Category: Poems

Summer-Writing Recap

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As the fall semester begins this week at my university, I’m pondering my writing over the past 3 1/2 months. In my last post, I noted how difficult July was (in terms of doing any sustained writing). I’ve learned that teaching 2 summer classes will complicate a writing life. (Big surprise!)

In those 7 weeks between end of spring semester and the start of my summer classes, I did make some substantial progress on two projects.

“The Essay”

I signed a freelance contract to write a 1,500-word essay on a passage from Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost For His Highest. The essay will be included in an anthology that commemorates the 100th anniversary of Chambers’ death.

This essay was arguably one of the most difficult pieces I’ve ever worked on. Over May and June, I completed at least 5 drafts, most of them at my local Panera. I consumed many cups of coffee during the process.

Part of the reason that it was so difficult was that I’ve never written anything quite like this: part theological reflection, part personal narrative, and all aimed towards a broad audience.

Don’t misunderstand me: I like to be challenged as a writer. I enjoy taking on a writing project that stretches me. It was refreshing to revisit Chambers’ book and its impact upon me. However, it was also a relief to send the essay off to an editor.

I do count it as a type of “warm-up” piece towards a future project. (See below.)

“The Poems”

I received a summer research grant from  my university to work on a poetry manuscript, Your 21st-Century Prayer Life. Most days from early May through the end of June I wrestled with a different poem each day.

I would ponder a single word in a single line of a poem, change the word, ponder more, and then change the word back. Other mornings or afternoons, I would ponder a line break, play with different possibilities, and then change the line break back. Sometimes, my approach would involve the radical actions of cutting one line (or more), cutting one stanza (or more).

By mid-June, I had revised over 2/3 of the poems. I dug through the remaining poems, and weeded out another half dozen to arrive at 40, a good biblical number. By the end of June, the time had come for the organizing portion.

I spent a couple of hours one afternoon, a big glass of iced coffee within reach, and sorted through the poems, looking for connections among them. Single sheets of paper were scattered around my home office. I began gathering them in small bunches. I was trying to create a meaningful sequence, and I organized the manuscript around the church calendar and certain repeating subjects.

Once I had created that order and copied the drafts into one document, I sent it to an editor. Back in April I’d had a conversation with this editor while attending a faith-based writing conference. I had told him about my manuscript, what my plans were, and asked him if he’d be interested in seeing the project at some later date. He had said, yes.

He and I are now working on the manuscript. He has suggested I attempt certain types of revisions to the poems, and I understand where he’s coming from with those suggestions. I’m excited about the future of this project, seeing that some of these poems go back 9 years.

*

“What’s next?”

I’ll be working on these poems for several months.

I’ll draft and/or revise a short story (or two).

I’ll be writing more material for a book-length memoir.

That’s enough to keep me occupied, I think.

The Rhythms of Reading and Writing

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I’ve commented here before about how I tend to write in the genres I am currently teaching. Although I’ve written for a long time, I’m still discovering things about my writing process, as well as about my writing and reading rhythms. Over the last weeks, I’ve been thinking and analyzing. What trends and tendencies are there? How might I make better use of my time, to write smarter, to read smarter?

One conclusion, after doing some close study, is that when I’m tired, fatigued, or experiencing difficulty concentrating, it’s much easier to write prose. Trying to write poetry, whether drafting or revising, is near impossible and most often futile at these times. I believe part of this is because I’m thinking less precisely on each word, as I tend to do in poetry. (Of course at the later stages of a prose piece, I am scrutinizing each word, but not so much in earlier drafts.)

For instance, a few autumn’s ago, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. each weekday morning to write, more specifically to write short fiction. With the music of Hammock in my ears, with the large mug of hot black coffee, I was ready to enter those fictional worlds. I could pick up where I left off the day before as I gradually awoke to the real and the made-up worlds.

With reading prose–whether novels, short stories, or creative nonfiction–I am also able to enter into the worlds without much difficulty. There’s no warm-up necessary. I resume the novel, the memoir, or start the next short story with relative ease.  Again, this characteristic is a likely result of the way I read poetry, with such close attention.

I suppose it sounds as though I am a “sloppy” prose reader, and when I’m tired, perhaps that’s true. With prose, however, I do focus on the individual sentence, reading just as much for how the writer uses language.

These conclusions are already helping me as both a reader and writer. Poetry is best when I most alert, most awake, which generally means the mornings. I want and need to interact with the poem in as coherent a state as possible. Prose is for any time.

When I have the desire to write but the flesh is weak, I know I can stumble my way through the sentences, wandering through the rooms of paragraphs, not concerned about the hallways, knowing that I can (and will) return when I am alert to renovate the house of prose into a coherent design.

On the Pleasures & Demands of Poetic Form

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I’ve been busy revising poems as a part of a summer research grant from my university. That time so far has been satisfying and productive. Last week, for some reason, I found myself using certain forms in three of the five poems I revised. Two sestinas and a pantoum.

With one of those poems, I observed a pattern of repetition in initial draft–a way of turning over the subject of the poem–and I thought, maybe this could be a sestina. And then I thought, that’s too much work. Over an hour later, however, I had succeeding in creating a sestina. (More on that form in a moment.)

My impulse and attraction to so-called “fixed” forms might be a holdover from my Creative Writing: Poetry course this spring. Students wrote in a variety of poetic forms, including some that use repeating lines: villanelles, pantoums, triolets. There is usually much initial resistance to these particular forms (as was the case this semester), but students eventually came to appreciate (and even enjoy) working in these forms.

A pantoum uses four-line stanzas (quatrains), with the requirement that lines two and four of each stanza become one and three of the following stanza. The poem can be any number of quatrains (but a minimum of 3), and the poem’s first and third lines return as the second and fourth lines of the final stanza, usually inverted. Some pantoums rhyme abab, and some don’t use a rhyme scheme. Poets, as can be expected, vary in their strictness of repetition.

I’ve written a handful of pantoums, but it had been a long time since I had attempted a sestina, a 39-line poem that uses six repeating end words. These six words recur in different orders in sestets (six-line stanzas) throughout the poem, and the poem concludes with a tercet (three-line stanza) that includes two of the end words per line. Part of the fun of the form is figuring meaningful ways to use each end word seven times.

(Side note: I’ve learned that if you start tweeting about how you’re writing in certain poetic forms that someone might challenge you to a duel. A friend saw my tweet and promptly challenged me to a sestina duel, picking three of the six end words, allowing me to pick the other three.)

Writing in a “fixed” form that uses repetition is one of my favorite poetic approaches. The form provides a structure, an architecture. a set of boundaries. After all,  writing–whether poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, a blog post–involves a search for form in conjunction with a search for subject.

Just as any writer, I have subjects and images to which I regularly return, and writing in a form that requires repetition often helps me shape my ideas, my words. I find these forms (and other patterns and forms–sonnet, meter, syllabics) often enable me to explore my ideas more effectively. In these forms’ demands, I (paradoxically) find poetic freedom.

Now to finish up the draft of a new sestina. How am I going to use the word __________ repeatedly to end lines?