Spring cleaning seems like an obvious metaphor for revision and assembling a poetry ms. It’s not unlike casting a hard look at the poems you’ve accumulated and clearing out the debris that clogs their pipes, whatever elements might interrupt their force for a reader: cliché, unproductive digression, wordy moments.
I’ve done some beyond-the-ordinary cleaning this year, too, as a person on sabbatical tends to–and maybe a person winding up the whirlwind of a book launch, too. First ritual is clearing junk out of the office, which is both helpful (what have I lost track of?) and restless procrastination (I think of a dog or cat circling around before settling into a comfortable position). I also clean, literally and metaphorically, between hard writing pushes. For a few weeks I keep my head down and focus; then I get tired and fuzzy, unable to see the project, so I do a variety of chores. This includes professional stuff like reference letters; personal stuff like getting a haircut; and home tasks such as tackling a closet that suddenly looks dysfunctional. Visiting my kids as they struggled also meant tackling cleaning tasks that overwhelmed them–hard work but genuinely helpful, unlike some other parental behaviors in face of crisis. While I sorted and scrubbed, I thought a lot about cleaning my mother’s home during her final illness five years ago. Sort the pills into a dispenser, throw out expired foods and buy new, and shine up the sink because you can’t shine up the future or make medicine actually cure a person–that sort of desperate labor standing in for all that I could not do.
While polishing poems is a good and necessary step, though, I’ll make a case for dirtying them up first. At least for me, first drafts usually hide something important. It’s hard to dig into the real mess of my thinking and feeling. That stuff is ugly, burdened with shame, jealousy, misdirected anger, lazy illogic, and other emotional and intellectual habits that make me look bad. But poems become more valuable to others when I’m willing to do the work.
That’s part of what I’m hoping to accomplish with whoever shows up to my virtual Poet Camp class on June 28th. Here’s the description I came up with when, a few months ago, founder Sarah Ann Winn invited me to create a two- or three-hour class:
What feeds us—and frightens us—sometimes lurks underground, like fungal networks, fantastic caves, and weirdly shaped vegetables in root cellars. Poetry has a way of bringing what’s hidden into the light while still honoring its mystery. What’s buried, after all, can sometimes flower. If you’re willing to open that basement door or lift that mossy rock, join us in this generative workshop. We’ll begin by considering how other poets explore underground spaces, including the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze. Writing prompts will get you digging. Writers who wish to can share what they unearth. We’ll also discuss how to develop these drafts, keeping in mind that strong poems often balance disclosure with enigma, manifestation with evocation. Finally, participants will lead the way toward whatever further enlightenment they need, possibly how to establish a fruitful writing practice, revise toward greater poetic power, or submit work for publication.
I’d be grateful if you’d help me spread the word. I’d love to gather more poems from the upside-down, too, to share with the group, pieces by you or someone else, so please let me know if one occurs to you.
I’m also grateful to Jeannine Hall Gailey for boosting Mycocosmic in a recent blog post about which books win the laurels (particularly welcome given today’s news about prize-winning books and stories that depend on AI–disheartening). Bouquets, as well, to a couple of journals that recently published poems from my ms in progress, Spiral Hum. All happen to involve understories. Online in The Hopper is “Uncoil,” a short-lined, slant-rhymed sort-of-sonnet–a form that’s hard to put back together once you disarrange it, but the first draft contained digressive imagery that had to go. There just isn’t room for nonsense in poems, especially very short ones. In its final (print) issue, Asheville Poetry Review published two. “Underworldlings” suggests its dirty leanings via the title, but I was especially pondering katabasis, a hero’s passage through the underworld, in relation to my last bad bout of depression, during menopause. The title of “Shelter in Place, Credible Threat” quotes an urgent message that my university sent around one autumn day a couple of years ago. Literally, I was trapped in my third floor office, higher up than any of the police climbed, in fact, when they allegedly cleared the buildings. Yet there was archaeology involved in revision.
I had to dismantle and rebuild the latter poem several times. Early versions, entitled “Employee Morale,” were a little flat, wordy (exactly what happened, in order), and defensive: I indicted the university and the larger culture of gun violence, but held back on examining my own complicity in education’s business model. I have strong vocations for writing and teaching, but universities exploit that dedication to get more work out of people. There was a time when it was difficult to support my family on my associate professor salary, so I jumped into “productivity” on the administration’s terms to earn more money. That was a reasonable choice, then. I’m past that urgency, but it’s hard to let go of productivity’s rewards, even though I know I need to treat the academic culture of overwork much more skeptically. It’s bad for my mental and physical health as well as supporting a damaging system. I capitalized on that three-hour lockdown to get some grading done, for heaven’s sake. The whole episode was terrible and the responsibility lies elsewhere–yet my hands are dirty.
Perhaps it’s easier to sympathize with a poetic speaker who is willing to descend into a mess of motives and entanglements. In any case, the poem is now truer, even as it leans into the hypnotic strangeness of Faber Birren’s art, which caught my attention in a campus gallery around the same time. No matter if the poem ever means as much to anyone else as it does to me. Honesty may be an ever-receding goal–you can always dig deeper–but it’s worth something in its own right.
Now, can someone please publish crib notes on what browser I should switch to now that Google’s going to hell–ideally something compatible with the stupid university websites I need to use?
