loft mentorship: seminar with jude

Jude Nutter spent some time in Europe this late spring, researching.  She grew up in/near Bergen-Belsen and on a recent trip with a historian, she was able to take in both personal and world history.  She gathered pieces and shared them with us.

Above:  upper left:  a piece melted glass; lower left:  a piece of window with wire still in it; middle: a hand-forged nail; right: a broken piece of ceramics, likely brought from home. 

Below:  perhaps the most jarring of broken ceramics, of course, because that symbol is so absolutely terrifying and fraught.

We spoke of journeys, of opportunities, such as being an artist in residence at national parks and monuments. 

This particular session was dedicated to discussion telling lies / telling truth in poetry. 

Talking about how publishing houses decide if something is called memoir or novel.  One (CNF, but prefers to call it prose, or simply not label) participant said, Our concern with the truth is an American thing.  We're letting markets dictate our hyped up emotions.  Yes. 

Jude pointed out the use of metaphor (love is a dog from hell) as a device but an impossible occurrence.  Immediate lie.  I thought:  emotional truth and plot's lie.

Then there was the discussion of topic and how far a lie can go in poetry and be OK:  some felt cheated when finding out Jude's latest book was 80% fabrication (a poem she read to us about a lover that was emotionally true, but there was no spy-lover, only much research).  But others were OK with it--but if they looked to the back of Jude's book and discovered it was written by a father-of-three living in Chicago (as opposed to the woman who grew up near/on Bergen-Belsen after the event).  The narrative of abuse that never happened.  Evoking pity where pity wasn't deserved.  I mentioned the idea of appropriation versus lying in the service of the truth--these things were vastly different.

The same CNF participant said, The new discussion should be Your Problem, Not Mine.

A poet:  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Another poet:  I'm just fascinated with all the curtains.

Jude:  Here she brought in the idea of truth as expressed through structure.  One member has had several pregnancy losses and writes about them in such a stunning way:  one suggestion in her conference with Oliver de la Paz was that perhaps she does not have to rely on chronology or to maintain each separate event by truth, that blending could happen.  It's a complicated decision, as each loss is so personal and has such a different impact, depending on if it was before or after the birth of her daughter and how far along she was when she experienced the loss.  So then does the book need cohesion or is that disjointedness, that inability to fully track a part of the reading experience?

Jude:  Ellen Bass wrote about her mother having cancer and killed her off in a poem.  She was nervous for her mother reading the book, but it turns out her mother wasn't hurt by this action; instead she was bothered by her wearing a wig, which she didn't do, as she didn't want people to believe her hair wasn't her own.

A poet:  told us of how she received an ornament from her aunt to memorialize a cousin of hers who killed himself.  By hanging himself on a tree. 

Another poet:  You arrived at the irony of this through language.

Another CNF:  This is why we are the writer and she isn't.

Original CNF:  And I bet she's happier for it.

 In the context of my own work, so much of it leans on truth, with small embellishments.  There are false poems out there:  my poem "Breaching" (in paper, Berkeley Poetry Review) takes the fact of a honeymoon in Alaska, an orange curtain, two black bears, and embellishes, becomes a poem where my husband and I physically fight, which is ludicrous in truth.  But narratively, it's compelling.  In another poem, "Linguistics," I change the word my grandfather uses from "asshole" to "cocksucker" because it has more punch and shock.  I cannot imagine hearing either out of his mouth, but he has Alzheimer's and does so much I could never imagine happening.  I feel exhausted in some ways, with The Truth, and have been flirting with the idea of putting together a hybrid / lyric essay weaving together witches, a burning, the South, midwifery, kudzu, bears, I don't know what-all else.  I picked up a book at McKay's in Chattanooga on front porch culture.  I'm drawn to The Farm.  I'm ready to see where these elements take me.

weekend seminar with susan power

I've done an awful job transcribing notes from my experiences with the Loft mentorship, so I will start here, with our last meeting with fiction writer Susan Power.  And I must say, before I delve into my notebook, that I highly recommend her work.  We read Roofwalker for our mentorship group and all of us absolutely loved it.

This was a reading weekend, and at the Q&A, she spoke of how there's that saying write what you know, but a writer once told her she ought to write what you need to know instead.  (I love this; it's so critical to what I'm in the thick of Right Now.)

When asked about writing pain, she confessed she's attracted to the juicier parts, so she writes those first, leaving the connective tissue to writing later.

On the business of writing
- In thinking of change or letting a book go:  "I'm not going to give up on my characters.  I'm not going to give up on my stories."
- As a judge, she's concerned about carelessness.
- Never forget what you are serving, first and foremost.  Portrayal of authenticity / clear vision backed with reason.  In creation process, simply follows, doesn't understand reasons at the time, but in revision.  Often stands ground when she feels she is being edited culturally.  Watch when we / our work is being treated as a product.  What we do is sacred.
- Manage expectations.  Aim for the world, but don't expect the world.  Always be on guard for agendas of others--pressures from business or even family members.  Know what is reasonable for you.  Remember that your job is to be as authentic as you can be about your writing.  Don't apologize for your process, your journey.  Each writer, each project is different.  Realize you are called to do different things and each needs something different.  (Be OK with that.)
- One writer, when talking about the way we compare ourselves to other writers (or reviewers do):  "It's like there's no more room at the table."
- Another writer said she "enjoys the ancestry," and that it "causes [her] to feel less alone."
- Somewhere in there, we talked about the conversations we have with books--about how, when we are pushing to do something unique, to think of our work as conversing with what came before, and know that everything on the shelf is speaking to something else on the shelf.

I wrote to myself:  This discussion of Getting A Book exhausts and depresses me, this honesty and wishing.  I think it's because I've been wishing so hard and long for my full-length.  I'm worrying about so many things.

We had two writing exercises:

- Interviewing.  This one can be adapted in many ways, but Susan uses it to help jumpstart a stuck place.  Often she'll set up an interview for one of her characters to get at answers she cannot logically come to on her own.  Sometimes, as in a piece she's worked on recently, another character entirely shows up to answer the questions.  The response was complicated, but good.  It can be a generative exercise:  write ten general questions and see how they get answered by a character, a not-even-a-seed character, no-one in mind.  Just go.  Or, if you are writing nonfiction, a way to imagine how someone might have answered those questions, or someone else, just to get a better understand of the situation.  Another way to do this is to do it in role-playing with a writing partner.  For me, during the exercise, what called me was to really follow the development of the questions themselves; I'd like to interview my mother about her attitudes towards her pregnancy with me and my sister to see what it might do to my current poetry manuscript.

One student suggested writing with a non-dominant hand.  She said she was surprised at some of the results she got.  Another writer spoke of how she would let herself lose complete control in freewriting and once dreamed up a daughter for couple-friends who had no plans for children and were heading into unbearing years and not long after, that friend called with News.

Other exercise suggestions:
- Create a list of characters such as the patron saint of liars (after Ann Patchett) and see what roles come out.
- What if your character walked to the "wrong" end of the rainbow?  Let the character contend with that object.  (Not a "wrong" object--but, say, a baby)
- Another writer suggested the technique of mind-mapping

Each session we've had with Susan, I've come away rethinking my manuscript deeply, and that surprised me.  I thought, perhaps, nonfiction would influence me--after all, this is confessional, very naval-gazing stuff, but fiction certainly isn't a realm I'm comfortable in.  But, as with many things, it does depend on the instructor and her ability to draw in students.  I found her energy inspiring--she looks to opening yourself up to receiving your creative impulses.  Characters arrive and speak to her.  She follows, doesn't question.  Generation is a magical thing.

oliver de la paz visit: reading (with me!)

 

On the Loft's blog, Writer's Block

oliver de la paz: seminar

(photos from the Loft website)

Part of the involvement in the Loft Mentor Series is working with an out-of-state poet for an intensive weekend.  (We also work with a local poet, and in this case it's Jude Nutter, and a pair of fiction writers and a pair of non-fiction writers.)  Oliver de la Paz was our poet, and my son Finnegan sat in my lap the whole while.  (Excepting, of course, when I was walking the halls with him, etc.)  So my notes are sporadic, but valuable.  Oliver has a reputation for being an excellent teacher, and it's well-earned.

- Receptivity to reader:  narrative, sequence, tone ---> create a map, must be an entry point.
- can have one subject, but something else must run parallel 
- we are the summation of our contexts--studying other writers when you've written yourself into a corner--there's something to be said about painting over the work of the masters (imitation as exercise)
- "A little backwards movement to go forward"--sits down to revise for half an hour before generating for half an hour (this is where he told the story of how cleaning up kid-poo on the carpet for half an hour isn't conducive to a productive poetry-mood, so he revises in order to return his focus)
- (when asked about continunity and revision for the sake of a book) story of how Nick Flynn changed a poem of his that was published in a journal to match the tone of his book; de la Paz's "Requiem" was originally one long poem, but he wanted to maintain inertia, if it was kept as one long poem within the book, would have been weight unable to overcome, written as sonnet so could be autonomous but the poem did sacrifice itself for the sake of the book
- (when asked about his attitude towards his town in Requiem for the Orchard) looked at Larry Levis, who wrote about Fresno with a love-hate relationship, de la Paz learned a lot about his feelings towards his own town; the slow, descriptive quality ideal for nostalgia and small epiphanies; couldn't tell if eye loved Fresno or heart did; Levis described with a loving eye even the grotesque
- (when asked about common pitfalls of submissions):  gives himself 48 hours to resubmit poems, emphasizes knowing the journals
- (how does he know when he's done?) surrenders process to editor, work can calcify or not move forward--being through with writing is not the same as being done with a piece

He worked us through a writing exercise packet, in which we wrote about a poetic obsession, answering questions about it:  What color would it be?  What sound?  What animal?  If it were a boat, what ocean would hold it?  What continents would it see?  If you were to marry your obsession, describe your wedding cake.  The view of your obsession's apartment?  How will it die?  We then were told to write a five-word sentence that is also an image.  The idea here is to help expand boundaries--make the animate inanimate, etc.

Then we examined poems, asking:  What is palpable for you?  We looked at repetition and rhythm as a way of structuring meaning.  Of the way rhythm can reveal content.  One exercise was to adapt the exquisite corpse he called the wall sonnet, where one would write a new line each day on a series of ten sheets, moving the covering paper down on the poems--the number of poems and the number of days would allow for enough improvisation to surprise the writer.  The idea here would be to continually think about the obsession, to have only this small context in mind, leading to spontaneity.  In his book, the poems called "Self Portrait With..." often reveals a time when de la Paz was giving himself a writing exercise.

Often he'd compare the manuscript to the experience of an art gallery.  Of the Picasso gallery with sketches along the walls, leading to the final painting.  Of how the Mona Lisa's wall space had to be so carefully planned.  How we have to think about the stream of experience as well as the individual poem.

loft mentor series reading #2

I drove up to the Twin Cities with my daughter strapped in the back, ready to exchange her as I once did when I taught Thursday nights at the university.  My husband's work, so familiar meeting car-to-car, transfer of seat and diaper bag, and he thrust her onto his shoulders, jogging with her to the door, her pink coat flopping.  My eyes stung as they did two years ago, when I'd quickly give her as much milk as she would tolerate; she never took to the bottle and it would be a long night for my husband with this infant, squirting pumped milk from the bottle, her squalling and my engorgement meeting in the night.  I don't know why I felt as if I were leaving her again like this; she's two now and so very independent.  I struggle with the separation of these two lives:  mother and wife / poet in the world.

But I knew venturing out for this night would be very worth it, despite the snowstorm that hit halfway through the drive and left me creeping toward the parking lot.  Kelly Hansen Maher, a fellow participant in the Loft Mentor Series, was reading, and her work truly, truly blows me away on a regular basis.  Her reading was no less.  She has a background in theatre and knew exactly how to guide the reader through her heartbreaking poems, where she melds the north woods with pregnancy loss--poems of loon calls and canoeing in fragmentary bits, punching and moving.  It should be no surprise that I cried--pregnancy hormones, perhaps, stroking my enormous belly as I sat there--but too, Kelly's worth is so honest and heartfelt and told in a form I could not manage myself, and as a person, I really think she's amazing and deserves so much.  Pregnancy and (in)fertility have been such driving forces in my own work; it's hard not to take those varying levels of no personally, internalize them and put as much wish into others' lives as I can.

Also reading was Jude Nutter, one of our mentors, and her work is equally breathtaking.  She's a narrative-lyric poet, has three books, the last two of which I've read (I'm trying to get my hands on the first), both of which blew me away in her descriptions of the world.  She's a good model for me, a goal to get my own poems, about very different subjects, to work towards--the long narrative, the poem holding together over pages, as opposed to the drive-bys I do sometimes.  Creating a solid world, a book that exists on one plane and several at once.

I missed the first reading when I fell under pregnancy's varying levels of (un)wellness.  It stoppers me up sometimes, causing me to miss events I truly wish to attend.  The commute of an hour does not help; I feel as if I could make it to some of these things, if it weren't for the two-hour sit.  Fortunately, the Loft records these things, and I would recommend checking out MaryAnn Franta Moenck's reading of family history poems and Amy Sullivan's account of the Girl Scout camp murders in the 1970s.

writing prompt: filtering present through the past

1/  Distribute copies of the poems:  "Staff Sgt. Metz" by Dorianne Laux and "The Writer" by Richard Wilbur.  Introduce these pieces by explaining the interest in filtering the present through a past moment.

2/  Start with Laux, and read without the past moments.  There is a beautiful description of the moment, but one note, missed opportunities to step into the figurative.  Read again and read the full poem, including the past bits.  There we have the hinge.  How does this change the poem and its meaning?  Examine first line:  "Metz is alive for now" and later, earning "I don't believe in anything anymore: / god, country, money or love. / All that matters to me now / is his life"

3/  Turn to the Wilbur.  Read aloud with only present moment.  Read again with past included.  See how Wilbur uses the frame of the present.  See his use of enjambment to create urgency in the center of the poem, the memory part.  Ask students about the extended metaphor:  we start "at the prow of the house," we get the gunwhale and the passage.  How does Wilbur return to this metaphor, what physical image?  "clearing the sill of the world"--there it is, the horizon for the bird, for the daughter.  It is in this way that Wilbur deals with cliches without having to completely eradicate them.

4/  Assignment:  create your own poem, which takes on the past to filter through a present moment.  Don't be shy--one expects at least a typed page, but no more than two.  That space is enough for the two moments to marry one another well.  Consider, too, the marriage of form and content, knowing what's at stake.  These poems don't need that left-justified treatment.  Take advantage of white space, of line breaks, of couplets, of tercets, of prose blocks.

All credit for writing exercise goes to Jude Nutter, who brought it to our full group poetry session at the Loft Mentor Series this weekend.

from the bookshelf: i wish i had a heart like yours, walt whitman

I worked with Jude Nutter in a mentorshop program at Intermedia Arts before I started my MFA program; in fact, it was just as I was gathering materials to begin applying, and she helped me sort through my poems to determine which would be strongest and in what order.  Through the time we worked together, (along with three other mentees, which include Greg Watson, a poet who has invited me to read with him twice now, an honor), I began to write what I referred to as "my grandfather poems," and the bulk of which became The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake.  So, you see, I owe a lot to her instruction and the inspiring timing.

Once again, I am Jude's mentee, and today we'll sit down as a whole group together, discussing Carolyn Forche and Polish poetry and the poetry of witness.  It's somehow exactly what I need--I'm incredibly interested in moving away from such tunnel visioned poems, which I still love to write and think are very important, and see what it is to write a more braided poem that looks out into the world.  I don't want to "take the I out," so to speak, but after writing a full-length manuscript that keeps so close to the body, I am ready to write about the body in the world.

We read her most recent, I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman.  Beautiful, heartbreaking book.

What feels to be the thesis of this book:
it's been slipping beneath the skin / of every poem I write (10)
Your father's dead will not leave you in peace (81)

Phrases and images I loved:
At the keyholes of the nostrils (1)
crisp grass with green light up its sleeves (1)
the wind's white shoulders (2)
banner of his blood (2)
the breath of the [gun] barrel (3)
black knuckle of an axe head (5)
boys began to smell strange, like objects / that never dried out, like the rank / hug of air in the bunker (11)
And this is how I came to language, / with such fear in my small body.  And it would burn / down through me like a wick. (13)
the pod of a silver canoe (14)
dirt's top drawer (16)
this is how it was that we let you die // several different deaths at once even though / you were given only one. (27)
Long, braided / straps of song (29)
the yoke of your narrow / shoulders (31)
the leaves like the polished tongues // of church shoes. (31)
chime of trowels (40)
urge us to offer // our bodies up into the mouths of others (41)
I was on my knees, which had blown / inside out, like flowers (43)
I found my donkey, half dead / and braying in the ruins, wearing stockings / of blood and shit. (44)
the small, worn / tray of the page (53)
the wet drawbridge of his tongue (56)
the fender of your teeth (56)
its bright, precise grammar of sails (61)
The knife was honed and bright as a grass blade. (65)
a fritter of sunlight (67)
These are girls / who have recently discovered / that the bodies they have are the bodies / men want more than they / themselves do. (72)
wearing even / the promise of their large hands like expensive / accessories (73)
sliding through the belt of shadow / under the overpass (73)
the bright lasso / of a wedding ring (75)
the heart's // four neighborhoods (77)
Bless the grave of every poem. (78)
The brain / is just a basket of blood vessels. (91)
the insects / mistake my windows for clean platters / of sky (96)
green trawl of light (98)
I thought the flesh // was a door but it was always a mirror (101)
the heart's / plump slipper, there between the lungs' little kitbags (101)

2012-2013 loft mentorship

Not that I've been knocked up enough times to cite a true pattern, but it seems each time I am with child, I want nothing more than to hibernate--to curl up into the child's pose and read a great deal of fiction in bed, preferably with a snowstorm or a thunderstorm out the window and my husband playing tag with our daughter in the living room.  Me upstairs, just to clarify.

It's hopeless for me to make any kind of play date that involves rooms without doors these days.  Not without my un-nauseated husband, that is.  Me, I'm sunk into it up to my armpits, and I feel aversion not just to random foods, any kind of motion (including, as we discovered today, going over train tracks, and last week, the merry-go-round was incredibly destructive, my eyes squint-shut and praying the ride would be over soon, soon, soon), but I also seem to avoid work of any sort.  That is to say, I will have spurts of ambition and might organize an entire dangerous pile of books into their alphabetical homes in one fell swoop or maybe organize Maya's closet according to future-sizes and get that second dresser ready for past-sizes to go on the tadpole within, but mostly, I just want to be lumpish and kneel with my head resting on our new stain-resistant carpet.

Poems are not forthcoming.

This isn't entirely true.  I feel lots bubbling inside of me, alongside tonight's shrimp with broccoli, but I have lost that hugely industrious pattern I had when insomnia was at its pregnancy-induced height.  I was submitting poems in batches of ten journals a night and in April, I managed a new, worthy of revision poem nearly every day.  What's more, I actually wanted to converse about poetry and read the sorts of books that require a pen for the margins and eat, breathe, sleep it all.  And I was.  I dreamed poems into being.  Now, my Ambien prescription blanks much of those evenings out, and my thrice-weekly trips to the acupuncturist / chiropractic has cleared up a good portion of my restless legs syndrome. 

The closing of an MFA thesis helped keep me going when I was pregnant with Maya and in that post-baby haze.  I had to churn out twenty new poems in a matter of weeks, or the fire-breathing so-and-so (not on my committee) would peel my skin and I'd be a puddle of postpartum tears.  In many ways, it was good for me--not the cruelty, but the sprint-to-the-finish that spring.  I kept reading.  And writing, and nursing, and writing, and breathing.

This academic year, I'll be extending that experience--not through the university program, but through the Loft Literary Center, a place I've loved and admired for years.  There are many incredible programs this place puts out, and one of them is the year-long mentorship sequence.  It's a competitive program, and I feel incredibly, incredibly honored to have been selected among the many manuscripts to spend these next seasons with twelve mentees (four in each of the poetry, fiction, and nonfiction genres) and six mentors (two in each aforementioned genres).  The poetry mentors will be Jude Nutter (representing the local faction) and Oliver de la Paz.

I've worked with Jude before, when Intermedia Arts had a program called Writer-to-Writer, another mentorship program, this one designed where four writers work with one mentor, divvying up the time as the group sees fit.  The Loft's is different in that it has a strict schedule, I brought home a binder that could really do some damage if it fell from a great height, and you work across genres regularly.  Like Intermedia's program, this one culminates in a reading, and reading at the Loft has been one of those fantasies I've had, a kind of something to check of my list of goals as a poet.

Receiving a space in this program is humbling.  In the binder, there's a list of the past mentees and some of them have gone on to have careers I've really admired.  It's also precisely what I needed at precisely the right time:  discipline.  When I was carrying my cell phone about me like Maya with one of her bee-bees, waiting and hoping for that phone call, my friend Meryl told me that, while she had absolute confidence that I would be accepted, if I didn't, then the universe was making space for something else that my writing life needed.  When she said that, I knew that the Loft mentorship was exactly that, though I couldn't say it, not out loud.  I didn't want to jinx it.

So here I am, getting foggier with sleeping medicine, about to pull my novel upstairs with me and curl into bed with my just-bathed daughter and my exhausted-but-content husband, and I feel that jittery and important connection to poetry being maintained, no matter how much this delightful parasite wants the whole of me, deteriorating brain and all.