poetry goals

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What do you want?

May 2, 2012 in Writing poetry | No comments

Wild rabbit on the lawnMonday’s poetry prompt brought me back to this question–specifically, what do I want to be when I grow up? Or maybe I should ask what do I want to do when I grow up? More generally, what do I want? And that leads me to three sets of questions:

What do I want?
What do I want to do?
What can I do now to get me closer?

I’m not good at any of those. I feel like I haven’t figured it out yet–or I have an idea but it isn’t sustainable in the real world (as in, it won’t pay me money for food and rent or health insurance–revisiting The starving artist–fact or myth).

I often think I just want to wake up and read poetry and write poems all day–with a break for eating. (I also want to be able to eat and drink as much of whatever as I want with no repercussions.)

I want to be a better wife and mother and friend (always room for improvement).

I want acceptance and recognition and I want to belong. Very human and pretty boring, right? And not directly under my control.

But what can I control? What I do. So what do I want to do?

Wake up and read poetry and write poems all day. Write kick-ass poems, poems that resonate, poems that leave the reader glad for having read them.

I want to share what I learn with anyone who’s interested. 

I want to find more/new ways to get Into the Rumored Spring out into the world.

I want to do good work–work that makes the world better–and what is that?

I want to ask questions, explore answers, and listen to what other people–yes, you–have to say.

I want to fix up the family room (yep, that’s on the list).

I want to speak Italian.

Please note that even with all these wants, I am deeply grateful for what I’ve got. It’s just that I’m 52 years old and I feel like it’s high time or past time for me to start heading in the right direction.

With the exception of the family room and Italian, these are all pretty vague–general statements that don’t provide details. The next step is to dig into those details–with the idea that if I know what I want to do, I have a much better chance of doing it, start to finish.

In my planning a May list of things to do, I need to find things that will help me get closer–and then I need to do them. And I need to ask a lot more questions: What will help me write those kick-ass poems? What’s lacking? What kind of good work do I want to do? What do I need to learn so I can do it? Can I do any of this before I retire?

What do you want? What do you want to do?

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Never?

October 1, 2008 in Writing poetry | 3 comments

In a recent post, Amy King (thanks, Kelli, for the link) warns about all the fame and glory a poet will never get. No sudden discovery. No overnight success. Not like the musician with his EP, or the scientist with her Eureka! moment.

What? Never? No Pushcart nomination? No Pushcart prize, no poem in Best American Poetry, no reading at the 92nd Street Y?

The title of the post is “Poetry Is to Money as Ice Cream is to Mud,” and I won’t argue that point.

But never is such a long time.

Okay, that cat’s out of the bag. Don’t ask me why, but I harbor certain hopes. Maybe it’s vanity or maybe it’s a thirst for validation. Should it be necessary to have that validation? Is it why I write? No on both counts. But I have my hopes just as the person who buys lottery tickets has hopes. My submissions are my lottery tickets. (The lottery probably has better odds.)

This morning, that reminded me of something my friend Gina told me about two kinds of genius: the Mozart kind, where you’re immediately obviously blindingly gifted and brilliant, and the Beethoven kind, where you just keep working hard. That was back in the ’80s.

Fast forward to now, and Gina has been working hard all along. You can read more about what she’s been up to in this profile that appeared in Vanity Fair. The same goes for Pat Graney, who has always followed her own vision. And, as I’ve mentioned before, Ross Palmer Beecher, who has over the years kept an amazing work ethic and kept making art, which you can see here and here and here.

It is about doing it. It is, for me, about the writing–and it’s about sharing that writing, reading it and publishing it, they way you perform a dance or hang a painting.

And I’m still not ready to say Never.

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One little silver lining

March 16, 2008 in Writing poetry | 2 comments

Most poets don’t make a lot of money, or maybe any money, by writing poetry. It is largely an unpaid art.

However—

Even as the rejections have been arriving, steady as the gray rain, I realized in one moment yesterday that I didn’t have to care all that much. I can take comfort in the writing, the act of creating, the doing of it. That is a lovely luxury.

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A poem a day, or not

October 1, 2007 in Writing poetry | No comments

At the beginning of September, I decided that I should write about food and that I should write a poem every day—hence, a poem a day about food. I also decided that I should do a free write for my next direction every day.

Success was marginal.

I found that my “poems” were more like free writes and mostly didn’t even have titles. And I found that my free writes were more restricted than I want, as though they were trying to be poems right away.

And I missed a day, but only one.

So I think I’ll take the whole batch, or both batches, and hide them away for a few months.

In the meantime, in this year’s Poet’s Market (I am so old fashioned) I found a magazine that publishes poems about food: Alimentum, the Literature of Food.

P.S. Last week I mentioned writing response poems. My earlier effort at this is posted this week on the sofa.

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2 bits & 1 longer thought

March 7, 2007 in Writing poetry | No comments

My son’s 11th grade language arts teacher told the students that, because they were 16 or 17, they could write a love sonnet. My son worked on this all weekend. Sunday night, I asked him if he had finished it. He said that he had—but that it was not about love, exactly. It was about toast. His first line: I can handle toast.

*****

In a previous post, I talked a little bit about my poetry goals. The other day, I was discussing them with someone (probably with at least a little frustration), and he asked me this: If I achieved them—or even some of them—how would I feel? Would it change who I am? Hmmm…

*****

This past week, I’ve been reading Fence Above the Sea, by Brigitte Byrd (Ahsahta Press). Most of the poems in the book are in prose poem, or short short, format. They have a stream of consciousness feeling, and they carry through and return to certain phrases, certain themes. They also weave phrases of French (I plan to go back and reread them when I have my dictionary nearby).

The resulting images are tactile and surreal at the same time, and I find the work inspiring. It’s so different from the poems that I’ve been writing, and I can feel myself being nudged into a new direction.

To me, this is the value of reading—and reading work in a variety of styles and voices. I might try on someone else’s style, an exercise used in writing classes. It’s fun to bust out and do something unfamiliar. It gives me a chance to explore other parts of myself and other ways that I can express that self. And even if the poem starts out sounding like the poet, it will change as I revise it. It will, for better or worse, become mine. It’s just good to stretch.

How do you stretch? What are you reading?

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