News from the Little Office

I never did exactly get around to creating a room to call my own -- a door to close, a screen with bamboo accents to hide behind -- but nonetheless things have been quite busy as usual here at The Little Office, where I have returned to researching saints. This week the focus has been on Teresa of Avila, a woman of great creative powers, as well as a love for Jesus, and also did you know she was a forerunner of mental prayer? A brillant lady full of strong feelings about the need to restore order (and weekly flagellation) to the convents, along with decalceation (a fancy word for the taking off of one's shoes--who knew?). She also was known to levitate during mass, and she often communed with angels, along with her very own beloved invisible Jesus (sort of like a transparent blow-up doll Savior), which from the sound of it she was having rather deep interpersonal connections with.

She was also a writer, at one point heading off in solitude with quill pen in hand for five years. Imagine! And I was feeling guilty for leaving my husband/children for a few weeks to cloister myself from the slings and arrows of sunbutter sandwiches, Chex Party Mix, and the ever-present for a spot (back handspring... Mom?). But since of course Teresa had no husband or children, five years of cranking out the pages was a piece of cake, or make that a golden lance with a spearpoint an angel jabbed into her so many times she began ecstatically moaning (just what is it about saints and self-mutilation, anorexia, and torture?). 

As you can see, there's been a party going on this week in the inner sanctum, and that's only the half of it. Stay tuned for some new poems that will leave you with a keen understanding of why the smartest women of the 15th century headed straight for the convent.

In the meantime, I leave you with some words from the great Teresa herself:

To reach something good it is useful to have gone astray.

Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul.

I know the power obedience has of making things easy which seem impossible. 

Spellbinding Reading with Kelly Davio & Caleb Barber

Kelly Davio, reading from Burn This House

Caleb Barber, reading from Beasts & Violins

I always know it's going to be an especially great night of poetry when I arrive at The Station to the melodious notes of a whistling-over-time espresso machine, Waylon or Luis working the counter like a dervish, my right hand gal Betty Jean running to the back room to grab more (and more) folding chairs for the spill-over-into-the-street crowd. They come from all over the city, and always they come ready to listen closely, laugh, sigh, and knowingly nod. There are so many great things about bringing people together for a common appreciation, but when it's a do in the name of poetry, gawd help me.

Since Beacon Bards launched in September 2012, every reading/open mic has been special in its own way; last night was the same - though something about it still being LIGHT at 8:30 pm, light, light, and more light all through the reading, coupled with the illuminating words of both Kelly Davio and Caleb Barber, made the night particularly luscent. These two rising stars are definitely ones to watch. Kelly and Caleb both have recently-released collections from Red Hen Press - I picked up copies last night, and can't wait to dive into more of their fine work. Here's just a sampling of what we were graced with:

From "In a Twilight Town," by Caleb Barber:

I'd like to hear about all those goldfish
that never survived through winter
on her parents' porch. I'd like to know how
the couch felt when it froze through.
But the plane for the mail route is spinning on
and this place will always be his stop.
The night makes us all older, and just walking
toward it, she covers her thighs with the dark.

From "Children's Art is Asylum Art," by Kelly Davio:

At recess, children work with a diligence
of bowed heads, use mirrors to burn flags
for invented nations into patchy grass.
They wait for blue sparks from heaven,
for emancipation, the loosening of sky,
the bus home, the family dog--hallelujah 
and hallucination imitating one another
from the eye's corner. 

Poems like these remind me that poetry can be a savior, a redeemer, and a balm, but also a way into a more sharpened notion of who we are and how we live.

Ten Reasons You Should Write Most Days: a Funnel Cloud of Fruition

Long hand draft: May 22

10 Reasons Why You Should Write Most Days

10. It keeps you honest.
9. It feels good.
8. It gives your life a sense of purpose.
7. Instead of making lists of what you want to write, you can skip that step and go straight to writing.
6. It feels wholesome.
5. Because that which is in you which is not brought outward will destroy you.
4. Because it's better than bitching about not having time to write.
3. Because when you are writing you are not wishing you were writing.
2. You were given to write. Write!
1. Because it's important to be caught up in a funnel cloud of fruition.

Channeling Richard Wilbur's "Junk"

Do you know this poem by Richard Wilbur, written in Anglo-Saxon accentual-syllabic meter, titled "Junk"? I believe I first came across it about twenty years ago, when I was trying to learn something about poetry while enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Washington. I found that one of the best ways to do that was to go back and read all the poetry textbooks I pushed aside as an undergrad in favor of my plant taxonomy textbooks. Anyway, "Junk" gets anthologized a lot. At first I didn't understand what was going on, never having really grokked Beowulf, but I think it was Shannon Borg (fellow UW student) who helped me to understand, finally, the kenning and the caesura, in a way that I could teach it to others, which I started doing about ten years ago at Bellevue College, but I could never find the right subject for this kind of verse -  I would write ten lines of consonant lines with a break in the middle, but the poem would just die there on the page.

Another student in the UW program at the time, I think it was Allan Nicoletti, pointed out, about form, that the point was having them all in your tool box at the ready, just in case you were in the middle of drafting a poem and realized you were writing a villanelle - I mean, imagine if you hadn't written a dozen or so bad villanelles, read all the best villanelles out there - where would you be?

So last night I looked at some notes from the day before, and I had that moment of recognition: this poem wants to be written in accentual-syllabics! How exciting to know that my twenty or so years of thinking about "Junk" and its predecessors would finally pay off. Here's the draft, but it will go poof in a day or two as I continue to revise and revise.

The Architect of the Inevitable

*POOF!*

Day 19 of Poem a Day in May

At this point I've lost all perspective on whether anything I've written this month is any good, and I reckon that's probably where I should be. When one is focused on creating new work day after day, one cannot also be worrying about whether the work is "good"; the whole point is to focus on getting words onto the page, right?

I have done things I've never tried before, mainly because I have to come up with tricks to get a poem onto the page. One spontaneous idea this week was to end every line with a word that has an "er" sound. It helped me fill up a page and a half with couplets, though the poem needs a lot of work to make it into something worth sharing with an audience, even a small one such as the one called Readers of Blue Positive, unless that audience recognizes that I am not sharing this poem because it is finished, or "good," or "worthy of publication," but only in the spirit of this thing called creating a life where it is possible to turn one's attention to one's art most days of the year.

For me, writing a poem a day means I am working on poems most of the time, because when I am walking or preparing dinner or folding laundry I am thinking about what I wrote that day, asking myself What if I added more Confucius into that poem? or What does it mean to make art for the sole purpose of watching it disintegrate from exposure to the elements? Or making notes to myself to re-read the part in Madness, Rack, and Honey where she (Mary Ruefle) talks about the moon. Or thinking: hey, maybe I could moosh together the poem with the cicadas and the one about the artist who creates disintegrating sculptures? In other words, writing daily turns a life into a creative life.

May 14, 2013

*POOF*

Self-Knowledge, one poem/day at a time

It is getting easier, this poem a day thing, but for a few days I really struggled. Almost gave up, but found a solution: write your daily poem early in the day. Other revelations include the realization that it's hard to start a new poem when you're in the middle of revising yesterday's draft. Here's one from last week, before I started really, really lowering my expectations:

Flower Girl
*POOF!* [deleted]

Day 8 of Poem a Day in May

Another day, another draft.

Seriously, I did not know how hard this would be.

What I am learning about about myself is that once I write a draft I like to work on it LOTS, make it better, tinker ... 

but then it's time to start another poem, ach!

So today I worked on the poem below, started two days ago, but didn't have time to revise the poem from yesterday (which bugged me, kinda), and then I had to start something new, but I was really, really wiped out from getting up early to jog and grading a dozen papers most of the day, so the draft isn't very good and barely legible at that, but at least I started the research and jotted a few notes.

And this is only 8 days into May. I still have ...23 more days? I know it's a problem of the happiest kind, but I am not sure how people do this. 

But there are many bright sides, including: 

1. I am taking more risks with figurative language and line breaks;

2. I am maybe going to have a book of poems way quicker than I ever expected;

3. I do not have to waste my time thinking about where to submit my work - I am too busy writing;

4. I will, at some point, have a lot of poems to submit!

Under the Sun

*POOF*