Less is More

In time of cyclone

and rice riots, I sleep with

one dog, two pillows.

More techno stuff

The need for a computer is obvious. I have two. Neither one really loves me. The little old one runs on Windows XP, a generally useful and uncomplicated system which I prefer. The new one runs Vista Basic, one of the truly evil inventions of this millenium. It's slow, stubborn, does things I don't need or want it to do. But this machine is stable and the old one tends to lose its grip on a page or a command. What to do? I could trade both and get a Mac, but that won't come with a word processor, and what's the good of that? So, sigh, I've just upped my anti-virus on the current newest laptop and promised that I will be patient with it.

I was browsing a thrift shop yesterday and patted, longingly, an old portable typewriter. Remember typewriters? But I don't see that happening. I don't even see the possibility of buying ribbons for one, nor the need to drive off to the post office to do business. And more and more of the markets to which I submit work are asking for electronic submission. So, instead of carting home yet one more device for putting words on paper, I bought a two-volume Norton--a truly wonderful find for three dollars!

The sun is brilliant today, the swallows are clearing the air of bugs, trees are leafing out almost before my eyes, and Dog is freshly clipped for summer. I think I'll take a walk and then get back to work on my submissions folder. KD

Thinking things up

I read somewhere that there are three kinds of people: beginners, middlers, and enders. I am definitely not an ender. Getting to the end of a story, a poem, a letter, I feel that little knot in my brain that says, this isn't right, and I quit. Or I often do. Obviously, as a writer, I need to discipline my instincts and find a graceful exit. But this is the part of writing I dislike and I'm not sure why. Ending means it's time to push the baby out of the nest, and maybe it will crash in the bushes, never soar high enough to be seen. Maybe that's it. Or I'm so inmeshed with characters that I just don't know how to say goodbye. This too. Maybe I'm lazy or unimaginative.

No, my imagination is always on. I can start projects at the fall of a leaf. As we speak, I am in the midst of designing a short writing course for adult religious education at my fellowship. And I have scads of poems that live in the notebook but which are really drafts in need of revision. If I sieved through my old journals, who knows how much stuff I've thought about writing and never completed. No, ideas abound. Endings wither. Is this true for anyone else out there?

Where have all my readers gone?

I like blogging, just wandering through my writing life, flashing a light on whatever thought seems most urgent or interesting as I start my day. But I do seem to be talking to myself. As my friend Ben says, we are in the communication arts, so what am I communicating? To whom?

According to Alison Hawthorne Deming (Writing the Sacred into the Real, Milkweed, 2001), " . . . a struggling writer needs not austere self-reliance but recognition and the companionship of like-minded others" (p. 49). I've copied that idea, like many others, onto an index card and put it in my growing collection of helpful quotes from other writers. If I don't have readers, I can be a reader for others, and keep their best thoughts close. The internet gives us the illusion of contact, but we need face-to-face contact with other writers.

For many years I have dreamed of a writing center where we could work and gather, casually, to talk about books, poems, writing projects, ideas and issues. Many years ago, friends in Shreveport took a good shot at this, creating for a time, McNeil Street Studios, a cavernous, dusty warehouse, in which we created space for writers, musicians, visual artists, and anyone else who needed "a room of one's own" and comradeship. It was backbreaking, frustrating, and wonderful to turn commercial space into artistic space. I wish we had worked harder, had more time and money, had more organization. But I leaned a lot there, and with a little luck (which we now call synchronicity) I can dream this center into reality. Stay tuned.

Prairie Dogs

A wonderful Colorado morning so Dog and I went for a long walk in the land of the prairie dogs. Cheeky rodents, they chitter and warn, heads poking out of the holes until we get within a few feet of them. They all look alike, though some seem a little battered around the head. If I spent my days digging head-first in this dry, high planes clay, I'd look rough too. In fact, I look rough without the digging. I like little everyday critters, crows, red-winged blackbirds, gulls, prairie dogs, squirrels, the commoners.

This week my daughter and I visited a wild animal rescue site near Ft. Lupton, CO. The place does an amazing job of providing shelter for large, exotic, dangerous animals who cannot return to the wild--tigers, leopards, bears, lions, wolves, and an emu. The emu gets no note in the guidebook, but both of us saw it, so I didn't hallucinate. Seeing huge tigers sleeping in the sun, lions sprawled on their backs, napping under the shade of a cement overhang, wonderful. A noble endeavor to take these animals from the tiny, cruel cages where they lived, often without a good meal, prisoners of their own nature. What started as a cute, small, exotic pet, soon became a dangerous mistake. So these folks promise a life-long haven for the animals.

I'm not exotic, no one needs to rescue me, and I think that's why I like the prairie dogs. They go about their business in complete privacy, except when Dog and I wander through their neighborhood and they scold us. They keep their own society.

Prairie Dogs

Fat, brown busybodies
snacking on sunshine—
I’d be one,
hovering at the burrow,
gossiping. Maybe
I was once,
munching prairie grass.

And what ate me,
coyote, crow, beetle?
I was once lunch,
will be again,
molecule by molecule
spreading into the next form.

I’ll feed on sunlight
as we always do,
mind nibbling on dawn
over the lake, loving
a clatter of geese, ducks,
red-wing blackbirds,
feast for the senses
in a candyland of houses,
cars, yellow roses, yellow wasps.

Cruising along on momentum

The most recent book of poems by a famous, well-regarded poet does not impress me. I plan to attend a reading by this eminence in the near future, and I hope that the living voice will give life to these words. Why am I not amused? Let me count the ways: the poems are filled with unneeded adjectives pulling me along like a kid resisting the dentist. I don't want to be pulled. I can walk perfectly well, thanks. I have the feet of a poet. The nouns are vague, general, and mostly plural. (Robert Bly warned us years ago about the weakness of plurals.) All of which give a cold, distant aura to the whole book. Poems feed on specifics, no matter how much we want to reach that Grand Unification Theory envied by poets and physicists alike. Please do not tell me over and over about the sea, the moon, the clouds, the wind, the stars. Tell me about Casco Bay and Venus rising, at least. Let the sea be Mediterranean, Atlantic, Sargasso--some real place, not one pretending to be the ultimate symbol of whatever. Some of these poems depend on repetition for their effect. For a line to deserve repeating, it had better be a killer line: "And I have miles to go before I sleep. / And miles to go before I sleep." Or, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Sometimes the great moderns were great.

Was the early work by this poet was always so much like pablum, a sticky consistency meant to nourish but offensive to my palate? Is he resting on his reputation, a grand poo bah of poems?

Well, I feel a little better. Of course, I may relapse after hearing the eminent poet read. Maybe there will be cookies and punch. That won't quite explain the cost of the event, but I will gladly put my money, when I have any, in service to poetry. Funding weak poetry is better than buying guns and grenades. And at least I've said, in reverse, what I want in a poem. Oh, look, that Mallard drake is landing on the pond in front of my window. He's making a wake. I'll go look at him. He's a poet of the best kind.

Have you seen?

This morning brings some weirdness in the book world. A story in the LA Times says that scam artists have called bookstores, claiming to be authors scheduled to read in said stores, then telling sad, urgent tales of loss and asking for money to get to the gig! Good plot lines, bad characterization, because the real authors do object to being used for nefarious purposes. Great word nefarious. All of which relates to the ethics of writing and how we treat actual people who serve as springboards for the characters we create.

Recently, I sent a copy of a poem I had written about her to my aunt. And I held my breath a little. Not because I lied or intentionally misconstrued her character. But I did mention family business and wasn't sure she would approve of "airing our laundry." Notice I did not say dirty laundry. It wasn't risque or illegal or immoral, just private. She certainly rose to the occasion and plans to copy the poem and send it to her sister and all her children. Now that's what we hope for. But in a recent workshop, the leader, Shari Caudron, told of a writer who used one physical trait of a long-time friend. The friend was furious and broke off contact with the writer. And there is no guaranteed way to avoid using our own lives in real writing. I believe that most fictional characters rise out of a stew of familiar people. But that's not to say they are those people. As a writer, I have to tell the truth, but "tell it slant" as E. Dickinson says. I have to take the chance that someone with thin skin will object, will see her/himself in my work.

My current reading is Mark Doty's Dog Days. I've met Mark, met his late partner Wally, and I respect him. He tells us in this memoir about Wally's final days, his own reactions, his new relationship, and the history of his beloved dogs. He has a light touch, an honest touch. And I don't think Wally would object at all. Surely the dogs don't care. Mark is, himself, the key character and he doesn't object. So maybe good memoir has much to teach us about good characterization. Help is where you find it.