Today’s three-minute poem is a found poem inspired by the Winter Solstice post of one of my favorite bloggers, Sion Dayson at Paris (im)perfect:
Winter Solstice
The shortest day, the one
with the least
light and true darkness.
Now
the light starts growing
again.
Happy Solstice!
For the past three years, I’ve done the poem a day challenge for National Poetry Month in April. But at Cave Canem , I learned about 30-for-30–writing a poem a day in the months with 30 days (April, June, September, and November)—and decided to give it a try. Here are a five things from this experience:
#1: November is a good month for the challenge. It is far enough away from April (sorry, June) and not crazed with poetrySpark like September. Also, doing a PAD challenge in November is a show of solidarity with my prose-friends attempting to write 50,000 words in a during NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month. I’ve decided to do the challenge in April and November from now on.
#2: It is impossible to do a PAD challenge alone: Although I was only one among my local poet-friends doing the PAD challenge out of season, I discovered that the Poet Laureate of Rockland Maine was doing the challenge too. Also the numerous Facebook comments and email responses to the poems reminded me there were people who appreciated that I was writing poems—no matter the month.
#3: I don’t need prompts: Unlike the April PAD Challenge, I didn’t follow the Poetic Asides blog. Doing a challenge without prompts meant that I had to be open to the inspiration coming from anywhere: a photograph, an email from a friend during her vacation, or a story I heard
IPhone Poem “At the Bottom of Mercury”
on NPR. When I got stuck, I cultivated those seeds in my poetry notebook, scrolled through my iPhone notes, and found the time to write 5 poems from the list of poems I needed to write. It felt good to finally bring these ideas to life on the page. Now I have something to revise.
#4: I need to trust that a poem will come out. So much went on this month: the first week of November, my mind was preoccupied with the Hurricane Sandy aftermath in my hometown; the second week, a close friend of the family died and my mother and I attended the funeral; the third week, I caught a cold and had no energy for much of anything; and last week I had a good friend visiting from LA and spent almost every night out. Not to mention that Mercury went retrograde from November 6th-26th, making any form of communication that much more difficult. And I still managed to write a poem every day! You’d think I would have learned this lesson by now, but obviously I needed this experience to become a true believer.
#5: I need to share my poetry more: Typically I post the daily poem to my Facebook notes (which can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look) and send it via email to about 30 family and friends who don’t use Facebook. I’ve tended to keep the poems slightly hidden in case I want to publish them later. But I’m having a change of heart. Out of the poems I write during the challenge, I submit about 6 or 7 and they go through extensive revision before I send them out. I’m starting to so I feel okay about posting them to a wider audience, so come April, I will also post the poem-a-day here.
Most of my poems were born in a 4.3 X 6 inch Picadilly wire-bound journal I bought for $4.99 in the bargain section of Barnes and Noble. I used to have separate notebooks—one for thoughts, one for dreams, and sometimes a third for my to-do lists—but I’ve consolidated to one notebook for my entire life because everything is connected, isn’t it? I’ve saved over 30 notebooks, going back to 1999, though I didn’t always write in them on a regular basis. And of course, I’d love to say I write daily, but the reality is that I don’t. However, I bring my notebook everywhere, just in case a thought falls out and needs a safe place to land.
My current journal contains sayings of Buddha on every page as well as notes from my Spanish conversation class, three-minute poems, and the poems I need to write but haven’t finished. It’s also the vehicle to carry around photos, letters, and printouts of poems I’ve read at open mic events. A lot of what my notebooks contain may never become poems, they are the filler helping me to write my way to the next idea.
When I was in my MFA program, I came to the page with the expectation that what I was about to write would become a poem. With a packet of 3-5 poems due each month, I felt pressure to make every word count. Working full-time, I felt I couldn’t waste any thought, that every thought must eventually become a poem or else! Fortunately, my 3rd semester adviser, Sascha Feinstein, gave me this advice:
“Consider everything in your notebook to be seeds, and understand, too, that seeds need time to grow.”
Now I approach writing in my notebook as being just that—writing in my notebook. With what I learned about my writing process, I know there are good poems living in those pages even if I have to go back 2 or 3 notebooks to find them. What’s most enjoyable is reading about the events going on in my life around the poems, seeing the context in which each poetic thought grew, and understanding what might have influenced this word or that image.
A few weeks ago, I ran into Jan Parker sitting at a crowded bar right before the Erotic Poetry and Burlesque show started. After exchanging the usual long time no sees and you’re looking mighty fine tonights, Jan cut to the chase and asked the question I dread the most, “Are you writing?” Most people ask how is my writing, and I can satisfy their curiosity with a simple, “Fine.” If pressed for more specifics, I can always rattle off my litany of poem ideas to fend them off. But this was another writer asking me the question, and more importantly, Jan Parker, who has a finely tuned BS meter. So I told her the awful truth, “No, not really,” then gave her the run-down of my September–poetrySpark (of course) and the weeks of planning before the event, the upcoming football trip to Charlotte, and the wraparound weekend in Myrtle Beach with mom and then to Atlanta for a professional conference. And I did not fail to mention my day job and the 8 projects pulling me in exactly that many directions.
Jan held up a finger then dismissed my excuses with the shake of her salt and pepper mid-length bob, “You only need three minutes a day.”
“Three minutes?” I repeated incredulously. Three minutes is about how long it takes to write a poem on demand. Even I could do that. And maybe that would make me feel less guilty about not finding the 15 minutes in my day to write (as a former MFA advisor once suggested) or being able to get up earlier than the crack of dawn like Mary Oliver.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have not written for three minutes every day, but there has been at least one time each week when I’ve found time to put pen to page. Here are a few good lines:
September 18th: We used to believe that pluck and determination could shatter glass faster than our silent screams of protest
September 24th: The hall is dark, save a strip of light on the floor. When my eyes focus, my ears hear the music of laughter and clinking glass
September 29th: The ocean talks in his sleep at night in rhythmic murmurs
I’ve even used the three minute time to write poems in response to the Monday Poetry Prompt I send out each week to the Living Poetry Meetup Group
Visual prompt (9/24): From here the earth looks like the globe on your father’s mantle–perfectly round and unmovable
Borrowed lines (10/1): And the kiss that drained all of the bitter cynic from my blood
These poems and lines are not “finished”, but the three-minutes-a-day mantra keeps the creative juices flowing and helps to maintain the proper balance in the double life.
Lately, I haven’t been writing much because the double life is working overtime. My daytime career is chock full of project meetings and deadlines. My evening career is tying up loose ends with preparations for poetrySpark next weekend. Most nights, I collapse on the couch and veg out in front of the TV, often falling asleep before I realize it. And I feel guilty about it. Don’t real poets write at every possible moment? If Mary Oliver could get up at 5 and write for a couple of hours, isn’t that what I should be doing?
Instead of being so hard on myself, I am trying a different tactic—writing poem ideas down. Often the topics come in the form of working titles
and a line or two that might be in the poem. Here’s my list so far:
Suiting Up: “If I don’t belong, at least I can dress the part”
Natural Hair: “Yes, natural hair is making a comeback everywhere—except my mother’s house”
Cleaning up the Break Room: “She wipes away the crumbs so they won’t think we’ve left a mess behind”
Then there are the planetary poems about I need to write to go along with the “Transit of Venus” poem I wrote during Cave Canem:
Mercury in Retrograde
Curiosity of Mars
House of Saturn
And the science-based poems that with any luck will turn into extended metaphors about race:
Dark energy/dark matter inspired by Adler Planetarium in Chicago.
Dark spot corrector inspired by a casual conversation with one of the inventors
I might have a trio of “Stuff White People Like” poems if I can ever finish that poem about yoga (#15) and start that poem on grammar (#99)
And just yesterday, I got the idea to write persona poems about famous women in technology
Lady Ada Lovelace – 1st programmer and daughter of Lord Byron
Grace Murray Hopper – found the first “bug”
Patricia Selinger – creator of stored procedures
Whenever I do get time to write, this list will keep me plenty busy!
As promised I’m posting the poem I wrote to the Monday Poetry Prompt. Here’s the picture:
Lordsburg, New Mexico © Mitch Dobrowner 2011
And here’s the poem:
Clouds have learned to funnel
their way to the ground, spin
themselves into black thickness,
and swallow whole lives
and trees below—like an all-natural
atom bomb spreading destruction
from the top down.
Last week was one of those weeks when my writing rhythm was thrown off by travel and late nights in Raleigh for work and poetrySpark. When I can’t think of anything to write or haven’t written in a while, prompts are a way to jumpstart the creative juices. Luckily, one of my responsibilities for Living Poetry is sending out the weekly poetry prompt. Every Monday on the ride into work, I have to figure out what the prompt is going to be—which means focusing my energies on thinking about what topic might possibly inspire me to write. Here are a few of the prompts I’ve used so far:
skin * breath * night * fireworks * the smell of mint
Recently, I started using a visual prompt on the 3rd Monday of the month. Last month, a photo in the UCLA Magazine inspired this poem:
Carbon Footprint
From the “Vegan Campus” article in UCLA Magazine: http://magazine.ucla.edu/features/the-vegan-campus/index1.html
I want to leave
something behind,
more than this poem,
this page, this pen,
a lineage beyond
what my fruitless
loins choose to bear.
In time, the mind purges
any memory too heavy
to carry. The soul
must be free to take
the next step without
a trace of regret.
Today, I sent out a photo from National Geographic. I’ll post the poem I come up with next week.
As a double-life poet, you have to find ways to keep yourself creatively inspired. It is so easy to let work and the rest of your life crowd the poetry out. Last week, I traveled to Chicago for a non-literary conference. Although two of my work colleagues were there, we attended different sessions and kept our own company afterward. My first day in the city, I took an architectural boat tour with one colleague and her daughter. Afterwards, I found a place to eat outside. I was dutifully chceking Facebook when I heard this shuffling sound. I looked up to see the guard and watched as he made his way around the block. I didn’t think to take a picture, but I did manage to jot down this poem:
The sound of the shuffle precedes
His overhang belly with shirt
buttons stressed, but holding
his uniform blue in tact as the slow
waddle of his patrol rounds
the corner of Michigan Ave.
My time at the Adler Planetarium also stuck with me. I’ve always been fascinated by the ideas of galaxies and universes far beyond this one. And I’m sure reading Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars re-ignited my interest in the planets and stars. After watching the planetarium show, The Searcher, 
I stuck around to ask the guy behind the booth about supernova. His explanation and the exhibit on the topic provided the details needed for this poem:
You were a red giant star
eons beyond your white-yellow hot,
destined to expand into oblivion.
I refused to let you go, kept orbiting
around you, drawing your energy
to fill myself like a helium
balloon—tethered to the whim
of your finger—swirling past
my limit to our beautiful
demise, this spectacular disaster.
And finally the explanation of dark matter next to the supernova display led me to this poem:
A Different Kind of Matter Altogether
Dark matter doesn’t
interact with light.
It is too dominate,
too heavy, too much.
This is Universal Law–
the lesson I forgot
to learn because
I was too busy
trying to be
like everyone else.
This double-life poet worked overtime on both fronts this week. The poet staked out old and new writing spaces, made five poetry submissions for her boot camp obligation, and went to the poetrySpark planning meeting on Tuesday. The data guru was busy in meetings for five projects, reviewing project notes and report drafts, and designing interview protocols. The poet thought about going to an open mic on Thursday, but decided to stay home so the data guru could pack for a conference in Chicago. Neither one of us had much down time to think or process what was seen, heard, or experienced, let alone make a dent in the summer reading list.
It’s easy to lose touch with creativity, especially when the business of poetry is what is keeping you uninspired. When I first got the idea for this blog post, I was riding on the DRX bus, typing on my iPhone when I could have been reading on the Kindle or writing in the journal I take everywhere. But in between the search for words on the page, I looked up and found little bits of poetry sprinkled here and there:
Emergency Exit
Exits are identified by red
Handles on the side of windows.
Locate your nearest exit.
This sign is posted on the back of every seat. I’ve read it a thousand times, and each time, the line break between ‘red’ and ‘handles’ still amazes me. I know the decision to break the line there was based solely on the available space on this 3×3 inch placard, but it is a stroke of genius! Then there’s the haiku-like quality of this sign:
Turn Then Push Knob to Exit
Girar
Y después
Oprimar
La perilla
Para abrir
Al
though this sign poem is in Spanish, the rhythm, the alliteration in the ‘p’ sound, and the assonance in the ‘ri’ diphthong are unmistakable. I have to look up to see the sign, which I often forget to do. Usually, I’m too wrapped up in thoughts or a book to see the poetry around me. But I always enjoy it when I do.
When I started writing, words poured out of me as if drawn up from some unknown emotional well deep inside. Poems flooded the pages, but it wasn’t until much later that I considered myself a poet instead a failed novelist. My emotional state directed the content of my writing: feelings of love, loss, and longing became the heart of the poems. Here’s an example:
I miss our magic
I miss the way your kisses taste like kisses are supposed to taste
I miss those four moles that form a constellation on your face
I miss the way you look at me and stare into my soul
I miss the easiness I feel when you take control
I miss you
Even though I’m not supposed to
Fast forward to Vermont College of Fine Art’s low-residency MFA program. For two years, I wrote 3-6 poems every month. I didn’t have the luxury to wait for the Muse to rifle through all the emotional boxes in the attic. I had to take inspiration wherever I could find it, even from the view of the old location of Chapel Hill Public Library:
Here is where I connect
to the essence of everything unfolding.
Here is where I witness
how life stripped down can be just as full.
But I already see buds forming on the leaning maple.
Soon an abundance of green will block the view outside.
(excerpt from Pritchard Park)
Now everything I see, touch, taste, hear, or smell can inspire a poem. The poems I wrote at Cave Canem ran the gamut of topics: my brother, my father’s death, unrequited office romance, professional development, berry picking, and the transit of Venus. Lately, I’ve inspired by photographs and movies like this one:
You were loose once
and then a mysterious
finger twirled you
around itself. You begged
for the ride to stop
and when it did, the middle
and thumb used you to strum
their pain. And now the ring
finger pulls you ever so
gently to your edge.
Fearing you will snap
at any moment, you beg
for the all-powerful hand
to release you and scream
when you reach your limit.
But then the pinky
hooks and stretches you
just a little more,
just to prove you wrong.
Images are a good starting point for expressing an idea connected to something I have observed or experienced. It is my job to find the words to let you, the reader, see this snippet of the world through my eyes.
A Poet's Double Life 