sometimes an ‘error’ is the poem’s new center

A few weeks ago, I was at a chamber music concert and a violinist’s stand collapsed with a loud thud during a Mendelson octet. The first time it fell, the musicians all tried to ignore it, acting as though a single sharp drumbeat belonged in the first movement. The second time, the piece crashed to a halt—there was an awkward silence and then all eight musicians sprang into action. They turned the moment into a delightful joke (“I’ll go find a new violinist,” the one whose stand had fallen said, “let’s not blame the equipment”). We applauded when a new stand was brought out; we shared in the anticipatory silence as the musicians reassembled. (“And the battle resumes” said another violinist, lifting his bow like a sword, and it did.) This was a much richer, more human experience than listening to a flawless recording of the same piece. The music was somehow louder and more harmonious for having contained a pocket of silence. And it got me thinking about how I respond to ‘errors’ (to actual typos or homonyms, to images or lines that seem not to fit) in my own writing.

My default strategy is often to delete or fix the error before anyone else can see it. And sometimes deleting a mistake (or ignoring it if it happens during a public performance like a reading) is the fastest and best way to handle it.

But the other way to handle a mistake is to explore it, to become an archaeologist of error and brush the dust off, study it, search for its origins, display it, and learn from it. For example, when I meant to write “mindful” but actually wrote “mine field”, I found myself reckoning with the connections between minds and fields and between thoughts and explosives. Some might call this “hanging a lantern” on the error; some might call it “writing off the subject”. I like to think of it as “digging in”—both because it’s a messy process and because it sometimes creates rabbit holes.

Digging in around an error often leads to interesting new material—sometimes even a whole new poem. An error is, after all, a kind of surprise; and, to paraphrase Robert Frost, the writer needs to be surprised in order to surprise the reader. Spotting an error and pausing to explore it takes a willingness to laugh at and with oneself, a willingness to turn a stumble into a fall into a roll. But it’s an opportunity to create a deeper, more human piece of writing. And it’s more fun than working in perfectionist mode and beating myself up for every mistake.

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Research and the Writing Life

I have a new essay about writers and spies (and poems and WWII code encryption/decryption) out at Socrates on the Beach. Preparing it for publication was an opportunity to reflect on the role that research plays in my writing (both poetry and nonfiction) and on the way that writing fuels my learning and learning fuels my writing. (No spoilers below, but you’re welcome to read “Trade/Craft”  first if you’d like.)

There’s a madness to my method. It goes something like this:

1. I start reading about a fascinating topic

2. I start writing (first notes in the margins, and then poems) as a way of deepening my understanding

3. As I write, I realize I have more questions and I do even more research, cycling through steps 1-3 for a few months

4. At some point, I stumble on what I call the overlap—the places where the history or science that I’m researching echoes/mirrors/parallels something in my own experience; this is where the creative serendipity really takes off

5. I write an essay exploring the overlap and also teasing out the gaps—the places where my experience and my research topic complicate or contradict one another (for example, I wrote “network” to explore the lives of 19th century women telegraph operators and contemporary internet users; and I wrote “Trade/Craft” to explore the methods and ethics of writers and spies)

6. I use what I’ve discovered about the overlap and the gaps to start putting together poems about my topic and my life (and ideally poems that blur the two together), weaving my way toward a portfolio or collection

7. The conversation I find between poems reveals gaps in my knowledge and I do a bit more research (sometimes stumbling on references that point me toward a new fascinating topic and a new step 1)

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Finding Landmarks in Poems

I recently read Dark and Magical Places: The Neuroscience of Navigation by Christopher Kemp and found it fascinating. It’s full of beautiful descriptions of the brain and its processes. And it got me thinking not just about how I know my way around my hometown, but also about how I find my way around a poem.

It turns out that language is integral to mapmaking and orienting; storytelling helps us navigate. We build mental maps faster when we have a personal story attached to a landmark than when we are just following a series of turns (ex. “turn right after the park where you had your first-grade school picnic” instead of “turn right at the next intersection”). Landmarks help us narrate and direct our movement through space; they help us connect our mental awareness of where we want to go with our multisensory awareness of where we are in space.

This helped me understand why I can navigate without GPS in places I’ve lived for years but become embarrassingly dependent on my phone when I visit a new city. It also helped me understand a pattern I’d noticed while editing poems (my own and others’): sometimes my initial response is to feel lost, ungrounded, disoriented, unsure which direction I’m facing or what I’m meant to be looking at. Even if I have a clear read of the speaker’s emotions, I don’t quite know where they point. In short, I can’t navigate my way through the process of meaning-making because the poem hasn’t fully developed its sense of place. (This is not to say I don’t want a poem to bewilder me a little; I want to be simultaneously bewildered and oriented when I read a poem.)

Poems (or the people who read them) need landmarks. A poem’s landmarks help readers explore the world of the poem; they tie together the tangible and the abstract or possible. Reading a poem is an act of navigation in that it fuses mental awareness and multi-sensory perception.

A landmark might be an image that begins or ends the poem—telling us just where we are. It might be an epigraph that helps us connect the poem to a particular context. It might be a reference to the sky, to the earth, to I-80, to the doors or windows of a room. It might be a series of memories that serve as touchstones from the speaker. It might even be a recurring sound that serves as a kind of mile-marker, charting a loop back to a particular mood or obsession. But all landmarks help the reader find their way into and through the poem.

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Poems are like Screened Porches

I’ve been a bit obsessed with screens for the past week—not phone screens, or computer screens, or television screens, but window screens. It’s finally warm enough for me to open the window near my desk and this small change has transformed the atmosphere in my study (and in my mind). My workspace is still indoors, but it suddenly feels much less separate from the outside world.

I’m writing about the sounds (birdsong, sirens, shouts from frustrated golfers on a nearby course, and leaves rustling in wind) that pour in through my window screen as I work and about the sounds (flute practice, arguments, barks, CNN’s updates on the war in Ukraine) that pour out through my neighbors’ windows as I walk my dogs. I’m writing about the smells, and about the warm and cold breezes that filter in. And, of course, in noticing and writing about these things, I’m also writing about my own fear and grief and hope and nostalgia. Because this, for me, is the territory where poems originate—in the interplay between self and other, in the way that moods and thoughts shapes perception and are in turn shaped by new perceptions.

I don’t have a screened porch myself, but I’m a bit envious of all my neighbors who do because it’s occurred to me that, if they were rooms, most poems would be screened porches—places of liminality and permeability where outer experiences and inner thoughts mingle and communicate. Screened porches are contained (they have frames) but also open to incursions of sound and gusts of wind. The very screens that let the world in also let their inhabitants’ words and gestures out into audibility and visibility.

Standing Aside for the Inflow

It’s been two years since my mid-pandemic cross-country move in April 2020 and I feel as though I’m still remaking my life—still trying to map out a wildly reconfigured reality and asking myself how to work/write/love/live in this new reality. One text I’ve been turning to for both pragmatic advice and creative encouragement during this process is Marion Milner’s A Life of One’s Own (you may be able to find a less expensive used copy under her pen name Joanna Field; another book, On Not Being Able to Paint, is also a creative gold mine). It’s a strange little book (first published in 1934 so it feels dated in some passages and prescient in others) full of doodles and diary entries and big questions about how we determine our own inner wants in a world full of external pressures.

She writes wisely and beautifully about the complex interrelationship of writing, thinking, and consciousness. But it’s this sentence about the relationship between creative thinking and the nervous system [my modern language] that I keep returning to:

“I began to suspect that there might be rhythm of thinking just as there is a rhythm of the heart-beat, and I had perhaps been concerning myself with one phase only, trying to make the strong push forward last all the time, never recognizing the need to stand aside for the inflow.”

Here is negative capability in the language of the heartbeat. It reminds me of the connection between inspiration and breath; it opens the possibility of not gasping/grasping after inspiration, but rather letting the next inbreath, the next word or idea, follow the pause that follows the outbreath. I’m not a social scientist or economist, but I suspect that The Great Resignation is partly based on a collective desire to escape 24-hour productivity and get back to rhythms of living and thinking that allow us to ‘stand aside for the inflow’.

On a personal level, I have been shedding some of the workaholic habits I adopted while completing my PhD (definitely a ‘strong forward push’) and finding that, when I ‘stand aside’ regularly, I have more energy to give my coaching clients’ writing AND more moments of insight and inspiration for my own poetry.

Here’s what ‘standing aside for the inflow’ has looked like for me recently:

-setting aside no email/no internet Saturdays (and even whole weekends)
-sitting down with my commonplace book and letting myself doodle rather than write
-sitting with new interests and letting them whisper and rustle at me before I dive into research mode and order 10 books from the library (this one has been a struggle)
-sitting outside and doing nothing
-occasionally putting off tasks (like submitting to journals or updating my website) that make me look productive to the outside world in favor of less visible work on writing projects that feel urgent to me
-embracing the pockets of boredom in my day instead of rushing to fill them with small tasks and furious (often futile) attempts to think my way through problems

Boredom, I have been realizing, isn’t the death of creativity—sometimes it’s the origin of creativity.

What Pottery Taught Me about Poetry

I’m taking a pottery class at a local studio. So far, I have made many spectacular messes and lots of small mistakes, learned several ways not to handle clay, gotten my arms very tired, and formed one small plate (which may or may not survive firing and glazing). Still, it feels like good creative cross-training.

Learning how to make things out of materials other than words helps me drop into a depth of attention (or maybe beginner mind) that I need for writing. It lets me practice the arts of messing up, getting frustrated, and starting over without telling myself stories about what kind of writer I am. And it almost always gives me new ideas and tools to bring back to my journal and keyboard.

Working on a pottery wheel is challenging in ways that initially seem completely unlike writing a poem. Everything happens so fast as the wheel spins. A tiny divot rapidly becomes a wobble and then a collapse. There is no pausing to look out the window and collect my thoughts. A correction soon turns into wild overcorrection. The clay is either so slippery it feels out of control or so dry that it is about to lose its adhesion and slide off the wheel altogether (in theory there should be a just right state in between, but I have yet to find it). I have to hunch over the clay and use all my upper body strength to flatten it. And then it splatters everywhere when I try to scrape away excess slop.

My first real (albeit tiny) triumph happened yesterday when I learned how to connect my hands. I’d been using my right fist to press down while my left hand cupped the side of the clay in an attempt to keep it rounded together. I was performing two separate actions without any coordination and the result was a wobbling lump. Then my instructor had me hook my right thumb over my left thumb and plant my elbows on my lap. Now my hands were stabilizing one another and communicating an even pressure to the clay. Planting my elbows not only gave me a way to brace my arms, but also helped turn my attention back to how the clay was shifting under my hands (and away from the amazing bowls my classmates were crafting).  My efforts were concentrated and coordinated, morphing the clay into its new shape.

Once I’d connected my hands, I also started to see connections between throwing a pot and revising a poem. The wheel spins much, much faster than I can cycle through rereads of a poem, but the process of smoothing the surface and sponging away excess—of iterating and iterating and letting a series of small changes accumulate into a new shape—is actually pretty familiar. And so is the need to coordinate all my intentions around what I’m making. Sometimes when revising a poem, I oscillate between paying attention to how it sounds aloud and paying attention to how it looks on the page.  I’ll revise a poem with my eyes one day and then come back the next and revise with my ears and find the poem growing awkward and lumpy. It is only when I consciously link my eyes and ears (by reading the poem aloud while I break and move the lines around) that I can really tighten and hone the poem. I’m going to call this “connecting my hands” the next time I need to remind myself to do it. And I’m hopefully eventually going to make a bowl.

How Fences and Frames Shape a Poem

Last week I visited a friend on her farm in Kentucky. We hiked across a few empty pastures and made our way down to the almost-frozen creek, pausing to watch a red-tailed hawk and to explore an abandoned barn and an old cellar. My dog was thrilled and frustrated by a pair of wild turkeys taking flight. Then we walked back along the wire fence, following it to the road. It was a cold day, but very beautiful in an austere Midwestern winter sort of way.

As I drove home, I found myself thinking about the empty barn—how my friend plans to reuse the beams and planks in a future construction, how the view through the barn doorway framed the hillside and the creek and concentrated my attention on them—and about the fence, which my dog kept slipping through while my friend and I treated it as a natural end point to our walk.

And then I found myself thinking about the structures that shape a writing practice (all the structures—formal choices like rhyme, schedules or habits that drive a writer to work at a particular time of day, choices of subject matter, and tools—like a journal or a laptop—that subtly encourage or discourage different modes of writing).  I thought about how sometimes these structures can be a concentrating force that presses the poem towards new movements and discoveries, while at other times, these structures feel more like arbitrary guardrails thrown up to limit the poem’s movement and to keep the writer from feeling exposed or being startled.

By the time I reached home, I’d started to divide these structures into two categories:

Frames help hold the work up so we can see it more clearly. They help the writer (and later the reader) to discern what the poem is about, where its center rests, AND to set aside all the stuff outside the poem. They might contain and productively compress the work. On some level, frames are intentionally chosen limits—in the way that my friend and I chose to walk into the frame of the barn and look out through the door. But they are limits that invite free play within their borders. For example, I’ve created a frame in my daily routine by always sitting down at my desk to write from 6:30 to 7:00 AM, but without any definite goal so that I can be surprised by what arises.

Fences are unintentional (or at least unexamined) limits that choke the draft. They hold back discovery and movement. Sometimes they hold back discovery by being too wide and vague (a poem about Nature in the abstract probably isn’t going to speak as powerfully as a poem about a particular encounter with a particular owl). Fences make it harder for the reader and writer to explore the world of the poem and see the work clearly. For example, my tendency to stop a poem when I hit the one-page mark is a fence that discourages me from discovering what might happen if I kept writing or if I compressed the poem down to a page.

The catch is that these categories are fluid. They depend on the writer’s temperament and the poem’s subject matter.  One writer’s fence might be another writer’s frame. And one poem’s frame might be another poem’s fence. The trick is for each of us to figure out which is which on any given day or for any given project.

Commonplace Books

By coincidence, I happen to be starting a new commonplace book this week. Usually a commonplace book lasts me 6-9 months (I use large softcover Moleskins). Since I happen to be starting a new one with the new calendar year, though, I thought I would take a moment to appreciate and recommend this tool at the heart of my writing practice.

My commonplace notebook isn’t a journal; it doesn’t track what’s going on in my life, but rather what’s going on in my head. Sometimes I think of it as the writing equivalent of a yoga mat—a place where any kind of movement or stillness can happen. Sometimes I think of it as a cauldron—a vessel where notes, quotes, anecdotes, observations, questions, obsessions, frustrations, and facts simmer together into something new.

When I learn something, through research or daily life, that I think I can use in my writing, it goes into my commonplace book. When I read a line or sentence that really resonates, it goes into my commonplace book. When I look up a word in the dictionary, the definition goes into my commonplace book. When I read something I disagree with and want to push back against it, my counterargument goes into my commonplace book. When a phrase starts haunting the back of my head, it goes into my commonplace book—and hopefully becomes part of a poem. When I have a question about my work or the world, I write it in my commonplace book. When I have something to say, I find a blank page in my commonplace book. When I feel stuck, I reach for my commonplace book and turn through the pages to see what clues I might have left for myself.

For example, my most recent commonplace book contains:

-lots of notes on World War II and Cold War era spies and spycraft

-lots of drafts of poems—partial drafts, abandoned drafts, drafts that have been marked up and revised in three different colors of ink, and drafts tagged with checkmarks to signal that I have typed them

-definitions of Integrity and Confidence

-complaints about the smell of dead cicadas

-quotes from D.W. Winnicott, Emily Dickinson, Kate Bolick, Leo Marks, Anne Sexton, Joanna Field and others

-lists of things I things I want to write about, lists of things I remember from high school, lists of things I miss

-this question: Is the poem a time machine or a timelessness machine?

Having everything in one place helps me to see connections I might otherwise miss. For example, this quote from Emily Dickinson: “Thank God the loudest Place he made / Is licensed to be still” + this quote from Anne Sexton: “A writer is essentially a spy” + notes about Ian Fleming (British Naval Intelligence Officer and creator of James Bond) + notes about poem-based codes used by spies in Nazi-occupied France à an essay about the overlap between writing and spying. Having everything in one place also keeps me from losing individual drafts or scraps. And writing it all by hand offers me a much-needed break from the glare of the screen; the commonplace book gives me space for messy experiments and uncertain beginnings.

Negative Capability

For the past few years I’ve secretly thought of December as Negative Capability Month. This is partly my cranky introvert response to the over-commercialized “Holiday Spirit” and partly because the poet Keats first coined the term Negative Capability on December 21, 1818. For me, it’s a helpful reminder to be patient and attentive as I revise poems and put them together in a manuscript (something I’m working on right now).

Keats (in a letter to his brothers) described Negative Capability as “being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”. My own understanding of it keeps evolving over time. I first encountered Negative Capability as a teenager reading Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (if you are a fan of the series, Negative Capability is the mindset Lyra uses to read the Golden Compass). At the time, the most important word seemed to me to be “Mysteries” and I thought it sounded cool, but I wasn’t sure how one actually accessed Negative Capability or what one used it for (certainly not for passing standardized tests!).

Only later, when I read Keats in college and grad school, did I start to recognize Negative Capability as the frame of mind I needed to write a poem, or to revise one. At that time, “doubts” was the part that resonated most for me. I had so many doubts about whether I’d be able to finish projects I started, about how my work would turn out, whether any of it would ever be published. But I kept writing through/into/out of my doubts.

Last year, I latched onto the “uncertainties” part. Every day was full of Covid-related uncertainties and political uncertainties. Creative work felt like my best way of navigating those uncertainties.

And now, for me, the most important word is “irritable”. I actually do a lot of “reaching after fact & reason” when I put together poems with elements of history or technology or science. I use facts to find images and metaphors. I need facts because learning almost always fuels my writing. But when I try to make the facts tell the whole story or when I try to wrangle the manuscript into perfectly logical or chronological order, the writing falls flat and I get more and more frustrated. Irritably trying to yank the facts into place so that I can have a solution NOW, leads to creative dead ends. But when I stay calm and playful, when I turn the facts and quotes and images around and around like puzzle pieces, letting them show me how they might fit together, then I move the draft forward.

Exercising Negative Capability doesn’t mean giving up on a challenging project, or wandering off to see what’s new on Netflix. It means sticking with a manuscript even though it feels like you are making no progress at the moment. For me it often means going for a walk or folding laundry or doing some yoga—anything to get out of Neurotic Honors Student mode and back into my body so I can hear how my unconscious wants to approach the problem. It means shuffling poems into an arrangement (even a wrong arrangement) and reading them aloud, noting the rough patches without rushing to get rid of them, learning from them, shuffling the poems again, learning more, and finally starting to hear where they are working together.

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Seasons Shape a Writing Practice

We’re about to turn the clocks back and I’ve noticed that my poems are shrinking. They do this every fall.  In theory, because I get up and write before sunrise, I have extra time and should be writing longer poems. But in November I seem to spend more of the early morning listening—to passing trains, to newly arrived coyotes howling from the woods near my home, to wind or rain, or to the quiet that sinks in as the insects and tree frogs die off. I do more listening than writing this time of year and draft only a few lines (or sometimes none) each morning.

I used to get nervous about this, worrying that I would stop writing altogether. But I’ve realized it’s more of an instinct than a problem. It’s a way of being in step with the world I write in. It’s a reminder that, even though writing can feel lonely, poems aren’t made in vacuums; they’re shaped by seasons and environments. Now is the time for shedding leaves and preparing to winter over.

For writers, this moment can be a chance to turn inward and sit through the long dark mornings, to wait and see what ideas will emerge in the spring. I’m trusting my instinct this year and using the fall to revise older drafts, paring back lines and phrases that seem less essential now in the cold and the quiet. After the winter solstice, I predict I’ll start writing longer drafts, reaching for the light (or poems about shoveling snow after a January storm). But for now I’m enjoying the listening, the revising, and the waiting.

Obsessions Are the Stuff of Poems

This post goes behind the scenes of a recently published poem. If you want to read it first, you can find it here.

Obsessions are the stuff of poems. Sometimes we chase them and sometimes they follow us around for years. Sometimes a poet becomes obsessed with a sound, sometimes with an image or an idea. Obsessions are like spells—siren calls for repetition and alchemy.

I’ve had a word crush on “fathom” since fifth grade when I found it in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. I loved the sound of it. I loved that there was a specific word just for measuring the depth of water. And I loved that the word also meant to understand. But I also liked that fathom could mutate into something trickier; that which is unfathomable cannot be understood.

For decades, I’ve loved finding “fathom” in nautical stories and mysteries, but I could only use fathom every so often in poems, and usually only in verb form (how often, after all, do you need to measure six feet of water depth?). It kept showing up in poems and I kept editing it out.

And then suddenly the whole world became very interested in measuring six-foot increments of distance. And I found myself reaching for my obsession and writing “Approximating Fathoms”.

This poem taught me that obsessions aren’t just about inspiration; obsessions really are the stuff of poems—they provided the tangible (and measurable) details that help us grip our anxieties and hopes so we can wrestle them into poems. Obsessions give shape and structure to abstract feelings. They call us to investigate our depths.

Whatever this October brings you, I hope you find time to follow your obsessions—or to listen to their haunting whispers.

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A Recipe for Inspiration

A few weeks ago, I made a spice cake for my sister’s birthday. This meant I also had to make The World’s Most Delicious and Intimidating Frosting. The recipe looks deceptively easy. You drop

2 cups of brown sugar

1 cup buttermilk

1.5 sticks butter

1 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. vanilla extract

into a saucepan WITHOUT STIRRING and set the heat to low. And then you wait and watch the butter melt and the brown sugar loosen into spirals. You watch and wait until the whole surface roils into an unappealing froth. Then you start to check its temperature every minute or so until the mess reaches exactly 236 degrees (Fahrenheit). Then you take the pan off the heat and stir like crazy for 3-5 minutes until the mixture starts to lose its sheen (which will be right about when your forearm muscles cramp). Then you have approximately 97 seconds to spread the frosting between and around both layers of the cake before it solidifies.

If all goes well, you have a delicious masterpiece; if you miss the temperature or the stirring time, you can wind up with a gooey unset mess dripping from the cake plate or a sugar fossil lodged in your saucepan.

Still, I really like making this frosting. It tastes amazing and makes the kitchen smell like a toffee factory. But what I most enjoy is that it always seems to set new ideas bubbling in my brain. Staring into the mess of metamorphosis and trusting it to transform into something delightful (without my stirring it too soon!) helps bring me into the observant/introspective mindset I need to write a poem.

It reminds me that creativity feeds on the sweet spot between tedium and mild danger, that mode between attention and reverie where the mind is focused on a task but still has a bit of room to wander. Driving a car, knitting a hat, sharpening a knife, lowering a candy thermometer into a saucepan every thirty seconds.  Whatever tasks bring you into this working-resting state, I hope you find time for them this September.

Using Your Creative Spine

I wrote in July about finding the poem’s skeleton—the bones that shape its movement across the page. I’m revising some longer projects this month and I’m finding it useful to focus on one part of the skeleton in particular: the spine.

This is a concept I’ve borrowed from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit (my all-time favorite book about creativity!) and played with in lots of different contexts. She puts it this way:

“The spine is the statement you make to yourself outlining your intentions for the work. You intend to tell this story. You intend to explore this theme. You intend to employ this structure. The audience may infer it or not. But if you stick to your spine, the piece will work.”

Just like a skeletal spine, the spine of a creative project has to be strong enough to carry the weight of the work and hold it. And it has to connect the project’s body (its structure and movements) and its brain (its ideas). Ideally, the spine is flexible enough to stretch and twist in different directions while still maintaining its integrity.

I can use the spine to revise a single poem by asking myself: what’s the central tension here? where are signals running in opposite directions? Once I find the spine, I can tune the poem to it by trimming lines that don’t connect to the spine or refining word choice to make the spine more visible to the reader.

I can also scale up the concept of spine to work with a longer project. Each poem in a manuscript is a vertebra in its spine. When I was working on my chapbook Automotive, I decided that my spine was “automobile=self-moving” and realized that every poem had to feature a self in motion, not just a car. This meant asking what it meant for a self to be in motion; making discoveries, I decided, transforming, or making decisions. Then it meant cutting poems that weren’t about a self in motion. But it also meant I could add a poem (even though technically there wasn’t a car in it) about going to the DMV for a new license because it was about moving forward through the world as a self, as a car-driving citizen.  Finding the spine took the project from a stack of poems about cars to a manuscript that explores how owning and traveling in a car reshapes a driver’s sense of self.

What I love most about the spine is how versatile it is.  I can use it revise a single poem, to discern which poems belong together in a manuscript, or to outline an essay. You could use it to structure your memoir or arrange a music album or put together a dinner menu. Maybe even to plan a road trip. I hope you’ll put it to good use this August.

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Form: Finding the Poem’s Skeleton

It feels wonderfully quiet now that the cicadas have died off. The first few weeks of summer filled my hometown with their droning, fluttering, pulsating, and screaming. Sometimes it was too loud to think. At other times I thought the cicadas were like poems: small, urgent creatures making uncanny noise. (Admittedly, not the most flattering comparison.)

Now that the cicada nymphs are burrowing into the ground for the next 17 years, I’m looking at the exoskeletons the parent cicadas left behind and thinking about form—about the shapes that we fit poems into and the structures we give them. About choreographing movement across the stillness of the page.

I used to think I was anti-form. Why saddle a poem with a bunch of arbitrary syllable count and rhyme requirements? Why not just say WHATEVER you meant to say in a free verse poem and call it day? Why limit your creative process? Hadn’t we been there and done that with five paragraph essays? I was looking at traditional forms like an exoskeleton—something to squeeze into or to shed.

Practicing yoga changed my mind. I started to see poses not as shapes to fit my arms and legs into, but as experiences that filled my body with breath. I started to think of a twist, for example, not as shape to hold or make, but as a way of arranging my bones and muscles so as to become aware of breath moving through the back of my body. This helped me to see form as scaffolding and support for the writer’s (and the reader’s) attention; and it helped me to see form everywhere, not just in sonnets and sestinas.

All poems have forms—skeletons shaping their strides. A prose poem focuses my attention on the sentence as a unit of movement and sense-making; a lineated poem focuses my attention on the line. A list poem asks me to find relationships between the items it names. A poem that zigzags across the page asks me to weave back and forth between different ideas.

I’ve come to appreciate traditional forms as ways of channeling attention toward particular sounds and repetitions, ways of acting out patterns of thought. I wrote lots of sestinas during April 2020 when the shifting repetition of the same six end-words felt like an obsessive shielding against uncertainty (when nothing else can be predicted, it’s nice to know how every line of a poem will end).

The bones of my poems don’t always want to stack into traditional forms, though, so finding the poem’s skeleton—the bones that will shape its movement—is an important part of my revision process. Sometimes I do this by reading aloud and listening. Sometimes I use the content of the poem as a guide. I recently wrestled a poem about Gertrude Ederle’s 1926 swim across the English Channel into three-line stanzas to fit the one-two-three-breathe rhythm of freestyle swimming; this forced me to cut ‘leftover’ lines and brought the poem into clearer focus. And I spent years revising a poem about telegraphs before realizing that I needed to make it read like a telegraph by using ‘stop’ instead of periods—folding in all the ‘stops’ helped me see what the poem had to say about silence and miscommunication.

So these days I am very much pro-form, whether that means growing the poems inside a structured exoskeleton or revising with x-ray vision to find its bones.

Who knows? Maybe the next cicada return will find me writing sonnets.

Zombies and Unicorns: Talking about Poetry

I’ve been fully vaccinated for about six weeks and I’ve made a kind of re-entry resolution for myself: to stop hedging around the question “so what do you do?”

In pre-Covid times, I often answered this question with “I’m a grad student” (I was back then; defending my PhD was one of my last in-person gatherings) or “I teach the first-year composition class at the university”. These were true answers, but they were also ways to avoid the little pause that tends to follow the statement “I’m a poet”. They were attempts to keep the rug and trap door securely in place over the wild creative void, to keep the conversation safely in the realm of small talk. Kind of silly, because I don’t particularly like small talk. But I also don’t like stirring things up or putting myself on the spot.

And saying the words, “I’m a poet and I teach creative writing” is like walking through the door with a unicorn. People react.

Some people react with “oh cool, what do you write about?” They are usually surprised when I say “submarines, time machines, telegraphs, and automobiles”, rather than “wildflowers and moonbeams”.  But then we can have an interesting conversation about how I like to use poetry to ask big questions about how we live with technology, and about how poetry can be haunting as well as delightful. My unicorn is not all stardust and sparkles. It has sharp teeth. Sometimes it wants to eat your cellphone.

Other people react with “I don’t get poetry”. Or “poetry isn’t my thing”.  Sometimes they say this resentfully. More often they say it wistfully, like what they really mean is “I wish I got poetry” (sometimes they even tell me how they struggled with “themes and metaphors and stuff” in high school English).

The truly resentful don’t like poetry because it can’t really be quantified and it isn’t exactly an MVP in our capitalist economy; they suspect poetry is full of uncertainty and deep feelings and they want nothing to do with it. There’s not much I can say to them except, “okay, I guess we view the world differently.” They don’t want to meet unicorns.

But the wistful break my heart a little. I think they know on some level that poetry would enrich their lives, but they feel cut off from the possibilities of playing with words or taking pleasure in sounds and images. Having learned to succeed in the world of standardized tests and business memos, they’ve stopped knowing themselves as creative beings. (Most kids don’t even have to think of themselves as creative, they simply imagine and create as modes of experiencing the world.) Maybe they had to write a thematic analysis paper in high school and picked up the idea that there is some correct method for understanding a poem—and the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ has gotten in the way of their ability to enjoy reading one. Maybe they find it a little scary to abandon the marked trail of logic and commonsense, even though they sense that great discoveries (maybe even their own unicorn) wait elsewhere in the woods. Whether a school-system or a workplace has slammed the door shut or whether they’ve shut it themselves, they’ve decided that the door to poetry is closed to them.  

It isn’t locked though. As language-wielding animals, all of us ‘get’ poetry. We all have the capacity to play with words, to feel our way toward meaning or to speak our way toward feeling. In some ways, the pandemic has cracked the door by giving everyone a heaping dose of uncertainty and a mixed bag of emotions, forcing us to slow down and sit with all it. A lot of people have realized they want to make a little more space in their lives for joy and contemplation and creativity—all things that poetry can bring us, whether we are reading it or writing it.

So, in this moment of collective rediscovery, I’m not ducking the question “what do you do?”. When I meet new people, I’m introducing myself as a real live poet (and poetry coach) and starting conversations about poems, because I believe that poetry is for everyone, that everyone can get something out of poetry.  I’m engaging this way because I want to live in a world with more words and more voices. (Also, this way I get to meet other people’s music and dance and photography unicorns.)

I’m trying to open the door wide for people who feel unsure about this whole poetry thing and for people who want to live a little more creatively. I’m trying to let in all the unicorns. I’m inviting people to try new poems (in case the Shakespeare they read in high school just wasn’t their favorite poetry flavor) and to try reading them aloud. I’m sharing poems I love, poems that remind me what poetry is for, and poems that might expand our ideas about what a poem is supposed to say.

Here are three poems that I’ve been sharing lately as invitations to the world of poetry:

Burlee Vang’s “To Live in the Zombie Apocalypse” (some poems double as survival guides)

Ada Limón’s “How to Triumph Like a Girl” (if I could time travel, I would go back and tape a copy in my high school locker)

January Gill O’Neill’s “How to Love” (for me, this one speaks powerfully to 2021, to the tenderness and challenge of relearning trust)

This is obviously a short list. I’d love to hear your favorite poetry recommendations—your old standbys and the ones you find yourself reaching for in this strange new moment.

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Playing Your Cards

“Play the hand you’ve been dealt.”

            I heard this one often while earning my MFA; it was one of Mike Madonick’s informal laws for the writing life, something he said at the beginning or end of workshop. It was one of those sayings that made us nod attentively—the way grad students do when they don’t want to admit that they aren’t sure what something means.

            After a while, I began to understand it as a reminder to write from my own life, from the life I was actually living (with its routine errands and embarrassing mistakes), not from some hypothetically more interesting and writerly life that I wished to be living.

            “Yes,” he said, when I was rear-ended and wrote a poem about it, “play the hand you’re dealt.” He nodded again when I brought in a poem about driving home alone and stopping at a four-way stop. The cards in my “hand” were whatever circumstances and experiences and lessons life threw at me, no matter how mundane or disruptive, and whatever words I could find for them.

            I finished my MFA, moved to Utah, and completed my PhD, thinking that I understood this whole “play the hand you’ve been dealt” business. Then 2020 dealt us all a giant handful of wild cards. Last spring, I moved back in with my parents and wrote about how strange that felt. And I wrote about hand sanitizer and masks and social distancing and fear and uncertainty. Those were the cards I’d been dealt. But a lot of my writing felt stale and effortful at the time. It took me several weeks and a few games of cribbage to realize that I’d forgotten the most important word in the rule: “play”.

            Cribbage is, it so happens, a great game for poets. Winning takes a balance of skill and luck. The math isn’t too complicated (you earn points through combinations of cards that add up to 15, through pairs, and through runs) and you get to use rhymes like “fifteen-four and say no more” as you count your cards. Like a poem, a hand of cribbage has a bit of ritual and surprise baked in; one person cuts the deck and the other turns the card over—if the card is a jack, the one who turns it over earns two points. For me, the game is also full of family history because my dad and I play on a board made to commemorate my grandfather’s 29 hand (the cribbage equivalent of a hole-in-one), which he achieved at age 93.

            The whole give and take, call and response, nature of the game feeds my poet brain. What I really love about cribbage, though, and what really makes a round of cribbage like a poem, is that it requires me to pay two different kinds of attention in close sequence. First, I have to look at the six cards I’ve been dealt and decide which four I want to keep and which two I want to discard into crib (the extra hand that goes to the dealer). This process is like discerning what goes into the poem—which events and feelings I need to write about and how they are related; four-way stop + rain + windshield wipers à slow and careful loneliness, I might think to give myself a general direction as I sit down to write.

Second, as soon as the deck has been cut and the fifth card that will contribute to both players’ hands has been revealed, I have to immediately set aside any and all calculation about how many points my hand might contain in order to focus on pegging. During pegging, players take turns laying down their cards and adding them to a running tally; you can earn points by hitting 15 or 31, or by pairing your opponent’s card, or by creating a run of three or four cards. To peg well, I have to let go of what I think my hand adds up to and pay attention to each card as it lands on the table. This is like the part of writing a poem where I have to let go of what I intend for the poem to say and focus instead on how the words and sounds are fitting together—I sometimes think of this as shifting from brain-thinking to ear-guessing. In both cases, I have a goal in mind (to write a poem or to score points), but to reach that goal I have to focus on the process as it unfolds and respond spontaneously. I can’t just count cards and call them a hand or string images together and call them a poem. I have to play. We all do, whatever we find in our hands.  

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How to Revise a Poem

some thoughts on chicken broth

My dad’s cooking is easily the best perk to sharing a pandemic pod with my parents. He makes pretty much everything from scratch—including his own broths and stocks. Like writing a poem, this is a process requiring labor and patience.

The other night, we had a roast chicken dinner and he called for me to “save everything—all the scraps” as I cleared the table. Then we got down the stock pot and threw in the chicken carcass. And all the bones. And all the scraps of skin and gristle. (Full disclosure: I snuck my dog a chunk of dark meat because she was doing the Big Eyes.) And then my dad flung open the fridge and grabbed a bunch of parsley. He threw it in the pot. Then he threw in some leftover vegetables from dinner. And some freshly peeled carrots. A few ribs of celery. A withered apple, some red grapes. Anything he thought might add to the flavor. We poured in water and let it all on an extra-low simmer overnight.

And this, more often than not, is how I start a poem. I throw a bunch of scraps onto the page: the blue jay outside my window, a wise and funny thing my sister says, a fact I hear on NPR, some joy, some dread, a decades-old memory. I work fast at this stage, grabbing any available sound or image that I sense will add to the flavor of the poem. And then I leave everything to sit for a few days.

The broth simmered for hours and hours. My dog and I twitched our noses every time we walk past. Dad lifted the lid and stirred every so often, or poked the bones and vegetables around.

I open my notebook from time to time and stir the draft around. I doodle around the edges. I underline any phrases that I think are part of the poem’s essence. And I cross out words that don’t fit. I write myself questions in the margins (for some reason this helps even when I never come up with an answer to the question).

When the broth is finished cooking, it is fragrant and golden—and full of bones and clumps of vegetable. It smells good, but doesn’t look edible. It has to be strained first. It gets poured through a colander, and then through a fine sieve. Once all the bones and vegetables and parsley leaves—which give the broth so much flavor in the first place, but also keep it from becoming pure liquid—are strained out, we have an elixir far better than anything poured from a can.

It takes me a long time to properly stain a poem. I think of typing the poem, or transferring it from notebook to laptop, as running it through a colander. I catch the big stuff that doesn’t belong to the poem then. But it takes me months of reading aloud, and tinkering (sometimes you have to add salt and pepper to broth too), and setting aside, and reading again, and deleting a word, and fidgeting with punctuation, to run a poem through my revision sieve. But the poem is always deeper for it.

Nothing that goes in the pot or on the page gets wasted, only transmuted. Even the words and lines we ultimately discard help to shape and season the poem.

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