Purposeful Sight

I've been reading a lot of fashion blogs recently. I love them: they're like subscribing to Vogue, but funkier, more egalitarian, more influenced by thrift store style, and much quicker (they change rapidly in response to street style). Even for someone who's never been known as a fashionista, they're strangely invigorating.

One of my favorite fashion bloggers Jessica Quirk. 

I wish I could say that this has substantially changed my wardrobe--in a small way, it probably has--but it has changed a good deal about the way I see the world. I notice aesthetic details more often now, most often in others' clothing but in design in general. When I see a woman who looks stylish, I don't just think, "She looks cute," I think, "Look at that interesting ribbing on her cardigan. And what makes those shoes a little different? The higher ankle? I like her choice of watch size, etc."

I've made an active study of these details in the hopes of improving my own work wardrobe. I've taught myself to see differently to the point where, believe it or not, it's almost second nature to me to notice the impact of individual accessories on an outfit. To say the least, this is not something I would have ever thought I'd be doing!

But I wonder if what we choose to see always comes at a cost to those details we choose to miss. The human eye--and mind--can only take in so much at a time. It's a survival tactic: if we pay attention to every blade of grass on the plains, the fluffy clouds in the blue sky, and the grasshoppers zinging around our feet, we might miss the irate buffalo barreling toward us. We tend to see the most important thing in any given setting by nature. Charging buffalo: important. That cloud that kind of looks a little like a buffalo: maybe we'll notice that when we're not running for our lives.

Watch out!

But in the absence of a buffalo, the first things we notice are what we've trained ourselves to see by inclination and mental habit. This is why one of my first creative writing teachers encouraged our class to eavesdrop on others. She told us to keep our ears open on buses, in hallways, in our dorm rooms, to listen shamelessly whenever someone talked loudly on a cell phone in public. She said it would give us an ear for natural dialog, a familiarity with spontaneous human language which would seep into our own writing. I've always been thankful for her advice--it makes public transportation far more interesting!--and because it actually works: along with my writing style, she has altered my vision in some small way forever.

If you subject me to your cell phone conversation on the bus, be assured that I will be listening to you.

People choose their own systems of vision every day, seeing things and events as proofs of whatever interests, theories, assumptions, and prejudices that they have adopted most fervently (or allowed to be ingrained in them). We see the world through a lens shaped by our past, by our culture's ideologies, and by ourselves, a  lens that actively reshapes the world whether we want it to or not. Without ever knowing why, a depressed person driving home from work will see gray clouds, all the lousy drivers cutting them off, and roadkill strewn along the median, while a relatively happy person might see the light shifting through the clouds, the green fields nearby, and that nice little Toyota that got back into the right lane right on time. The road may stay the same, but a person's state of mind changes everything.

Distorted vision.

My point is that it's important to be conscientious about the sight you choose to exercise in the world. Seeing is not passive but an active reshaping of our surroundings, our relationships, and, consequently, our lives. I may choose to be more cognizant of fashion, yes, but I don't want to forget how to see others' personal strengths and struggles and uniqueness. I want to remember how to look past nail polish and bias cuts to see people how their friends and mothers must see them, with kindness and understanding and completeness, as people whose lives stand for far more than what they wear, where they work, or who they text as they wait to get off at their bus stop and walk home.

Opinionated

In the last year, I've found myself having more opinions, a lot more opinions: more opinions on music, on cultural figures, on literature, on fashion, on politics, and even on what I think are the best ways to live.


On the whole, I think this is great. I have more opinions not because I've started thinking more (trust me, I've always done far too much of that), but because I spent a large chunk of my growing up years thinking that the best way to get by in life was to not have any opinions. It seemed like a good way to get through the world without conflicts, without commitments, without ever making mistakes.

But now I know better: being afraid of having opinions doesn't lead to universal ease and understanding, it leads to being a damned milquetoast. Being opinionated obviously put a person at risk for experiencing disagreements and making mistakes, but not having an opinion means that a) you're not paying attention, b) you're not interested, or c) you don't have enough guts to try to be anyone at all, even yourself. To me, being opinionated means not that you're incapable of being wrong, but that you're confident and grown-up enough to handle being wrong every once in awhile.

But note the "on the whole" up above. What makes being opinionated less than perfect is that it's not all that useful for writing. There are some types of writing that are built on opinion and argument, of course--opinion columns, blogs, persuasive and academic writing of all kinds--but the types of writing I love aren't at their best when they're opinionated. Personal essays and poetry thrive on ambiguity, on challenging the pat answer, on withholding judgment for as long as possible for the sake of complexity, honesty, and surprise.

Keats's negative capability is probably the most famous statement of this--"when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason"--but I like Robert Frost's version, too: "No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." I like my writing best when I've gotten from beginning to end and realized that I've turned around on my initial opinion--I don't necessarily make a 180, but at the very least I prefer to end up at an odd angle from where I started. It helps if I write about topics that I don't already have a firm opinion about; it's much better for me to start of feeling intrigued or confused instead of confident.

Writing like this helps me to remember to hold my opinions lightly. They're great, obviously, and probably 100% correct and as brilliant as I am (like, duh!), but writing helps me remember that the world is a fantastically big, complex, and surprising place; we're all muddling through as best we can, and all of our dearest beliefs and conceptions of the world may be proven absolutely false tomorrow. Writing helps me to remember that it doesn't matter whether I'm proven right or wrong in my views, only that I must remember to laugh when I'm proven wrong and to be gracious on those rare, glorious occasions when I can call myself something like "right."

The Supposed Hazards of Creativitiy

One of my co-workers and writing group pals sent me this video a few weeks ago. It's Elizabeth Gilbert (yes, that Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame) talking about how Western culture conceives of creativity. Basically, her argument is that it is necessary for writers, artists, and musicians to figure out a way to deal with the pressures of creativity in a positive, nurturing way. Gilbert does a great job with her talk, and I thought I'd share it here.

It also reminded me of Black Swan, which I really, really enjoyed. But  . . .

***SPOILER ALERT***

why does Nina have to die at the end? Why does she have to go crazy to be a great dancer? Why can't she just evolve into a fulfilled, well-rounded human being who can dance like hell?



The movie is beautifully made, visually stunning, and genuinely (and I don't use this word lightly) thrilling. But I think that it perpetuates a stereotype about artists and, perhaps more importantly, about artists who happen to be women.

Take 20th century writers, for example. Sure, there are plenty of male authors who have killed themselves, but Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, two of the most famous and brilliant female writers of the 20th century, are notorious for their suicides. More people know them for their deaths more than for their writing. (C'mon, be honest--how many of you saw The Hours but haven't read the wonderful, revolutionary, life-changing novel that is Mrs. Dalloway?)

In fact, I don't know how many times I've heard Plath's breathtakingly beautiful and challenging poetry ridiculed by undergraduates simply because they don't like her personal story. They won't even give her poetry a careful reading because of how she died. She even gets the cliche of the mentally ill author permanently named after her ("the Sylvia Plath effect") while Ernest Hemingway gets to keep on being the lovable big "Papa" of Modernist literature despite his suicide by shotgun. He somehow has maintained his integrity in our culture; she has not.

These women, of course, are not the only writers and artists who have experienced creativity and mental illness at the same time, but their reputations are permanently marked by their suicides in a way that male writers' stories rarely are. And in some ways, I believe that our culture tells female artists quietly yet consistently that to be a great creator requires some sort of profound personal loss or damage: you'll lose your boyfriend, you'll lose your family, you'll lose your femininity (like the bluestockings), you'll lose your life. To create, the story goes, we must risk self-destruction and death. (See Dear Sugar and Elissa Bassist for more on this.)

Pretty much every time I've not gotten a job or gone through a breakup or had a fight with a friend or was in some other way miserable, I've been told by someone that "at least it's good for your writing." And every single time I've found it profoundly offensive. Why should suffering and writing--one of the most redeeming, life-affirming, challenging, and terrifyingly real acts I know--be wed together in such hideous matrimony? I don't want people wishing unhappiness on me as some backhanded means of pushing me toward success. What an awful way to live. What an awful way to be treated.

So even though Gilbert doesn't mention gender in her talk, it has sparked in me a belief that pursuing mental health as a female writer is a feminist act. And I truly appreciate Gilbert's thinking on this topic, even if I'm not entirely satisfied with her solution of the happy and distinct genius.

Dear Blog,

I miss you. I really do. I want to write posts for you about snow days and this really good new sugar cookie recipe I found and Eat, Pray, Love and walking in the cold and writing essays and . . .


*sigh*

You get the idea.

But things have been busy here in Lesley Land. I took on an editing job last week that had a very tight deadline. It was a fun project, but it kept me busy all last week. Regular work has been unbelievably busy because of the snow days, and I've been furiously playing catch up for a solid week now. And then last week my writing group members decided that it was time for me to wrap up the essay I've been working on and submit it, so I've been furiously churning out 1,500 words per night all week long--and I'm still not done! Now I'm hoping to whittle it down and send it off early Saturday afternoon.

So, blog, know that I miss you. Know that I keep having ideas for you and writing them down, right before I go off and edit and/or write and/or work really hard and/or go to the gym to stay sane.

Anyway, I'll visit again soon.

Much love,
Lesley

Happy December

Happy first of December, everybody!

I'm always a little bit excited about December. It's not the holidays I love--I'm not a huge Christmas person--and it's not exactly the weather; I don't usually like the cold, and I hate having to wear gloves to drive my car or type at the office. But I've always liked winter. At the beginning of the season, the cold feels crisp and new and intoxicating. The first snow flakes look cleansing and bright, and roads and cars aren't yet covered in that awful salty, sandy, dirty sludge that seems to epitomize the February doldrums to me. It feels like a new world is beginning each December, and I like that.

Besides, I've been ready for November to be done for awhile now. It was not my best month ever.  :P

In other news, last night, I walked out in the cold and the dark to see a reading downtown. The two authors were local-ish (native Kansans from a town an hour away). One wrote essays and the other poetry, and they were both underwhelming. They did not write excellent or surprising or even terribly engaging literature, but I tried to listen to it with a better attitude than I used to. In the past, I've been a terrible literary hater; I've gotten angry over the success of poems and essays and even people that I don't like or respect. But that's a cheap and miserly way to live, and it certainly wasn't making me any more successful when I ripped on others' work.

These days, I'm trying to remember that all literature, even literature that I *ahem* disagree with, was written by someone who was doing his/her best to write, to survive, and to be happy. All literature is written by someone who is trying to learn his/her own song and sing it, and their bravery, persistence, and stubborn individuality is something to respect, even if the writing itself irks me.

Random Five for Friday

1. Dead Tired. I've been planning to write a blog post all this week, but I didn't expect for my travel hangover to last quite so long. I have been beat. My trip to State College was fantastic, as was my family reunion in Marion, but they made for a whole lot of traveling and not a whole lot of sleeping. So my post in praise of Susan Orlean will just have to wait until next week!
2. Spicy Food. This week, I attempted vegetarian chili, which is basically a bunch of beans with some spices and tomatoes thrown in. The problem with vegetarian chili is that meat adds a good deal of fat and flavor that is indispensable to the whole chili experience. I was forced to turn to lots and lots of red chili flakes to make my chili appetizing. My taste buds have been feverishly thrilled all week, but every day my stomach growls at me and says, WTF, Lesley! Are you kidding me? MORE of this stuff? Ahhh! Stop it!!! Where's the Tums?!
3. Good Reads. I finished two really excellent books this week: The Art of Losing (a collection of poems on mourning that I wrote about here), and Jonathan Franzen's How to Be Alone. I picked up Franzen's essay collection because I was curious about his writing, but I didn't want to commit to taking part in the Freedom "best novel of the century" hoopla.Though many of the book's essays are about reading and the state of the novel, How to Be Alone consists largely of an old-fashioned curmudgeon's complaints about modern society (its disinterest in serious fiction, its mindless passion for new technologies, its meaningless passion for privacy, etc.). It can easily be read as a work of late adopter naysayer-ism that frequently contradicts itself, but Franzen is so brilliant in his thinking and so adept in his prose styling that you're willing to growl and harrumph along with him, just for the pleasure of spending time with his voice. The collection made for surprisingly good airport reading material, and it's convinced me to put The Corrections on my to-read list.
4. Writing & Wranglin'. The last week's busyness has put a serious crunch on my writing time, so the writing has been going slowly. I'm in the process of radically revising my chapbook, and I'm trying to work my way through a new process of drafting and revising. In grad school, I had to write fast to keep up with the pace of workshop (I wrote one poem a week for years!). Now, I'm trying to write more slowly and to think more deeply. Instead of playing with images and making up the substance as I go along, I'm trying to clarify the ideas and feelings I want to express before I start worrying about image and diction and line length. I think that this will be an excellent method in the long run, but it's trying right now. Writing more truthful, more emotional, more intellectually interesting poetry is hard. I'm trying for a sort of clarity that is extremely difficult to achieve. So, like one of my Penn State MFA Reading Series t-shirts says, I "Just Keep Pounding Those Keys!"
5. Wedding Weekend. Last night, one of my third cousins got married. She's having her wedding reception in Abilene this weekend, and I'm going with my mom. Though I'm not thrilled to be traveling for the second weekend in a row, I'm really looking forward to it. Charlie's stepfather once told me that the quality of a wedding always depends on the feeling between the couple. If the couple is joyful and deeply in love, the wedding celebration will feel joyful and easy and sincere. Consequently, I expect this weekend's celebration to be an excellent one. :)

"Gaity, or Truth in Sheep's Clothing"

I got home from a reading a few hours ago. There were five readers: three fiction writers, one non-fiction writer, and one poet turned non-fiction-ist. The reading was fine--it was a little long, a little dry, and in a restaurant filled with smoke from an over-heated pizza oven--and only one writer really stuck out to me. She was one of the non-fiction writers, and she was writing about growing up as an evangelical Christian in a public high school.

In most ways, her writing was no different from her peers': her language flowed smoothly, her scenes were rife with clear imagery and distinct characters, and her prose felt polished and lively. But she differed from everyone else because she made the audience laugh, and not in a cruel way. Even though she was writing about the misadventures of an overeager young girl fumbling her way toward an identity outside of her religion, she was tender about her past self and her former friends. She acknowledged that her audience might not identify with her upbringing or her past beliefs, but she never sacrificed her past self cruelly, selling herself out for cheap satire. Her essay worked because she was unashamed of her past and because she treated her past self gently, with great kindness and great levity.

Her writing made me think of Dostoevsky, a little bit, and of Michel de Montaigne and Jane Austen in that she was capable of telling her story with both levity and compassion, something which is exceedingly rare. The other readers read very nicely crafted pieces, but they took themselves awful seriously. There was a lot of imagery and profound symbolism in their pieces, but not a lot of joy.

I've been thinking about the importance of gentle humor because of E.B. White's excellent One Man's Meat. Early in the book, White describes "a certain writer, appalled by the cruel events of the world" who has "pledged himself never to write anything that wasn't constructive and significant and liberty-loving."

"I have an idea that this, in its own way, is bad news. [. . .] Even in evil times, a writer should cultivate only what naturally absorbs his fancy, whether it be freedom or chinch bugs, and should write in the way that comes easy. [. . .] In a free country it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty. Only under a dictatorship is literature expected to exhibit an harmonious design or an inspirational tone. A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom--he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold. His gravest concern is lest gaiety, or truth in sheep's clothing, somewhere gain a foothold, lest joy in some unguarded moment be unconfined. I honestly don't believe that a humorist should take the veil today; he should wear his bells night and day, and squeeze the uttermost jape, even though he may feel that he should be writing a strong letter to the Herald Times."

 After a long stint in graduate school, where satire and self-deprecation often took the place of true gaiety and good-humoredness, I'm a little more appreciative of writers who, like E. B. White and tonight's reader, can combine humor and kindness to get to the heart of whatever they're after.

Sunday Randos: A List!

1. I've finished my first week at the new job! Each day, my thoughts swung from "I can totally do this! Yay me!" to "Oh, God, I'm lost and confused and destined to be a failure at life. I'm going back to the cafe!" So far, it seems like the biggest part of my job is learning the ropes. I'm going to have to learn how to navigate KU's staggeringly complicated bureaucracy, learn all the quirky little software programs I'm working with, and learn the myriad tasks and procedures associated with running an academic department at KU. It's intimidating, but I know that (I hope that?) I'll eventually figure everything out!
2. I finally finished Middlemarch. The end was a little disappointing--the happy ending felt out of sync with Eliot's world--but I'm glad I stuck with it. The plot really picked up around page 500 so that the last 300 pages went quickly. For all the time Eliot spent on small-town dynamics and politics, the novel was ultimately about marriage and the way people perceive themselves and people's expectations about their lives. It wasn't the best novel I've ever read, but it was definitely thought-provoking, and I think it will stay with me a long time. Here's Virginia Woolf's brilliant quote from the back cover of my edition: George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment. Briefly, it meant that the novel ceased to be solely a love story, an autobiography, or a story of adventure. It became, as it had already become with the Russians, of much wider scope."
3. I haven't done a thing about the fact that I'm moving to an apartment in Lawrence in a couple of weeks. I should start packing, but it doesn't seem real yet! I walk past my apartment building every day on my walk to work, and I gaze at it longingly. I can't wait to move in and decorate it and start living my life there. But it won't seem real until I'm holding the keys and my cat's litter box is moved in!
4. Speaking of kitties, I've been cat-sitting this weekend. The parents are in Virginia for my cousin's graduation, so I'm feeding the cats, picking up the newspapers, and taking out the garbage. It's strange to be in Olathe, but it's made for some good shopping. I love New York & Co. way more than I should!
5. I've been writing over my lunch hour at work. I like it a lot: it's nice to be creative for a half hour every day, especially in the midst of all my phone calling and spreadsheet wrangling. But it's also making me want to buy a netbook, so I could type on a tiny little laptop instead of scribbling in a notebook!
6. One of my inspirations these days in One Man's Meat, a memoir-y essay collection by E.B. White. Each brief chapter covers a month in his life and contains a handful of tiny essays about anything and everything, from chickens that lay too many eggs to the approach of World War II. There's a sense of happiness and relaxation to White's writing that's very appealing. The book is not entirely memoir, and it's nothing like the research-based nonfiction so common today. It's full of good-natured, free-form ramblings in the style of Michel de Montaigne. Reading White's book feels like chatting with an old friend who is candid and funny and smart and true, and it's a wonderful thing to read at lunch before I start my own writing: it makes me feel as if writing naturally is the best and easiest path to writing well.

 E. B. White with his evil and affectionate dachshund Fred.

AWP 2010

This year, AWP did for me exactly what a professional conference should do: it made me feel refocused, motivated, and, in the words of Gary Snyder, famous poet and environmental activist, "way stoked."

In years past, I've spent a lot of time in AWP's panels on writing and pedagogy. The AWP panels are one hour and fifteen minutes long, and they cover a wide range of topics. You can hear talks there on anything from charming magazine editors and teaching poetry in high schools to discussing trauma in a workshop setting and writing effective sex scenes.

This year, I didn't force myself to sit through too many panels. I went to three talks (one on on-line journals, another on writers collectives, and a third on careers in the literary arts), one reading (Anne Waldman and Gary Snyder), and I went to the book fair. The panels ranged from so-so to fascinating, and Gary Snyder was a let-down while Anne Waldman lived up to her reputation as a "human dynamo" with a highly theatric reading of her poems. And, yes, she was wearing one heck of a green and fuchsia scarf!

 Anne Waldman

But, as always, the book fair was my favorite part. It's always an overwhelming/disheartening/inspiring experience due to its size: I would guess there were nearly 250 tables packed into a single warehouse of a room. 

One half of the book fair.

Some of the exhibitors were literary journals, some were large publishers, and some were writing programs. But my favorite tables were the small presses, many of which were publishing visually gorgeous books of fiction and poetry. This year, there were more handmade publications than I'd ever seen before, beautiful books printed on vintage hand presses and bound by hand individually. I found myself lusting after hand-printed calendars of typographic art and chapbooks covered with reclaimed leather covers and literary journals bound in strips of carpet insulation!

The other half of the book fair.

What makes the book fair overwhelming is its size and the impossibility of really examining every book and talking to every interesting publisher. What makes it disheartening is seeing the thousands and thousands of new books printed each year, most of which are purchased and read by very few readers (selling 700 copies of a book of poetry is considered pretty successful). It can make you realize what a saturated, competitive market writers work in, and it can make you wonder whether the world really needs another book ever again.

But it's inspiring to see so many people writing, designing, and printing based purely on love. These people don't hope to turn a profit--even big publishers rarely do that any more. They just hope to create something beautiful and have it picked up by a few admirers. It reminds you what we all write creatively for, anyway: not for money (though it would be nice), not for fame (though it would be fantastic), but because we love literature, enough to travel to Denver and spend too much money on literary magazines and limited edition chapbooks!

Besides the book fair, my favorite part of AWP was meeting people. At past AWPs, I slipped soundlessly through the book fair and never asked any questions at panels. This year, I made the effort to meet my local writing community. I talked to one of the New Letters publishers, shook hands with an NEA program officer, met a slew of Lawrence's Bathtub Writer's Collective members, and even encountered a poet-programmer while chatting with a table full of on-line publication editors. 

I wasn't networking to find a job or create "business" connections. I networked to meet my local writing community and to experience the pleasure of speaking to enthusiastic people. Meeting these new people and getting excited about their ideas was almost--almost!--as rewarding as spending time with old friends from grad school who love writing as much as I do.

Me, Alita, and Stephanie.

My grad school friends and I drank excellent Colorado microbrews, talked about critical approaches to the memoir, bitched about poets who can't read their own poems out loud, and hoofed all over downtown Denver together, and that alone was worth the price of admission!

So, Washington, D.C., watch out! You're next!

AWP

I'm off to the AWP conference in Denver for the weekend! I'll update here when I get back. Expect pictures, poetry reading reviews, and Denver sightseeing stories!

I'm most excited to see this lady: Anne Waldman, famous Beat-era poet and one of my personal favorites from college. I'm certain that she'll be wearing a scarf at her reading, and I'm certain that I'll want one of my own afterward!

Best wishes, folks--I'll be back soon.

100th Post!

To celebrate my 100th post on Poems About Oranges, I wanted to celebrate reading instead of writing. One of the unexpected outcomes of starting a blog is that I've become a fan and avid reader of many blogs that I didn't know existed a few months ago. Now, I read them daily.

Some of my favorites are funny (Cake Wrecks), and some are smart (The Best American Poetry), but my favorite blogs are those that combine funny and smart with a few strong dashes of warmth and personality--Easy Street and That Looks Cozy, I'm looking at you!


Thank you readers, for sticking around, for prodding me to update, and for commenting. And thank you fellow bloggers, for giving me something to look forward to when I open my laptop each morning!

Poem a Day: Days 3 & 4

The first three days were easy.

Today, not so much.

That's how it always goes. Even though I've never tried to write a poem daily before, I wrote four or five days a week in grad school. So I'm very familiar with sitting down and staring out the window for ten minutes without having a single idea I can stand putting on the page. I know this feeling all too well: the ennui, the dull laziness, and the sense that I have nothing to say and have never had anything to say before.

But I persevered. And that's the whole point, right?  : P

Yesterday's poem is about a pest-infested shed. Today's poem is about the Lazy River water "ride" at Worlds-of-Fun. Enjoy!

---------------

Day 3

"you find it everywhere, 

behind hollow walls, wriggling

between rotted boards, dangling

from exposed beams--life! 

dark-eyed, glinting things: 

a sea of insects glittering

in soft-sheen shells . . ."

---------------
Day 4

"parched maple leaves clinging to the damp tube,
a rosy pall of sunburn blushing down your stomach
as you bump and swirl your way into the future
on sheer, blue, burbling, bleachy waters . . ."


Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010

A Poem a Day

I'm finally done teaching my literature course (at least until the next session begins), and I've finally settled into a schedule at the cafe. So what does this mean for this blog, you may ask?

Fortunately, I'll be writing here more often, baking more often, job hunting more vigorously, and writing a poem a day!

Writing a poem a day is not a new idea. I first heard of it while researching David Lehman's The Daily Mirror (1996) for a class in college. He wrote the entire collection by writing a poem a day for 140 days. Some poems, he has said, were awful and were scrapped, but some were good enough to be published in the final manuscript.

Lehman's idea has spread rapidly since then, and writing 31 poems in a month is popular enough to have caught the attention of Writer's Digest and to have inspired at least one independent web site supporting the project.

So I've decided to finally try my hand at the Poem a Day project as a way to make good use of my new free time. And, folks, I'm depending on you all to keep me honest! So I'll post a few lines from each day here. (I can't post whole poems in case I want to publish them elsewhere later!) The lines will be rough, I promise you, and they may not make much sense on their own, but the whole point of the project is to create frantically, joyfully, and consistently, all without paying too much attention to my internal editor!

So here are the inaugural lines of the PoemsAboutOranges Poem A Day project. I hope you enjoy reading along with me in this process!

"This time of year, geese fly overhead,
soft white bellies, brown-black wings,
trailing out flawed V's, branching figures,
aerial charts like family trees . . ."

Copyright Lesley Owens, 2010

Encouragement

Hi, folks! No, this blog isn't abandoned, just going through a dry spell. I've been working a lot (I put in eleven hours at the bakery today). Once I get my class finished up next week and slog through my first 40-hour work week at the cafe, I'll surely be on track!

I've had some good news this week: The Raven Chronicles, a literary magazine based in Seattle, Washington, nominated one of my poems for a Pushcart Prize! I'm very, very excited about it, and so proud that they thought my poem worthy of being one of the few they nominated in 2010.

It's given me a big boost of confidence when I've been feeling low about my writing. I've managed to write about one poem a month since I've been out of grad school, and I haven't even revised those. I've been seriously doubting my commitment to poetry, but this nomination has made me feel rejuvenated and ready to gear up for another round of poem submissions. So watch out Post Office--I'm headed your way with a big stack of manilla envelopes!

I recently stumbled across Kate Monahan's blog MFA Confidential. In her most recent post, she writes about the vital importance of encouragement in a writer's life. I completely agree with her: I remember every single time that a professor, workshop member, or friend told me that, yes, I could do this, that I could write something worthwhile. And every time it's happened, it's come at just the right time, just when I felt like giving up.

Monahan quotes Anatole France at the end of her post: “Nine tenths of education is encouragement." I believe that this is absolutely true, especially when teaching writing. I've made the decision to never tell a writer "No" in workshop, and I would never tell a beginning composition writer "No" as they worked on a paper, nor would I tell a beginning reader of literature "No" when they first start trying to interpret a short story. I've seen enough students come into my classroom morose and unwilling, convinced that they "are just no good at writing." They cannot learn if they do not believe themselves to be capable of learning, or capable of writing cogently. As a teacher, I try to tell my students "Yes" as much as I can, to focus on the positive, to show them how they can build on their natural talents and what they already know.

Anyway, that's my pedagogical rant for the day. Now, I'm off to bed: gotta get up and sell them bagels tomorrow!  ;)

"We Have Entered Eternity": Louise Gluck'sThe Wild Iris, Part Two

I finally finished Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris, and I'm completely in love with it. I've already written a bit about it here, but after finishing the volume, I'm even more astonished by Gluck's skill. This is a book that could stand up to Keats or Dickinson or Frost, the kind of book that I think will be read and loved for a very long time.

Here are my reasons for being a total fangirl about it:

1. As a book, it's masterfully conceived. Gluck obviously planned it out very carefully and thought a great deal about her premise and how the poems would speak to each other. The book begins with the first flowers of early spring and ends with the death of the last of summer's blossoms. Each poem is told from the point of view of either a human speaker, God, or a flower. The human speaker calls out to God to be reassured of His existence, God chastises the human about her deafness, and the plants speak to the human to complain about her foolishness.  The book is tight and precise, and I wonder at Gluck's ability to get a whole collection out of such a limited space (a summer garden) and such a limited subject matter.
2. Speaking through flowers? Is she kidding? The book's premise sounds implausible and frivolous and silly, but Gluck makes it feel totally natural. I took the flowers perfectly seriously and found the poems to be surprising, moving, and profound.
   
3. Gluck makes death new again. The fear of death is an ancient theme, and the inability to connect with God is just as old. But by speaking through one garden, a few clumps of flowers, and certain slants of light, Gluck makes the human speaker's angst entirely new again. Her ability to reinvigorate this fear is astonishing.
   
4. The poems are wonderfully simple. Each poem is brief, perfectly executed, and centered around one concept, one nugget of truth. The rest of the poem simply sets up the speaker's voice and prepares us for the poem's real crux. Gluck gives her poems space to breathe, space to luxuriate in their own meaning. I think it takes a lot of skill, self-restraint, and confidence to write this way.
5. This book makes me want to write. Not all poetry does this to me: some poems cow me with their brilliance, some poems bore me with their dullness, but it's a rare and wonderful poem that inspires me to pick up my own pen and write. Gluck is the kind of poet that other poets love to read, and I'm no longer surprised that this book has been recommended to me by so many writers.
   

I could go on and on. I liked the book so much that as soon as I finished it, I turned right back to the first page and started reading it again! But I'll stop with the praising and share a few of Gluck's poems here.

These two poems are the last in the book. After all of the human speaker's yearnings for God, after all of His failed attempts to be heard, after all of the fear of death lurking at the edges of these poems, everything comes to a head here: the flowers die, and it seems that God cannot, or chooses not to, hear them.

These poems are beautiful in themselves, but the impact they have at the end of the volume is astonishing: the phrases "your child's terror" and "we have entered eternity" leap from the final pages, chilling the reader with the harsh reality of mortal life and death.


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The Gold Lily

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Taken from Plagiarist.com

As I perceive
I am dying now and know
I will not speak again, will not
survive the earth, be summoned
out of it again, not
a flower yet, a spine only, raw dirt
catching my ribs, I call you,
father and master: all around,
my companions are failing, thinking
you do not see. How
can they know you see
unless you save us?
In the summer twilight, are you
close enough to hear
your child's terror? Or
are you not my father,
you who raised me?

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The White Lilies

By Louise Gluck

From The Wild Iris

Taken from Plagiarist.com

As a man and woman make
a garden between them like
a bed of stars, here
they linger in the summer evening
and the evening turns
cold with their terror: it
could all end, it is capable
of devastation. All, all
can be lost, through scented air
the narrow columns
uselessly rising, and beyond,
a churning sea of poppies--

Hush, beloved.  It doesn't matter to me
how many summers I live to return:
this one summer we have entered eternity.
I felt your two hands
bury me to release its splendor. 

Learning HTML

When I was in junior high, my gifted class teacher was always trying to make her students into amateur computer programmers. In 1996, she thought that computers were The Future (and she was right, of course), so she thought that all of us smart little kiddies should go out into the world and become rich computer programmers. She made us all spend one period a week writing DOS programs on an ancient green screen Apple computer.

It looked something like this.

I staunchly repressed any memory of this time of my life, except for how much I hated it.

But I've been learning HTML for a few weeks now, and, surprisingly, I sort of love it. HTML stands for "HyperText Markup Language," and it's the language that most Web pages are written in. If you've never messed with it, it sounds really impressive and complicated and fancy, but it's really not. It's fun and pretty intuitive, once you know the basics of the language.

I like learning HTML for a few reasons. First, the book I'm using is great. Charlie recommended it: it's called Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML. It teaches you all the basics of HTML, CSS, and XHTML, and it does so with lots of exercises, frequent repetition, plenty of diagrams, and a writing style that's humorous and casual.

The awesome Head First HTML book I'm using.

The Head First books are supposed to be "Brain-Friendly" and to make learning a new programming language intelligible, fun, and easy. Fortunately, their system is definitely working for me--I'm actually remembering everything I learn from week to week (which is more than I can say for all those history classes I took in high school).

Second, learning HTML makes me appreciate the complexity of the Internet. I've used the Web for so long that I take most of it for granted. But the more I learn about HTML and the quirks of Web browsers, the more I respect the people who make really good Web sites. To write a good Web site, I think that a programmer has to be both compulsively detail-oriented and capable of planning ahead and seeing the big picture. It's hard to do, and they definitely get paid well for a reason!

Third, learning HTML is a completely different form of mental exercise. I'm used to crafting words into texts that are flexible and depend on themselves for their internal logic. For example, there are no rules about what makes a good poem; the only rule is that each word and line in the poem must contribute to the whole, that each part must follow the rules and structure that the poem creates for itself. So poetry (and most forms of writing) is about relative harmony, not correctness.

My HTML for one of the Head First exercises.

Writing HTML, on the other hand, is about perfect correctness according to what the Web browser expects. Every element and tag has to be correct and without typos (leaving out a single < or " or = or / can make a whole element fail!). It's strict, and I love that. I enjoy it in the same way that I enjoy doing math: it doesn't come easily to me, but it does make me think in a new way, which gives my mind a healthy workout.

Fourth, I love the excitement of loading a new page into my browser. I never know if it's going to look right or not. I type a change into my editor, click the save icon, open the page in my Web browser, and then wait with baited breath: Will it load? Will the images appear? Will the link be active?

One of my Head First projects. Each image is a thumbnail that links to another page.

Having a page open perfectly is kind of a rush. It's like magic: you write this file that looks like a jumble of half-words and symbols, but when the page loads, it transforms into a real live Web site. I love it, and Charlie (who works full-time as a Web developer) says he feels the same way when he tests a site for the first time.

Right now, I've only made exercises out of the Head First book, and I haven't dabbled in style at all. But who knows? Maybe one day I'll get to experience to rush of making an entire Web site that's functional and pretty!

NEXT BLOG

Have you ever noticed the little NEXT BLOG link at the top of Blogspot's pages? Each time a blog page is loaded, Blogspot connects the NEXT BLOG link to a random site from their network, and it links to a different page for every new page load.

I'm a big fan of the NEXT BLOG link. Clicking my way through strangers' posts is surprisingly fun. I can't understand at least a third of them--it seems that Blogspot has quite a user base in South America--and I rarely read any of the posts closely. But it's interesting to see what other people blog about.

So far, I've seen three main types of posters on Blogspot:

1. Families: Many young couples are using Blogspot to record their children's early years. These blogs always involve lots of pictures and cute stories. Maybe these couples live far away from their extended families, or maybe the mother or father just feels the need to write and focuses on their family for content. Either way, it's a great way to record the kind of events and images that are so often lost to children because they're stored only in memory. These kids will be able to go back and look at their parents' posts for the rest of their lives (or at least as long as Google stays in business), and that's pretty amazing.
   
2. Crafters: I've seen everything out there, from hand-made cards to belly dancing costumes to crocheted doilies. Sometimes the bloggers are selling their wares, and sometimes they just like to write about what they've made, often in excruciating detail. But I sort of love these sites. They're usually maintained by quietly passionate women trying to share something they love. A blog gives them the chance to communicate their passion to the blogosphere, even if no one ever buys their hand-painted porcelain kittens figurines.
3. Travelers: Blogging must be an inexpensive, convenient way to let others know you're alive and having fun traveling through exotic lands (assuming, of course, that those exotic lands have the Internet). These sites always have lots of pictures, usually of wild looking foliage, towering buildings, and blurry-faced people in fleeces and sunglasses. Though these blogs are the most exotic, they're also the dullest: the scenery is always beautiful in the same flat way, and the experiences of travel (wonder, delight, fatigue, and alienation) aren't terribly interesting unless you're the one feeling them (which is why everyone loathes looking at everyone else's photo albums). But I know that these sites must be fascinating to their owners and to their friends and family, and they show how blogs can used to communicate directly with loved ones.
   

What I like best about the NEXT BLOG button is that it reminds me how many passions are out there. No matter how much I love poetry or advertising or baking, there are a million other bloggers who would pass my site by just because we're not passionate about the same thing. It's humbling. Whenever I see someone else's 2,000-word post about their new hand-knitted baby booties, I'm reminded not to be such an old snarkster about everything. I'm sure that the bootie-knitter feels just as flummoxed by my love of poetry as I am about her fascination with tiny feet.

Blog browsing reminds me that everyone loves something, from the smallest thing to the biggest, and that exploring that love through writing is what really matters.

"What Elements You Blend"

Last night, standing in a long, tortuous line at the Wal-Mart pharmacy, I thought to myself, "Maybe I should become a pharmacist! Clearly, there are not enough of them in the workforce. Why else would this line be so infernally slow?"

This idea isn't as crazy as you might think. I've always been good at chemistry. I usually had the top grade in my high school AP chemistry class, and I continued to do well in chemistry, biology, and genetics courses at KU. For a few years, I even wanted to be a chemistry major. I was fascinated by how many billions of chemicals and compounds existed in the world, and how they always reacted together in the same ways. Combine three white powders, add heat, and boom! You get a blue-black chunk of soot. Each reaction is reassuringly reliable and completely mysterious at the same time: there is no chance that the three powders will make something other than the blue chunk, but, looking at the powders separately, it seems impossible that they could conceal such a surprising product. So, to me, chemistry seemed both magical and mechanical, awe-inspiring and comfortingly sane.

This mysterious reliability is the same reason I love to bake. Baking is essentially chemistry: if you mix ten ingredients together in the correct proportions and add heat, the results will yield a delicious dessert that looks like none of its component parts. In the absence of human error, baking is as regular as the seasons, as breath, as hunger.

While my first poetry workshop at KU didn't erase my love of chemistry, it certainly overwhelmed it. Where chemistry was intriguing but tamable, writing felt alchemical and downright wild. Writing a successful poem was a rush because it was so much more difficult than following a set of instructions to reach a certain chemical product. Language is just so wily, so slippery and difficult that a good poet can be unsuccessful for 29 days out of a month only to succeed outrageously on the 30th day.

Besides the artistic thrill of it, I liked how immediate literature felt, how it could change a reader's life almost instantly. I know that chemistry makes lives better (I've seen your commercials, Du Pont!), and that there is meaning to be found in understanding the minute workings of the natural world. But reading a poem makes you feel something right away, though even the fastest pills take a half hour to enter the bloodstream. Besides, without pleasure and understanding, how fulfilling is a healthy but unexamined life? And so I set myself to the task of gathering words and images, mashing them together in a few hundred syllables, and hoping for an explosion.

Among all these thoughts of chemistry and poetry, of transformation and reliability, I thought of Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star." It's always been one of my favorite poems. I love the speaker's tonal modulations, how his voice shifts smoothly to match the popular mob and the distant star. But I also love Frost's underlying message that, no matter how much we uncover about the mysteries of the natural world, nature's ancient archetypal meanings still loom large in our minds. What we know about stars changes every day, but starlight's essential human importance--its offerings of perspective and patience--cannot be changed by any fact.

---------------

Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Poems of Love, and Coffins?

A friend of mine is getting married in October, and she asked me to read a poem at her wedding. Since she first brought this up a month ago, I've been flipping my way through anthologies trying to find something just right.

I spent this afternoon at Borders skimming the pages of every love-themed anthology I could find (and there are a lot of them). I kept thinking I was hitting gold: I'd start reading, and the poem would be aurally enchanting yet plainspoken, passionate yet safe for church, modern yet without ennui, and romantic without being too flowery. I'd be ecstatic, and a lump of triumph and wedding-time goodwill would start to balloon in my throat--

And then I'd hit the last stanza. Gah! Each poet had to slip something unpleasant in there at the end. Sometimes he left me with a surprise ending that savaged my belief in happy marriages, or she would mournfully reveal that her lover was long gone and that nothing, especially love, could ever last.

The most common trick, however, was to end with death. Not the death of one of the lovers, per se, just the mention of death. Even a hint was enough to kill (har!) my interest. Poets are always going on about how love can stand up to age, decay, and mortality, but that means that they end up writing an awful lot about death when they claim to be writing about love. For example, take Shakespeare's oft-quoted Sonnet 116:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no, it is an ever-fixèd mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his heighth be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

The opening is gorgeous, iconic: "love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds." Beautiful! It's about the steadiness of love, how it never wavers--fantastic marriage material! But Shakespeare just has to stick in those unsettling images of the "bending sickle" and "the edge of doom." These images don't really embody the joyful mindset I'm going for; I don't want anyone watching that wedding to see sickles looming over the flower arch.

Or how about Kenneth Rexroth's Songs of Love, Moon, & Wind? It's a gorgeous little book of translations of Japanese lyrics, each of which is brief, imagistic, romantic, and as refreshing as running your hand through a cool creek. After skimming the table of contents, I naturally flipped to the following poem:

Married Love
By Kenneth Rexroth
 

You and I
Have so much love,
That it
Burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Molded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mold again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt.
In death we will share one coffin.

Perfect title, terrible poem for my occasion! I was willing to give the unexpected metaphor a try, to let the clay have its chance--and then he drops the "one coffin" on us in the last line. Kenneth, just like Shakespeare, you are not helping!

This happened so frequently that I started to look for the catch in each poem. This, in turn, got me thinking of how rare it is to find a poem that is a perfectly sincere expression of love or joy or praise. I think this is because poets don't really write out of pure emotion like Wordsworth argues. We write out of complication, which means that if we write about our emotions, we pick ones that have been somehow perverted, thwarted, or made to fail (which is why so many of the love anthologies included special sections on loss and lovers' quarrels).

To me, conceiving of a poem isn't like sitting down to express myself, it's more like scratching a mental itch. I sense something strange or paradoxical or just plain tangled up in my head, and I have to figure it out on paper. I don't know if that's how other poets do it, but I do know that finding a wedding poem for my friend that is beautiful, meaningful, and positive will be a challenge.

But at least I get to read a lot of great poems about death in the process.

"Writing Is Just Thinking on Paper"

I spent yesterday morning revising a writing sample for a job application. As usual, I found myself struggling to keep my word count down. Wordiness is my great flaw as a writer; I tend to compose long complex sentences with too many words and too many ideas. I know, now, to be wary of my own prolixity, to be generous with my periods and quick with the delete button, regardless of whether I'm writing a blog post, a poem, or a cover letter.

Every writer has something they struggle with, no matter who they are or what they're writing. I think that the first step to being a good writer is psychological: it's accepting that writing is always a struggle and knowing that you have weaknesses as well as strengths, bad writing habits as well as innate talents.

Most beginning writers don't understand that writing is hard, hard work. The 18-year-olds I taught at Penn State liked to believe that writing was anything but struggle and revision and an uphill battle against language itself. In my composition and creative writing courses, there were a few expressions of this resistance that I heard again and again:

1) "Writing cannot be taught." Usually, this one reared its ugly head in creative writing courses and was used as an excuse to ignore constructive criticism. Because my writing has been wonderfully improved by reading great writers, listening to the advice of my brilliant professors, and scouring pages and pages of feedback from my workshop classmates, I'm almost offended when students tell me this. Not only does it devalue my teaching, but it seems to insult the many people whose knowledge, time, and generosity was invaluable to my development. In a classroom, learning how to write happens slowly, it's true, in small, nearly invisible increments that never seem like much on their own, but these changes add up over time. Besides, talent is just a starting point, not a free ride to success; you have to develop what you've been given, not stubbornly refuse to get better than you already are.

Maybe it's true that writing cannot be taught, at least not to an unwilling mind; it has to be actively learned by a dedicated student through practice, close observation, and the awareness that they can always be better.

2) "My writing is personal, and critiquing this poem is like criticizing who I am." People get all upset when you say critical things about their writing. I do it, you do it, we all do it. This happens because writing so often reflects our thoughts, and our thoughts are, in some way, ourselves. This means that our writing can sometimes feel like ourselves on paper. This thinking is natural, but it's also not true. Words are just words, and the way we put them together is a matter of instinct and accident and choice; our ideas can be expressed in a million different ways, and good writing is about finding the best possible way to do this. So if I tell a student that their story's plot doesn't make sense, that doesn't mean that they are illogical and faulty, just that their words aren't yet doing the work they were intended to do.

3) "Good writing just happens because of inspiration. If the writing isn't good, then I wasn't inspired and it's not my fault." First, "inspiration" can apply to ideas, but not to the medium expressing the ideas (in this case, words). If the sentences and images and paragraphs are crappy, you can't blame that on a lack of inspiration, just on a lack of revision. Second, even ideas usually need mental "revising"; that's what brainstorming, outlining, and thesis-writing are for: to take an idea from a hunch to a cohesive and persuasive argument. Do you think Shakespeare's plays just sort of happened? Or that the Declaration of Independence was knocked off in a half hour? Or that Descartes got to "I think, therefore I am" one afternoon while paddling in his bathtub?

That being said, there are a few instances of good writing spurting forth naturally. It happens to everyone once in a while, but even Allen Ginsberg spent months revising Howl and Jack Kerouac tinkered with On the Road before he published it. Anyone who's written for any length of time will tell you that revision is far more important than inspiration. I've revised this post about four times before I published it, and this is just a rant for a blog. So there.

4) "Judging writing's quality is subjective and based on personal opinion; therefore, no one should grade another person's writing." Most students who say this have never read really bad writing. In English classes, students are usually exposed to the best literature ever written, so they don't understand how difficult it is to read shoddily constructed, grammatically confusing, logically flimsy writing (only English teachers and publishers have to do that). Sentences with faulty grammar, paragraphs with convoluted structure, and essays with no clear message are all difficult to understand and remember. Any practiced reader can tell the difference between good writing (which calls little attention to itself because of its orderly, logical, elegant construction) and bad writing (which requires a furrowed brow and much rereading to understand).

I agree that preferring Virginia Woolf to William Faulkner is a matter of taste, but preferring Faulkner to the average freshman student's essay has nothing to do with opinion.

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I once got a fortune cookie that said "Writing is just thinking on paper," and, by God, I wish it was (wouldn't my life be easy then!). What this fortune cookie and most beginning writers don't understand is that writing is not quick or easy or a mirror-like reflection of the self. Heck, it's not even about pleasing oneself. Public writing (meaning classroom papers and published articles and creative writing) cannot be judged solely by the standards of its author. Writing is a social task, one that is dependent on the reader's comfort and understanding. No one would consider themselves a good conversationalist if their small talk amused them but always left their partner confused, annoyed, or bored, and the same is true for writing. Learning how to write well is not about practicing direct personal expression; it is about learning how to let go of your solipsism, to gain awareness of the world outside of you, and to express oneself carefully so that your readers can really hear what you have to say.