The Seven"

As promised, my results from the prompt I last posted. My 7th place was a small town in Idaho, the 7th thing I remembered was the extremely wide roads running through town.

Exploratory Essay: The Wide Roads of Soda Springs, Idaho

The roads in Soda Springs are strangely wide. I do not know the exact historical reason for this, though I can make a few educated guesses. Mining occurs not too far out of town – you can see the red glow of slag running down a high point in the distance, if a local points in the right direction for your eye to follow. Likely the roads had to be wide enough for the trucks and equipment required for mining. This makes sense to me, but in the four days I spent in town I didn’t see a single large vehicle other than the all-American SUVs we brought with us on the drive from the airport in Utah. A good thing we chose SUVs instead of something more environmentally friendly – those gaping dirt roads would have been impossible to maneuver had it rained.

Those wide dirt roads haloed everything in dust, including the two worn-looking diners in town. I wonder if anyone had ever considered paving them (the roads, not the diners); certainly it had to be difficult to deal with dirt roads in the rain or other inconvenient weather. The roads contribute to the entire town looking like an inconvenience, since the space they require only serves to highlight how little else there is in the town. Diner one or diner two, a single hardware store (there might be more, but the rest of the buildings are all shabbily clothed and appear to be shut down for good). Paving them would make the town look more industrial than it really was, I suppose, but it would be less depressing than that empty span of soil trampled to concrete hardness. I have never lived in a town without properly paved streets, providing definition and a reassuringly firm foundation under daily life.

Did no one expect the place to last long enough to need the roads paved? It’s not a new place, by any means, nor decent enough to die out and let the buildings fall and let the roadspace win, since families have lived there for years without branching to other parts of the country, so that can’t be it. Unless the people told themselves they would leave – next week, next month, next year, after the baby is school-aged, perhaps. I didn’t meet enough people to ask about it. Even when there was traffic on the road (which was mostly us, in town for the wedding and wondering what sort of a place had spawned our girl Mazie), the road dwarfed the cars, making them seem small and inadequate for whatever task they were scurrying about. In light of the broad western sky and the mountains in the distance, perhaps this was an intentional reminder that our concerns and daily struggles are small. But I do not think so.

I always thought possibilities were ‘wide open,’ as the phrase goes, but those wide hard-packed roads in Soda Springs make me wonder if wide-open isn’t also the way a small town dies out, with too much room and not enough to fill it and make it habitable. I grew up in a city where everything was cramped: the buildings, the people, and the streets. There is a difference even in the word: street versus road. A street is citified, shrunken, and always paved. Civilized, somehow, and oft-traversed. A road, on the other hand, is a country thing, paved or not, with machinery just as likely to appear on its span as a passenger vehicle, or even the occasional cow.

Thinking about them, I found these roads disturbing, though I didn’t dwell on it during my visit. It was just a strange part of an already-strange landscape to me. Knowing that as a road, a facilitator of travel, things other than cars are implicitly invited to use them…what other massive things might take those roads as an invitation to walk through town? What thing that might have a footprint large enough to justify that girth? The country there is beautiful, with the mountains and no building taller than two stories to challenge the view…perhaps the roads in Soda Springs are large enough for God’s feet to pass. I imagine he visits mountains and forgotten people on a fairly regular basis.

A Prompt: The Seventh

Hello all, and merry Friday evening, for those of you who read this.

1)Make a list of seven places you've visited in the last seven years. Rank them, with #1 as your favorite, and #7 as your least favorite. (If you have to go back 8 years, that's fine, but no more than 8 or 9).

2) Take place #7 from the above list, and write down 7 things you remember about that place. (These will naturally come out in order of most vivid to least).

3) Pick something about that last to write about. If it can be broken down into multiple parts, pick the one that you think will be most difficult to write about.

4) Write a one-page exploratory essay on that topic.

Making certain that you are working with themes and images that don't pop straight into your head (the point of picking the 7th items on the list) means that you actually have to work at pulling themes, images and words from your head. Don't cheat on the listing just to make it easier, since that negates the power of the entire exercise. I found this experience very interesting and useful, as I returned to a place I barely visited the first time. This is an exercise that, if you let it, takes you places you hadn't expected to go, which is most productive for a writer. My essay is available for any interested; I may consider posting it later. I think it's pretty interesting. *grin*

A Mellow Evening

I should be reading Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" tonight, or the parts of it that are assigned for my next meeting of my weekly poetry workshop. Or the Nikki Giovanni selections for the same MA class. Or going over Anne Sexton's All My Pretty Ones or Pico Iyer's Sun After Dark for the essays that are coming due for my MFA program. (I am stubbornly NOT linking Ayer's book because I think it is not worth your money. Go look for it on Amazon yourself, if you must. Yes, meet the Peripatetic Poetess after a glass too many of wine!) I should also be reading Hugo's The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir, which is a good book, but requires a bit of concentration.

In a fit of selfishness, laziness, and pure, unadulterated bourgeois taste (ha! Note the second use of 'bourgeois' in my last 4 posts. My good friend PinkandChocolateBrown will be thrilled!), I will be reading Morrigan's Cross by Nora Roberts. (Indeed, I nicked the whole trilogy from our library's new "Free paperbacks to Encourage Reading for Fun" stand.) How could I resist? Come, read the blurb on the back of the first book of the trilogy:

As a storm rages, the tale begins...of a powerful vampire's lust for destruction - and of the circle of six charged by the goddess Morrigan to stop her.

Blame it on my tastes in fiction (I love Roberts as J.D. Robb when she's writing her In Death series with heroine Eve Dallas). Blame it on my lifelong addiction to anything having to do with vampires. Blame it on the fact that the Morrigan occupies the majority of the space on my back in my half-done backpiece tattoo. Blame it on the glass of wine I consumed with dinner. It doesn't much matter. I have just as many paperbacks featuring snarky half-naked women baiting the Commodore (or any other variation on paperback romances) as I do tomes by revered dead white men.

Tonight I haven't the patience or the attention span for anything deeper than some good trash fiction with lots of violence, strong heroines and villainess-es, and maybe some frantic, fulfilling sex. (In the book, that is. I'm currently completely unprepared for company. Unless he looks battleworn and in need of some lovin', like this.) I've been gifted a thunderstorm - no better time to read some vampirish powerlust novels. Delish!