From Memoir to Lyric

As I have been sharing in previous blog posts, I have started writing poetry again within the past two months. It feels fairly accurate if over-dramatic to say that poetry has been pouring out of me. And while it's hard to judge one's own work I think it's good -- or at least not bad, even if it probably needs more revision than I am aware of without workshopping.

Most immediately crafting poems feel absolutely wonderful, like better-than-anything-else-I-can-think-of wonderful, and it makes me amazed that I lost or gave it up for so long. The satisfactions of academic writing have been only the palest echo of this pleasure.

But what is happening is also confounding in ways: I wanted to be writing creative nonfiction, which lots of people read now, not poetry, which mostly only other poetry types read, and my desire has truly been to communicate about my life and perceptions to a potentially wider audience. I don't want to give up one overly limited readership (people who actually read literary scholarship) only to tie myself to another. And I wanted to be writing something solid, a book.

I haven't given up writing prose -- I am actively working on creating some shorter pieces out of what I've been drafting -- but I am also trying to attend to my authentic creative impulses, since that was the whole point in the first place. I struggle with some frustration over my writing plan having derailed, but then try to accept that a plan is one thing but what I am really engaged in is a deep journey, something that cannot be mapped in advance. My therapist keeps telling me that, and I hang on to it.

The two forms aren't separate, of course. Leaving aside any abstract literary reflections on their relationship (I'm sure they're out there, but I haven't looked for them so far), here are some thoughts I've been having recently:

• Working on the memoir/Mary Dyer project, I wrote my way into regaining a sense of my voice, and that voice gravitates towards poetry. And I recognize that the passages in the project where I was writing most lyrically felt the most alive to me. I write so much out of rhythm and sound, always. The parts that were more narrative/expository always felt a bit heavy and dull.

• Working on the project, I wrote deeply into key emotional areas of my past. I wrote the images that resonate for me. Some how that woke me up, reconnected me to my authentic self. And that self was a serious poet once, and seems to be announcing that she wants to be one again. I feel like I need to listen to her. And none of the writing I did is wasted: it just might turn into something else. 

• Many of my poems (now and earlier in my life) have an element of memoir -- they are about my past, as intertwined with the present. I don't consciously want to write autobiographical or confessional poetry (although, admittedly, I read it avidly from others), but I am also not especially drawn to poetry that is too abstract, divorced from recognizable lived experience -- just as, I realize, I am also now choosing to reject the disembodied quality of literary/cultural/gender theory. So I am still doing memoir, I see, just in a different way. 

• My relation to memory lends itself better to poetry than memoir: what stays with me are emotions, shards of scenes, resonant images, things that can be put together and built out through imagination in a lyric way. "These fragments have I shored against my ruins." I do not tend to remember larger scenes (what happened sequentially, who said what, what the setting was fully like, etc.), and I feel numb and blocked at the idea of recreating them imaginatively. When I read normal memoir and step back to think about the craft of it, the novelistic detail writers are able to recall or fabricate so that it sounds recalled amazes me. For better or worse I don't have that talent. I was never going to write a traditional memoir; I knew I couldn't.

I wrote a new poem yesterday that is the most complex one that has come since I re-started this. Although it is grounded in the present and recent past (a short visit to the Adirondacks a few weeks ago, echoing one last summer), it dives back into past memories I wrote about as part of the project this winter while I was in Mexico, excavating my emotional/relational life. With the associative freedom of lyric, I pulled in other things as well -- past and present juxtaposed in the historical/political realm. (My Dyer project was very much about that too.) I'm putting it in below.

Here is one image (not mine) of Fort Crown Point, the immediate setting of the poem below. The historic site is a much more expansive area with more structures than this limited view suggests. It is not far from Fort Ticonderoga, but in some ways more compelling because so untouched. Very Tintern Abbey -- I felt like I was in Britain or Europe more than in New York.

******************

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

******************

And one more photo, from the actual experience: my Cocoa (DC Chocolatedrop) and her famous daddy Cracker (Flupascrackerbox) in 2017. 

Of Open Mics and Mindfulness

I'm going to share a poem that comes from a deep place. I'm excited to have written it, not because I think it is a great achievement of craft, but it marks a new level of understanding that has been opening up for me over the last six weeks or so. This semester off has turned into as much a spiritual journey as a writing one.

Yes, I'm still writing poetry since what I think of as real, serious poems started coming out of me in March. This wasn't planned but it feels overwhelmingly like coming home to myself.

Anyway, I read two of my poems last week at the Final Thursday open mic. Such a sense of power and centeredness going through me as I heard my words coming from me. I do love to read aloud and know I do it extremely well. But then, as I discovered in the fall already, open mics seem so brutal emotionally to experience -- at least this one, at least for me. There was no response at the break or at the end (okay, one colleague briefly as I was going out the door), and the pain I experienced was intense. Some of it is bummedness and ego disappointment, I'm sure -- I so longed to have someone reassure me my poetry was good. So of course one fear that came up was that it was actually so awful no one had anything good to say. But I tried to stay with the feeling and not judge it, and I realized how deep it went; to such a primal sense of non-response and the pain of not being met. Offering all you are, letting your deepest self shine forth, and then nothing. (Blogging is rather like this too, I find, but this was more immediate and profound.) And I tried to be with myself in a compassionate way.

The miraculous thing is that over the last six weeks or so I have been been doing pretty dedicated meditation/mindfulness practice, and not only is that what is part of what has reopened my capacity and desire to write poetry, it has also begun to show me that I can be the one to attend to my feelings with kindness, rather than looking for that outside myself only. That practice is part of it; there have been some other outer and inner happenings that have contributed to the opening of this new perception as well, and it's still at an early stage. Yet I can feel it is deeply transformative. One thing that has had a tremendous impact that I should acknowledge is encountering the work of meditation teacher and psychotherapist Tara Brach and reading her book Radical Acceptance, which has hit me so very deeply (I'm on the second time through now).

At any rate, here is what I wrote. I think, hope, it explains itself. I don't think I'm as wise yet as it sounds; the words themselves carry me as I discover them to a place I am only beginning to touch in real life.


Reminder

When you stand in what you have become
trying to find your way back
to yourself and the wind that roars through everything
and you let that wind come through your mouth
in the words you have plucked from it
and they feel like burning
and they feel like an offering
and you feel yourself in and out of your body
doing what you came to do at last --
then, when no one speaks to you,
acknowledges what came from you at all
you bank the fire that you thought you were,
you walk out to the night, the car, the road.
The sound you hear is the ball that is your heart
rolling loudly around an empty room.
You remember all the times you longed
to give yourself, and no one saw you there;
and maybe your words are just pretension
and you alone have no purpose here on earth.
Stay with yourself then:
Sit down on the hard floor of the empty room
silent and listening, and you will hear the wind
that moves through everything come in the window
flowing into the room, and it is the room,
and you are the one speaking and seeing
you are the giver and the receiver
standing in the room saying I love you
standing in the fire saying thanks

The Night the Bats Came Out

I truly am not obsessed by bats. But having written a poem sorting through family memories and present feelings via an experience with bats, it triggered the thought of writing another one, which I wrote earlier this week.

I did a little background reading, and now realize that the image we had -- of the bats leaving the nest all at once, for good -- is not the reality. Did they really go out every night once the babies were old enough, until at some point later the "maternity colony" dispersed? That takes away from the story as we remembered it. But at any rate, none of us ever saw the sight described here again, despite my parents' many evening fishing expeditions on the lake.

I have now written five serious poems in the past month. I haven't even wanted to be writing poetry, but it seems to be what wants to be written. There is power and awe -- and bewilderment -- in realizing I still know how. The poems feel a little rusty but not bad; they feel (for better or worse, I can't tell) strangely recognizably akin to the poems I wrote in college or shortly after. I am aware I know what I am doing in terms of craft much more working with poetry than when I am trying to write creative prose.

I searched some possible bat colony pictures to share, but yikes. They are horrifically creepy looking, just as the experience was.

*******************************

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

Let go, go back.

Well. I drafted another poem, sitting in a hotel room in Saratoga Springs, NY, before going out to spend the rest of the day exploring. I want to share it because I am awed that poems are starting to come to me again after so many years; also it stands as a report on recent days. I did find my old college poetry again a couple of days ago, and I am awed by how good I really was. And, I think, how far I could have gone had anyone really taken me up and mentored me in those years -- I had good creative writing class experiences, a few (there wasn't the culture of it then there is now, at least where I went to college and then graduate school), but no one gave me a sense how to purse this as a calling. I am struggling with a tremendous sense of lost opportunity and power . . . but trying to hold onto the thought that maybe not everything is lost. I'm not sure where poetry fits given that I have been trying to write personal essay, but I don't see it as an either/or thing. As long as I write, it seems like a good thing.

Yesterday I left my family's home symbolically -- it probably isn't the last time I will be there before it is sold (the closing date of which is uncertain, although the contract is being drafted) but it might be the last time I have stayed there; if the closing comes fairly quickly (the purchasing family needs to sell their own house which should go on the market soon) it will probably be cleared out with an estate sale before I see it again. I don't even know how to process this -- it is probably impossible to do. But anyway, this poem tries to distill one experience of it.

***************************

Counting Breaths

Counting breaths in my family home
the morning before I leave it.
The thighs press against the woven seat.
The abdomen lifts and falls.

The lake glitters coldly past tall windows
in this belated spring.

In 1918 a family bought this house.
In 2018 a daughter of that family buys it back
after fifty years. And this daughter goes on
to what I don’t yet know.
to what I knew but somehow gave away,
hoping it is not too late to find again.

Counting breaths, each number rises and falls,
reaches ten to start over again.
Quieting the mind as a bird calls,
as the furnace cycles on, as the world
is lost and present, decades whirling round.

A day earlier in a box I found my writing
from college, when being a poet was all I wanted.
I tried not to scream for the lost power.
In those years too I tried to watch my mind,
counting breaths in a gabled dorm room
as a same spring moved trees beyond the window.

Thirty-five years later, I can see everything
I want and wonder about is much the same.
Trying to count and watch again.
Numbers ticking over, the same body breathing
though now a voice on my phone teaches me.
What is lost, found, possible
if everything is present?

Let go, go back. Let go, go back. Let go, go back.
At the edge of awareness
breath summons the whisper of a poem.
Breathe out. Open the eyes. Close the door.
A day later, count again and write it down.

The Bats

I am in New York state working on the sale of my family's home. I haven't been able to focus on writing until I made myself do some journaling last night. But this morning I drafted a poem that had been, um, battering around in my head since I got here as something I wanted to write while I was in this space. I just wrote it during the weekly Tuesday morning Shut Up and Write (#suaw) hour for academic women (and others) hosted by Lisa Munro on Twitter.

So, go me! I think it's a viable poem -- I do feel like I am regaining some ability to write poems. I'd love feedback for improvement though if anyone feels so moved. It is just a rough draft!

I can't put quite into non-literary words what I am trying to express here. Family memories, of course, but also something of what I am dealing with at this time of my life, reflections on who I am and what I have lost and might re-find inside myself. The scariness of otherness both outside and inside, but realizing that what is strange and scary is not actually bad.

*************************

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

Heading towards Bewilderment

A great deal has been stirring in my life in recent weeks. Not all easy, but things are happening that feel profound and momentous, and like they are moving me towards who I will become in the second part of my life. The sense of change after so many years of relative stasis, of having intense feelings after knowing I've been somewhat numb for quite a while, the feeling of wanting and realizing that I could in fact have some things in life I want, if I choose to move towards them, and not necessarily ten years from now -- all of this is overwhelming. And, well, bewildering, in a positive if scary way. I feel very grateful to be working with a therapist who is able to understand, honor, and support such a journey.

I undertook something big and risky and deep since returning from Mexico, involving contacting someone who has been at the center of my emotional world for thirty years, but with whom I have had no contact for twenty-five. I don't feel comfortable saying any more than that here. I did get a caring and considered response, but one that was quite painful to receive -- let us say this person was not able to receive my story in the way that I had intended it to be read or meet me in the way I longed to be met. Which means, ultimately, that to honor my own life I have to let go, to take the love and longing I placed there and find something else to do with it -- something worthy of the sacredness with which I invested it. I have done some intense work to process that, writing and writing in journal form, but it seems like the jarring disappointment is moving towards freeing up some key emotional energy that has been bound to the past and to a place of impossibility. Late one night it struck me: What had I been truly yearning for all these years, within my yearning for the idealized image of this person? What if part of it was for my own lost self?

I feel like through this whole writing and discovery process but especially now I am starting to contact my authentic self -- a self that has been largely suppressed for many, many years, at least since graduate school (though different parts were lost and found at different times). Probably this view takes things to an extreme, but I have been overcome by the thought that almost my entire academic career has been based on a desiccated, suppressed version of who I really am -- a big part of this has been channeling my desire for self-expression into "safe" academic writing (focused on the wildness and courage of seventeenth-century others), though it goes beyond that. So no wonder, I find myself reflecting, I have lacked confidence and an internal sense of authority as an academic writer, as a teacher, etc.; no wonder I have always felt a little disengaged, diffident, vaguely ashamed of myself. Always comparing myself, always unsure where I stood, secretly anxious and enraged.

What does this all mean for the future? I am pondering intensely. I am not sure I can recapture my authenticity within a context that has been an edifice of suppression, even if it doesn't pose any literal barriers. When I think what my real self wants, all I know is that it doesn't want continue the life I've been leading for the past twenty years at least, as I've been leading it.

One quite dismaying thing that has happened -- it would be more dismaying if the reasons didn't feel so compelling and positive -- is that my plan for the book as I was writing it has pretty much fallen apart. I don't know how well I can explain this, except to say that the structure I imagined examined my life in dialogue with the trajectory of Mary Dyer's. But as I am seeing new things about my life, and realizing my own story is not what I was thinking it was only a few weeks ago, I don't think I can follow that trajectory. Mary Dyer's story moves towards the courage of witness, self-sacrifice and death. It is the story that called to me when I was in a very dark place. I still admire courage and witness, but now I realize that what I desperately want is more life, richer life. And I cannot, in any case, move through the latter sections of the book I had planned until I know where my own story goes, can speak with understanding about my own experience. I cannot write what I have not yet lived. That was always an issue; when I conceived the project, I hoped I would be clearer by now, at least about what was happening in the world and what my role in it would be.

So what to write now? I was cranking along pretty well. But now I don't have a book that will be drafted by this summer. I have not been able to focus on writing during some of these very intense recent weeks of "life work" as my therapist calls it (and she reassures me that's okay). I still want to explore the same material, but it is going to look different. More fragmented, I think. And it's going to take longer to do. Which may be inevitable; more and more I realize I truly need to learn how to write, or how to write this material; having an idea does not mean I possess the craft. I do think the aesthetic vision I have for this work involves lyric fragmentation; the parts where I am telling narratively have always felt heavy, saggy, and the most lyric parts have felt the most vital. Evidently I really am a poet still, even if I am writing in prose for now.

One step I took in the past week is to sign up for a week-long writing workshop in May that might capture where I am right now, and something of what I want to write: "Memoir as Bewilderment," taught at the Omega Institute, a holistic learning and retreat center in the beautiful Hudson Valley, home of my heart, an area I have begun imagining what it might be like to return to to live. The description:

When first approaching the idea of writing our memoir, says acclaimed poet, memoirist, and playwright Nick Flynn, we often write what we believe is our unique autobiography—but as we press on, we discover that our story is connected to everyone’s story, and only then can we access the deeper mysteries of life. 

Under Flynn’s guidance, we look for those moments when we begin to stutter and stumble when talking about our projects, and push more deeply into the shadows, into the unknown of our misremembered past. We wrestle with these deeper mysteries as well as the concept of bewilderment, and how we can embody both in our memoirs—through syntax, our access to the duende, leaps into the unconscious, or simply circling around what is unsaid, unknown, and unrealized. 

Come with a willingness to push deeper into this shadow world, and an openness to question why you tell the particular stories about your life that you do.

I had not heard of Nick Flynn but his work sounds quite compelling, and along the lines of what I aspire to; I just received one of his books from Amazon. So we'll see. I think there will be mostly more developed writers there and I'm somewhat terrified; the workshop is also very risky and experiential from what I've read (I found a former participant's account here). And it makes me deeply uncomfortable to think of opening up in front of a male leader and mixed-gender participants; it's been many years since I can remember choosing to do that. But I think it is what I need.

So, bewilderment. I am trying to hold all the openness and strangeness and unknowing of that as I try to find what and how to write now, and move towards whatever new thing my life is becoming. And in a few days I will arrive in New York state to begin the process of selling my family's home, the absolute ending of everything past and known for me.

Long ago, this happened.

This is a self-exposing post, because it reveals an experience I really did have when I was eighteen that I virtually never talk about . . . . Also because it's a poem, and even though I am not focused on "writing poetry" at the moment, I find I still gravitate to it when I want intensity and compression and/or I have a short set time and/or I am not trying to "do my project." I feel verrry rusty, but I don't think this is too bad, although it's still an early draft. I suspect I will go back to poetry as a main form eventually, once I get past my current memoir drive. . . .

How this arose: Last night I went to The Cedar Room writer's group in Cedar Rapids. After a discussion period there was enough time left to do a writing prompt. Someone offered a prompt from a book he was working with, but my immediate reaction was refusal and ire: it asked us to imagine and describe a fantastic world (I forget the further details). I can think of nothing I am less interested in; the very thought was like stabbing my eyes with a fork. (Can I just bitch that it is a real problem to have clearly fiction-oriented, to say nothing of fantasy-fiction oriented, prompts in a group that is explicitly billed as all-genre?? This has happened both times I have attended.) But, I did want to write. So I took up something I had been writing in prose the day before and turned it into a poem written against the idea of the prompt. I do actually like it, so I came away from the group feeling pretty good. I kind of wanted to share it, but didn't get a chance, so I thought I'd post it into the ether here.

[poem taken down during submission for publication]

(Note for the literary types: if you detect an echo of William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All" in the description, you would be correct. I have taught that poem so many times and it is deep in my psyche . . . especially as I am drawn to the whole idea of finding spiritual beauty in "waste lands" and have often imagined that if I were to write a book of poems that would be the focus.)