A Poet's Double Life

For poets working outside the literary world.

Category Archives: Take-Aways

Quotes about writing or work or other food for thought.


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June 2020: Lucille Speaks


The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010

My last post was on the day before Memorial Day–the day before the world witnessed George Floyd’s murderbefore their eyes, the day before Christian Cooper posted his video of a white women pretending to be frightened as she called the police to say that a Black man was threatening her when he simply wanted to watch birds in peace, six days after the arrest of the man who shot the video of Ahmaud Arberybeing chased and killed by white men because he was #joggingwhileblack, and 12 days after Breonna Taylor was killed while in her bed whenthe police entered without warning and fired multiple shots into her apartment.

I had been posting poems I read before lunch and before dinner on Facebook and Instagram following the Italian poet’s Franco Arminio’s first of 10 recommended domestic decalogues—ways to spend our time during lockdown. The first poem I posted (3/21), Emily Dickinson’s “My life closed twice before its close“ is part of the anthology The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing edited by Kevin Young. I bought this book on March 7th—the last time I got my nails done before the last social gathering I attended before stay-at-home became a thing. Little did I know how much I was going to need this book three weeks later.

I posted my first Lucille Clifton poem on April 21st—“blessing the boats”—a poem featured in the Academy of American Poets’ selection of “Shelter in Poems.” Their selection of Clifton’s work prompted me to pull out my copy of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, a 700+ page volume edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser. Her poems provided comfort during that month of isolation, and after recent events that reminded us that racism is alive and well in America, I found that her poems spoke all of the words we needed to hear and that anyone needed to say. So for the last 2+ months, I’ve let Mama Lucille speak.

BlessingtheBoats

blessing the boats by Lucille Clifton

Yesterday would have been Lucille Clifton’s 84th birthday. I had the honor of meeting her the year before she died at the Furious Flower Poetry Center. I posted the two poems she wrote about turning 70. I think it is only fitting to end this mark this mile of my stay-at-home marathon with her poem, The Last Day (p. 365):

we will find ourselves surrounded
by our kind          all of them now
wearing the eyes they had
only imagined possible
and they will reproach us
with those eyes
in a language more actual
than speech
asking why we allowed this
to happen          asking why
for the love of God
we did this to ourselves
and we will answer
in our feeble voices          because
because          because

 

~from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 (BOA Editions Ltd, 2012) edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser.

 


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Dear Husband: A Manuscript


Plate of french toast and fried egg in the foreground; open laptop in the background with cup of Earl Grey tea and teapot

My favorite poet’s brunch at my favorite Sunday brunch spot, Rifrullo Café

Yesterday, I attended the Colrain One-Day Informational Retreat on the poetry manuscript. The workshop leaders, Fred Marchant and Joan Houlihan, touched on all the topics they cover in their four-day retreats. Each participant brought a packet of six poems they thought represented their manuscript. Fred and Joan guided the discussion of the packet by asking us: Is the voice consistent? Do the poems feel like they represent the manuscript in style and tone? Throughout the day, we considered the emotional content holding the poems together and whether the chronology of the poems supported or detracted from the overall feeling the manuscript established for the reader. The latter third of the day, we discussed the specifics of creating a manuscript: length (15-30 pages for a chapbook; typically 60-70 pages for a full-length collection); finding publications and contests for manuscripts and individual poems; and establishing your presence in the poetry world. At the end, we did an exercise where we searched for good titles within our poems, and closed the day by reading some of our work.

The specific feedback for my poems made me feel good about the progress I’ve made since I took Kwoya Maples‘ advice to create a document and title it “manuscript.” The manuscript’s working title, “Dear Husband,” is a series of poems with the same title. I thought I needed to keep the set together, but Joan & Fred suggested that I use each “Dear Husband” poem as a structural device, and possibly as section dividers that provide the reader with emotional markers throughout the manuscript. This advice is probably going to be easier said than done. It did get me to think differently about the themes each “Dear Husband” poem addressed and the other poems that could amplify that theme. Overall, the workshop made me realize I needed to be more intentional about the order of poems, their themes, the variations on that theme, and taking opportunities to swerve and surprise the reader.

I’m about a third of the way to a full-length collection, and after this workshop, I feel more confident about where it is going. There’s a lot more writing ahead and a lot more brunches needed to support the work.


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Birthday Week


Screenshot on Thursday, April 12 at 4:12 am

April is my favorite month of the year because I celebrate my birthday. When I lived in North Carolina, I was known to take 2-10 days off and plan something grand like skydiving or hiking through three National Parks in Utah. Now that I work at a college, my birthday falls in the second half of the semester where we rush to get everything done before students and faculty scatter across the world for the summer. I can’t take vacation like before, but I can still celebrate all month. For my birthday, people were kind enough to buy me dinner, cook for me, join me at a Celtics game, dance with me, send me lovely cards & gifts, and wish me well via phone calls, Facebook messages, and texts.

That April is also National Poetry Month probably means I was destined to be a poet. It’s been great to share a photo of a poem that I love every day. People are being introduced to and reacquainted with the poems and poets that have touched me over the years. As the NYT article on Tracy K. Smith implies, poetry can certainly be the cure that ails us at this moment.

Here are the next 7 poems:

Day 9: A Small Needful Fact by Ross Gay

Day 10: Waiting by Yevgeny Yuvtushenko

Day 11: Harlem Dancer by Claude McKay

Day 12: Twenty Questions for Black Professionals by Pamela Taylor

Day 13: For Grace, After a Party by Frank O’Hara

Day 14: Angina Pectoris by Nazim Hikmet

Day 15: I, Too by Langston Hughes

 

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Poems for King Pluto


Pluto's Frozen Heart. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Pluto’s Frozen Heart. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

Last Thursday, I had the opportunity to write a poem in honor of the King of the Dwarf Planets—Pluto—as part of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences weekly Science Café talks. NASA Ambassador Shawn Bayle provided background about Pluto and the New Horizons mission that has been transmitting stunning images of the ninth rock from the Sun.

This event was the third time the museum had invited Living Poetry members to craft poems inspired by a science talk:

Pluto's Poetesses. Credits: Erin Osborn & Alice Osborn

Pluto’s Poetesses. Credits: Erin Osborn & Alice Osborn

I don’t think it was accidental that old King Pluto had four ladies scribing in his honor. He’s got that effect on women—ask Proserpina (aka Greek’s Persephone) and his largest moon, Charon, which is gravitationally locked in sync with Pluto’s orbit so that the two celestial bodies always face each other. Some other facts about Pluto and the New Horizons mission gathered from the talk and mentioned in the poems:

  • discovered by mistake by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 in search for Planet X presumed to exist beyond Neptune
  • first object identified in the Kuiper Belt
  • New Horizons took 9 years to get to Pluto; the gravitational boost from Jupiter reduced the time to get to Pluto by 5 years.
  • scientists discovered two of Pluto’s moons—Styx & Kerberos—after the New Horizons spacecraft launched in 2006

I enjoy writing planetary poems already but especially at these events because I can hear similar threads in each poem while noting each poet’s unique voice. I’ll share an expert from my poem here, “New Horizons Meets Planet X,” but be sure to watch the entire talk on YouTube (poets start about an hour into the video).

Feed me your data in bits
and bytes as we shimmy
in front of Neptune to soak

up the sun. I don’t see any rings
around you, so maybe we can
make a new moon or two.

 

 

 

 


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Over-Scheduled


photo-2I hate to look at my schedule for the next few weeks but I can’t help it. I carry around a calendar in my head.
This week is packed–coffee meet followed by tango on Monday, practice session for a art salon on Tuesday, last poetrySpark organizer meeting on Wednesday, lunch meet on Thursday, and flying to California for the Labor Day weekend on Friday. Full days at work are the unmentioned yet unavoidable backdrop to the landscape of the upcoming week. September is no better–VCFA alumni gathering, a practice session for the art salon, a wedding, poetry book club, softball double-header (watching), poetrySpark, and a milonga–all before the 15th! And did mention the work project I am leading will be in the report writing phase and having to fly out to a professional conference in Austin, TX the morning after the art salon? And I know what you’re going to say, Pam, when are you going to have time to write, revise, and submit poems? I have no clue. September I will take a break from tango classes, though I don’t know if work or poetry expand to fill that void. We’ll have to wait and see.


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Living the Double Life


“One of the saddest things is that the only thing that a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work. You can’t eat eight hours a day, nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.” ~ William Faulkner

Often I feel disconnected from other poets who teach for a living, are freelance writers, or who have a job where they work with words, language, books, or images all day. My job taxes my analytical mind. I spend a lot of time in meetings, in the field gathering evidence, or in front of my computer processing information and data to identify problems and generate ways to solve them. My colleagues know that I am a poet, and send me links to poetry contests and articles about poets they happen to come across. They are used to it, having spent two years creating workarounds for my two-week stints in Vermont in January and July. They know I am “poeting” when they see my closed office door during the lunch hour. But I don’t expect them to understand anything about sonnets and I don’t try to steer the break room conversation away from “So You Think You Can Dance.”

Most poets I meet are full-time poets. They recognize what I do as important, but clearly unrelated to anything literary. Some can recount the litany of odd jobs they’ve had while they were finding their way to their first book or teaching position. But most let their eyes glaze over; they don’t understand how I can do something other than poetry all day and call myself a poet. Unfortunately, these are the same people who are editing literary journal and magazines, and don’t seem to relate to the poems I write about life at the office. Thankfully, my poet-friends are sympathetic to the double life because many of them have to carve out time from work and family to continue to do what they love to do.

I started this blog to be a place for poets with non-literary careers. The people, who like me, have both feet firmly planted in their careers and the poetry world. We have to work hard to succeed on both fronts and don’t want to have to choose between them. As much as I would love to live on poetry alone, I truly appreciate having a job that gives me the freedom and flexibility to pursue poetry. I don’t have summers off and my job wouldn’t pay to send me to the AWP Conference as part of my professional development, but I can afford to pay for plane tickets to writer’s weekends. And the 9.16667 hours in vacation time I earn each month can be used however I want, even for another trip to Puerto Rico.

So on this Labor Day, I wanted to express my gratitude for my other career, the one that allows me to live the double life.