NaPoWriMo 2017 Day 1

I'm doing this! It's National Poetry Month, and that means another round of NaPoWriMo. I will be writing a poem a day all of April. This year I'm part of the crew posting on the Bloof Books Blog (thank you, Shanna Compton!). Here we go!

Daily Wonders

The weather had us, umbrellas charged
and ready. Another Nor'easter swipes
the city. We pour out of the theater,
headed for dinner to be photographed
on our phones.

Our pens have forgotten how to write,
so stiffened our writing arms from texting.
It's not the pain so much as the wind
that buffets human invention.

We cross the street mid-block to skirt
the lake drowning the gutters at the corner.
Dinner is better with a little truffle oil,
so we all have the orzo mac and cheese.

South of here, a mess of PVC ignited
to wreck a bridge, sink a highway.
We were not in traffic at the time,
we were not texting while driving,
we were nowhere near the overpass.

Why press these sticky notes to the page?
The organ bellows, the wine mellows,
the crowd goes wild. It's been too long
since we touched a piano. Touch this.

Poetry Jump-Starts (for my classes and whoever else needs them)

It's Wednesday, which means that Mary Biddinger is tweeting a new Summer Poetry Prompt, as she is doing every Wednesday this summer. I thought I would post the prompts I give to my FIT students here, too.

Poetry Jump-Starts

Here are some prompts to get you started on a poem! 

·      Write a poem in the voice of another person, a creature, or an object, using first person (dramatic monologue).

·      Write a letter in verse form to a famous person.

·      Write a verse letter to someone you know very well.

·      Is there a piece of art or music that you admire, or even dislike?  Write about it—describe it, but try to say something beyond the mere description.

·      Look out your window at the scene you see every day.  Observe it for some length of time.  Try to imagine you’re seeing it for the first time.  Do you see anything new?  Use your imagination.  Then write.

·      Go somewhere you’ve never been before, and write about what you see there.

·      Write about an image from a dream. Describe it as specifically as possible, just as you remember it, without interpreting or explaining it.

·      Write about a specific, detailed memory.  Using sensory detail and/or figurative language, try to “show” the significance of that memory to your reader, rather than “telling” it. (Try to use all five senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste)

·      Take two lines from poems by someone else.  Write one at the top of the page, and one at the bottom. Write your way from the first line to the last.

It's National Poetry Month--and NaPoWriMo Starts Today!

Image from http://www.wildviolet.net/

Today for the first time I'm participating in NaPoWriMo, a month-long challenge for poets to write a poem every day for the month of April (National Poetry Month). I'll be posting my daily poem here, then probably deleting it, so keep checking back if you want to see what I'm up to!

Also check out the Bloof Books blog, where Shanna Compton is posting a selection of NaPoWriMo work.

Join me, and wish me luck!

Ah, Summer! Taking the Virtual Blog Tour...

Summer is half over already (or something like that), and all of the "real work" I was gonna do has yet to be done. Instead, I have been teaching (2 online classes in June), parenting (more on that later), and plunging into a healthy new lifestyle of plant-based food and regular exercise. Oh, and recovering from one heck of an academic year, both for myself and my kids. As I have learned many times over the years, I really need a deadline, and a metaphorical cattle prod, to get words down on the page and out in the world.

So I was delighted to be invited by a dear and long-time friend, April Lindner, to participate in a "virtual blog tour," aimed at giving more exposure to blogs that readers may not have seen before. It's been quite awhile since I've posted (yikes!), so I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to get Saint Nobody up and running again--in hopes of revving up my own writing. This is the first in a series on various subjects I've saved up since my last post--time to put it out there.

First, meet April, the author of two poetry collections, This Bed Our Bodies Shaped from Able Muse Press and Skin from Texas Tech University Press.  She also has written three young adult novels—Jane, Catherine, and the forthcoming Love, Lucy, all published by Poppy. With R. S. Gwynn, she co-edited Contemporary American Poetry, in Longman’s Penguin Academics series.  A professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University, she lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania.

April and I were classmates in the PhD program in Creative Writing at the University of Cincinnati many moons ago. We read drafts of each others' poems in workshops, were roomies at my first-ever AWP Conference (Pittsburgh '95), and walked together for our doctoral hooding ceremony in 1998. It's been wonderful to see April from time to time at AWP and the West Chester Poetry Conference near her home in the Philly area. I've been a fan of her poetry for years, and have watched her career as a YA novelist with admiration ever since my niece, Mary, devoured the signed copy of Jane I gave her in 2012. I'll be posting a poem of April's, which I've used often in my classes, later in the week.

The next component of the blog tour meme is a quick "self-interview." Because this post is already fairly long, I will answer briefly here, and elaborate a bit in future posts.

1. What am I currently working on?

what i do instead

There are a million things to do. And unfortunately, I have a problem staying focused. Instead of doing what I "should" be doing, I keep myself "busy" with lots and lots of Nothings. I check my gmail. I check my FIT email. I check the Angel network for messages and my online classes for new discussion postings. I go on Facebook (aka World's Most Successful Time-Suck). Lately, I even started playing Klondike solitaire again--a Nothing I hadn't indulged in for years, but which became frighteningly enmeshed with my hourly routine.

I found a wonderful blog on Psychology Today called "Don't Delay" by Timothy Pychyl, PhD. According to his bio, Dr. Pychyl's research is "focused on the breakdown in volitional action commonly known as procrastination and its relation to personal well being." Reading the blog I discovered that, like creativity, procrastination is a sub-field of study in psychology research. Fascinating.

Of course, reading the blog posts gives me another thing to do--not quite a Nothing, and it really gives me some food for thought. Mostly, it helps me feel less, um, pathological--I am certainly not alone in my Nothing-ness.

I've also read that checking email or texts obsessively--or even compulsive Googling--is connected with the surge of dopamine you get from receiving messages and retrieving information instantly. The last thing I need right now is to get locked into a dopamine-feedback-loop. I'll never get free!

I have decided that, today, I will only check gmail once an hour (if that sounds like a lot, believe me, it's a huge reduction). I will only go on Facebook at lunchtime and the end of the day. And I will not play Pretty Good Klondike at GoodSol Online at all.

Instead I will write. I will get my tax information to my accountant (a BIG source of entrenched procrastinating energy). I will make headway on grading. I will chip away at the dozens of things I need to do for the family--paperwork for Stella, child care arrangements, spring break travel plans.

One thing I am proud of is my commitment to exercise. This week, I have gone for a run/walk every day except Tuesday. And last night I finally did a yoga class at my gym for the first time in a few weeks.

Having done at least that, no matter how much of a blob I've been in other ways, shows me that, in at least one area, I can make the choice to do the right thing, the smart thing, the thing that is good for me. I know that this good energy can carry over into the other parts of my life.

Wish me luck! I'll keep you posted....

weekender

NOTE: It is perhaps unsurprising that I originally drafted the following post LAST weekend and am just finishing and posting it now.

I haven't posted here in awhile (again). Mostly it's because I've been doing other things, but there is always the shadow of blogger's block. I still don't know what it's about, exactly. Partly it's the same as regular writer's block, but the other part of it is the public nature of blogging. I have a link to my blog on my email signature, it's on my facebook page, it's the first thing that comes up if someone googles my name. So there's no way I can really hide here, unless I have some "restricted" posts, and I don't really see the sense of that. If I have something to say that's private, for a small group, I either just write in my notebook or send an email to a couple of friends.

Anyway, lately I've been remembering the words of Dave Smith, who with Claudia Emerson led the workshop in which I was a fellow at Sewanee last summer. Dave really held my feet to the fire, but it was something I needed. I'd submitted a manuscript of work-in-progress (something that most of the fellows don't do, for some reason, but I thought I'd take advantage of having a thorough reading by some experts, free of charge). After my hour-long conference, I read the three-page single-spaced letter Dave had written--it was more like an essay directed to me individually, engaged, elegantly-written, and incisive. At the end, I broke down and cried because he had hit the nail on the head--not so much about the poems themselves (although his comments were useful and on-target) as about my commitment to poetry.

I think the "serious" poet is not competing against stand-up comics but against the great poems in our language. To bear that burden of competition is a killer weight, but if a poet is not trying to do the best possible work, how is he/she different from the literary week-ender?

That, dear reader, is the question, and underlying that is another series of questions: am I destined to be a "week-ender"? what would I have to do to be "serious" about poetry? something's gotta give, but what?

At the end of the letter, Dave wrote:

I think you can be a very entertaining poet, especially reading to small crowds who have every reason to like not being challenged; or you can be both entertaining and much better, the kind of poet whose language has resonance and durability.

He went on to name some poets (all women, of course) he considered "non-week-enders" and the list included some of my personal heroes and one of my close personal friends. That was when I cried. Yes, I want to do what these writers have done. What has been stopping me? Why, if I consider my writing so central to my life, do I always give other work, the work that is for pay, more legitimacy and thus more of my energy? How can I change this?

If I don't get a handle on this I'll never have a second book. I'll never finish the memoir. I'll always be a might-have-been, an also-ran, a "but she had so much potential." I'm working on finding another way.

found: poem

Will the wonders of the world wide interweb never cease? Doing a random google search for examples of found poems for my students, I came across "foundpoem.com," which offers a program that will randomly generate poems and song lyrics for the low, low price of $11.99. I downloaded the trial and gave it a shot. It isn't really "found poetry," which takes text from another source and arranges it in lines, for dramatic (or humorous) effect. Rather, it selects phrases, presumably from a database, and arranges them in lines, with a title and everything. The pieces generated by this process would be pronounced bad bu even the most devoted dadaist, but this one I like quite a bit (probably because of the word "chorister" in the title):

for the chorister who admitted it
______

everything i appreciate
caves in
a zillion to one
a time check

with these chaperons telling me what to think
feeling nothing
i have lost my passion
what i want is all of september
what i want is apples
i am archetypal with another
expected
tonight
i imagine
in twenty-two different ways
these evils
clowning around
murder in the nick of time
as the rain falls

i advertise agreements
as part of bickering
don't i know