April 2011

There’s been a lot of talk in Ottawa recently about the value of being an experimenter in poetry, constantly trying out new forms, always open to new ways of writing a poem so one doesn’t get stale or bored. I’ve sat back from the discussion not because I don’t have an opinion but because I wanted to think about it and about why it doesn’t appeal to me at this point.

I had to ask myself if it is age-related – most of the poets talking about it are at least a few years younger than me. Or is it a stage of life issue? There’s no question I’m settling down – I’ve done the student years, the living in attics, the joyous partying times. I’m now happy to curl up on the sofa. I’m also traveling in a way I didn’t used to be able to.

So perhaps those play a role. Also, I’ve done some experimentation in order to reach where I am now, both in reading and in writing. I had to. It’s the way writers, artists, and composers find out which style is going to be theirs, which is their own voice among all the clamour. It seems like a necessary part of discovery.

But I don’t want to stay there, in discovery. I’m at the point where I want to concentrate on learning one aspect of the craft really well. Of focusing on it.

This doesn’t mean I think I’m better – or worse – than some of the other poets in town. Just different.

It’s like medicine. Some are born researchers, keen to search out new drugs, new treatments. Others want to be family doctors, learning as much as they can about everything. Or emergency room doctors, fast on their feet, constantly open to a new problem every minute.

And then there are those who want to specialize, to study just one aspect of the body in great detail.

In the end, I’ve realized that’s what I want to be – a cardiologist, if you will, not concerned with the superficials of the heart, but struggling with its relationships to every organ, every chemical pumping through the veins, every crisis and aging whimper.

To be precise, I’m specializing in lyric poetry, which is to say, in poetry that is not specifically narrative (most of the time), that is more contemplative and personal. Lyric is considered to be the most common type of poetry, which would normally have me running in the opposite direction as I tend not to be a pack-follower. But this form is the one my words choose. And so, I have committed myself to learning how to do it as best I can.

Here’s the first draft of the lyric poem for today:

The bird in the kitchen slides a feather in
your yoghurt bowl, black depths layered with
the ocean’s green iridescence beside
the purple grapes floating in a small sea of
rind-flecked white. Orange scents the room as
wings beat, each wing enough
for one heart, one day. You’d open a window out
of courtesy but it’s a grey day and the bird shines
better under your small light. Still the wings
beat, a flutter your throat echoes as one eye observes
you, wondering what you’ve got planned.

It might seem odd, but this is one of my train poems, written on the trip from Montreal to Schenectady as we passed Lake Champlain, a long ice-skinned lake covered with birds, the surface a tracery of their footprints. I wrote several other poems too, during the length of that narrow water, but this is the first one to be finished. Its inspiration comes from the sight of a feather falling, yes, but also from the memory of a pigeon that flew down a friend’s fireplace chimney when we were visiting one day. Judy showed great cleverness in catching the pigeon with a towel and releasing it outside but that’s not where the poem decided to go.

As happens so often with memory in poetry, it slips sideways, obeying its own truth, its own inner logic, especially through various drafts and edits.

Here’s another draft:

Looking for the Way Out

The bird in the kitchen slides a feather in
your yoghurt bowl, black depths layered with
the ocean’s green iridescence, each tip
its own evening dress, its own hat
trick party, beside the purple
grapes floating in a small sea of
rind-flecked white. Orange scents the room as
wings beat, each one enough
for one heart, one day. You’d open a window out
of courtesy but the sky is weighed down
by clouds and the bird shines better under
your small light. Still the wings
beat, a flutter your throat echoes
as one eye observes you, wondering
what you’ve got planned. You measure a towel
with your eyes, a soft one, bearing the imprint
of autumn’s leaves, a suitable nest to line
a box. But what do you know?

The work this poem mostly required was of expansion. It started as a short image with a couple of lines I really loved that I then had to build on, editing the new additions as I went. You can see one of my experiments above, “each tip/its own evening dress, its own hat/trick party”. It was hard to hit delete on those lines. They work in and of themselves. The problem is, they don’t work well with what followed so, as always, the poem wins over my own desires. The same happened with several versions of the ending, until I got one I was finally happy with.

By the way, you’ll notice I’ve ended many lines with a preposition, something I almost never do. I did try arranging the poem in different formats, but this is the one that creates the insistent movement forward the poem requires.

Current Version:

Waiting for Wings

The bird in the kitchen slides a feather in
your yoghurt bowl, black depths layered with
the ocean’s green iridescence beside
the purple grapes floating in a small sea of
rind-flecked white. Orange scents the room as
wings beat, each one enough
for one heart, one day. You’d open a window out
of courtesy but the sky is weighed down by
clouds and the bird shines better under
your small light. Still the wings
beat, a flutter your throat echoes as
one eye observes you, wondering what
you’ve got planned. You think towel, measure it
with your eyes, a soft nest to line a
box, bearing the imprint of
autumn’s leaves, perhaps a suitable
home. But what would you know? You of
the hollow bones bearing the weight of
supper’s flesh, each meal a girdle the
bird doesn’t have to understand. You’d rather
have wings to lift you to the sun, wings made of
the softness of feathers plus
sharp pinions to set you free.

I’ve just spent a full week riding the rails, crossing the United States from east to west and back again on Amtrak because my husband was going to the big American geography conference in Seattle and we thought this would be the best way to travel. (I am so off airport security, I can’t even write a poem about it.)

We took the northern route there, which proved to be a soggy choice, one that delayed us for a full day on an embankment above the brown flooded fields of North Dakota. Then we came home down the west coast to orange blossom-scented Sacramento and across through the Sierra Nevada to Salt Lake City (at 3 am), the Rocky Mountains, and down into the golden plains to Denver and finally, Chicago, where we abandoned the train to fly home as the times didn’t work from there on.

All this is to explain why I won’t be showing you much more than a minimal edit of a poem today. To my surprise, since this was supposed to be a holiday, I have written non-stop since leaving home on April 7th. I had, of course, planned on writing a poem a day while away. A good musician always keeps their chops in shape. But I have written more than eight hours a day, including during the conference, since I sat in on a few geography of poetry sessions which I found inspirational too.

I also took pictures during the trip and, on the way home, video since I realized, partway through, that I was clearly working on a second book of poems, currently called The Four Seasons, as I plan on taking this same train trip another three times. Okay, I know it’s not an original title, but it too will probably be edited when I have time to breathe again.

Because I need to start editing what I’ve written. By the time you read this post, written on the train, I will have only just arrived home. My inbox will be full of files sent from my phone with the most recent work in them. Some poems exist as fragments, some as longer chunks, and some as major sections of text as I finally stopped trying to format them as poems on my phone’s small screen and decided to just write and leave the formatting to later. I’d like to see this book published as an e-book so it can incorporate the video with the poetry.

Today, I’m going to share just a first thought on this amazing country, this astonishing landscape. I had not expected to fall in love with the States, but that’s my usual mistake of thinking politics are the sum total of a place, which is, of course, nonsense.

It remains a sadness, however. The poverty is visible in the rural States, with many communities at least half made up of trailer homes, some parked so close together, they breathe each others’ air. And too many houses are peeled paint, shingles thinned and patchy. There is a lot of money here, in the monster homes. But there is a lot of hunger too.

The poem below doesn’t look in that direction. It started as a fragment before we left but was written and edited on our first Amtrak ride from Montreal to Schenectady, as we passed a long frozen lake full of birds.

Today you see the black birds from the fields
and white birds flying from the sea and hear
the chittering of sparrows in bushes under
the blue sky, nesting cries, the wild voices free
on the still cold wind, the red buds forming,
like the flames in a fire just catching and you
with your hands held out rejoicing in
the new warmth each new red-gold flicker
brings, the wild shoots, the fresh greens,
the tight unfurlings

This poem shows once again why poetry is not filed under either non-fiction or fiction, why it simply is. I may have been writing about the birds I saw in a lake, but at no point did I want to write that word into the poem. In the first draft, I used sea, but that was because the first two lines are the original fragment of the poem, pre-train. When I revised it, I didn’t want the harsh sound of the ‘k’ in lake. ‘Pond’ lingers much better in that line. Yes, the ‘k’ could have found its echo in the ‘c’ of conversations but by using ‘pond’, that ‘c’ is softened too, all the consonants become rounder.

I chose ‘conversation’ for two reasons: ‘chittering’ is a somewhat overdone verb in relation to sparrows (I’d hate to do a count on it in my own poems) and ‘conversation’ is more intimate and of course was what I was overhearing as I typed, since I couldn’t actually hear the birds we were passing.

After that, I rearranged what was in the original, slipping in what I was seeing before me in the landscape, maintaining the perspective of my new title, but also remembering that brightness is always brighter if there is some darkness. You’ll know this if you edit your photographs. Just adding fill light or highlights whitens out a picture. You always need a bit of contrast to make it work. That’s why I added what I could hear, the train’s cry, ‘the voice of lonely’ and the ‘faint glisten of hoarfrost’ our late spring has left over the land.

So this is the current version of the poem. I’ve read a lot of wonderful poetry on this trip, thanks to the excellent Poetry Foundation iPhone app, and have learned how far I still have to go.

Moving Towards Rejoicing

Today you see the black birds from the fields
and white birds filling a blue pond and overhear
the conversations of sparrows in the bushes by
the red buds forming, flames in a fire catching and you,
hands held out, singing with the red-gold
flickers, the wild shoots, the tight unfurlings,
fresh greens upthrust in leaf-scent, earth running
in brown-streamed gurgling. The sun
blinds you, slipped-disc following you around
the sky, but you refuse to let it go without
the warmth spring beds deserve even though
you hear a train’s cry, the voice
of lonely in the dimming sky. You’re moving
towards rejoicing, only a faint glisten
of hoarfrost holding you down.

I’ve discovered a new poet to learn from: Matthew Zapruder, an American poet with a wonderful ability to intermingle the ordinary and the painful. Take a look at the opening to his poem The Prelude.

‘Oh this Diet Coke is really good,
though come to think of it it tastes
like nothing plus the idea of chocolate,
or an acquaintance of chocolate
speaking fondly of certain times
it and chocolate had spoken of nothing . . .’

and these lines from further down:

‘                           . . . I am never
at ease. Not with hours I can read or walk
and look at the brightly colored
houses filled with lives, not with night
when I lie on my back and listen,
not with the hallway, definitely
not with baseball, definitely
not with time.’

Given that the poem ends with a subtle but powerful allusion to suicide, Zapruder has done a masterful job of drawing his readers in and sucker-punching them.

I decided I wanted to learn how to do this. I sometimes have a bad habit of telegraphing my intentions so I set out to write and repair a poem using Zapruder’s technique. I even challenged myself to start it off with a can of Coke as an act of homage (though not diet, I can’t stand the taste of diet).

Here’s the first bad draft:

After Your Gin and Tonic

Why you said yes, you can’t remember. You were holding
a can of coke at the time, a free taste-test your hunger
couldn’t let you resist. New flavour, no
artificial sweeteners, but oh, that black acid washing
down your throat. It made you feel
for a moment like one of them, enough to follow
wet wool into the fast elevator, leaving
your stomach behind.

Snow knitting itself into lace as you watch from glassed warmth,
eyes safe but wanting out, out into the flurry
of falling individuals, of oneness, of art shaped by frost
heave in a cloud bed. You know the hunger for the feathers,
imagine the drift of them powdering your skin as
the party talks on behind you, all
martini and small words in loud
voices, the crash of ice into
a taller glass, satin slinking up a willing
leg. You imagine winding a scarf around
your neck, pulling wool, the wool of sheep and
hillsides, brambles and gates, around your shoulders,
and stepping out, twenty-three stories high, a tale told
forever, of how you sought snow’s
height, and fell.

Chief problem with this draft? It’s obvious as hell. Whereas Zapruder does a long slow seduction, I spell too much out for the reader, starting with the very first line. Also bad are: ‘It made you feel…like one of them’ and ‘leaving your stomach behind’. I had to be more oblique while drawing the reader in, in order to let them do their own imagining. Otherwise, why wouldn’t I write this up as a short story?

What I’ve worked at instead is leaving my reader with my character’s hunger and inchoate feelings, the ones which propel him/her onward. I also filled in a missing step, the arrival at the party, though I don’t name it as a party until near the end of the third verse in the following version. I use a single metaphor to describe my character’s feelings about small talk and I’ve chosen one that deliberately contrasts with the weather in the next verse, setting up a parallel structure, one that is at odds with the usual sun=love, winter=hate.

For about 8 drafts of the poem, I moderated the killer punch of the ending with words similar to these:

But you don’t. The elevator’s black
mouth swallows you whole.

But on rereading Zapruder’s poem, I was struck by the ambiguity he was able to keep and that I wanted to copy.

Here’s the current version:

The Decision

You were holding a can of Coke when they
asked you, a free taste-test your hunger
couldn’t resist. New flavour, no
artificial sweeteners, but oh, that black acid washing
down your throat. It made you feel
for a moment, enough to follow the lines
of their coats into the fast elevator, leaving ground’s

flatness behind. When you arrived, small talk flowed like
a long river, flat and wide, baked
under a hot sun until
mud cracks appeared. You were surprised
no one else was watching
where to place their feet. Your own took you
to the window where snow

knit itself into lace as it fell just beyond
your glassed-in nose, eyes wanting out into
the flurry of falling individuals, of oneness, of art shaped
by frost heave in a cloud bed. You knew the love
of feathers, imagined the drift of them powdering
your skin as the party talked on, all
martini and small words in loud

voices, the crash of ice into
taller glasses, satin slinking on a willing
leg. You imagined winding a scarf around
your neck, pulling wool, the wool of sheep and
hillsides, brambles and gates, around your
shoulders, and stepping out, twenty-three stories up, a tale
told forever, of how you sought snow’s height
and fell. Flakes flying like an invitation you
don’t want to resist.

By the way, I also changed the poem’s title five times, from After Your Gin and Tonic to After You Said Yes, The Consequence, and The Postlude (yes, I couldn’t resist, but in the end I decided it really didn’t fit) before settling on The Decision. The latter works for me because there are at least four decisions in the poem, each one contributing to the next.

I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of writing inspiration lately, though I have to say, hearing Barry Dempster read at Ottawa’s first ever VERSeFest was the highlight. I first encountered Barry’s poetry in an online magazine called Paperplates, where I read his poem ‘The Conversation’ about a man contemplating suicide. Here’s the opening:

Some days are sneakers, tramping through
the leaves, slowly getting soaked. Others
are buses, lumbering from pole to pole,
joining dreams with destinations
like a giant Lego set. Today was smaller, …

It’s a breathtaking poem and I wrote my first ever fan mail. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been learning from his poetry ever since, studying the way he uses metaphor to utterly transform the ordinary.

I’ve needed the lessons, since my writing started out as a lot of ‘he said’ and ‘she did’. Poetry’s power lies in its ability to lift the reader above the short story narrative, to take them deeper into an experience.

First drafts of my poems playing with metaphor, however, are likely to be pretty ugly. Take a look at this one:

Hunger goes with every word, is a drawer
where emptiness sits, the plate is a letter
containing no words. You rearrange alphabet soup
in your mind at lunch time, smelling
the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. You remember the agony of a school
trip where a two dollar bill would buy
a stuffed animal for the loved, two buns and a patty
for the not, you counting the coins left in your hand.

It clearly needed a lot of work. ‘Hunger … is a drawer where emptiness sits’ is redundant and ‘You rearrange alphabet soup in your mind’ is not very subtle. I found by taking out the word alphabet, I could leave the image hanging in the reader’s mind, especially given the previous phrase. I liked the image of the orange rind but simply cut the rest of the poem.

By the second draft, I had a clearer sense of where the poem was going:

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” William Bell

Some look at the moon, see only a corpse
in the night sky. Hunger goes in cupboards where
dishes sit, bowls holding letters containing no
words. You rearrange soup in your mind
at lunch time, smelling the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. The smell is strong
in the cafeteria, rising above the wax sandwiches
came in and the chalk bullies draw pictures in the dust
with. Your hair lies like grief
on your skull, limp as the dress your sister wore
before you. It doesn’t matter. No one notices
the new girl sitting with her back
to the wall watching the principal make
his rounds. If you could have, you would have chosen
a mug to hide in, one of the scarred plastic
ones they served cabbage soup in once, you can tell
each time you pick it up. Hopscotch is too
many squares into a future you can’t
believe. If you could, your well would not
run dry.

It’s getting tighter. But there’s a new problem of smell in this version. I’ve got the orange rind smelling stronger than the wax the sandwiches come in. Hmm. Fortunately, I still remember my school cafeterias. It wasn’t hard to fix.

Next: do bullies really draw pictures with chalk? No. So even though fear is an abstract term I wouldn’t normally use in a poem, by changing the chalk to fear, I leave the reader with a more complex image.

I also changed the description of the girl’s hair. I may as well have put up a neon sign at that point. So instead I went for the more subtle ‘mat’. The whole cabbage soup episode just got cut. It didn’t work. In it’s place, I extended the hopscotch metaphor.

Here’s the current version. I don’t think this is one of my best poems. We’ll see what further edits it undergoes.

Looking Ahead

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” William Bell

Some look at the moon, see only a corpse
in the night sky. Hunger goes in cupboards where
dishes sit, bowls holding letters containing no
words. You rearrange soup in your mind
at lunch time, smelling the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. The smell is strong
in the cafeteria, rising above the bologna
and the fear bullies draw pictures
in the dust with. Your hair lies like a mat
on your skull, limp as the dress your sister wore
before you. It doesn’t matter. No one notices
the new girl sitting with her back
to the wall watching the principal make
his rounds. If you could, you’d choose
a square to hide in, one of the blank ones not
yet drawn. But hopscotch is too many squares
into a future you can’t believe. If you could,
your well would not run dry.

I was a bit late noticing this as it was posted while we were in Ghana, but poet Pearl Pirie pulled a Gillian and did a ‘watch me edit’ post on her website. Check out her Editing Rounds.