{#npm’17: borrowing from martha}

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