Not to Scale

Since my "I'm gonna write 1,000 poems" decision, I've written 5 poems. Not bad, I guess. I've got a 3-day car trip ahead of me, so I hope to write a few more -- hopefully, they won't all be about the existential loneliness of the open highway.

Actually, I do have a poem in mind: the past few days, I've been thinking about how we human beings actually have a very poor perception of scale. How big is the universe? How small is an atom? How big is that problem that's getting all of my attention, and how small is it in comparison to what's really important to me?

What's a big deal, and what is not? Sometimes there's a lot of meaning in a seemingly small gesture.

The poem, if I write it, will be called "Not to Scale."

Meanwhile, I leave you with a quote by Shigenori Kameoka (whoever s/he might be), which was shared with my by a dear friend of mine: "Find the seed at the bottom of your heart and bring forth a flower."

A Thousand Poems

Yesterday, I decided to write a thousand poems. Yes, I know: it's going to take me three or four years, at least. And it's highly likely that not a single poem turns out to be really good. No matter. I'm going to do it anyway, because I believe that doing it a thousand times anyway will end up counting for something.

It turns out that, not counting activities related to my immediate survival (e.g., taking a breath) or my personal hygiene (e.g., taking a shower), there are actually very few things I've done a thousand times.

Here's the list I've come up with:

*cooked dinner

*done a load of laundry

*gone grocery shopping

*nursed each of my children

*read a bedtime story aloud

*hiked a mile

*had sex

*sung a song

*sent an email

*phoned a friend

*written a journal entry

*graded a student's paper

I don't know how long a person has to do something before it becomes part of her identity – “I am” rather than “I do” – but I've always wanted to be a poet, and writing a thousand poems seems as good a way as any to get started on becoming one.

No, I'm not going to post every poem I write. But since today's is the first of the thousand (not to be confused with one-in-a-thousand), it marks something of an occasion. So here it is, such as it is:

#1

Called to account, I'm counting

everything this morning,

making chalk marks on my wall,

leaving traces: two pieces of toast,

two kumquats, a single

porcelain cup full of black tea,

and all those words I worry

I won't have said.

Not just what my daughter,

four years and three months,

brought home in a plastic bag

(three red camellias, three wet stones,

two silver slippers, six brown buds,

and a slug) but also

all those wishes in the rushes,

unnamed, and thus uncounted.

Hurry, quick: slalom and zipper,

halcyon and cyan (five lemons

on a blue plate – can you see it?)

yes and chit and chop, and choreograph,

lined up alongside blister, bluster, blather,

and also blah blah blah, which is to say:

I was here, and here, and here.

Dream Poems

A few nights ago, I dreamed I was with my husband in a concrete house that was suspended, foundation and all, in the air. We seemed to be moving slowly over a body of water. Rather suddenly, the whole thing tipped, like the Tower of Pisa, and angled into the water; soon, we were submerged. My husband said to me, “Watch out!” – and I realized that I was in danger of being pinned under the weight of the sinking house. I managed to follow him out from under the house, and we swam to shore. In my hand was a key, but it was just an outside key, not an inside key. All my writing – journals, poems, essays, everything – was in a sealed box inside the house at the bottom of the ocean. I no longer had access to any of it. I was really upset by this: why hadn't I found other places to house my thoughts?

I was reminded of a series of thematically related dreams I had several years ago.

In the spring of 2007, my writing practice was to record my dreams immediately upon waking and then, later that morning, to turn at least one dream into a poem. After a couple of weeks of this, I started to notice that my dreams were changing: more and more, they were about the creative process.

Here are two dream poems from that time:

Verisimilitude

The author has his wares displayed

at Page 101, a little art gallery downtown

that's set up like an illustrated encyclopedia.

Most of his characters are life-sized men

of monochrome maché doing chest presses

with cardboard dumbbells painted to match,

too big for my house, but I could consider

the smaller, craftier things for sale in the back,

like ceramic toothbrushes and a flower vase

sculpted to look like a train engine, very pink.

What really captivates me is a plate

decorated with red and yellow pear tomatoes

and pea pods so green I want to eat them

even though they're fake -- and look,

see that pile of peas and unshelled peanuts

on the shelf, scattered, come unglued?

The author must have intended this mess

to be a mirror for entropy in the world.

Because I have always longed to own

my very own metaphor, I check its price

and discover that what I have picked up

is an actual peanut, actually just half

an empty husk, those familiar ridges

on the brown outside, and on the flipside,

formerly an inside, those scooped hollows,

each the right size for the tip of my tongue,

and each equally worthless to me

because there is no round-trip ticket

from what's imagined to what's real.

The Critique

Whenever other people's psyches are up for sale

I love to take the tour, trying on every room

for size, savoring the delicious pretense

that I could afford their marble, gilt, and plush.

Your place is lower-budget than most,

all low-ceilinged hallways and musty closets.

I don't want to spend even one night here,

but I follow along as you push open each door

and flip light switches on and off, to no avail.

And then you're gone, and whatever sleeps

under your washing machine comes slithering out.

I'm looking right at it, but all I can see for sure

are the stripes, black and white, writhing:

no snake skin or rat tail or tarantula leg

could match this clown kachina black and white,

this cheap costume stocking stripe, unwinding

on the floor in front of me while I stand

paralyzed, backed up against your flimsy wall.

I can only breathe in, and in, and in again.

I'm choking on my own voice, swallowing

each forsaken thought as if it were a balloon

I could only inflate by speaking it aloud --

And when I escape from here, the sentence

I pull out of my mouth will be a perfect copy

of the unknown creature coiled in your hallway,

each word a stripe, each space a stripe,

this pattern that means precisely nothing

until you tell me how it strikes you.

Hallmark Guerrilla: A Writing Exercise

This morning, someone in my household (hint: his name rhymes with Schmyler) came up with the brilliant idea of going through a bunch of document boxes to see if there was anything in them that could be tossed. So I spent a couple of hours going through old correspondence (yeah, I grew up in the days when the USPS occasionally delivered something other than the Tuesday Penny Saver), and then, in a sudden frenzy of “I need to throw something away NOW, or I will have wasted my entire morning!” decided to chuck several folders full of teaching materials.

There's one writing exercise I decided I needed to save in electronic form. It's something I used in the poetry writing class I taught back in – what, 2005? I'd totally forgotten about it, so it was kind of fun to encounter it again.

Here's how it works:

1. Each person brings to class the schmaltziest Hallmark love poem they can find. (It isn't necessary to actually buy the card – it's fine to simply copy the text. Yes, anyone who wanders down the greeting card aisle will look at you askance, but at least you won't be “voting” for bad poetry with your hard-earned dollars.)
2. Each person reads his/her candidate aloud to the rest of the class, followed by a brief explanation of what made the poem schmaltzy.
3. Mock writing workshop: identify what's not working in the poems, and come up with suggestions for improvement. (Sorry, all you Hallmark poets out there: I know this is like being tried in absentia....)
4. Class discussion: What common problems did we observe? How do we avoid making those kinds of mistakes in our own poetry?

I'll copy two examples here:

I. Sometimes I wish

you and I had just met

And we had a whole lifetime

ahead of us yet

It's fun to imagine us

starting brand-new

with so many wonderful

things we could do.

And maybe this time

we'd avoid some mistakes

Or manage to catch

a few luckier breaks

But you know, I just can't

imagine a way

We'd be happier, ever,

than we are today.

II. I love you

I love your eyes

I love your smile

I love the way you eat spaghetti

I love the way you kiss

I love the way you look at me

I love the way you spoil me

I love your walk

I love it when you act silly

I love the way you look when you wake up

I love the way you love me...

And that's just the beginning.

The first poem sounds like Dr. Seuss wrote it: there's that sing-songy anapest, the predictable end-rhyme – catchy enough, but pretty silly sounding. What would happen if it were written in a different meter, with a different rhyme scheme, or no rhymes at all?

The second poem might as well be titled, “One Love Fits All” – it's just a catalog of generalizations. What if each line were made much more specific, even absurd? (e.g., I love the way you eat spaghetti / With your fork between your toes)?

Review of Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit

Twyla Tharp (yes, the choreographer – how many Twyla Tharps could there possibly be?) begins the second chapter of her book The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life with the following revelation:

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 a.m., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and thell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91^st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours.”

Dude.

I mean, seriously: 5:30 a.m.? Two hours? Every day? How am I supposed to take this woman's advice about anything, given that she's obviously made of different stuff than I am?

To make matters worse, there's this gem, from her last chapter: “When I look back on my best work, it was inevitably created in what I call The Bubble. I eliminated every distraction, sacrificed almost everything that gave me pleasure, placed myself in a single-minded isolation chamber, and structured my life so that everything was not only feeding the work but subordinated to it. It is not a particularly sociable way to operate. It's actively anti-social. On the other hand, it is pro-creative.”

A paragraph like that is confirmation of my worst fears. Well, okay, not my worst fears. Still, I find it discouraging to think I've got to make Tharp's pact with Devil Discipline if I want to have a hope of creating anything worthwhile. (What next? Burnt offerings? Every last guest at my would-be dinner party? Awww, really? Do I hafta?)

As you can see, I read the whole book through a haze of suspicion, looking for reasons to discount what Tharp had to say about developing the creative habit. So maybe it's no surprise that my favorite passages were those that seemed to contradict her more characteristic “singleness of purpose” through-line.

I particularly liked what she had to say about luck: “Habitually creative people are, in E.B. White's phrase, 'prepared to be lucky.' The key words here are 'prepared' and 'lucky.' They're inseparable. You don't get lucky without preparation, and there's no sense in being prepared if you're not open to the possibility of a glorious accident.”

Later, she suggests that being generous is the surest route to luck in the creative arena, because, “If you're generous to someone...you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It's like inviting yourself to a community of good fortune.” The most fortunate people Tharp knows, she says, have a few characteristics in common: they are prepared, they work hard, they're alert, they involve others in their work, and “they tend to make others feel lucky to be around them.”

Hmmm. I don't know about you, but these ruminations on the importance of community and collaboration don't jive (is it “jive” or “jibe”?) with her claim that spending extended periods of time in The Bubble is probably a necessary evil for those of us who want to create.

So...here's to many more dinner parties, chez moi. Cheers!

The Fine Art of Noticing

A couple of nights ago, I saw a raccoon cross the road, hurrying to get out of the way of the approaching car. A couple of nights before that, it was an opossum that my headlights had picked out. At first, I'd thought it was a large, ugly cat – and then I noticed the pointy snout and the long pink tail.

The noteworthy (beautiful, strange, idiosyncratic, ironic, thematic, defining) details of our lives often appear suddenly and disappear just as quickly. As writers, it's our job to be open to them – and sometimes, it's our job to record them, even if we're not quite sure why.

Here are a few of the things I noticed today:

*A group of several tiny birds, greenish-yellow, with white chevrons at the tips of their wings, busily picking at rust-colored catkins in the birch tree outside my bedroom window.

*The way a downtown newspaper vendor held out both of his arms to test for rain – a gesture that reminded me of religious statuary – before pulling the hood of his parka over his head.

*Branches curving up like candelabra, strung and studded with raindrops.

*The first open daffodils.

*A menagerie of plastic dinosaurs placed among the rocks and ferns of a front yard landscape.

*The feral look in a stranger's eyes right before he passed me on the sidewalk: “Slutwhore,” he said, aiming the comment straight at my face.

*That clover honey doesn't taste like mesquite honey, even mixed into tea and milk.

*Strata of memories and associations attached to a specific song (in this case, Coldplay's “The Scientist”): within 20 seconds of hearing the opening notes, I was in tears, even though I had been feeling really happy only minutes earlier.

What are some of the things you've noticed today?

What I Read in 2011

My sister-in-law Kate recently posted a list of all the books she read in 2011 on her blog, and I was blown away: I think I counted 57. None of which I'd read, although there is a copy of Blindness on my shelf and I have been intending to read it for...oh, the last five years or so, in case that counts.

My list is much shorter. Here, in roughly chronological order, are the books I read in 2011:

Fanny Hill

Just Kids

The Glass House

Vox

The Bride Stripped Bare

Foolsgold

Jealousy: The Other Life of Catherine M.

Lit

Bliss:Writing to Find Your True Self

The Other Side of Desire

Writing From the Heart

Sex at Dawn

The War of Art

Creative Is a Verb

Ordinary Genius

The Chronology of Water

A Billion Wicked Thoughts

Bonk

High Fidelity

Nineteen books. A third of the number Kate read. Not that I'm competitive or anything.

Oh, have I mentioned that in 2011, she also found a literary agent, had a play produced, wrote the first draft of a YA novel for the NaNoWriMo competition, and made (and sold) a bunch of her new whimsical bird/people sculptures?

So I was surprised when Kate recently wrote me an email asking if I wanted to be her “writing buddy.” Her idea was that we'd send each other pages every week – not for feedback, exactly, just as a way of checking in. It seems to me that Kate is doing just fine on her own, and that I'm the one who could really benefit from some hand-holding – but hey, I'm not going to argue with her about who is likely to get more out of this deal. Sign me up, I told her.