Monthly Archives: September 2019

15 posts

“You Have Spent Vast Amounts of Your Life as Someone Else…”

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In the final essay of her book, The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit proposes, sensibly enough, that we are not ourselves. The pronoun “I” is suspect, in other words, but for a reason most of us wouldn’t consider: stories.

I’ll let Solnit speak for herself with a few relevant paragraphs:

“Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual I we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specialize in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgetting and misremembering, the portions of a life lived through others’ stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.

“As I was approaching this chapter, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought something I should have written down at the time. The empty shell of it that washed up on the shores of morning was to the effect that sometimes an extraordinary or huge question comes along and we try to marry it off to a mediocre answer. The protagonists of fairy tales and fables embody questions about who we are, what we desire, how to live, and the endings are not the real answers. During the quest and crises of a fairy tale the protagonist is nobody, possessed only of the powers of determination, resourcefulness, and alliance, an unconventional estimation of what matters. Then at the end, the story breaks with its own principles and unleashes an avalanche of conventional stuff: palaces, riches, and revenge.

“Part of the charm of [Hans Christian] Andersen’s ‘Snow Queen’ is that Gerda rescues Kai from a queen and brings him back to friendship in attics, and that’s enough. Many Native American stories don’t quite end, because the people who go into the animal world don’t come back; they become ancestors, progenitors, benefactors, forces still at work. Siddhartha is rich, thriving, loved, privileged, and protected, and walks out on all of it, as though the story were running backward. He’s born an answer and abandons that safe port to go out into a sea of questions and tasks that are never-ending.

“Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea. The thread is cut and becomes the ribbon with which everything is tied up, a sealed parcel, the end. It’s easy to do, and I’ve done it again and again, sometimes with a sense of betrayal of the complexity of what came before, and sometimes when I haven’t done it, an editor has asked for the gift wrap and ribbon.

“What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea? What if we liked the brothers to be swans and the nettles not yet woven into shirts, the straw better than the gold, the quest more than the holy grail? The quest is the holy grail, the ocean itself is the mysterious elixir, and if you’re lucky you realize it before you dock at the cup in the chapel.”

All of this reminds me of short story writer Peter Orner’s belief that stories should not have an ending so much as a horizon. I like open endings and unfinished business because they are more lifelike. If I were part of a feedback group asked to screen a new movie before release, for instance, I might be the lone voice saying the movie doesn’t need a neat ending where everyone lives happily ever after (Hollywood viewers love such endings, maybe, because they serve as escapist relief from viewers’ own open-ended tribulations).

But what I admire most in Solnit’s rumination is the idea of I, the Pronoun, as something that is not so much us as every story we’ve ever read, heard, or watched. We are an amalgam, a composite, a stitched tapestry of shared stories, from the fairy tales we read as children to the words that rained down from our parents’ mouths to nurture (or torture) and form us to the secrets shared with friends growing up.

The story of “I” begins but never ends, in other words. Never ends but forever changes. Think of that next time you try to be selfish. Think of that next time you set out to write, too.

The Poetry of Past, Present, and Future

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The reason Buddhism (whether you take yours as religion or as philosophy) is so Protean in nature is simple. At least to me (a simple man).

There’s no need to do any math, either. No Four Noble Truths. No Eightfold Path. I just repeat the mantra “change” and watch for the internal battle of two-against-one.

In that corner, the crowd favorites, the past and the future. And in this corner, the seriously undervalued known as the present.

When you look through the lens of that unholy trinity (past, present, future), you’ll see the futility of the favorites and the persistence of the underdog in many pieces of literature. The smiling referee? Change.

A lot of poems work with this model because it’s so broad, but for my purposes this morning I’ll take two by Joseph Mills, a writer who spins family conversation into poetic gold. First, a look at a poem titled in a most deja vu kind of way.

“We’ve Had This Conversation Before”
Joseph Mills

We’ve had this conversation before,
my daughter and I, many times,
about what she might buy
with her allowance, about candy,
about how her brother annoys her,
about where her birth mother might be,

and we’ve had this conversation before,
my son and I, many times,
about how fast he is, how fast horses are,
about candy, about how his sister bosses him,
about how much a horse costs,

and we’ve had this conversation before,
my wife and I, many times,
about how tired we are,
about what we might buy them
and how much it all costs,
about how they annoy us, how fast
they’re growing, how scared we are
about what might happen, about this life,
this life, so tiring and wonderful,
and how, if we could, we’d repeat it,
this life, many times,
many times.

By nature, many poets mine their pasts for material. Experience is the muse of memoir, after all, and memories move poets to write. Here we note the son and daughter both struggling with their desires and their wishes. And here we note the parents worried, too, especially about change and what the future will bring for their kids.

These worries prevent them from enjoying the present, yes, but the final lines imply that they’d gladly do it all over again.

This is a very western take on samsara or reincarnation. Second chances? Tenth? Hundredth? Yes, please!. But to the Buddhist and Hindu scholars of old, these cycles of birth, life, and death were unpleasant, indeed. Pain. Sickness. Old Age. Death. All the things westerners hide from and do their best to thwart, over and over again.

If you think the unspoken worry of Mills’ first poem is a death that takes all this joy away in the blink of a lifetime’s eye, you’ll be interested in a second poem that cuts to the quick (as only children can blithely do).

“Questions”
Joseph Mills

On the Interstate, my daughter tells me
she only has two questions. I’m relieved
because she usually has two hundred.
I say, Okay, let’s have them, and she asks,
What was there before there was anything?
Stupidly, I think I can answer this:
There was grass, forests, fields, meadows, rivers.
She stops me. No, Daddy. I mean before
there was anything at all, what was there?
I say that I don’t know, so then she asks,
Where do we go when we die? I tell her
I don’t know the answer to this either.
She looks out the side, and I look forward,
then she asks if we can have some music.

Maybe you can read something into the final lines where the daughter looks “out the side” (present) and the father looks “forward” (future) and maybe not, but it seems clear that the daughter’s quick shift to the oh-so-ordinary (“she asks if we can have some music”) is an enlightened response to her father’s non-response.

Oh. No answers (or possibly unpleasant ones) about the future? Let’s enjoy the present, then, shall we? Music, maestro!

Thus, in the most prosaic of ways, does Joseph Mills make a larger point. One the Buddha would have applauded. With one hand.

Rebecca Solnit on the “Astonishing Wealth” Called “Writing”

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Montaigne would be proud. This week I have been reading more essays, specifically Rebecca Solnit’s in her 2013 collection, The Faraway Nearby.

In an essay called “Flight,” she devotes a few paragraphs to the act of writing and, as is only necessary, reading (because what’s one without the other?). I thought it was interesting. Maybe you will, too:

“Writing is saying to no one and everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them. Matters that are so subtle, so personal, so obscure, that I ordinarily can’t imagine saying them to the people to whom I’m closest. Every once in a while I try to say them aloud and find that what turns to mush in my mouth or falls short of their ears can be written down for total strangers. Said to total strangers in the silence of writing that is recuperated and heard in the solitude of reading. Is it the shared solitude of writing, is it that separately we all reside in a place deeper than society, even the society of two? Is it that the tongue fails where the fingers succeed, in telling truths so lengthy and nuanced that they are almost impossible aloud?

“I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away—first the silent voice that can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one, and even when you’re reading to a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd of the absent who hover all around the desk.

“Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to become a writer was told by a gypsy, ‘You will be loved by people you’ve never met.’ This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing. You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way. It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor.”

You see the words “faraway” and “nearby” popping up here, how perfect they are for the lonely sharing that is writing and reading, yet the source of the title is alluded to in another essay called “Wound.” Georgia O’Keefe, the great artist who once lived in New York City, moved to the desert boonies (read: Taos, New Mexico), and when she did, she signed letters to friends with the closing “From the faraway nearby.”

Thank you, Georgia, for a theme! One which Solnit stitches like a thread through the collection is this wide-ranging book. Thank you, too, for a metaphor. One elastic enough to cover writing and reading and many other paradoxes afforded by daily life.

As for her pearls of wisdom re: writing, you can see Solnit’s point all too well if you write. As I am the nearest writer at the moment, let’s use me as an example.

Why am I writing this? I could just sip this wonderful first black coffee and passively read emails (easy) and news of the world (not-so-easy). Instead, I’m milling away at this keyboard, watching letters do the ant-crawl thing across this screen.

I’m not writing strictly for myself (though I gain from it, surely). I’m doing it for intrinsic reasons, because I’m compelled to as part of a “odd compact,” as Solnit puts it, an assumption that people I will never know are out there (in the “faraway nearby”) reading words I only recently strung together, enjoying them, relating to them.

Scary, I know. But think of it: Some may start this piece and not finish it. Some may dig all the way to the other side (the end, or what Solnit might call “China”). Some may even return to this webpage regularly to see what I write again.

Almost mystical, isn’t it? But without each other (writers, readers), the magic would be gone. The faraway wouldn’t be nearby at all.

The Poetry of Questions (and Possible Answers)

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Poetry serves many purposes, but one of my favorites is as facilitator of questions and possible answers. Why? Because the answers are often novel concepts. Even better, they’re often new questions in answer’s clothing. Sure, they might not pass muster with a scientist, but who’s worried about scientists when reading poems? Not this guy.

The late W. S. Merwin provides a nice example of the Q&A model with his poem “Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning.” As is true with all Merwin poems, the first hurdle is reading for rhythm, specifically the rhythm lost by his habit of forsaking my favorite writing prop, punctuation.

Once you have that figured out, you can better notice how the age of wisdom (read: old age) both is and isn’t so wise. Or at least the narrator seems to conclude here. Let’s don our poetic bathing suits and jump into his stream of consciousness:

“Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning”
W.S. Merwin

There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I’m smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone

I think we can agree that the narrator has figured out a few things about life, and one of them is that we’ll never figure out everything about life. One pearl of wisdom is knowing what questions not to ask anymore, either because you’ve come to learn the answers through experience or because you’ve come to the conclusion, “Why bother?”

Then there’s that mirror thing, namely those questions that reflect the asker. According to the speaker, these are questions…

…I return to and dust off and discover
that I’m smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time

Got it? You are the question, but it is not a question, and it holds multiple meanings. Here the poem takes on the character of a koan.

Then comes the paradox of age: how an old man or woman always holds within the young boy or girl, both simultaneously alive in one form.

Finally there’s an admission: Though the answer is incomplete and always will be, arriving to an advanced age seems a partial solution.

The poem “turns” (as many good poems do) in the 14th line with that heavy-lifting conjunction “but.” Despite all the deep, head-scratching thoughts about life, the narrator knows this much for sure (and it’s a novel concept, the kind poetry is uniquely positioned to pose):

…but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone.

If you’re Buddhist, you’re finding the familiar in this thinking: Let’s focus on the present. Sure, I’m old, but this morning (like all mornings) is not old and “I am the morning.”

Hot damn. Ponce de Leon spent all that time hunting the Fountain of Youth in the Everglades, and all he had to do is become the morning, which sat on his doorstep each dawn.

Sounds easy, right? But not so fast. The last two lines place this poetic meditation in the season of autumn. Note that the leaves have no questions. Note that the breeze (our short lifetimes on Earth) “passes through them and is gone.”

To return, the speaker implies, because that’s what winds and seasons do. The circle thing. Samsara. The old mouth-eating-tail metaphor of questions and answers.

The Moment vs. Writer’s Block

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Some people are fervent believers in writer’s block. They stare at paper. Paper stares back at them. They stare at screens. Screens stare back at them.

Me? I’m rude. I write on paper and type across screens with little regard for their whiteness.

What’s in a first draft, after all? Mostly garbage. So why so much respect for writer’s block?

Whenever I hear talk of writer’s block, I bring up the pedestrian term moment. “OK,” I say, real casual like, “write about a moment. Could be any moment. Could be this moment, even. Moments don’t care. They’re free and, when it comes to first drafts, every one of them is willing — more than willing — to share.”

All of which means you’ll be doing one of two things: a.) checking into stand-out memories and asking yourself the 5 W’s/1 H (who, what, why, when, where, how) and the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell), OR b.) drinking in the moment around you right now, hitting you over the head, practically. Clearing its throat. Waving its arms and asking, “What about me, writer? I’m game for the 5 W’s, the 1 H, and the five senses, too.”

You can bet the poet Evan Boland did a. or b. above when she penned the first draft to the poem below, aptly named…

The Moment
Eavan Boland

A neighborhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.

If you’re wondering what words appeared in her first draft, I’m worried about you. Go to the concrete imagery first: stars, moths, fruit rinds, a black tree, a lit window, a mother and child.

If that list doesn’t look like much to you, then you don’t understand the writing process. Yes, even a list counts as a first draft in my book, and even a list brings the mighty writer’s block to its knees (assuming blocks have knees, which I do because I have a poetic license as good as any Harry Potter “Creativido!” wand spell).

Consider this: The wonderful simile “One window is yellow as butter” no doubt started as a lit window. Then, in subsequent drafts, the poet asked herself what that soft yellow color looked like as it softly punched its shape into the night. Butter, of course.

Is this a lesson? Probably not. Unless there’s something to be learned in the obvious: Writer’s block doesn’t stand a chance against the moments we live every day.

How Teachers Can Make Challenging Poems Fun

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class

For reasons that border on unreasonable, elementary-aged students love poetry (usually rhyming) and middle- and high school-aged students detest it (especially when they are tested on it).

Perhaps this is because of stodgy assigned works from textbooks and/or old warhorses that continually get trotted out as assigned readings. Perhaps it is because students are often forced to scan and interpret a poem before they are allowed to (radical thought) enjoy it.

Matthew Zapruder is on record for saying that students only need one tool to understand poetry: a dictionary. I wrote an entry on his theory, but I’ll take it one step further. Students need an open mind beside that dictionary, too. What, after all, is the success rate of a psychologist who has a patient unwilling to cooperate, or of a coach with an athlete unwilling to buy in?

Choice is nice, sure, but the trouble with bringing a class of students to the library (or of carting up Dewey’s entire Decimal of poetry books to your room) and saying, “Browse, children, and pick something you like!” is they become overwhelmed, then bored, by choice. Talking to each other makes for better poetry, as you’ll quickly discover.

No, it’s better for a savvy teacher to pre-select poems tailored to the interests of her students. Poems about teenagers, social concerns of teenagers, sports teenagers love to play. Lyrics from songs and musicals. Verse about (wait for it) school-related issues. They’re out there. In spades.

And just as students listen to songs over and over again until they’ve memorized the lyrics (first the refrain, of course), so they need to hear poems again and again. No teacher should ever be shy about reading a poem three or four times before anyone even rolls up a sleeve to dive in.

If anyone complains, just ask what happens when they first hear a new song they like. Do they wait a month before listening again? Then another month before hearing it a third time? OK, then. On the other hand, has anyone ever listened to a song over and over again, head bobbing and volume cranking, until they own it? Thank you.

Teachers need to practice reading poems, too, as if the poet herself were in the audience. The demanding poet, I mean. This is her baby you’re reading, after all. Read it right! Read it con brio, which is Latin for “with emotion” or some such.

From there, let students do the instructing for you. Put them in groups and restrict their time. Two minutes to come up with the coolest words, line, or lines and why. Assure them the why does not have to be a “poetry reason.” It can be a student’s reason. What does it remind them of or bring to mind?

They’ll do this, of course, by choosing the sharpest images and sensory details (imagery!), the neatest comparisons (similes, metaphors!), and the most ear-pleasing rhetorical devices (say, anaphora for one… only say it three times!).

Voilà! Isn’t it nice when students open a door and walk through it of their own volition? By God, these “cool” lines they choose almost always have a poetry-related name. And, getting inside the head of the poet, there’s probably a darn good reason she chose them, too.

Are there any detectives in the room?

Yes, the detective metaphor is a good one. Forget the student label. Let’s be poetic detectives. And, now that the cool stuff is out of the way, let’s take a little more time to look up words we don’t know (enter the Zapruder dictum). Every definition of the word, not just the first.

If this sounds like familiar slogging reached at last, deploy the group’s creativity. For each word they don’t know, tell the group to split up duties and write a short riff of music using the word in all of its multiple ways (or in its one unique way just learned).

Have them use online dictionaries, if they prefer. Then they can first explore and second set their ditties to a familiar tune or make a rap of it, bold-printing, underling, or italicizing the word as it shows its multiple shades.

Once they’ve shared in front of the class or just by shyly standing near their group (safety blanket method), they’re ready to don their fedoras and return to detective mode for the original poem. Which meaning fits this poem’s line? How does it help unlock meaning for what at first was a head scratcher? Now at least some reasonable theories can be floated, even if we are now on Day 2 of the activity (the singing or sharing of written songs being a good dividing point).

Speaking of, the time has come for making a statement about the poem! I always had groups co-create a thesis statement, saying what poetic tools the author used to reveal a certain truth about life (theme). Before they did so, I let them know that we would be putting each thesis before an opposing counsel and jury (classmates), one if by whiteboard and two if by projector.

The job of the opposing counsels was to poke holes in the theory. I told them the first weakness to look for in any theory was this: either that it did not apply to the poem at all (except in the overly-rich imagination of the readers) OR, more likely, that it only applied to parts of the poem (not good enough, friends).

“Any ideas about meaning have to stand up to every line in the entire poem,” I cautioned. “So be on the look-out for words and lines that bring the theories you’ll see into question. As to those of you co-creating a thesis statement for the court, you can save yourselves some embarrassment by rereading the poem before it goes before its peers, testing each line to your thesis yourselves. Anticipate opposing arguments, in other words.”

Early in the year, I engaged in this ritual umpteen times before ever assigning students the task of a full-blown literary analysis. The discussions and debates unfolding in class as “prosecutors,” “defendants,” and, ultimately, “juries” were like warm-ups. Sprints. Push-ups.

They got kids ready — truly ready — for poetry. And kids had fun doing it, too. Reading and understanding poetry, I mean. Even difficult poems. But always poems that had meaning for them.

The rest of these difficult skills will come, eventually, like a Field of Dreams no English teacher ever believed in. But first, you need a foundation. A foundation student-detectives have plenty of practice building themselves.

Making Synecdoche Work For You

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We’ve been looking at a lot of poems that use personification of late. Here’s one that employs the rhetorical device known as synecdoche.

As defined by Mental Floss, a website that cleans the brain, “A synecdoche is a figure of speech in which a part or component of something is used to represent that whole—like calling a car your ‘wheels,’ the staff of a company the ‘hands,’ or the film industry as a whole ‘Hollywood.’”

In other words, synecdoche is something we use every day. We just don’t know it because we didn’t know the name.

Name? Funny I should say that. Your name is a part of you that becomes you. Think reputation. But the poet Danusha Laméris went one step further. She thought mortality. Names die, after all, as they rise and ultimately fall in popularity. True, some pull the Lazarus act and make comebacks, but when’s the last time you saw a baby named Lazarus? (Another rhetorical device, called “the rhetorical question”).

Let’s see synecdoche at work:

Names
Danusha Laméris

What happens to the ones that fall out of favor:
the Dorises and Archibalds,
the Theodores and Eunices?
They all had their day,
once roamed the earth in multitudes
alongside Gerties and Wyatts—
at least one in every classroom.
Names written in neat block print,
scratched into tree bark,
engraved on heart-shaped lockets,
filling the morning paper
with weddings and engagements.
How could they have known
that one-by-one the Constances
and Clydes would disappear,
replaced by Jennifers, Jacobs,
Ashleys and Aidens.
That few would ever dance again,
corsages pinned to their breasts
or hear their names on the radio
whispered in dedication,
or uttered in darkness
by a breathless voice,
or even shouted out in anger—
Seymour!”—
as they grabbed the keys and stormed out the door.
Each name fading quietly from daily life
as though it had never existed,
except for the letters etched into stone,
warmed by the sun
and at night, lit by a crescent moon.

Interesting, the way our names “live” beside us only to lie down above us. It’s not the way we think of them, typically. It’s the way a poet thinks of them. It’s why we read poetry.

Crossing a Divide

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starry night

In the Fall 2019 Rattle, in one sense, the shortest poem has the biggest echo. It crosses the divide. Or maybe it joins what was once a divide and is no more.

For me, it’s personal, but the divide thingy works for any reader, I’m sure.

You see, I am part technology wizard, part Luddite. The Luddite half is chiefly comprised of a small pocket of emptiness. I do not own a cellphone. I do not want to own a cellphone. I cherish my un-cellphoned life known as the emptiness in my pocket.

As might be expected, sans the constant rings and texts, I have more time for the natural world. There is no interruption when I see a flight of American Painted Ladies (a type of butterfly that prefers flowers to circuses, thus avoiding Washington D.C.). There is no interruption when I walk the dog under a full moon on a black river of road passing the house. There is no interruption when I walk down to the pond and smell the damp earth and decay of leaves lining the shore.

No. None of that.

So, mistakenly, I divided poetry topics into natural and artificial (read: human-made). Foolish, really, as any dichotomy of black and white ignoring gray is bound to be. I mean, really. Nature poems vs. Human-centric (and often eccentric) poems, and never the twain shall meet?

Enter the shortest poem in the Fall 2019 Rattle. It was written by someone named Rolli, a sobriquet previously unknown to the likes of me. Monomynous people are either famous or ambitious for fame. Madonna. Cher. Sting. Prince. Beyoncé. Drake.

That’s a lot of singers, but there are writers with mononyms, too: Voltaire, Colette. Moliere. Rumi. Bashō.

But back to Rolli and twains meeting. Nature. Man. Natural. Unnatural. You be the judge:

Let Us Not Even Dream

of speaking
no

for the stars are
luminous
phones

in the palms of night

See what I mean? The cellphone gets equal billing with the stars (unnaturally enough). Unless, of course, you read it as a criticism of cellphones, in which case the twains are not only meeting but high-fiving each other.

I leave it to you, reader, as Rolli left it to me, the Last of the Mohicans (read: cellphone-less sorts with empty pockets and yes, that includes money).

“As Dead Now as Shakespeare’s Children”

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David Kirby, another one of those poet slash professors (in this case at Florida State University), is known for long-ish narrative poems, often leavened freely with humor. It’s an engaging combination, one I’ve been coming to know better since I picked up two of his books.

As a short intro, I found an unusually (for him) short poem that makes liberal use of personification. It provides insight into Kirby’s imagination, too.

Imagine, reader, that your broken promises came to life, that they dogged you and surrounded you every day. Think: The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. As you’ll recall, she had so many children (another vagrant dad, apparently) she didn’t know what to do.

That’s you. You and your broken promises. Stuck in a smelly Reebok.

Hey, it might make for a great poetry prompt: Pick an abstract thing (like promises) and give it human properties (Boardwalk, preferably). Run with it in a poem.

Here’s what happened when Kirby did:

Broken Promises
David Kirby

I have met them in dark alleys, limping and one-armed;
I have seen them playing cards under a single light-bulb
and tried to join in, but they refused me rudely,
knowing I would only let them win.
I have seen them in the foyers of theaters,
coming back late from the interval

long after the others have taken their seats,
and in deserted shopping malls late at night,
peering at things they can never buy,
and I have found them wandering
in a wood where I too have wandered.

This morning I caught one;
small and stupid, too slow to get away,
it was only a promise I had made to myself once
and then forgot, but it screamed and kicked at me
and ran to join the others, who looked at me with reproach
in their long, sad faces.
When I drew near them, they scurried away,
even though they will sleep in my yard tonight.
I hate them for their ingratitude,
I who have kept countless promises,
as dead now as Shakespeare’s children.
“You bastards,” I scream,
“you have to love me—I gave you life!”

Note how your personification poem won’t fly unless you surround it with realistic props. Concrete props. Dark alleys. One-armed handicaps. Single light bulbs for rotten illumination.

A promise that’s “small and stupid, too slow to get away,” is not only wearing its personification on its sleeve, it’s showing off with a little alliteration to boot (note return to Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe theme).

What gets me here is how the narrator chases broken promises away but knows they will return to “sleep in my yard tonight.” Now that’s a concrete image. Rogue promises that partake of sleepovers in your back yard. Blanket rolled out, I imagine. Sleeping bags and bug spray. An empty bag of chips blowing in the wind.

So go ahead. Promise to write a personification poem. If you don’t, it’s just another broken promise ringing your doorbell at 3 a.m. (Serves you right.)

“Catching Grain Through Spread Fingers”

poetry publishing writing writing inspiration

You may think it strange that I annotate magazines, but sometimes, thumbing through them afterwards, I enjoy revisiting certain lines. The sentences and paragraphs I choose are not necessarily pithy like an adage or purposeful like a sage. Sometimes they just strike me and the reason is, as the French say, je ne sais quoi.

For example, the September/October 2019 issue of Poets & Writers, I annotated these lines from a piece called “The New Nonfiction 2019”:

“I could not know then that it would take me nearly two decades to figure out what, exactly, I meant and that some of those ideas would compose my first book. Writing now about the experience of making this book feels like catching grain through spread fingers—almost but not quite like magic, since we know the best writing work is the hardest labor. It is still painful to remember much of it. To note all of the things that no one told me before I plunged: the tarrying loneliness of making a book; the confidence that waxes and wanes (mostly wanes); and the urgent matter of finding one’s tribe, so that when you realize the vast distance between starting and finishing and threaten to quit they can remind you that James Baldwin said, ‘Deep water and drowning are not the same thing.'” — Sarah M. Broom, author of The Yellow House (Grove Press, August)

“Before I wrote essays, I used to string together pretty sentences I’d call stories and then wait around for the world’s admiration. It was kind of like riding my bike through a parade in sunny weather but with a creeping sense that something wasn’t right. After college I discovered the essay and found a way into the real work—the hard work—I’d always wanted to do. I loved the scrappy elasticity of the essay, loved spending time in this place where you bring everything along, where you can fashion your own complicated misfit from some combination of a first-person perspective and the bizarre raw materials of the world. I even liked how, for a while there at least, the essay was not really capital-L literature, or not quite pure. My position was: ‘If you need me, I’ll be in the shadows working on my bastard art.’ Even now, writing essays gives me permission—to drag strange things home without explanation, to bring together disparate worlds, to live offline with my secrets.” –Krista Eastman, author of The Painted Forest (West Virginia University Press, October)

And from an interview of Ben George, senior editor at Little, Brown, in a piece called “Agents & Editor,” I noted this:

“Sadly, it’s a primary part of the job—falling in love with a book and getting your heart broken because someone else acquires it yet managing to keep your heart open for the next great book.”

(Nota bene: I loved the idea of an editor getting his heart broken instead of a writer. That happens? I asked. Of course it does. And every writer, for inspiration, should imagine a big-time editor losing out on his or her manuscript because some other publisher scooped it up first. This image is a long way from the more concrete one of boilerplate rejection emails.)

“I also don’t think a writer should ever make a change to a book that doesn’t in her gut feel like the right change to make. In an editorial letter from the novelist and New Yorker editor William Maxwell to Eudora Welty, Maxwell once said, simply, ‘I trust you to be firm about the unhelpful suggestions.’ I’ve always remembered that.”

(Nota bene: Note my attraction to quotes that empower writers who, by their very nature, are used to rejection.”)

“Look, every day we hope to read an amazing novel. Editors are first and foremost just readers who are moved and delighted by books. And the editor’s greatest desire is to bring an exquisite book to readers.”

(Nota bene: Amen, Mr. Just Reader. Amen! May I someday write a book that delights not only you, but both Little and Brown!)