Month: April 2017

One of the Mr. Rogers songs I remember from when Niecelet was tiny was something along the lines of “let’s think of something to do, while we’re waiting.” A very simple song for impatient little people who want everything now – allegedly it’s a song for small children. Realistically, impatient people? Are most of us.

It’s been almost six months since Tech Boy hasn’t had full-time work. We’re blessed to be in a position that it’s okay, but it does make us more careful, which is a necessary pain. Waiting is part of the job, for him. For me, that’s the case as well – waiting to see who will say what about a manuscript. Waiting to see if I have new idea, or can finish the one I just started. Waiting to see if I can pull of this miracle one more time.

I loathe waiting.

untidy mind

awash in a sea of paper slips
my desk is discovered:
the dictates of the day
          groceries
          cumin, chamomile, mint – ?
          allergens to milk and strawberries?
retain reminders
          email Sara:
          call Dr. M
          what is cousin jupiter’s real name?
of the chaotic contents contained
a planned productivity –
administered order,
borne on the backs
of envelopes

Today, it’s cleaning off my desk. Tomorrow, my purse… Monday, the world. Or something like that.

so many adventures could come today

sheer nosiness will
get you up, and peering
over the next hill

Annunciation

Blessed, blessed

are you, for

I

will make you weep

when the light hits the grass

in the morning.

I will make you crave

conversation like red

meat, lay you

weak, at the feet

of strangers. I will open

lives like vistas

before you

that you will never

seal.

Read the rest of the poem at Read, Write, Believe

Some days the world will crack us open. Some days, we will write, as Sherman Alexie famously said, in blood, because we remember what it felt like to bleed. And no matter how long it takes to get a character across the kitchen floor, maybe the trick is to keep writing.

This happens almost at the end of every NPM project; I get my momentum going to get out one last novel before the summer slump hits publishing, and so I am working wildly, finishing a revision while another novel makes new rounds. Yes, I have determined that the rejection was a blessing, an opening of a door, and am going to move through it with that.

It’s deliberate, to articulate that this is a blessing, an opportunity. Yesterday a friend who has recently been eviscerated via Kirkus hung up her keyboard. Told me it was no longer worth it. We have struggled together, she and I, over the past few years in response to various crises, and it’s a bit painful to me that she’s quitting – and yet I know that our lives are not identical, and her decision is today, and maybe not forever. But, it’s just got things reverberating through my mind.

Today’s offering isn’t really a poem, more a meditation from Martha Graham, and a response. Tomorrow’s is a poem by poet and novelist Sara Lewis Holmes, who is also one of my poetry sisters. Her thoughts on art and creation have clarity and depth, and often the way they strikes me creates a reason to go forward. I will not reprint the poem here in its entirety, & encourage you all to read it on her site. It’s worth the click, though, as so many of Sara’s poems are. Onward, to today’s post, though:

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it.

It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work.

You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.

~ Martha Graham

Today I removed
Six accounts of washing hands
two descriptions of slicing
& one commentary on tying an apron from a scene
which should have taken two minutes to finish
but some days
it takes hours to get my characters across
a kitchen floor

I gave up writing this piece
the day Michael Brown gave up his life
a child bleeding to death in the streets meant
my work meant nothing. nothing meant anything
and everything was wrong

it has been a long road back

what does it take to write?
closing my eyes, and going it blind
shutting out the world
in favor of imagination?

what does it take to open myself
to this blesséd unrest?

no artist is pleased
but I must be pleased
to make all worlds mine