Myco-outtakes

First: the 75th anniversary double issue of Shenandoah launched this week! The website has been professionally redesigned, too (I’m so glad Beth secured funding for that just under the wire–universities are all belt-tightening now). I read and proofread the whole issue so I know for sure it’s terrific. I hope you’ll check it out. If it makes you want to join the party, by the way, the dates for submission windows are here. The number we can handle in any period maxes out fast, by the way, so aim to send early.

Otherwise, my central mission for the last two weeks of spring was to enjoy visits from my adult kids; rest; and read lots. More difficult aims I made some progress on: catching up on chores (the yard was egregious) and taking stock of the poems I’ve been jotting and forgetting so I could get some under submission at magazines. I’ve now read everything in my digital files, revising what seemed most promising and sending out a few (there are other drafts handwritten in notebooks, I suspect). Revision has been slow, partly because I’m legitimately tired, but partly because many of the poems I dug up are emotionally intense as well as wobbly in quality. It was hard to remember some of the occasions and feelings that inspired them.

Revision, for me, is a long process that requires critical distance I can only gain by putting work aside for a weeks or months. Often changes follow that classic formula of cutting the poem’s throat-clearing opener, its overexplained ending, most of the adverbs, and occasional moments of defensiveness or self-pity. Often there’s a governing metaphor with logic that doesn’t quite fly, so I have to re-enter the thinking and parse the poem logically. This sometimes involves expansion, too, especially if I realize I’ve been too oblique or have been dancing around the hard stuff. Those are the architectural moves, but the finishing work of strengthening diction, especially verbs, and trimming unnecessary words (my former colleague Heather Ross Miller called it “thattery and whichery”) also seems endless–I think of some new tweak every time I reread a poem. And some are beyond rescue. I can make them cleaner and craftier, but I’m not capable of rendering them genuinely powerful, the kind of poems a reader might fall hard for–at least, not now. It’s hard to pin down that quality, but often a poem with strong appeal conveys vulnerability or insight, or the language is especially surprising and sparkling.

Below are two poems I drafted in spring 2021, one while my mother was ill, the other not long after she died at the end of April. This was the period from which much of my book Mycocosmic emerged. Clearly I thought they weren’t fully realized enough to make the manuscript’s final cut. I tried to reapproach them this week, but I still agree with my former self. They’re not bad; each has some good language, imagery, and sound textures; and I continue to identify with the feelings I was trying to capture. I just don’t feel confident that they would have value for others. Maybe they need expansion–second stanzas, deeper digging? I’d be interested to hear how you make these judgment calls: do you have criteria that are clearer than mine? Hmm, now that I reread that first one for the twentieth time, how is a reader supposed to know that the “robot” means a foot massage machine my mother gave me? Well, you see what I mean.

Hymn

Robot foot massage. Pot of chai.
Forget to put cherries in the cherry scones
then prod them into sticky dough the way
anxiety will poke at my sticky brain
all day. Walk in the drizzle and fumble
my mask. Ink a million puzzles
in the paper. Learn that it’s Palm Sunday
on Twitter. Try to call my mother
who must be doing her physical therapy.
Do my physical therapy. The old pain
in my knee is reincarnated. Unblessed wine
messes with my tendons. I lied; I never
do my physical therapy. Or rarely.
A salted bath is sacred ritual, barely. 

The Fog Burns Off

Someone pushes off in a yellow boat laden with morphine. 
Slowly the bones of her face appear: high forehead smooth
as bone, thin bridge of her nose. The first story-spinner 
of your partly-cloudy life stops telling tales, although 
perhaps not hearing them as she sleeps, lips open
for gusts of breath. They get further between. The crease
in the center of her brow eases, eases, until it disappears.