The Times on The Art of Typesetting

photo from Wikimedia Commons

Bibliophiles and lovers of all things printed: Go read this fascinating story at the New York Times.

Come, Thief

Last night I went to Kepler's to hear the poet Jane Hirshfield read from her newest collection, Come, Thief (buy this fantastic book here or ask for it at your friendly neighborhood bookseller).

As any mother knows, if a mother wants to leave the house any time after 4:00 p.m., she practically needs the Jaws of Life to get her out of there. Between homework help and a late start on the spaghetti sauce, and a Husband who left work later than expected, I just about bailed on my little outing. But there was a voice inside of me that was clear and indignant: "What!? Not go!? Forget it. You ARE going, missy, come hell or high water." I wasn't going to argue with that particular voice. She sounded pissed. So, I left the three bears in care of each other for five minutes, and scooted up the peninsula.

(Don't tell Judge Amy on me. They were fine.).

And here I would like to pause to give thanks to the gods of traffic, who allowed me to get well into Palo Alto before hitting a red light: **O, traffic gods, I thank you. I realize I have now had my one lucky day in California traffic and that it will never happen again. Amen.**

This was the first time I'd gone to a reading given by a rock star poet and I wasn't sure what to expect (btw, you know a poet is a rock star if her/his book comes out in hardcover). I was kind of hoping for a mob scene -- you know, hundreds of people lined up on the street to get in. Instead, there were about forty people in a quiet room, every one of them (including me) wearing comfortable shoes. I took comfort in this pairing of poetry and gentle footwear.

One of my favorite moments of the evening was when the poet came in unassumingly from the back of the room and sat down as part of the audience a few minutes before being introduced. After a moment, people noticed her and she said something along the lines of "Oh, people actually know who I am!?" I suppose she may have been in doubt since the placard for the event had her picture above the name Jan Hirshfield. Um, oops.

Anyway, on to the poetry.

Well, what to say? The poems were beautiful and she read them beautifully and with reverence for the process of reading poems out loud to those listening, that sweet poetry transaction, the way poems are meant to be enjoyed. The "thief" in the title is Time itself, and many of the poems are moments of careful witness and attention to all things fleeting -- nature, friends, solitude, empires, species, days and weeks and years, this very life. Her language is simple (but not simplistic) and inviting: you want to walk right in to the room of her poems and make yourself at home, even though you are sometimes startled at what you find there: some new truth or beauty that you should've noticed by now, but never had.

Probably my favorite poem from the reading was "For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen," which I took as a case for making art. She told a great story about how she came to the poem after learning that the lichens, though small, do the essential work of bringing nitrogen to the forest canopy (by the way, she also said that all of her poems are fact-checked so the science is sound). Here are some bits of it:

~

"Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving
unseen, unread, unremembered.

.
.
.

Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in."

~

She talked about her interest in what she called malleability -- the idea that objective reality, when brought into a poem, can be "suppled" (her word) and made elastic; that what's real can shift and change  in a poem. This really resonated with me, and I think it's probably why I'm so drawn to magical realism in poetry -- to let that shape-shifting reality, that suppling of the rules, take us somewhere we'd never have gone if not for the poem.

I was also interested to hear her "read" her line breaks, which she did, subtly. She later talked about line breaks as a "musical notation" -- echoes of Denise Levertov, who wrote that "the most obvious function of the line break is rhythmic: it can record the slight (but meaningful) hesitations between word and word  that are characteristic of the mind's dance between perceptions but which are not noted by grammatical punctuation." Let the people say, Amen! Line breaks feel so important to me, but I've often heard poems read as if the line breaks were not there at all, rather than giving the half comma D-Lev, and Jane Hirshfield, grant to them.

(Okay, okay, all the non-poets in the readership are probably bored now, but I promise you don't have to care about malleability or line breaks to enjoy these poems).

After the reading, she sat to sign books. Here is where I became terribly shy, almost too shy to get in line to have my book signed. What am I, in junior high again? I got in line and mustered the courage to tell her how much this poem has meant to me, and she was kind and genuine and gracious. And it's kind of cool to have a signed copy of the book.

Reader, all in all I'm glad I made the effort to leave the house, leave the children unattended, and get me some live poetry. Wish you could've been there. In your most comfortable shoes.

Today's Draft: Trust, Randomness

What my desk looked like this morning

There are unpacked boxes. There is unfolded laundry. There are barely-made beds. It's someone's 10th birthday. The girl needs an appointment with an allergist. People will want dinner. The State of California will want me to have a driver's license. But this morning I set a timer for two hours and sat down at my desk to write.

I approached this exercise with equal parts joy and fear. Joy to sit down and write after a long dry spell (the last entry in my notebook: April 2). Fear that the well had run dry. And anyone who has read Little House knows you don't want to have to dig a new well.

Gave myself a pep talk: Trust the process, I said. And, Rely on randomness. So I did.

Alas, the Nina Lindsay book is not yet in at my friendly neighborhood independent bookseller, so I pulled some Louise Gluck off the shelf, chose five poems at random to read aloud and to build a word bank from. Word bank in hand, I went to The Working Poet: 75 Writing Exercises and a Poetry Anthology, chose a page at random for a prompt: page 109, The Ekphrastic Poem.

Here is where I cursed under my breath.

Then I got over myself and pulled an art book off the shelf, opened it -- you guessed it -- at random, to page 111: Mountain Slope at Unterach on the Attersea by Gustav Klimt.

Here is where I cursed under my breath again. I mean, couldn't it have been The Kiss? Or at least The Virgin -- that one's on page 110!?

No. Trust the process. Rely on randomness. Okay.

Would you like to take a look at Mountain Slope at Unterach on the Attersea? Here it is, although the linked image shows considerably more blues and yellows than does the reproduction in my art book.

I studied the image and did some freewriting to capture the feelings it evoked for me, the sense I had of different elements of the painting, the look and texture of the brush strokes, etc. As I looked at the print, the trees on the mountainside began to look like a wall of faces to me; I thought I might try to get that into the poem. Then I went back to the wordbank and, at random, chose six words to use in a draft: starve, pay, mountain (coincidence? I think not.), offer, wind, earth.

In case you're wondering, yes, I did curse under my breath for the third time.

Trusting the process, relying on randomness, I went to my notebook. I tried for a poem that would feel dense, with small but bold "brushstrokes" to echo the painting. The resulting draft is "Lesson From Unterach" (not crazy about that title); here's a snippet:

[Insert 8 hour interlude here during which I picked Sister up from school, ran home to meet the boys walking home from their school, fixed a snack, put everyone in the car to go back to Sister's school for a meeting, came back home to oversee homework, directed the process of children finding library books (curse, curse, curse), did a load of wash, started dinner, fed people, bathed two children, read two stories, told the 10 year old to go put his bike away (curse!), kissed said 10 year old goodnight and sent him upstairs..... yes, I'm still the Mom Trying to Write!]

Ahem. Back to my post and the snippet:

"Here, you are starved for horizon,
for sky. All you know is slope:
mute faces crushed together
in green to make mountain."

Well........ it's a start. And it was good to learn again that trusting the process and relying on that-which-one-might-not-have-pursued-on-one's-own, and on randomness, can bring poems up to the surface.

And now, this mom trying to write is going to bed!

Friendly Reminder from the Head of Mars

forgive the blur -- photo taken on my phone

Reader, I have been Away.

The last time I was Away was in 2008 for an overnight at the World Famous Medical Clinic. I'm not counting it.

The time before that was the summer of 2006. I was Away one night.

The time before that was the spring of 2004. I was Away one night.

In case you haven't noticed, yes, I am keeping track. By my count (including this most recent trip) I have been Away 5 days and 4 nights since I became a mother in 2001.

Obviously, I don't get Away enough. I know this, and yet, getting Away is always harder than it sounds, isn't it?

But I did get Away this last weekend for a long weekend in Chicago with my mom. Way long time ago, I worked a corporate job based in Chicago. Going past my old office was one of those "worlds collide" moments. My life is so completely different now than it was when I was running through airports in a suit and high heels, catching a plane to Chicago, DC, or Atlanta for a meeting. Me-Now looked at that office building and wondered if Me-Then really could've been me? Me-Now asked Me-Then about running through the airport in the high heels: How did you do that?

But I digress. My point here is that it was so refreshing to get away, to be amidst a throng of people on a city street, to breathe in the Lake Michigan air, to be jolted by unfamiliar and once-familiar sights.

My favorite jolt came from the head of Mars. We spent some time at the Chicago Art Institute, gem of the Midwest, and of all the beautiful, intricate, artful objects there, the head of Mars was the one that spoke loudest to me. And here's what the head of Mars said: "Look, I had my day and you have yours. I might last longer than you, but at least you have a nose. This world, this life, are too incredible to fathom. Here I am looking at you across the centuries and the seas. Please forgive the expression, ma'am, but make hay while the sun shines."

I was glad for the friendly reminder.

Today's Draft: Recipe For a Poem

My experience is that the best way to get a poem on paper is to sit your butt down in the chair and write, and to do this often.  In other words, there is no substitute for time-with-butt-in-chair if one wishes to be a productive writer.  But every now and then the Muse (or the Universe, or the Thin Air, or whatever you want to call it) will drop a few lines in my ear while I'm going about the business of my day.  When I'm smart, I take the time to jot the lines down.  And sometimes, just sometimes, when I go back to those lines and try to make a draft out of them, it works.

Constraints help, too.  If I sit down and think to myself, I'm going to write a poem today, I usually get nowhere.  If, instead, I say I'm going to write a sonnet set on the lakeshore and it will contain these 10 words, then I'll probably get somewhere.

This week, the combination of given words, time-with-butt-in-chair, and constraints brought forth a draft.

The given words were thus:

It is warm.  Twenty

degrees.  A thousand

miles down the map

you wake alone.

Ok.  I jotted those down on Thursday, I think, and then went back to being a Mom Trying to Write.

Now on to constraints:

Yesterday I was reading the po-blogs and came across Sandy's process notes in which she described trying different titles to drive a draft-in-progress.  I decided to try titling the poem before drafting the rest of it to see where it would lead me (normally, I draft a poem first, then title it).  I chose the title "Letter to My Husband Away on Business."  As you can well imagine, the draft would have gone very different places if I had titled it "Letter to My Daughter Twenty Years From Now" or "Letter to My Uncle, Post-Stroke" or "Letter to a Gravestone in Rockford, Michigan."  And yet any of these titles might have worked with the given words (hmmmmm....... I guess I have my next few drafts titled already).

The next constraint came from the Poets & Writer's The Time Is Now prompt for last week.  Amongst other things, it suggested writing about something "you're afraid to write about in your own poems, either because it's too personal, or because you feel it's a cliche."  Marriage is first on my list in that category, illness comes second.  Given the title I'd chosen, it made sense to write about marriage.

The third constraint was self imposed: I decided this would be a lyric (what I think of as a "catalog of images poem") and not a narrative poem.  In a narrative poem, the poet tells a story.  In a lyric poem, the poet presents various images for a purpose.  It is a less direct way of saying something, and gets more to a state of feeling or state of mind than a narrative does.  And it always has me shaking in my boots because what if the catalog of images I choose isn't working for a purpose, or not one that is discernible to a reader?

Then came the butt-in-chair time.  All morning.

So, here's my recipe for today's draft:

1.  Take a few given words.

2.  Choose a title.

3.  Choose a subject you're afraid to write about.

4.  Choose a mode you're uncomfortable writing in.

5.  Sit your butt down in your chair and write.

Yield: 1 draft

In my draft, the given words remained the same and stayed at the top of the page.  The images roll through a blouse, moths, ghosts, sleeves, children snuggled in bed, a robin in a cedar tree, a house at night, a hill, the moon.  The end is a plea:  come soon / they're calling for thaw.  I am back and forth on line breaks and punctuation, and we'll see where this one goes as I continue to work on it.

Next I spent some time on revising recent drafts.  Let me tell you, Reader, I am still no good at true revision, at re-seeing a poem.  I'm thinking of self-designing a Revision Boot Camp, of developing a Recipe for Revision:  Take these five poems, do each of these five things to each poem.  Yield: five new drafts of each poem, and who knows but one might actually go somewhere?

By the way, if you are the creative type and need a recipe to get going every now and then, may I introduce you to Gerry's Gently Used Ideas Store?  She posts a prompt-a-day, and in her wisdom does not limit it to the writers of the world, but to any of us who wish to create anything for fun or "for serious" (as my kids like to say).

Happy creating to you, Reader.

Wordless Wednesday: In Case You Haven't Listened to 'Autumn' Yet This Year

here's a link

Art Feeds Art

My experience as a writer is that experiencing other forms of art feeds my writing.  Perhaps it's a painting, a photograph, or the name of a piece of music that triggers something deep inside and the there's-a-poem-in-that voice speaks up.  Or maybe it's a line in a novel or in another poem that calls up the muse with a new line whispering itself into my ear.  Sometimes just the act of Doing Art will loosen me up and carry me into a creative space where words can enter in, unbidden, and coalesce into a poem.

Don't get me wrong -- I am not a painter, photographer, sketcher, sculptor, or any other form of visual artist in any sense of the word.  But I do like to dabble in visual art, and especially in drawing and watercolors.  Said dabbling is always done in secret, except for the time I made a really awesome Yoda valentine and surprised the heck out of the Bean and AJ, not to mention Husband.  But last week, I saw a flyer for a visual journaling workshop and decided to go.  It was held last night at my friendly neighborhood art supply store, Wet Paint (by the way, public service announcement for paper lovers in and around South-of-the-River:  all pads and notebooks are 20% off through the end of this month.  My favorite kind of white sale!).

Visual journaling is just what it sounds like:  keeping a journal of things you can see, rather than a journal made exclusively of words.  The artist who led the workshop has several different visual journals going:  her "life" book (which contains sketches and paintings of things from her everyday life, like the shoes she wore that day or a person she talked to), her buildings book (filled with sketches of buildings, or elements of buildings), her travel book, etc.  As an avid journaler (pretty much words-only up to now) and occasional art-dabbler,  I found the idea intriguing.  Here is a link to some visual journals if you're interested; click on one of the links under "Recent Journals" and you'll be able to click through a visual journal page by page.

While I was at the workshop, I learned about a series currently unfolding on The New York Times called Line By Line.  Here's how the Times describes it:  "A series on learning the basics of drawing, presented by the artist and author James McMullan.  Line By Line begins with installments on line, perspective, proportion and structure, and continues from there, using examples from art history to illuminate specific issues.  Pencil and paper recommended."  There's a new installment every Thursday; yesterday was the second installment so it's not too late to grab your pencil and paper, play a little catch up, and begin.  Free drawing lessons, folks.  I'm in.  Here's the link if you want in, too.