Ch-ch-ch-changes…
Lots of big doings here this week.
1) We have a new dog at our house, and some new rules in place for the fourteen-year-old (and for me).
2) I emailed my novel manuscript to my agent. The last time I did this, I didn’t hear back for a month, then I was asked (very nicely) if I couldn’t add more tension…two years ago. I think there’s tension now, in fact, I feel pretty damn tense about the whole enterprise.
3) I am at work on a new novel…or a novella…or a really long short story. We’ll see what happens.
4) On Friday I turned in my letter of resignation to Everett Community College. I am still waffling on how much I will teach part-time. My real, true goal–to be 100% present for my daughters and my mom, wherever we are on our journey (and there’s the husband)–but also, always, TO KEEP WRITING EVERY DAY.
“If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible.” –Kierkegaard
Day 30: The Last Day
“Considering the ways in which so many of us waste our time, what would be wrong with a world in which everybody were writing poems? After all, there’s a significant service to humanity in spending time doing no harm. While you’re writing your poem, there’s one less scoundrel in the world. And I’d like a world, wouldn’t you, in which people actually took time to think about what they were saying? It would be, I’m certain, a more peaceful, more reasonable place. I don’t think there could ever be too many poets. By writing poetry, even those poems that fail and fail miserably, we honor and affirm life. We say ‘We loved the earth but could not stay.’”
― Ted Kooser, The Poetry Home Repair Manual: Practical Advice for Beginning Poets
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from POETRYisEVERYTHING (abbreviated):
THE PROMPT for Wednesday April 30th, 2014
Prompt 30 – Something old, something borrowed, something blue — Our poem will be 8 to 12 lines. Every other line (lines 2, 4, 6 and 8 and possibly 10 and 12) will be brand new lines that you write. One or more of these lines will include something blue.
For lines 1, 3, 5, 7, and possibly, 9 and 11 use lines from two to three of the poems you have written in the last 30 days.
This is what I came up with (tinkered with it a little, losing the 2, 4, etc. organization):
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Emma, Playing the Guitar
As a child I fell in love with words, pleats
and plaits, with words like implicate
which means braided into. Words
unfurling, an ocean that my streams ran to,
or out of, like my parents’ shelves of books,
my logger father reading aloud Emily Dickinson and Rudyard Kipling.
Tonight my youngest daughter practices her guitar,
in love with music, making me listen to a blue e-minor chord,
trellises of music like trellises of wisteria,
a wicker chair under a skylight, a scent
of gardenias and lilacs, the heavy bees thrumming.
Bout, fret, strings, saddle and bridge, soundhole, neck.
And her name, a word I’ve counted on
to make the world make sense.
Day 29: The Remodel
At POETRYisEVERYTHING, for Day 29 of National Poetry Month, Chris Jarmick assigned a house remodel poem. He also made some lovely, encouraging comments about the challenge to write a poem a day this month, for instance:
“And if you’ve paid a little more attention to poetry during our month long sharing of prompts and writing —thank you… I know good things will come of it.”
Because of Chris, I also have become a subscriber at Elsewhere in the Rain (the link should take you to a post that includes a list of poetic terms), which I highly recommend.
So here is my poem. Er, draft of a poem. May good things come to you.
I’m not sure why, but I have been thinking
about how death reorganizes us.
I don’t mean anything simple, no cleaning out of closets,
it’s more than donating the old suits
and scuffed shoes to Good Will,
throwing out the years of National Geographics
and Good Housekeeping. Something more primal,
more like remodeling, tearing out closets,
breaking out a window to add a cupola
or a deck, making the kitchen brighter,
expanding the bathroom to make room for a tub.
It isn’t our own death that does all this hammering
at the stays of existence. Other peoples’ deaths,
or whatever that category of event
that wakes us, that insists we see
the necessity of a wicker chair under a skylight.
Don’t wait to call the carpenters until things are dire,
until the time is more expedient–
Your own death will arrive one midnight and then your house
will be a small room, smaller than this one
in which you sit and write. You can promise
to write, but no letters arrive from the dead.
There’s no desk there and the ink
in your lucky pen dries up after the first millennium.
