March Onward

March has been a rather hectic month.  I had the most projects due for my grad classes so far, I joined the gym, and I’ve been trying to write poetry and work on some short stories.  Truthfully, I’m not happy with any of the writing I’ve been doing, but at least I’ve been trying.  Unfortunately, this blog somehow fell behind my writing desk and I just found it again and dusted it off.  I’m going to try to start posting at least once or twice a week; I feel like that’s a good starting point for me as I try to get back into the groove of things.  We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway, March has been a beautiful month for New England.  It’s hard to believe there’s going to be some snow, tomorrow!  There was one day a week and a half ago that it reached 70 degrees and I was walking around outside in shorts and flip-flops, and today I was wearing my winter jacket.  What is going on???

On that 70 degree day, I brought my rabbit outside, along with my camera, and took a few pictures that I’m going to post here.  I know it’s not much after being gone from the blogging world for over a month, but it’s something.

First Flowers

 

Curious

 

Blue Lady

 

Broken Path

 

Old Garden

 

Spring Cleaning

Bottom Dweller

Bottom Dweller

 

You are a bottom dweller of the deepest kind,

hidden away behind dark glass, scales and eyes,

where the air hugs your skin in balmy gloom.

This is black Atlantis in a basement room:

flickering jeweled bodies under secret light and

your love swimming with them amid hollow castles

and breaths of air that rise to the surface as pearls.

 

And I am no fisherman, but you are the trophy-fish of lore,

the dream that ancient Ahab could not stop searching for,

ghostly beautiful but battle-scarred, slipping slow

between veins of algae and mud-slicked stones.

Living somewhere between deep silence and earth,

because those are the biggest parts of you.

What else is there?

 

Oh, if you would surface, I would show you the sun

so it would peel away your slimed olive skin,

and you would breathe the air again.

And somewhere there would be what is real,

the father I know you used to be,

who held a little girl’s hand because she was afraid

to follow you into that monstrous myth, the silent sea.

Sunday is a Day for Waiting

Sunday

 

The church bells ring under a gentle

Sunday sun.

The farmer’s family arrives late,

slipping not-so-silently into the pews

with the toddler restless

and the sister crying over her stained dress.

They sit in stuffy silence,

fans slowly slicing the air above their heads.

 

The priest in his black soutane

clutches a worn Bible behind the pulpit,

and all of these faces are turned towards

a broken man’s drooping head,

all blood and teeth and spit

masquerading as grace.

 

And he is thinking that a man with

blood on his palms cannot possibly

care enough about an empty bank account

or sick dairy cows and dying corn,

or a fourth baby on the way.

 

He holds out his own calloused palms,

lets grace sit in his mouth,

swallows.

Blessed are those who wait.

Quotes the Dead Know.

Some of my favorite quotes from literature and poetry are about death.  That may sound morbid, but we often face the question of whether or not there is life after we die, another world to which our souls will flee and remain for eternity.  For some writers, death is something terrifying, to be dreaded in its finality.  For other writers, it is simply a curiosity, to be studied, or even a fact that brings hope rather than despair.

What do the dead know?  And what can our characters learn from the dead?  Here are some beautiful quotes by admired writers concerning death:

“And what of the dead?  They lie without shoes in their stone boats.  They are more like stone than the sea would be if it stopped.  They refuse to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.”

Anne Sexton, “The Truth the Dead Know”

Anne Sexton

“They were greeted by the same monotonous scenery as before.  Maguey and cactus stood stiffly like abandoned tombstones on the parched earth. “

Shusaku Endo, The Samurai

“Yes, that would serve to wrap the dreadful thing in.  It had, perhaps, served often as a pall for the dead.  Now it was to hide something that had a corruption of its own, worse than the corruption of death itself—something that would breed horrors and yet would never die.  What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas.  They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace.  They would defile it, and make it shameful.  And yet the thing would still live on.  It would always live.”

 Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray  

“I walk through the churchyard

to lay this body down;

I know moon-rise, I know star-rise;

I walk in the moonlight, I walk in the starlight;

I’ll lie in the grave and stretch out my arms,

I’ll go to judgment in the evening of the day,

And my soul and thy soul shall meet that day,

when I lay this body down.”

W.E.B. Du Bois, Negro Song in “Of the Sorry Songs”

“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that’s all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

“A strange melancholy was stealing over me, a melancholy that I would not have interrupted. Dim thoughts of death began to open, and an idea that I was slowly sinking took gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession of me. If it was sad, the tone of mind which this induced was also sweet. Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it.”

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, “Carmilla“

The Mystery of Trees

The woods behind the fields are guarded by a crumbling stone wall and a maze of pricker bushes with thorns an inch long.  It takes a bit of maneuvering to navigate a path, and it’s quite difficult to do with a dog who insists on following you on your adventure.  Still, we eventually made it through into the trees’ shadow-filled world.

They instantly reminded me of a favorite book from my younger years, The Lost Years of Merlin, and how the trees have their own language.  The wind moaning, branches creaking and shifting…it isn’t hard to imagine them speaking to each other, wondering what intruder has entered their canopy of twisting vines and groping roots.

Poetry Exercise: Word-Substitution Poem

Exercise taken from Creating Poetry by John Drury.  Page 26, exercise 2:

Choose a poem that interests you.  Using a fresh sheet of paper, write down new words to replace each word of your model.  Substitute your own words for those of the other poem, making sure you keep the same arrangements of parts of speech.  That is, substitute nouns for nouns, verbs for verbs, and so on.  You can write down opposites or antonyms if you like (“hot” for “cold”), but don’t feel restricted by that possibility.  The idea is to keep the other poet’s syntax (or arrangement of words) while providing your own building materials, your own vocabulary.

“A Dream of Jealousy” by Seamus Heaney

Walking with you and another lady

In a wooded parkland, the whispering grass

Ran its fingers through our guessing silence

And the trees opened into a shady

Unexpected clearing where we sat down.

We talking about desire and being jealous,

Our conversation a loose single gown

Or a white picnic tablecloth spread out

Like a book of manners in the wilderness.

‘Show me,’ I said to our companion, ‘what

I have much coveted, your breast’s mauve star.’

And she consented.  Oh neither these verses

Nor my prudence, love, can heal your wounded stare.

Model

Skating with you and only you

under hushed snow, the fallen flakes

rested their bodies on our woolen caps

and the clouds turned into a misty

hollowed sky when we looked up.

I think the grayness of the day excited us.

We laughed over ice and being cold,

our voices a warm smoky apparition

or a lost baleful spirit held out

like a flag of white in the breeze.

‘Tell me,’ I said to your cheek, ‘what

I have often wondered, your heart’s true want.’

And you answered.  Oh, neither this frost

nor your pretense, love, can hide your empty gaze.

What I think:

This exercise helped me think about word placement and parts of speech–I couldn’t just choose anything and hope it made sense.  They had to match the ones in Heaney’s poem.  It’s a good exercise for writers who tend to just throw words together rather than stop and think “Why am I choosing this word?  Does it establish the meaning I’m trying to get across?”  It definitely took more patience than free-writing.

That being said, I adore Seamus Heaney’s poetry, and I don’t feel my exercise could even stand in the shadow of his work…but the point was to try and emulate a good writer’s work, which can only lead to better writing for me.  Eventually 🙂

Poetry Exercise: Rise of an Avocado Day.

Exercise taken from Creating Poetry by John Drury.  Page 19, exercise 14:

Write a poem that’s all sound, a babble of word music, letting vowels echo and consonants repeat, not worrying much about what it means.  Savor the sounds.  If this seems hard to begin, try listing as many delicious words as you can, words you can taste (and proper names too), like “crush” and “deliquescent” and “Susquehanna.”

Rise of an Avocado Day

Silver’s gossamer evanescence slips down a cherrywood banister,

whispers a phosphorescent dawn.

This is an avocado day, the sky jade over the sea, so

our lips hover over taste in hope.

This is morning that knocks on your cellar door like cymbals,

crashing, open, but listening, glistening, freshening the sun.

Dew like clear pearls between grass blades, our toes curling

under chestnut earth, the delicate doves gray against green.

Wings slicing air like jazz in a hazy room, fog like

cigar smoke hovering above water.

Our breath is just an undercurrent of the breeze,

slender as invisibility

but grasping everything with the strength of a titan.

My love,

we go free with this daybreak,

we rise like robins,

rove like gypsies under mauve morning.

And we won’t return even when the moon steals the sky.

By:  Janessa Barrette

What I think:

I enjoyed this exercise because it allowed me to free-write with words that feel like honey on the tongue.  I found myself writing with a hunger for how the language sounded, not necessarily what it meant.  That’s for later revisions, not for the initial exercise.  I like “avocado day” and “wings slicing air like jazz in a hazy room.”  I think the end became a bit cliche, but I’m not too bothered because I was just going with the poem’s feeling…I think there’s something to work with, here.

The Problem with Poetry

Note:  I am not a published poet, though hopefully I will be, someday.  These are just my thoughts on what good poetry is and what it should not be.

Okay.  I took a poetry writing class in college with Dr. David Craig–quite a brilliant man, by the way, and hilarious– and I learned something.  (Surprise!)

Poetry is work, damn it.  You cannot just throw words together and call them a poem, which is what many people do (and I used to do).  This:

My heart

is bleeding at your feet

and I cannot

breathe.

Life.

Death.

Hopelessness.

By:  Hopefully nobody.

Is not a poem.  It is a cliché image scattered over an open space.  I am guilty of doing this (though not to the degree of the above example).  So are many beginning poets, I think.  And there’s nothing wrong with starting somewhere.  An excellent poem may come from an exercise where you just write random words and images.  But that initial rambling should not be your final work.

While taking the poetry class, I had to revise each poem at least seven times for my final.  And let me tell you, they had changed a lot by the time those revisions were done.  There were times I would go to revise a poem and think:  “How can I possibly revise this masterpiece?  It’s perfection!  I’m frickin’ T.S. Eliot!”

Dr. Craig would then kindly stick a pin in my ego, and I would quite rapidly deflate and scuttle back to my keyboard.

So what is the problem with poetry?  People think it’s easy.  They think it’s just jotting down haphazard thoughts and cutting them to pieces to form shorter lines and stanzas.  But it’s so much more than that.  It’s dissecting those words and trying to figure out what you’re really trying to say, then completely changing everything.  Over and over again.  Sometimes you may not need many revisions, but most of the time the poem will unrecognizable from what it began as.

And that, my friend, is a good thing.

Some Words Desire Beauty

I love to write.  It doesn’t matter what I’m writing on–it could be on the computer, in a tattered notepad, or carving words onto a stone tablet. (I have never done this, but it would be interesting to try).

The words are most important, not the devices used.  But I know some people who can only write in a journal, or who can’t focus unless they’re using Microsoft Word on the computer.  For myself, I do have preferences depending on what I’m writing.  Certain words, I think, desire beauty as much as we desire to make words beautiful.  This is why writers will spend $30 on an engraved or embossed notebook; it feels right to put the words inside of it, as if they deserve to be in there.  I often feel that way when looking at a certain notebook…but like many writers, I don’t have that kind of money to spend on a nice leather journal.

So one day, I decided to make my own.

"There is a place far, far away."

Decoupaging is an easy, cheap way to turn a $3 journal into a one-of-a-kind piece of art.  All you need are some magazines you’re willing to cut up, some decoupage finish (I use Plaid Royal Coat), a paintbrush, and a simple journal.  Just a composition notebook will do.

Cut the pictures or words out of the magazines and put the finish on the back of each piece to glue them onto the notebook.  I like to lay the pieces out first to decide where I want everything to go, and I do the front and back of the notebook separately:  cover first, back second.  After the pictures are stuck down well, use the paintbrush to put a coat of the finish over the WHOLE thing.  Let that dry, and then do another coat.

"The Evening Globe"

I find that you really only need two coats of finish to make it nice and sturdy.  I remember years ago when I first started making collage journals, I used scotch tape to put over the pictures…my mom was the one who introduced me to decoupage, which is much more beautiful and classy.

These two journals, “There is a Place Far, Far Away” and “The Evening Globe,” are my favorites I have made.  I mainly use them for poetry, as I tend to use my computer for stories and a fake leather (but still pretty) journal for thoughts and ideas.

So if you’re a writer, what do you use most for getting your words out into the world?  And do you use different ways depending on what you’re writing?

The Clutter of Crows

A "murder" of crows

Despite the negativity that surrounds crows, these birds are extremely intelligent creatures.  They’re known for collecting random objects (especially shiny things) and storing them in a hidden place.  They never throw these things out, but return and play with them, or even use them as tools if they figure out a way to do so.

We do the same thing, when you think about it.  Many of us have in our homes what we call a “junk drawer”–a place where we store odds and ends.  Usually these are objects we think we’ll be able to use later, or even things we just can’t bring ourselves to throw out.  I have a box dedicated to craft or decoupaging items.  It has beads, old keys, magazine cut-outs, broken necklaces, movie ticket stubs…anything I could use later for a craft project.  Sometimes I open it just to remind myself of what’s in there.

I don’t believe that a blog has to have a main theme–it’s a place for creativity and idea exploration.  Whether or not all of these ideas have to be connected is up to the person writing.  I have an interest in multiple things, as does everyone, and I will write each post as an idea comes to me.  My aim is for this blog to be a kind of online junk drawer of thoughts, ideas, photographs, beliefs, and whatever else there is to write about.  And I suppose that in itself is a kind of theme.