Seventeen lines on the immorality of toads, thanks to Ryan. Like everything I write, it started with me and some meter, and I thought I had left the toads behind until they made for a good twist to the trajectory.
A line-break darling:
no bird can sing, neither can the sun
come up, but they are metaphor
This one I would like to polish and do something with.
It’s not a trend that will continue, but the comment counts at Poetic Asides have been lower each day as I get around to posting there: on day 1, my comment was somewhere in the 860s; yesterday it was in the 300s; and today I’m in the 180s.
Mind, if I was smart and patient, I’d wait until later in the day (or even a day or two) to post these, since I invariably find small improvements to make a few hours later. However, I think part of what’s uncorked my March-dormant mojo (more on that at my own blog, in a bit) is making a point of making this a less-pressure exercise: because I’m acknowledging online that these are day-of drafts, and because I’m letting myself be okay with spending not too much time on them before moving on (I’m allocating to myself just thirty minutes on them, with the option to indulge in more only if the spirit so moves), and because the prompts (and, today, the title) are set by someone else, the “must make this as good as everything everyone’s read before by me” demon has slunk back to its swamp for the time being.
The downside, of course, is that posting them online disqualifies them from most paying markets, so to get more circulation for them, I’ll have to get serious at some point about compiling a manuscript (something that stopped being a near-future goal several years ago). However, saying even that is definitely putting the hansom ahead of the horses – let’s first see how many more of the challenges I manage to rise to.
Here’s today’s effort (already with two edits since the initial posting). The prompt was to title a poem with “The Problem with _______” and then write it:
The Problem with Easter
Five years ago, Vera mourned aloud,
“How hard can it be to find a hot cross bun?”
She’d scoured the local supermarkets, and
the only ones she’d found resembled
spongy cardboard with shriveled raisins.
The bakeries here require advance orders,
plus they charge more than she wanted to pay.
“Story of our lives,” Milton said. “You’d think
we’d know by now that what’s worth wanting
is going to cost more than what’s easy to get.”
Most of the time, I think of myself
as a pretty smart cookie, but this morning
as I pushed open the door to Marché,
I suddenly remembered my father’s birthday
is just six days away. This year
he would have become sixty-eight. Such days
were not a big deal in my family, nor
were any other holidays, and I doubt
he ever tasted a hot cross bun during his life,
and I doubt even more that he truly believed
in eternal life, deathbed conversion be damned.
It gave my aunt comfort, but it made my mom mad
enough to complain, “Too much Bible!”
as I tried to arrange a service to serve
the memory of who he’d wanted to be.
Mom never forgave me for wasting good money
on the pointlessness of a funeral. Two Sundays
before she died, she made me promise
I wouldn’t run obituaries or accept memorials –
vows I knew I would break as I made them.
When I was a girl, I adored the antique tales
of love and truth transcending all odds:
The hero doesn’t stab to death the dragon
housing the heart of his cursed true love.
The beauty twines her arms around the beast.
The harp avenges the silenced sister. I still
believe in a “happy ever after” of sorts, but one
that is stained and crumpled and patched
with the scraps of ill-colored sails. My altar
is the table at which we gather round
to knead today’s bread so that it may rise,
the only multiplication my fingers can clasp.
Part of how Mary and I became blog-friends years ago was our mutual interest in the nitty-gritty of making stuff, and it seems to interest some of my other readers as well, so here’s the DVD extra on how this poem got to its current state:
–> I peeked at the prompt first thing this morning after checking my e-mail and scanned some of the comments already posted. (This was useful, as it instantly eliminated some of the options I might have otherwise considered.) Pondered variations such as “the problem with love,” “the problem with holidays,” “the problem with babies,” “the problem with kittens,” “the problem with manga,” etc., as I drove the dog to Miss Kitty’s (a local groomer — I don’t know what Abby rolled in two days ago, but it was foul, and some of it hardened in her fur, and there’s a point where it just becomes more prudent to let the pros deal with it).
–> Took a wrong exit on my way to something else, and realized I’d forgotten a bunch of other things at home, and my body was giving me some strong “need protein NOW” signals, so I decided to stop at Marche for breakfast.
–> Noticed a sign on one of the windows listing a couple of April dates, which unexpectedly jolted me into thinking, “Oh, April 9 is in just a few days.”
–> Ordered a latte and corned beef hash, scanned a newspaper, and then opened my planner to organize my thoughts:
 |
| From things that make me happy |
[Click the image to view it up close.]
–> Realized where the poem was heading. Took out my laptop and started a Word document.
–> Typed through the latte and hash. Wasn’t done when the waiter brought the check, so I ordered a slice of chocolate-blood orange strata and kept going.
–> Finished the poem halfway through the strata (as the waiter warned, it was really rich, so it made for slow eating. Marché tends to be impossibly crowded during weekends, so it was startling to be able to linger there this morning — there was only one other table occupied when I first arrived). Started a “welcome back, mojo!” post for my personal blog.
For what it’s worth, the poem is more autobiography than not: “Vera” is a stand-in for a relative who did in fact lament the difficulty of finding hot cross buns some years ago (something I remembered recently, because my favorite bakery is offering them via special order this year. Said bakery is Jewish-owned — there’s a mezuzah at the entrance, and everything in the cases is dairy kosher, as far as I can tell — so yeah, the fact that I can get both hamentaschen and hot cross buns there is probably a poem I might write some other time). “Milton” is one of my alter egos. Everything after “Most of the time” is direct from life — and while I didn’t cast it in these specific words before breakfast today, it’s stuff that’s simmered within various levels of my consciousness for the better part of a decade — and, at times over the past month, boiling back into a furious boil, since I’ve had to relive it parts of it while organizing my parents’ papers for the estate tax returns.
Which is a long way of saying, sometimes what a prompt does is to kick a poem up out of the depths that had mined and tumbled it from a long ways back. (And that is a half-heated metaphor to cook into poetry some other day, so that’s enough from me here, for now.)
I nearly wrote about copper tungsten this evening because I was still being goaded by Jeannine’s periodic table from yesterday and CuW has such a beautiful look to it.
Instead, I did my 3 pages of scribbling, which went all over (but neither to arches nor tungsten), and ended up with a sonnet idea and an almost-quatrain. Perhaps something to come back to, tomorrow.
First Night
Snow rolls down the mountains, unravels itself like yarn
against the foothills. It’s April, did I say that? April,
and we pitch our tent in snow! Hands shoved between thighs
for warmth, the furthest thing from sex. Our sleeping bag shared
with sweater-swaddled laptops–please don’t freeze.
An Asian American
Lighten up,
even friends would say
whenever she cringed
at a singsong chant
or failed to laugh
during Avenue Q,
each order a knife
that carved her into
less of herself around them
until all that remained
was a cheshire grimace.
– pld
Goose Goose Duck
[A revised version of this poem will be published in an anthology by Uphook Press, Fall 2011]
[Written over the past hour or so in response to the “origin” prompt at Poetic Asides. (Props to Jeannine for the pointer!) Hopscotching through some of the other 800+ poems there so far, the one that caught my eye and then stuck with me is Kenji Liu’s Because origin is not a place.]
I had intended to post last night with my goals for this writing marathon and having failed to do so I feel as if I am already behind.
My goal is to write every day, not just every weekday. If it’s new scribbling, I’m holding myself to my three page rule from last time. I would like to work on Queen of the Steppe if so motivated, so I’m going to count revision as writing. Also, I would like to write at least one (new) pantoum because the journal is becoming all triolets, all the time.
Tonight? There are so many options, Joanne gives metaphor,
the Portland Art Museum an enchanting picture of arches I must return to, Jeannine the periodic table. So I confess to jealousy:
The whole world’s made of metal
to an astro geek, too heavy
with its many shells and layers,
banal in its scarcity.
Give me exploding pink shockwaves
of hydrogen, abundant mother
material whose lightweight arms
curve matter with the grip of gravity.
Real spark even if not high art. What fun.
I was sick for 2 days, so I’m cheating a bit and backdating my first 2 NaPoWriMo entries. I’ve written next to nothing poetry-wise since September, and I’m going to get over that by writing every day for the next month. And I’m going to post it all, in its terrifyingly rough and unedited nakedness, here. To give myself some guidance, I’m going to write about the trip I took across Canada and back through the southern US last summer. I camped the whole way, there was much chaos and bad weather, and there should be plenty to keep me going. The writing itself will probably be terrible–I’m an obsessive reviser and will usually go over a poem for weeks or months, or at least days, before showing it to anyone–but I’m interested to see what it will feel like to post first drafts publicly. It means I’ll also have a record of what I first wrote, which I can compare the final version to much later down the road. They’ll probably be insanely different, since I try not to self-edit too much during my first drafts. If I do any revising during this time, I’ll hold it back at least until NaPoWriMo is over.
I feel like I need to post a whole slew of disclaimers about how this isn’t what my poetry looks like by the time I edit and publish it, alongside a bunch of pleas for patience and mercy, but what the heck. Here’s day 1.
Heading Out
Out of the rain forest that holds you like green fog,
through the the alkaline lakes by Kamloops,
the pocket desert in Osoyoos where owls burrow down
in the roots of cacti, the running joke of Spuzzum—one house,
one gas pump, and somehow still a town—
over the mountain border, a half hours’ stop
in Banff, espresso and eight-dollar Internet, the irony of elk
hoofing it down the sidewalk, past Starbucks and the GAP
and tourists who want photos with wild bears—what is it
with them, a death wish? But who wouldn’t
want to die here, under bright snow, next to the lake
so clear and deep there aren’t words for all the colours
glowing in it.