Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August

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It is National Poetry Month, and having gone through all of my books in March (and letting go of a great number of them), I thought I would read an entire poetry book, each day in April, and then tell you about it.

A few years ago, when AWP was in Seattle, I attended a presentation featuring readers from The Sun, and that is how Danusha Laméris hit my radar. As soon as I got home, I looked her up and ordered her book. The Moons of August, I learned, once it was in my hands, was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize. When I read the list of acknowledgments in the back (Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar), I knew that I was surely destined to find her.

Laméris writes poems that so delight me, poems I have read over and over again. A few of her poems overlap with my own themes (for instance, “Fictional Characters,” which begins, “Do they ever want to escape? / Climb out of the white pages / and enter our world?”), but more often poems that I simply wish to goodness I had written. I write her poems into my own notebook, and see if I can imitate them, determined to write something that will please me half as much.

The Moons of August is like a series of hallways and stairwells that take you deeper and deeper into a house. You turn a corner and find a picture of her late brother, or her lost infant. Sometimes, you find hieroglyphics or cave drawings on the walls. There’s the funny story about her mother measuring penises, that turns into a reflection about God counting the hairs on our heads. We see people walking ahead of us, catch only a glimpse of Jack Gilbert or Temple Grandin as they disappear into a basement or climb out a window. Humor and heartbreak and a wry, forgiving and encompassing compassion are threaded all the way through.

I was thinking of the difficulty of picking just one poem to share with you, and then, I reread this poem. In it, Laméris displays that wonderful Ted-Kooser-like ability to take an ordinary moment in a woman’s life and turn it into something extraordinary.

Cherries

The woman standing in the Whole Foods aisle
over the pyramid of fruit, neatly arranged
under glossy lights, watched me drop
a handful into a paper bag, said how do you do it?
I always have to check each one.
I looked down at the dark red fruit, each cherry
good in its own, particular way
the way breasts are good or birds or stars.
Doesn’t everything that shines carry its own shadow?
A scar across the surface, a worm buried in the sweet flesh.
Why not reach in, take whatever falls into your hand.

Danusha Laméris: The Moons of August (Autumn House Press 2014)

 

Thirteen Ways to Get Some Writing Done Today

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I just read a post about discouragement, over at The Write Practice, and that happens to be a topic I am well versed in. So here’s a sampling from my own little arsenal for writing in the face of discouragement.

  1. Remember Newton’s First Law, or this important piece of it: a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Pick up your pen, open a notebook, and start writing.
  2. Tell yourself you don’t have to write for very long — fifteen minutes, ten minutes, one minute. Just get yourself into motion on the page.
  3. Once you’re there, on that lovely page, if you can’t think of anything else to write, write about your discouragement.
  4. Give your discouragement a name — I mean this literally, a name like “Fred” or “Alice.”
  5. Give your discouragement a place to sit, maybe the couch opposite your chair. Talk to discouragement, sort of the way the Dixie Chicks talk to heartache in their song, “Hello, Mr. Heartache.”
  6. Unpack your discouragement. Write about how, at its core, it contains the word courage. Write about how another word for courage is heart. I recently had an “aha” moment that is relevant here. I realized (finally!) what the self-help gurus mean when they say don’t focus on what you don’t want. “Stop procrastinating,” for instance (one of my long-time admonitions to myself) focuses on “procrastinating,” which is what I don’t want. “Write with energy and vitality and love — right now” is a better way to get what I want. But there’s a little lesson here about discouragement, too. Thinking about it focuses on the courage at its heart (and the courage in your heart).
  7. Rewards are nice, but I kind of favor bribes. If you (like me) are always jonesing for a latte (double-tall, almond milk, please!), take your notebook to a coffee place. Get the damn latte. Write while you sip it.
  8. Looking through old drafts and feeling stuck? Choose one (if you have difficulty choosing, close your eyes and grab). Take it out for a latte.
  9. Read with a pen in your hand. If you find an abstract, non-sensual word like “difficulty” or “arbitrary,” write a list of images, sounds, tastes, textures, smells that you associate with that word.
  10. Write out (by hand!) a poem by your favorite poet, or a paragraph from a favorite novel. (Just doing this will get your hand in motion!)
  11. Ask questions. What do you love about this piece of writing? What are the coolest words in this poem or paragraph? What are the sentences like? How do they vary from one another? What trap-doors are here that drop you through the lines and into your own imagination?
  12. Rewrite the passage as if you are translating it into your own language.
  13. Instead of fussing over what to write, write a list of what you might write — think wedding and write something borrowed, something blue, something old, and something new — write a list of ten things (or thirteen!). James Altucher says when a list of ten feels beyond you, write a list of twenty, which helps you to lower your standards and write the nonsense that will get you where you want to go. Writing.

 

How You Learn to Write

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Working with 60+ students for the last three weeks has been — well, a rock n’ roll show, a carnival ride, a trip — my head is spinning. Last night, having said goodbye to them, plus having picked up a bunch of papers, I felt so … almost guilty, as though I’d done something wrong. It was that weird hangover feeling one gets after a disappointment. I didn’t understand it.

This morning I can look at it all a bit more coldly. For one thing, I do feel a little guilty. I don’t feel I taught them enough. For another, several students showed up (on the paper due date) who hadn’t been there in days, students I knew were pissed off. One of them had written a note about two weeks ago, griping that “it wasn’t fair” that they had to learn new stuff.

The fact that this young woman received very low grades on the first two papers, was, I decided, irrelevant. Somehow I should have reached her. I should have done more.

My friend Paul once told me that our students are going to like us or not like us, but IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH US.

We remind them of their high school teacher, or their mother, or an old boyfriend. They have issues they’ve never worked out, and the idea that we will somehow sweep in and (in three weeks!) help them, is absurd. Especially when they stop attending class. If the students don’t do the work, nothing works.

So, deep sigh, or a fortifying intake of breath. And, my best tip for becoming a better writer:

Read. Read everything you can get your hands on. Read it with a pen in your hand (print it out!). Read it aloud.  Read in the genre that you aspire to (college essay or sci-fi novel or poem). Stretch yourself to read outside your genre. Read writing that other people think is stellar (The New Yorker, the latest Man Booker Prize novel, the new Edgar Award nominated mysteries).  Ask yourself “why” anyone thinks it is stellar. Investigate why. Explore. Whether you love a piece of writing or hate it, notice what emotions it evokes. If your response is a shrug, meh, then suspect that it is raising some issue that has put your curiosity to flight. Keep your lights on. Why are you bored? How did the writer get away with this?

Write it out in your own hand — which is, by the way, another way of reading — and read it again.

Maybe you remember that dated book, Dress for Success, which advised an entire generation of ex-wannabe-hippies that if they wanted to get a job, they should dress for the part they wanted to play.

I’m suggesting that you read for the part.

And one more thing — in my search of Pexels.com for pictures of books, I found the picture below. It reminded me of something David (my late colleague) once said in a department meeting. “An F isn’t a failure if it’s a step on your journey to becoming a better writer.”

Workspace minimal style

 

A Poem for March

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Did I say that I would write a blogpost once a week this year?

Did I sign up to teach (full-time!) for four weeks?

It isn’t looking much like it around here, but it really is March and my birthday month. So here’s a poem by Bellingham poet Luci Shaw. It appeared on The Writer’s Almanac on March 5, 2012, and I found it while searching for an access code in my sent-mail folder at work. (Pointlessly, I might add.)

Revival

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old believer, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn’t softened
for months, fogs layering their slow,
complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,
but as the light lengthens, preacher
of good news,
evangelizing leaves and branches,
his large gestures beckon green
out of gray. Pinpricks of coral bursting
from the cotoneasters. A single bee
finding the white heather. Eager lemon-yellow
aconites glowing, low to the ground like
little uplifted faces. A crocus shooting up
a purple hand here, there, as I stand on my doorstep,
my own face drinking in heat
and light like a bud welcoming resurrection,
and my hand up, too, ready to sign on
for conversion.
-Luci Shaw

I love so much of this poem that it’s a little hard to single anything out. But calling the earth an “old believer,” and the light, a “preacher of good news,” just warms my heart.

Talk to you next week. I hope you write!