Poetry and grief

Last Tuesday night, as some of you know, I released my dear old boy Reinie from this life. Then I headed off to Nashville to lead a writing retreat. It was the perfect place to grieve. On the retreat we held silence most of the morning and again in the afternoon and I had lots of time to think and feel. We also had beautiful surroundings and that was another big help. But mostly what helped was writing poetry.

I wrote a long poem to Reinie, a requiem (you can find it on my other blog http://www.sobertruths.blogspot.com/) and fashioning something out of my feelings was really helpful. So helpful in fact that I also wrote a poem about an altercation I had with a friend this fall that resulted in a painful parting. Fashioning those feelings and expressing them in a coherent way again helped me work through the sadness.

It is certainly possible to express feelings in a novel or memoir. The writing of scenes with feelings is much more powerful but somehow the distilling process of poetry is perfect for that.

I made a commitment to write 100 poems by April 15, just a commitment to myself but one I'm eager to keep. The two poems mentioned here are 52 and 53 in that series.

How much more do you need to learn?

I recently volunteered to give an editing workshop at women's writers conference. I like sharing what I know about writing with others, helping writers get better writing out into the world. I had no hesitation about volunteering but I did stop and think when the organizer asked me if I'd be there all day. Commiting to being there means I need something to do. Will I find it interesting or helpful to sit through other presentations? How much more do I need to learn?

I'm not really a snob about these things and while I am fairly experienced as a writer, I can always learn a new trick or two, or hear an idea that's worth considering. But when I'm honest with myself, what I really need is just to read and write, not to listen. I think we can get caught up in believing that somebody out there has the answers that will make us more sellable, more publishable, when in fact it's honing our own craft, finding our own voice, developing our own style, and creating our own stories. It's really about writing and writing and writing and self-editing and polishing and writing more and then sending it out.

I did say yes to the full day. Maybe I'll go to the workshops and maybe I'll get a coffee and write all afternoon. Either way it will be good.

Honoring our creative efforts as work

My New Year's intention is to live spaciously and that has meant, primarily, reorganizing how I use my time. I have a calendar policy and a new way to approach my to-do list. Both of them are intended to help me honor my creative efforts as work.

By that, I don't mean lumping my creative work into the burden of work, or the drudgery of tasks, or the overwhelm of too many promises made. Instead, I mean giving my creative work as much time and energy and pride of place in my calendar as my paid work gets. And while I'm not doing creative work every day (maybe some day!), I am doing creative work far more often. This week, I spent a total of 6 hours doing visual art and 3 hours writing poems in a week that had a huge stack of paid projects waiting.

Because I had honored my calendar policy (no appts on Monday and Friday and no more than two on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday), I could create some time to play.

My new to-do list helps too. I have two sets of items, Work and Self-Care, on the list, and cannot have more than 3 discrete items in each group for the day. Creative work can go in either place, depending on what it is. Writing efforts usually go under Work, since I consider myself primarily a writer. Visual art usually goes under self-care, for it helps me stay in balance. So this week, collage work showed up twice under Self-Care and writing poems showed up twice in the Work column.

It helps me make sure that this gets the priority attention that I want it to have instead of just getting stuck somewhere down the line on the master to-do list. It's a system that seems to be working well.

The poetry challenge

I have been finding it really fun and fascinating to write poetry the last 5 weeks. I don't consider myself much of a poet, though I am drawn to it. Taking the challenge with Sage Cohen for January prompted me to put writing 100 poems on my 2011 wish list and so far I've written 37. I'd like it to become a habit--writing a poem or two every couple of days. It's a very interesting way to see the world, to capture verbal snapshots of feelings or experiences or observations. Our last poem for Sage's class was to write about our relationship with poetry. Here's what I wrote:

I chanced upon four lines of verse

Nestled in a carton of colored eggs
And I resurrected my life poetic.
Sacred lines they were
The breath of the heart, the soul, the mind
Calling me in, calling me out
Of story.
I’d been telling stories
Of my life, of those I met, of those I made up
And I longed to twist the language
Inside out, upside down, right side round
To imagine the image, subdue the syllable, master the metaphor

Something had long slept in me
Known only as literature
Not as the living breath
Of the heart, the soul, the mind

Rising slowly, stretching,
It placed a soft paw on my cheek
And I began to write.

To pay attention

"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work." --Mary Oliver

I get several daily quotes via email. Often the platitudes are similar and not very interesting to me, but this one really struck a chord. Maybe it's because I've been writing poems most days since the beginning of the year and am more acutely aware of my surroundings and and my thoughts and looking at both more closely. Maybe it's because I've edited a couple of fiction manuscripts recently where the description was not handled so well; it was all too vague, too general to paint good word pictures for me.

And while I think Ms. Oliver may have intended her statement to encompass all of us human beings, I think this is particularly pertinent for those of us who are creatives, whether painters or sculptors or writers of poetry or prose. I'm coming to believe that authenticity in creation lies in the details. While the concept is important and some works are greatly enhanced by the big picture or big idea, paying attention to what we experience with the senses as well as we experience in our inner worlds and transcribing that to the page or the clay or the canvas is what it is all about.

It may well be that the most important question we can be asking ourselves as we do our creative work and as we make our way in the world is What am I paying attention to?

Two points of view

In my 31-day poetry writing challenge, we were asked to write a poem about something in the media and then then write a poem from a different point of view. Here are my responses to a news story on Yahoo from a Florida elementary school.

Old News


Jimmy’s pint-size backpack
Held 24 new crayons, an open
Package of Gummi bears, and a worn
Navy blue sweater of his brother Todd’s.

His Winnie the Pooh lunch pail
Held a Tupperware of cold pasta—
No sauce, the way he liked it—corn chips
In a Ziploc, and slices of Fuji with the peel carefully removed.

In the left pocket of his jeans, Jimmy carried a
Wretchedly disabled GI Joe, mauled and
Mangled by Rosie, his Uncle Brad’s pit bull,
One hot afternoon last July.

Weighing down his right pocket, the loaded Smith & Wesson
He’d found under the seat of Brad’s Ford F-150
That morning when Brad stopped at the 7-11 for
A Red Bull and a lotto ticket.

Jimmy liked Thursdays at Moseley Elementary
Music circle on the library carpet
It took Ms Ellison two turns around the whispering 5-year-olds
To spot the pistol next to Jimmy’s pocket.

Brad never missed it.

Bad Night, Bad Morning


Sun through the broken blind ran a knife
Into his temple
He groaned, rolling away from the pain
And into the woman

She grunted in her sleep
Pulled the sheets over her head
He couldn’t pull her name
from the night before

Cold water helped
Back of the neck, over the eyes
Toothpaste on a finger
Already late

He left the motor running
Rang the bell, hugged his sister
Jimmy handed him the lunchbox
He hoisted the kid into the cab, belted him in

Quick stop, five minutes
Belted the boy in again
Couldn’t the kid sit still?
School grounds with two minutes to spare

Brad never missed it.

The reality of fleeting time

In November, a friend and colleague died of a heart attack at age 48. I've been wondering these past months what dreams Peter had that he didn't have time to fulfill. Besides more time with his wife and seeing his young children grow up, did Peter have a "bucket list"? Did he have places he wanted to explore? Or books to write? Or music to learn to play? We never had that conversation, but I've been having it with myself.

Last post, I listed my writing dreams for the year. And the more writing I do, the more I want to do. The same is true of my painting and collage work. And now I'm writing poems and really having fun with it. What ideas do I want to explore in the novel? What characters make come to life? And while I'd be thrilled if one of my books sold big and lots of people read it, it's not why I write.

I write for the joy of the left/right brain connection, for the thrill of creating and organizing and resolving the issues that come up for my characters. There's a lot of satisfaction for me in creating, and perhaps in leaving my voice behind when I go.

So while my 2011 dream list seems ambitious, I'm really wanting creative activity to be a huge part of my life from here on out. We don't know how much time we have or what will happen in the time remaining. I want mine to be rich and full and productive. And I take to heart this question: If not now, then when?