Little Oblivion

Last year, during my poem-a-day September, I wrote a series of poems that I wanted to make into a crown of sonnets, but didn’t out of pure laziness.  This afternoon for my lunch break I edited the seven sonnet-ish poems into a crown of sonnets.  I know it still needs work (calling them “sonnets” would make form purists puke), but somehow, I’m drawn to the crown.  I have three relatively successful crowns–the first two were accepted for publication on the first time I sent them out. Both were primarily composed in my head–I counted syllables on my fingers, memorized lines until I could get to a pen (the first one I did  mostly in the sauna on board the Laurence M. Gould in Talcauano, Chile; the second I started while on bedrest, and really finished one year at AWP while I was sitting in panels), and minimally edited. This one was different. I was lazy, and didn’t originally intend it to be a crown of sonnets, so the first lines feel a bit more mechanical.  Which is why I’ll come back to it (again) on the next go-round.

In the meantime, I’m still editing the “new” manuscript. I’m cutting poems.  It hurts, but since I just put them together in the first place, it’s not too hard.  I just don’t want the thread of the manuscript to get too thick–I want a thread, but I don’t want it to be so dependent on subject like my first two manuscripts.  I want a thin thread–angle hair, not fettuccine.  Not too bad for the first time through. I’m still fighting with the clock for time to submit, and I lose an hour this weekend to the ether.

I have had to both give and receive shocking news in email recently, and it’s hit me hard.  I got used to “serious” emails when I was in graduate school and falling in love in email, so somehow it seems its own special medium for me.  Not the same as a pen and ink letter, which I’ve wanted to go back to as some sort of invisible confessional, but closer to a phone call without the other voice on the end.  I wrote some serious emails from the ice this year, received some back, received some after the Ice, and now, the latest, from my friend in New Zealand with bad news about her health.  I just saw her.  Sure, for only four days, but I just saw her in December, after years and years of only emails and letters, small Christmas gifts. Our last kids were born on the same day.  The same day. If I believed in arranged marriages, Sam and Lucy would already be matched.  I hate bad news email. I hate it more than bad news telephone calls. I can keep my composure on bad news telephone calls. I got bad news from home while I was on the Drake Passage on the Gould once.  I kept it together, well, much better than if I’d gotten the same bad news in an email.  I can be stronger in person than I can when I open my email. I’m unprepared in both instances, but for some reason, I have to keep it together on the phone, because there are other people who are involved in the news, with me, live.  Email allows me to hide in a corner and start bawling. It allows me to go back and read, and re-read, and read some more, the same thing, over and over, rather than just getting the news and processing.  And I’m a re-reader.  I’ve read the Harry Potter series maybe 7 times.  I’ve gone back and re-read the emails in which I fell in love. I’ve re-read the same poetry books. Email is bad for me for bad news in this way.

And in this, a broken-down moment, I have Claire, who, when seeing me cry, came up to me, gently put her hand on my cheek, and said, “Don’t cry, mommy. Your friend will be ok.  So turn off those tears, ok?”

March 9th, 2010 | Tags: cancer, poetry | Category: home life, poetry | Leave a comment

Today started rough.  The kids fought leaving the house. This week has consisted of: Sam hitting Claire in the stomach for no reason; Claire pushing Sam and taking things from him; Sam and Claire screaming in the van; Sam and Claire not getting out of the bath or listening.  So I’ve resorted to the dreaded sticker chart. The “good girl” and “good boy” charts are going on the fridge. Be good for a day, get a sticker. After a week of stickers, get a prize.

I realized I’ve been adding to my own internal sticker chart for the last three months.  Write a poem, get a sticker. Edit a poem, get a sticker. Submit a manuscript, put together a manuscript, chop up a poem, hack an ending, change a title, get a sticker. So how many stickers before I get a prize?  Don’t get me wrong–the stickers are a good reward. The imaginary stickers are a good reward.  Writing a good poem, making a poem better, is a good reward. But sometimes, like every good dog, a little physical reinforcement goes a long way. I want a sticker.

So I’m motivated by a red piece of paper that will soon be plastered with Disney princesses and Lightning McQueens.

March 5th, 2010 | Tags: poetry | Category: poetry | Leave a comment

I’ve been working on these poems from the last two years, which magicked themselves into a manuscript.  What I’ve discovered is that I’m horrible about ending my poems.  Most of the time.  Either I overwrite, or do the typical loopback, or trail off.  Sometimes, not every time, I nail it. And when I do, I feel like I’m watching Nadia Comaneci.

I’m putting on the editor hat and rewriting, and I’m disheartened and joyful that I’m finding whole poems I want to cut, or rewrite based on a line or two.  It means I’m focused, and I can see what was too drafty in the first place.  That is good work.

In the meantime, the business side of it is sighing loudly.  I don’t like dealing with submitting work, mainly because I don’t have much time for it. But it’s got to be done. Which is also why I’m being hard on myself for the end of my poems. Because when I was a poetry editor, the ending could ruin it for me.  And when I saw a batch of poems from the same author, and all of them fumbled the landing, I was sad. I was disappointed. But mostly, I passed on the poems.  So I’m trying to fix my own without justifying the endings.   And batching them together. And finding magazines to submit to.  And mailing/emailing/electronically submitting. The end.

March 3rd, 2010 | Tags: poetry | Category: kid lessons, poetry | Leave a comment

I used to be a melodramatist.  OK, I’m still a melodramatist, at least, in some aspects of my life.  When I was little, and an orphan, I identified with Little Orphan Annie. I didn’t grow up in an orphanage with a drunk, negligent den mother, but I did grow up an orphan (at least since I was 9), who wanted a little more attention than she got.  There were times when I was called “poor Cinderella,” among other things. But while family members and others thought I needed to “suck it up” and “deal with it,” I wanted to whine and complain. I had no parents. I had no one to go to who was required to love me no matter what.  I identified with Matilda, and Cinderella, and Annie, and Dorothy, among many other orphans.

So when I have a day like today, a day when of course there a ba-zillion other people in the world who are having a harder time than me (Haiti, and Chile, for example), but a hard day nonetheless, I crawl back into that skin, and beg for the attention, for the compassion, that seems lacking. At least, and this is so minor it’s hard to mention, at work.

I have my family, who fully support me. Marc, who looked at me with the most compassionate eyes today, and said, “I’m sorry I pushed you to this job,” when he didn’t push me at all; Claire, who told me “I’m going to be a take-carer, and I’m going to take care of the world. First, I’m going to plant a garden, and then I’m going to pick up all the trash, so that people have a place to play. And then I’m going to not pollute. I’m going to take care of the world”; and Sam… ok, Sam was having the same sort of day I was and hit his sister for no good reason.  I wanted to hit someone for what I thought was a good reason but restrained myself because I’m a grownup and that’s what we do.

Instead, I sat at my desk, feeling sorry for myself, after what seemed to me a humiliating exchange with a new co-worker.  It called to mind the time when I was in the 9th grade, didn’t have too many friends in high school, and was walking away from my locker, which was mixed in amongst the lockers of juniors and seniors that year. I stumbled–more than likely on that new skirt I was wearing that I thought would make me look cool–and fell, on my face, in the hall outside of Mr. R’s room (what was that guy’s name, the English teacher who used more grease on his hair than McDonald’s did in their fries? The one that made us learn 4 words a day, like sycophant, and made us read Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which I’m forever grateful for?).  I heard laughter, and I was humiliated.  Like I hadn’t learned how to walk properly. Or that it was something that would happen to me, and only me, because, for some reason, I was tainted. Not worthy. Broken.  Different.  Today, when a manager called out my technical inabilities (that they should be well aware of) in front of *his* manager, I felt that way. Humiliated.  Not that I should know what he was talking about, but I was embarrassed nonetheless.

I even hate that I have to write about this on my blog, which I try to reserve for poetry and poetry-like things.  I wanted to yell at him (as I relived this over and over on my drive home), Yeah, but can you scan  a line of poetry in ten seconds? Do you know what the rhyme scheme of a sestina is? I wanted to best him at what I’m best at.

Now I’ve got to go in tomorrow, and figure out how to work this, massage it, and make a working relationship turn positive out of it.  I’m most sad because I worked with much better people–much better engineers, who didn’t throw people under buses for their lack of knowledge, but taught them.  Told them what they meant, instead of setting them up for failure. I worked with some great engineers, who knew a lot of technical stuff, and didn’t look down at you because you didn’t, but tried to bring you up with them.  They knew compassion.  They knew how to be good people.  They are good people.  I miss them.  I doubt they read my blog (too busy reading Bruce Schneier, who is much more important than I), but I will tell them: I miss you.  You know who you are.

So here’s my whine for tonight: wahhh.  OK, I’m over it. Now for some mindless TV, some scansion, and some metaphoric imagery.

March 1st, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I am in love with my morning drive to work.  Because I work much farther away than I did, and my kids’ daycare is close to where I used to live, I go straight to work real early (leave at 6:15) so I can pick the kids up at night.  Marc and I now split the daycare drop-off/pick-up.  I’m now driving to work just as the sun is rising; I get to work before the sun is causing problems for traffic, and since I’m driving west, I get to see the glory of the sunrise in my rear view mirrors, but I get to see the amazing light that shines on the west, on the mountains, as I get closer to work.  I love the quiet, even if I don’t like the other drivers on the road. I like the early morning light shining off of the buildings, highlighting the mountains as if they will never see something so distantly warm.

I love the ride back to pick up the kids, too.  I have figured that taking the freeway gets me there around 10 minutes earlier, and with less hassle, but more miles.  The other day, I drove south to get to the freeway, and it was one of those “inside-a-ping-pong” cloudy days… not quite as smooth as the ping-pong ball at the South Pole kind of weather, but still… I was driving over the slow hills on Wadsworth, and as I came up on a crest, the mountains just rose out of the ground, into a clearing sky, and I caught my breath.  I had a body-memory of what it was like to drive on Rt 99 (Aurora) in Seattle, over the bridge, when Mt. Rainier popped up over all the buildings of the city, a monolith of nature over the chaos of industry.  I loved those moments in Seattle, even if I was driving somewhere undesirable.

I love driving.  This is, I imagine, shocking to my husband, since I make him drive all the time.  But when I’m alone, I love driving.  I get on a freeway, and I love going with the road.  I’ve driven across the country in a few different ways (Boston-Phoenix, Phoenix-Denver, Denver-Boston, Boston-Seattle, Seattle-Denver, Denver-Springfield MO) and I’ve loved all of them.  I love the feeling that I am going somewhere far away, somewhere I’m not quite sure I’ll get to very soon; I love having a destination that isn’t necessarily set in stone. I love driving with guidelines rather than a defined route.  I love not having hotel reservations but finding a place to stay when I’m tired of driving.  I love what I see on the road, on the way.  Most of all, I think I love being in my head on the road. Not in a conceited, I’m-awesome-at-thinking-deep-thoughts kind of way. I like wrestling with myself, with the philosophies of where I am in life, and roads do that for me. They give me space inside myself for… myself.  I think about poems, about lyrics to songs I can’t remember, the dog’s gimpy leg, the meetings I’ll have to sit through, the weekend plans, the laundry. But I also think about my good friends, my writer friends, my infosec friends, my friends that don’t fit into boxes, my friends that aren’t friends anymore, my friends I hope to run into someday, my friends I liked once but don’t care to ever see again. I think about my faith, my lack of faith, my insistent faith, my faith’s complexity. I think about potty training.  I think about the land and its life and death.

I think maybe it’s time for a drive.

February 26th, 2010 | Category: Uncategorized, home life | Leave a comment

Yesterday, we found out that our dog Nilas does not have cancer.  After two weeks of “she has cancer, we just don’t know how bad,” we found out she doesn’t have cancer.  Sure, she’s just a dog, some would say.  One of my brothers has had a series of dogs named “Buster” because they’re just dogs and they don’t want to have to bother learning a new name.  But Nilas came into our family as “Betty” as a rescue dog from the Denver Dumb Friends’ League raid on a hoarder.  Nilas was afraid of everyone.  She figured out that I was her human pretty fast, and we got to know each other’s patterns.  At 2:00 a.m., after she’s checked the house for mayhem possibilities and exploited those readily available, she scratches her collar with her back foot to jingle her tags and let me know she’s ready to jump up on the bed. But she won’t jump up on the bed without an invitation.  So I wake up, move over a little bit, and pat the bed twice.  Then she’ll jump up, find a spot not occupied by a human or a dog already, and settle in. She’s family.

The vet surgeon said the pathologist said her irregular cells are an immuno response to some soft tissue injury, so she’s in a splint and will get steroids, and hope that fixes things.  I’m glad she won’t lose her leg, but equally glad we don’t have to make a decision about cancer treatments for a dog.

***

So I’ve been distracted from the poems I want to finish.  I’ve been attempting poems, which is different from writing poems, during my lunch break at work.  It’s mechanical, but it’s work.  But I promised a sample of what I’m working on.  Here’s two, but I’ll take them down in a day or so.

The Angel of Blame

*Poof!*

The Angel of Loss

*Poof!*

February 24th, 2010 | Tags: dogs, poetry | Category: home life, poetry | Leave a comment

I’m working on putting together a few versions of chapbooks for some contests–even though I didn’t write these poems to become a chapbook (for those of you who don’t know what a chapbook is, see this), it’s possible to form some of them into a cohesive short collection. Most are 16-24 pages.  I’m trying to decide which poems work the best together, and can take a few approaches:

1.  Poems that link together thematically;
2.  My “best of” poems–the ones that rock stylistically, but without any thread to them;
3.  Poems that inform, but do not rely, upon each other.

I lean toward #1 always.  Especially for chapbooks, I tend to think that the “best of” approach doesn’t work, because in such a short space, you want something cohesive pretty darn fast for the reader. Otherwise it’s just 20 great poems, and not a book.  But sometimes #1 is a crutch for me, and I rely on theme too much.  So maybe #3 is the way to go, but that’s the creative writing professor answer–without any real good context or examples.  It’s like making a call on an out at home plate–you know it when you see it, but nothing is going to tell you how to call it.  So that’s this week in the world of Sue’s poetry–which poems inform one another but don’t rely on one another.

I have been writing a lot lately.  I’m not sure if it was my mental departure from Antarctica, my ability to finally let go of the Ice, or at least of writing about it. I feel like I’ve been given permission to move on to another area of my life, of the world, to write about.  I know that typically writers can think they can write about anything whenever they want, but I feel like I’ve been held captive by the Ice for a long, long time.  I’ve written other poems, but it was like moonlighting on my main gig–Little Oblivion.  Now that all those “other poems” are coming together in a cohesive manuscript–much more cohesive than I ever expected–I’m excited that what seemed like busy work to keep me writing about the Ice has its own life.

*****

In other news,  I’m still waiting for biopsy results on my dog’s cancer.  Waiting is not my forte.

*****

I’m re-creating one of the best mix tapes ever.  In the end it will probably cost me $32 to do it via iTunes.  But since most of the songs were put on the tape from, well, tapes, I’m willing to do it.  Now to figure out how to get the Beatles songs….

February 22nd, 2010 | Tags: music, poetry | Category: antarctica, poetry | Leave a comment

So I’ve been working on this series of poems. I’m not one to really focus on how I write, despite the number of times I had to try to explain it during my MFA.  But I have to focus on so much to make this series work, that I’m really paying attention here. I’ve found myself thinking about the subject of each constantly during the day, trying on phrases and descriptions, rejecting some, keeping others by repeating them to myself.  Today during lunch I literally had two separate drafts going at the same time, writing a line for one, then writing a line or two for the other. This sometimes doesn’t work, because the poems will get too close to each other, share too much tone/image.  I’m not sure if they’re doing that at this point, though; I’m just working to get them right.

With some of the other poems in the series I’ve written, I’ve had to write them, then let them sit, and go back with my mean hat on.  Sometimes I call this hat “Oliver” and sometimes I call it “Dale.”  Less often it is “Tito.”   Either way, it is a harsh-ish voice to tell me where it’s not what the poem deserves, where it’s not good enough, where I have to add three lines for every one.

At the same time, I’m itching to dig back into the rest of this new manuscript with the hat on, and update/fix/cull.  I know this series of poems fits as a spine and vertebrae into this book, and some others just don’t belong in it.  I want them in it now because I like the poems, but they will come out.

I love creating, because I’ve been pleasantly distracted from the chaos of my life.  I’ve almost returned to my daily free-writes, which I haven’t done since, well, since before my MFA, if I remember right.  My daughter has what we’re almost sure is strep throat, and has to stay home from school tomorrow.  I want to stay home with her, even though I don’t have any earned personal time off (PTO) time, because I want to spend the day writing and researching mags to submit to.  And submitting. Maybe I’ll get the courage to post a few of this series here soon.

The dog’s biopsy results should be back tomorrow, too. Send your good karma points this way if you can spare them.

February 18th, 2010 | Tags: poetry | Category: poetry | Leave a comment

When I was in graduate school for poetry, and my brother was going through some rough times himself, he started studying mindfulness, and passed some of it along to me when I was having a hard time getting a hold of my emotions. I was writing a book of poetry about my parents, who died when I was 8 and 9. I was writing about their love affair, their love, their deaths, the suppositions people made about them, the parallels to my own long-distance relationship I was going through/dealing with/enjoying… it was an emotional baggage wreck.  It was a whole baggage train derailment. My brother told me to be mindful–to pay attention to what I was feeling, but not to let it overwhelm me.  To “be the pebble in the stream, that lets the water carry it sometimes, and lets the water run over it sometimes. Sometimes it sinks, and that’s ok. Sometimes it floats [hard for me not to think of "very small rocks" a la Monty Python here] and that’s ok.  The fact that it’s still a pebble remains.  Be the pebble, Sue. This, too, shall pass.” Smartass brother.

Last night, I read through my father’s military record. Commendations, honorable discharges, promotions, testimonials. I found a picture of him teaching some folks at GE about something electrical. I read the spiritual bouquets people sent to his wake and funeral (if you’re not Catholic and you don’t know what a spiritual bouquet is, ask one).  I read the thank you note from the eye bank for his donation. The eye bank.  I read my mother’s medical record from her first biopsy, from her first (13 years later) cancer, and mastectomy.  I found posters that hung on my wall when I was six.  I found my dad’s driver’s license, the one he had when he died.  I went through reams of canceled checks and insurance bills and insurance claims and a letter to a doctor that appeared on Phil Donohue.  I did not cry.

Today I explained to my father-in-law, the one with brain cancer and who just had radiation, how my dog’s surgery went.  Soft tissue sarcoma in her left hind ankle.  The tumor had invaded all around the tendons, nerves, and blood vessels.  The vet removed as much as he could, but could not excise the whole tumor. He said he was “very concerned” about the appearance of the tumor, but we’ll wait for the biopsy to come back. He talked about alternative treatments, like amputation, and chemo and radiation, as a possibility.  And the cost of such treatments. Therapies.  How do you talk to your dad about not being able to afford treatment for your dog who has a similar disease as him? How do you explain to a toddler about cancer, in your dog let alone their grandfather?

All of this brings up the manuscript I wrote, and abandoned, eleven years ago. Eleven years of stagnant poems. Of poems that said something then, but sounds like a younger, naive, negative and wishful version of myself.  I’m afraid to re-read this book. My graduate thesis. I’m compelled to re-read it.  I’m avoiding it like the plague. I’m afraid it will taint what I’m working on right now. I’m afraid if I don’t look at it, I’ll lose the potential this new upwelling has. Which brings up what I’m working on right now–a series of poems to complete the current manuscript, which happened entirely in my peripheral vision. The subject of these new poems is raw, and needs distance, but they have to be written first.

Add a new job to the mix. Add the fact that I’m still dealing with the Ice and its aftermath. Add a sick dog.  I’m trying my best to be aware, to let go to the powers that be and have faith. I am struggling, but finding a meek voice nonetheless.

February 16th, 2010 | Tags: poetry | Category: antarctica, poetry | Leave a comment