Hopeless and Helpless

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image from www.exchangewire.com

I have now written a little more than 4000 words into my new novel. I’m still floundering around, checking out the territory and the voice and the point of view, exploring the characters. The main character, a woman stuck in an unhappy marriage, hasn’t admitted to herself  that she’s unhappy, that she’s more unhappy that she can stand. She’s telling herself that this is just life and she can’t expect more.

I’ve been thinking about how my process — how the writer’s process early in the drafting stage — is a little like a character’s process early in a novel. We’re hopeless and helpless. Even if we’ve planned ahead, even if we know the ending, early in the process we can’t really be sure that it’s working, that it will work and be worth all the work we are willing to put into it. All the steps of the hero’s journey or whatever other template we’re using is all out in front of us and, like the hero, we haven’t really gotten started yet.

I’ve been thinking about how life can be like this. In a novel, the character has about 20 pages, maybe 50, to be stuck in this phase, the hopeless and helpless phase, after which they have to shake themselves off and get started on their quest…or whatever it is they have ahead of them. In life, however, we get stuck (not just writers). We spend months feeling hopeless and helpless. Or years. Decades. We’d like to change our lives, but, geez, it’s just not possible.  We think it’s just not possible.

If your life were a novel, your readers would sigh and close the book. They would go looking for a different book.  You should do them a favor and and give them a different book. Get up, shake yourself off.  Get started on your quest.

Day 29: The Remodel

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cabin4At 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.

Day 28: Translation

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Here’s a thumbnail portrait of today’s process…

I tried to take seriously Chris Jarmick’s assignment for day 28, to “translate” a poem into English from a language I don’t know. I found a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and printed it out. I carried it around. I don’t know German, but I thought I could make out a few of the words. I opened my poetry book and copied out the poem in longhand. It’s a longish poem (“Erlkoenig” is the title, I think) and I thought I would copy only a stanza or two, but I ended up copying the whole thing. Then…for a long time…I stared at it. Then, I wrote this (please excuse the lack of cool accent marks):

Resisting Translation

The assignment is to translate a poem into English
from a language I don’t know–
and knowing so little of languages other than my own,
it seems an easy enough assignment.

“Translate,” in smart quotes, which must mean,
“not really translate,” though I can guess
that Nacht und Wind 
means Night and Wind. (Is that cheating?)

Assignments, I tell my students, are about
getting out of our accountant, linear left brains
and into our creative, more imaginative
right brains, into what poets count our better half.

But aren’t I beyond assignments, beyond
all that sturm und drang, not to mention the Nacht
und Wind? No knave or knabe, not I.
And spat (which I looked up) has nothing to do with spitting,

not even a spitting wind. Mein Vater, my father,
let me off the hook of this difficulty,
let me mutter and growl in my own tongue,
write (whatever it might mean) birgst du so bang. 

Day 24: The Clerihew

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(image found on the Facebook page of The Plot Whisperer, Martha Alderson)

The clerihew was, as I recall, favored by my mentor, Nelson Bentley, perhaps because the full name of its progenitor was Edmund Clerihew Bentley. It is a four line poem with rhyming couplets, biographical at least in that it begins with someone’s name. The four lines are rhymed AA BB (two couplets) and are of varying lengths and meter (for comic effect). It can contain addition rhymed couplets. This example is said to be Edmund’s first attempt at the form:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered Sodium.

I resisted this assignment so mightily that I decided there must be a gift for me in doing it. Then, researching this topic, I discovered that July 10 (the birthday of my two older daughters) is National Clerihew Day.

So, a few rhymes from moi:

Alas, said Bethany Reid
I’ve written a terrible screed.
I hoped Poetry Month would make me profound–
Instead it makes my head pound.
I could just refuse,
but now the ink’s–used. 
Consider this my apologia
For my April logorrhoea.