May 2011

As I’ve said before, I didn’t have the happiest childhood. Among other things, I was subjected to that hand in the night we’ve all heard about. Writing poems about it isn’t easy but it is necessary. Otherwise, I’d still be stuck in the writer’s block I suffered for decades when I wouldn’t face my past.

Confessional poetry is not the style I would have chosen for myself. But having learned the hard way that self-censorship doesn’t work, I’ve also learned blurting doesn’t either. Memories have to be turned into good poems.

Here’s the first draft of one of them.

The Consolation of Birds

Stay with me as I work
this through, the curlew’s graze
the crow’s flight by the window while
I sit, a huddled mass of silenced
words. We are the unspoken, full
of complicated thoughts we could not
name. Birds flew by heavy
with colour, that was all
we knew. They had wings
and a beak and were free
on a wind we could not see.
Let loose upon that wind great
cries we could not hear. Glass
and other sadnesses blocked up
our ears. Our tongues
were too young for all
of it. Branches swayed without
our knowing what
they were. Our minds made
black holes in the earth
for our memories to crawl
into. If you cut them
still, they lived.

I wrote this poem a few months after receiving a really lovely rejection letter from Arc Poetry Magazine in October of 2008. The rejection letter included comments from three readers who all advised me to be less blatant with my memories, to learn how to allude to them, to trust the reader to follow me. They also, bless them, encouraged me to keep writing.

In the draft above, you can see that I have committed quite a few serious sins. I move from first person singular to plural without any explanation. In two lines, I manage to hammer home that it’s all about ‘silenced words’, ‘unspoken’, ‘complicated thoughts we could not name’. Rather a heavy-handed attempt to be less blatant. The poem goes downhill from there, to the point where I say the birds had wings and a beak. Sigh.

You’d have thought I would have thrown this draft out. But I loved how the poem opened. The poetry group that I belong to also loved it – they found it to be a very intimate invitation. So I set to work pruning.

First off, I took the poem back to a single point of view, first person singular. Then I changed the first bird. The yellow-breasted warbler allows me to subtly set up a couple of images in the reader’s mind. I also use the naming of the birds as a way of signalling the two different time frames in the poem.

A small change in the title plus the tightening of each line allows the images in the poem to speak without needing to spell anything out.

The Bewilderment of Birds

Stay with me as I work
this through, the yellow-breasted warbler
and the crow’s flight returning me
to when I was young. I looked
out on birds then too, soft
with colour or none. I knew
no names. Nor could I see
the wind they were free on
nor hear the cries
they made. Glass
and other sadnesses blocked
my ears. My tongue
was too small to speak.
Black holes in the earth
were where my memories
crawled. If you cut them
still they live.

.
PS: One of my namesakes in the world, Gillian Wallace, the former Deputy Attorney General for British Columbia, died in March. She was a lovely woman who cared about human rights and helped bring about freedom of information and other important legislation. You can read one of her obituaries here.

Today’s poem is quite different from what I usually write. That’s because it’s an older one: I’m hitting up the archives, trying to save time while working on my copyediting backlog. It didn’t work. I’ve had too much fun with today’s poem, as you’ll see, spending an hour editing it, concentrating on getting sound to carry the weight of the imagery in the poem.

Here’s the first draft:

Walking Home

Used to do this nightly alone,
my poverty self unafraid
of streets empty except
for the carapaces of cars
waiting curbside under
streetlights. Whistled
when I saw a man,
to show I wouldn’t go
quietly, usually
Prokofiev, something
jerky to make them move.
It always worked. I never
knew knife’s edge,
the dragging of heels, mouth
gripped by teeth-bitten
hand. Only the smell
of worms rising on wet
concrete, leaves blowing
greenly in wind, and the peace
of a closed door.

When I read a recent version of this poem at Tree Reading Series’ open mic last summer, that night’s featured reader David Starkey, Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, praised it. But still, I wasn’t quite satisfied so as I started to write this post, I decided to play with it some more.

I didn’t want to stretch the poem much. I’m still copyediting madly so time is at a premium and I’m determined to send poems out to journals. I’ve been bad about keeping up with submissions lately. As in, I haven’t sent anything out in ages despite being asked for poems. So at first, I just tweaked a few words.

And then I got sidetracked by an interview on The Malahat Review’s website with Steven Heighton (one of my favourite poets) where he talks about the “re-enactive techniques–the little tricks and torques by which a poem’s word-music and rhythm, punctuation, structure, and layout all embody and re-present their subject matter instead of just describing it” which he says “are at the very heart of poetry.” I kept going back to reread his words, looking at my poem to learn how they could be applied. In the end, he prodded me to edit more keenly than I normally would have. Taught me how to push an image hard until its sharpness (in this case) shone.

You’ll notice I’ve only used a few of the tricks in Heighton’s bag. I’ve only played with the words and the rhythm. So far, I’ve not started experimenting with punctuation, structure, or layout in my poetry, preferring instead to concentrate on its sound. I’m not saying I won’t work on the visuals one day. I never rule anything out. But for now, I’m still specializing.

This was once a small poem, another one for the mulch bed. But I’m getting fonder of it. Let me know what you think.

Current version:

Walking Home

Used to do this nightly, unafraid
of streets empty except
for the carapaces of cars
waiting curbside under
the shells of streets’ lights. Whistled
when I saw a man
to prove I wouldn’t go
quietly, usually
Prokofiev, the tune
prickly to prod them
along. It always worked. I never
knew the sharp slit
of a knife’s edge,
heels black-dragged under
a heaving hot heaviness, mouth gripped
by teeth-bitten
hands, a belly’s blood
bruising. Only
the soft scent
of worms rising on wet
roads, leaves blowing greenly
in wild wind, and the luck
of a locked door tight
at my back.

Another brief post today as my copyediting backlog has grown exponentially. I almost think I should change my email address for a while so my boss can’t find me until I get caught up. Needless to say, this is not a boom time for poetry. Though I am still writing every day, I’m producing more than I’m having time to edit, and what I’m producing is fragments, the kind of fragments that will later pull together into poems I can be happy with, but that right now exist as scraps of paper and emails that are only slowly getting copied into my work file.

So for today, I’m going to settle for showing you one such scrap, scribbled initially late at night after I’d copyedited pages of references, then edited whenever I could between manuscripts. I know what this scrap will become. It just needs the kind of time my current deadlines won’t allow.

Here are the words, first draft:

postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s tight rug, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain whispers in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, a shovel digging, boot firm
against the sharp lip while stars turn
their blind eyes

Even though I was very sleepy by the time these words starting speaking in my head, I knew I had to grab them. Ignoring the muse has bad repercussions – it’s like turning down date after date with a friend and then expecting her to be there when you feel like talking. That voice dries up if you don’t listen. And while I know this makes me sound a little schizophrenic, I don’t know how else to describe it. After years of practise, I now hear poetry in my head the way a musician hears music. And when a new line comes, I drop everything to pay attention.

In this case, when I found the note to myself the next morning, I was glad I had. I immediately liked the images in the lines, even though I could equally immediately see the problems. So far, I’ve dealt with them by extending the images, hoping in that way to remove any echo of cliché. I still have to deal with the missing segue between the being in bed and the shovelling. I know what the link is, but I’m going to have to find a way to make it a little clearer.

But not now. Now it’s 1 am and I still have to finish copyediting 2 pages of a manuscript, proof it, then send it back to its authors. So here’s the current draft of this fragment. You’ll see it again, either here or one day in a book of my poetry.

Staying up late
postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s rug tight
around you, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain whispers in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, waking to turn and turn, a shovel
in the earth digging, boot firm against
the sharp edge while stars open
their blind eyes, taking light years to remember
your name

As a mental health break during this busy time, I’ve been deeply enjoying Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist, a stream of consciousness novel about a successful poet going through a time of serious writer’s block. In many ways, it’s a comforting book.

So when I worry about my poems, about whether this fragment can become as good as I want, can become part of a fine poem, I remember what Baker’s character, Paul Chowder says about what it means to be a great poet: “Out of hundreds of poems two or three are really good. Maybe four or five. Six tops. All the middling poems they write are necessary to form a raised mulch bed or nest for the great poems and to prove to the world that they labored diligently and in good faith for some years at their calling” (p. 101-102).

At the very least, this is my offering to the mulch bed I’m raising. Despite my deadline, I’m still writing.

I don’t have time to write a long post today as I’m behind on my copyediting, and want to send my novel out again, Anansi having sadly said no. I’m thinking Freehand Books this time.

So I thought I’d do an easy one and show you the editing behind the poem that won me the Diana Brebner Award from Arc Poetry Magazine in 2009. It might help to remind me that entering contests can be worth it so I’ll start making the time to do it again.

Here’s where the poem began, a few lines quickly written as I looked out the window.

And crows can fly
updrafting freedom with friends
Clean and free. How
an updraft lifts or, with the pull of a pinion
allows an easy turn on a spot no eye can mark

They’re not good lines but I wanted to write a poem that afternoon, so I kept at it. And got lucky:

The blackness of birds, a flotilla flying silently
in the blue of my window, cawing held
by glass, refrigerator hum, the wisp
of a passing cloud. They look so clean
from here, beaks that have never known
the soft meat of a lamb’s eye or how
a squirrel comes, one strand at a time,
off a flattened road. They updraft
freedom with friends, a chatter of trees,
don’t know the loneliness
of doors, chairs, single cups and plates.
Age leaves them black-downed
in mud, obliterated.
How can we not envy them?

Now it looks as if those first eight lines came easily, since they appear without any intervening drafts. But I remember sitting on the sofa gazing into space for long minutes, my hands hovering above the letters as my brain debated word choice, the nature of crows, incidents I’d read recently in the newspaper.

This technique can be fruitful but if you allow it to go on too long, it can rob you of your momentum and, as happened here, the poem starts to crash.

That’s okay, that is what editing is for. I could see I’d achieved a certain tightness in those first eight lines that I needed to make the rest conform to. The first to be cut was ‘freedom’ because it’s a concept, one which doesn’t belong in such a concrete poem. As for the rest, I was spelling too much out for the reader, which cheapened the earlier part. I kept a couple of good phrases and single words. I threw the rest out.

Next draft:

The blackness of birds, a flotilla flying silently
in the blue of my window, cawing held
by glass, refrigerator hum, the wisp
of a passing cloud. They look so clean
from here, beaks that have never known
the soft meat of a lamb’s eye or how
a squirrel comes, one strand at a time,
off a flattened road. Not for them
the singleness of chair, cup, bed. They
updraft to a chatter of trees, a caw-fest
lasting until age black-downs them in the mud.
If I had pinions, I’d float on the first draft
out of here, but we’re all trapped, all in
the grey-celled cage of our own construction.

At this point, the poem is almost there. But I’ve done something dreadful to it. I’ve inserted myself. Worse yet, I’ve tried to go all profound. After reading it over a couple of times, it was clear what had to be done. The delete button should always be a writer’s best friend. I used it.

Here’s the final version, short and sweet:

Crow, of the family Corvidae

The blackness of birds, a flotilla flying silently
in the blue of my window, cawing held
by glass, refrigerator hum, the wisp
of a passing cloud. They look so clean
from here, beaks that have never known
the soft meat of a lamb’s eye or how
a squirrel comes, one strand at a time,
off a flattened road. Not for them
the singleness of chair, cup, bed. Instead
an updraft to a chatter of trees, a caw-fest lasting
until age black-downs them in the mud.

P.S. Want to read a superb poem, very tight, very well-written? Check out Zach Wells’ Anatta. That’s something to strive for.