This month has been a battle of words. Since my current novel’s draft is in the mail to me, I didn’t want to start working on the new novel idea that popped, quite unbidden, into my head last week. So, to keep myself from working on either novel so that I’m ready to work once the mailed draft arrives, I have taken February as a writing challenge month. I missed NaNoWriMo this year—too busy surviving my career and address change to add intense writing to that month, but I wanted to devise a similar, non-novel challenge while I wait for the mailman.
My writing challenge: each day I must write something creative based on whatever chapter of Proverbs I read that morning. Once I had this idea (on January 28th), each morning I woke up excited to start, but I was disciplined and waited until February 1st. That’s also almost when I stopped the challenge. Oh, I hear the voices and even see their words on the page. I could hear faint echoes of the Fool, describing his life in a Robert Browningesque “Portrait of My Late Duchess.” I saw the limerick on the page of the Sluggard, his hand buried in his bowl of porridge, too tired to put the food in his starving mouth. And, in a moment of ambition (or hubris), I saw the Sonnet Corona of Wisdom’s Call. But as soon as I start writing, the voices and images hide. I fought with rhyme and meter for three mornings as I forced Wisdom’s Call into iambic pentameter. My satisfied grin when I finished a line of the first (and still only) quatrain faded when I realized that it ruined the rhyme scheme. After coaxing the line to end with the right rhyme, I remembered that the idea I had just written was supposed to be in the third quatrain, not the first. One rather snide voice in my head—my inner Literary Critic—sniffs at my work and asks if I think I’m Edna St. Vincent-Millay. A cynical voice—my inner Social Critic—laughs and asks whether the modern reader would even notice whether I followed the strict sonnet form I’m fighting for. I tell them both to be quiet since they are talking louder than the creative voices I’m trying to capture on the page. Since neither is very polite, they don’t usually listen. Add to this inner conversation William Zinsser’s voice since I’ve been rereading his On Writing Well this month. Even though his work focuses on nonfiction writing, his insistence on precise language guides my poetry writing. His voice reassures me, too, that we writers are not writers: we are rewriters. His admission that he does not like writing but rather likes to have written is exactly how I feel each day as I stare at the blank pages of my poetry challenge notebook. Were I not expecting my polished, sparkling Sonnet Corona to unfold on the page with perfect precision, I would be able to write a sloppy second quatrain. While I know that I will have to rewrite and rewrite my sonnet into a semblance of elegance, I am paralyzed because the messy attempt will ruin the perfect potential of my idea. While I doubt Solomon was writing about the art of writing, I find no truer words to describe my pristinely empty poetry pages than “where there is no ox, the crib is clean.”
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Not a big fan of change. I like trying new things. Today, I went to an Indian buffet and tried delicious “pepper puffs of pain” (my friend’s name for them) and loved them. A few weeks ago, I tried Turkish coffee and namoura—love, love, love both of them. See, new things are okay, safe, delightful.
And change can be good, too. I used to be a crazy busy graduate student; I’m not anymore. I get to sleep sometimes now. That’s a good change. I used to not be able to tell when I played a wrong note on my guitar because all of the notes sounded bad. Now my three-year-old niece says, “Wow” in awe as I tune the guitar. Another good change. (I'm sure my neighbors agree with that.) But transitions just aren’t fun. And I’m stuck in a transition period. I knew what’s on the other side of the transition (a good change), but I’m not there now. I sort of feel like I’m stuck in a holding pattern circling Atlanta’s Hartfield airport for the fifth time. And all my friends are muddling through their own transitions, too, except they are stuck on different metaphorical flights. A few years ago, while I was in another transition period (one in which I didn’t know what was on the other side), I started a poem about that feeling of being stuck, except my metaphor was based on elevators instead of airplanes. I haven’t finished the poem yet, but here’s the second draft of it: There's not much to do in an elevator-- They aren’t meant for people to stay in. But I hopped in, excited, because it was time. The button pushed, the doors closed, I looked up. The lights changed--up, up, up, and stop-- The doors didn't open at my stop. I pushed the button again, but nothing happened. With I sigh, I leaned back to wait. Finally, I pushed a different floor-- The doors didn't open there either. Another stop--but still closed doors barred me. Another stop--no change. Up, down, push, wait-- I tried floor after floor Each floor multiple times-- Impatient, worried, eager, scared, and Finally just ready to accept any floor, But the elevator doors are still closed. I hear people enjoying the other side of the elevator doors, But I'm stuck in an elevator with nothing to do but wait. Twice a year with my seasonal head colds, I lose my voice. Imagine the fun that accompanies that since, as a teacher, mine is the voice of authority. Yet, strangely, I find that losing my voice aids my authority. Students suddenly have to really hang on every word that I am mouthing to them or they will miss something important. Or as I write them notes, they must patiently wait to see what revelation Miss Lane is about to share with them.
Even more surprising, I find that my peers listen to me more. In my classroom (my seat of power, so to speak) I comfortably share my ideas; if I don't, my students still ask for my opinion. I do not, however, typically share my ideas with adults unless they solicit them. Over the years I have convinced myself that it wasn't my place to speak. I've rendered myself voiceless except for when I lose my voice and people must ask me what think and wait while I write an answer. As I reread the following poem I wrote nearly a decade ago, I realized that I need to add another stanza or perhaps write a parallel poem changing the anaphora from "because I thought I'd fail" to "because I thought they wouldn't listen." A decade later, I'm finally starting to share my writing with others, and (as I assure my students) each lesson I teach is an experiment with new thoughts ("Will this method work with these students with the variables at play in my classroom today?"). I suppose my next challenge is giving myself a voice. It could take another decade before I'm ready for that. Failure Because I thought I’d fail I didn’t write my stories, my poems, my thoughts. I wrote nothing. Because I thought I’d fail I didn’t compose the songs that accompany my life. I kept them to myself. Because I thought I’d fail I didn’t experiment with new thoughts or unconventional ideas Someone else did. They succeeded. Because I thought I’d fail I didn’t try. Because I thought I’d fail I did. As my family digs out their cars and driveways from their recent snowstorm, I must content myself with merely looking at a snow sky since my hometown refuses to gather more than a few inches of snow per year. As long as I don’t look at the ground, I can pretend that it’s covered with a blanket of snow; the sky, at least, is looking the part even if it can’t deliver.
As kids, my brother Gabe and I would spend hours sledding down the hill in our backyard. If the snow iced over, we could make it all the way to the front yard. Years later, when we drove by my childhood home, I realized that “the hill” wasn’t even a hill. We actually had been sliding across the lawn rather than down it, relying on our own momentum instead of gravity. But Memory does not exaggerate the amazing blizzards of the early 90s. It snowed and iced, and snowed and iced, until we had stratified snow drifts like the geological layers of rock. Gabe and I could hold onto the church roof to steady ourselves while we walked along the tops of the snow drifts, which startled our mother when she saw boots going by the top of her window. And the sledding that year was like none other: the snow drifts and piles from the snow-ploughs were so high that we didn’t need real hills. Any parking lot would do. Most of my haiku are about snow of winter. And whenever I need to remember what snow feels like, I pull out my snow haiku to reread. Perhaps, you need a reminder, too, so I’ll share them with you. The earth holds its breath As clouds spill stardust, swirling Snow awakens night. Snow muffles all noise save Its squeaking beneath my feet-- It’s too cold to crunch. Afternoon Snow-watching The ground and the trees Are having a snowball fight-- The trees are winning. The streetlamps wore hats Of snow like ice cream curlicues Had melted over them. Winds molded snow up, On, and down until my car Had a snow Mohawk. Earlier this week I was perusing some of my old poetry, hoping to cull that mine of raw material for something worth polishing. Rather than walking away with a sparkling new poem, I found a more valuable resource: an epiphany.
My poems fall into only three categories. There are the light-hearted or experimental poems that I write for students, there are the serious poems based on passages of Scripture that I write for myself, or there are poems about school and teaching (that I have no intention of sharing unless my brother Gabe tries to impersonate Anne Bradstreet’s brother-in-law who published her poems without her knowledge). While I certainly knew that I had written a poem marking the beginning of each school year, I had not realized how many other occasional poems I had written about school from either student or teacher perspectives. And just by reading the poem, I can tell which school year the poem came out of, whether or not the lines have anything specific of my experience (which they so rarely do). Even in some of my poetry “experiments” I end up with a school theme. For example, my students and I were working on parodies. Usually when I write parodies, I go to Emily Dickinson. I’m not sure why; I’m not really an Emily Dickinson fan. (I’d much rather read Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sonnets or short poems like “Grown-up”: “Was it for this I uttered prayers, / And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, / That now, domestic as a plate, / I should retire at half-past eight?”) But to stretch myself as a poet since my students cry foul when I don’t push myself too, I went for the Bard and ended up with this: To teach, or not to teach, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler, in silence, to allow The barbs and insults of outraged youth Or to fight against of sea of immaturity And, by instruction, end it. To teach, to instruct-- No more—and by the lesson to say we end The ignorance and the thousand natural follies That man is heir to. My examples of more difficult forms of poetry like the pantoum or sestina are also school-themed. And even my favorite epigram is the result of my first teaching experience (and the 19th century British authors I was reading at the time): The leaders here have taken care To ignore the wheel and invent it square. I find it curious that as another school year begins, I still have no poem to commemorate it. In fact, I don’t even have the beginnings of one. Instead, I have a rough draft of a story, in parable style that is capturing my thoughts for a new year. And instead of hiding this one away with the other first-day-of-school poems, I want to share this one and plan to in my post next week. I suspect that this marks a turning point in my teaching career. |
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