marathon monday
april air crisp as tulips
blood on the pavement
A Few Notes About April, National Poetry Month, and Related Topics
A few notes about April, National Poetry Month, and related or tangential topics:
- April is the cruelest month because it is neither one thing nor another. Especially in Boston, it is neither the callused braw of midwinter, nor the soft (and — thanks to climate change — rainy) flower-fest of spring. In February we laugh at freezing weather, we don our extra layers and our vaselined lips as a matter of course. In April, lulled into a sense of false security, we open our petals into the sunny breezes, decide to take out the summer dresses and the short-sleeved shirts. And then freeze and shiver in temperatures that felt warm to us in February.
- T.S. Eliot is a fussy little busybody who thought that shirtsleeves were sordid.
- This April, I want the fields to lay fallow. I walk the wavering line between abandonment and overpruning of my poetic garden.
- The sap rises up and I write, write, write, accumulating pages and pages of white, letter-sized writing pad, the blue lines running undercurrent beneath my  handwriting, sometimes scrawl and sometimes legible.
- The sap rises up and I want to run through the bogs screaming, expounding. The sap rises up and I rise with it, and then I return to the couch, or the breakfast table, looking at the birds who congregate at the feeder outside, along with the squirrels.
- How much longer can I keep both the squirrels and the woodpeckers — two downy, two red-bellied, none red-headed, in spite of the red head of the red-bellied woodpecker — in suet?
- The worst thing to do with the seedling is disturb it. Let it lay there, half in and half out of the ground. But when they start to crowd thick and green (because you never obey the seed-packet’s instructions, always spacing them too far or too close), then you must pluck and choose, which one will stay and which will go. Otherwise, they all die out, competing for the same scant patch of dirt and sun and rain.
- The squirrels and the chipmunks — and your own damn cats — will likely devour many of the flowers, even in their bloom. Look at the crocus, who finally bloomed only to become scattered-pink the next day, scattered and tragic petals among their white-and-green-striped arrow-leaves.
- Plant them anyway.
- Trust the wisdom of the numbered list.
- Stay in touch, whether casual, constant, or connubial, with those who understand the importance of a turn of phrase, the difference between Joe Green and Guiseppe Verde.
- Take it moment by moment.
- Remember to be of service — in both the meaningful work and the work that pays the bills.
April on Its Way Haiku
the sun
the snow
the open window
Quantity, Quality, Dubious Dichotomy
About six months ago I joined a writing workshop. I’m still not sure whether it was a good decision or a bad decision. One the one hand, there’s the whole “make me a better writer” argument. On the other hand, I find myself cringing from imagined criticism before I write a single word.
Maybe I was better off posting mediocre haiku after mediocre haiku and getting random praise of dubious sincerity from strangers I met on the Internets.
I’ve written and rewritten this third paragraph three times now, not sure exactly how to say what it is I want to say. Did Emily Dickinson agonize over her verse like this? Do I really want to be Emily Dickinson? Her life kind of sucked.
I leave the workshops variously energized, exhausted, and frustrated. For a while I was sure I wasn’t coming back. But then I was accepted for publication somewhere, and asked to read somewhere. I felt like I’d broken through some kind of barrier, one composed mainly of my own hang-ups.
The workshop leader herself is expansive, creative, extravagant. She has lived the kind of life I thought I wanted to live: professorships at this university and that university; poet in the schools; workshops in France, in Maine, in Taos NM. She has written books of beautiful poetry. I want very badly what she has, but I’m not sure what that is.
After the first class, she said, “Wonderful! You are a wonderful poet, a wonderful critic!” At the beginning of the new term, she said “Welcome home,” and gave me a hug.
And then proceeded to rip into my poem when it came around the table. Is it just me? Am I being too much of a sensitive poet? Finding a reason not to walk the road I’d fantasized about for so long? Even after reality-checking with a friend, who agreed that she does seem harsher toward me than the other students, I don’t know. Can’t articulate it. Can barely articulate it in this post. Have no idea how to ask for things to be different — or if it’s even possible.
Wild Turkeys Haiku
three turkeys forage
along the side of the road
on my way to work
The God-Shaped Hole, the Still Water
the god-shaped hole
must remain empty
so that god can pass through
it widens like the ozone
the world ends
and begins again
the guard opens the gate
and you make your way
to the pond with its
face of glass stillness
once before you came and sat
until the birds darted
over the gulf between bushes
and a red-winged
blackbird winked at you
now the water itself gulps
and returns to stillness
in the empty space of the evening
Polishing the Stone, Perfecting the Craft
I was quite regular with my posts but have gotten rather shy of late. In September I signed up for some sessions at this workshop. It’s the largest commitment of time and resources I’ve dedicated to a writing workshop of any kind since I was an undergraduate. I had a lot of trepidation about doing so. My disillusionment with the whole workshop-academia-publishing machine can probably best be summed up by a meme that was going around the Tubes a while back: Emily Dickinson attends a writing workshop.
On the other side of disillusionment, of course, is truth. On the other side is the way things are. And on the other side of it, I still care about writing. I still do it in spite of the paltry rewards because it’s a reward in itself, because writing — especially writing poetry — lets me see the world more clearly. After some years of healing in various venues, I’m ready to ever-so-gently consider how best to polish the stones I picked from the riverbed.
The Shoe, the End of Summer
on the wet grass
beside the park
a lone summer shoe
glitters
despite the clouds
I am late already
but the shoe calls,
begging to be slipped
onto the delicate feet
of a princess
not yet discovered
High Summer
grass high and dry and
seeded as wheat
tips too close for focus
belly on the blanket beside it
a bowl of blueberries,
almost gone
the rain pretends to come
but no one cares
not even the cat
written july 31 — lughnasadh — feast of the grain harvest
Goldfinch Summer Haiku
goldfinch lights on grass
edges up the stalk to peck
at the ripened seeds
Garden of Words 