Genre to Genre: My Renewed Interest in Prose, for Better or Worse

 

When I was in grade school, I composed a short story about a whale who got to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Since my family were not opera buffs, my inspiration came from a Walt Disney cartoon. I don’t even think I’d ever seen the cartoon, but only a still from it, picturing the whale onstage. I recall being praised for this effort, and for so many other artistic products, whether or not the notions were my own or blatant violations of copyright. And so began my writer’s journey.

For the last many years, my primary focus has been poetry. Since poetry consists of words, and words are used for communication, my work rarely veers into the abstract. And since so little of it is of any decent quality, E.E. Cummings excepted, I do not use rhyming forms, or any traditional forms, in my work. I am strictly a free verse gal. My verses end when the thought ends, not when I reach a certain number of lines. Line breaks happen like natural breath, not when the ‘rocking horse’ has reached his destination.

My sporadic forays into prose have for the most part been unsatisfactory. I wrote for several local magazines and newspapers, and was paid a pittance for it. The news article format comes very easily to me, and that work was as effortless as the paycheck was lilliputain. Bottom line, my curiosity about local events only goes so far. I lack the inquisitive nature that marks the work of our greatest journalists. Jimmy Breslin I am not.

My short stories have been adequate at best. Late last year, while yet again cleaning out my physical files (yes, I still have work on paper, and you should, too), I came across some of my old efforts and decided to try to rework them. I have learned a lot in twenty-plus years, and felt I improved them greatly. I sent a couple out for possible publication, but short stories being what they are, the turnaround time is much longer. These days, if you don’t get a reply regarding a poetry submission, they’re either the New Yorker or they’re just lazy. With email, it’s never been easier.

Perhaps spurred on by these minor successes, I decided to start another novel. Meaning, I’ve got a couple of efforts in that area in those paper files, too, but never brought to any satisfactory completion. The final straw was an independently published novel I abandoned after fifty pages, even though the author was a graduate of the holy Iowa Writers Program. It reeked of the same moldy simplicity that most MFA work suffers from. Bland, simple, boring language that takes no chances, elicits no emotion. Maybe it’s just me and my lowly SUNY diploma, but I was not impressed.

Now, did I draw up an outline for this novel? Write up bios for all the characters? No, I did not. Am I aware of these traditional preparations for decent work. Why, yes, of course. I simply wanted the experience of writing prose, and decided to see if that myth where the characters “tell” you what they want and where they’re going could be true. To a certain extent it is. At the beginning of each session, I read the last couple of paragraphs and take them to the next place that seems right. I average about 1,000 words at a time, skipping some days when my schedule really doesn’t allow. I am still working full-time, and I am still going to the gym three times a week. I do what I can.

The good news is I’m not pressured by any deadline or advance. If this never gets done, it’s OK. So many of these projects around me, chapbooks, crochet items, even a bit of physical art that I’ve started probably won’t be finished. Many of these things will no doubt rejoin the elements in one way or another. Even words I’ve published may not be remembered in the next iteration of communication that’s no doubt on its way. You hear it over and over again—it’s all about the process. And I am enjoying this process. I have always enjoyed the process of writing. It’s the one activity I feel completely absorbed by, completely a part of. And if a certain project isn’t fun anymore, I let it go.

While it’s still my choice, I am letting a lot of these projects go. I won’t be a painter, or a seamstress, or make jewelry with polymer clay, although I can. I am at the point, the age if you will, where I need to streamline, focus more on the art that satisfies me, that will make up whatever “legacy” remains when my body has had enough. I’ll be 63 on Friday. That’s basically 60 years of creating, if you count that little drawing my mother has of her and my baby sister done at age 3. I figure I’ve got maybe 20 years remaining to finish what I can, or at least produce some quality work informed by experience. Wish me luck.

Experiments in Poetry- Acrobatics or Expression?

For most of my writing life, I have been a practitioner of the style commonly referred to as “free verse.” My only nod towards form is to imitate common speech, allow the lines to fall as the breath does. I will throw in a dash of alliteration here and there, if the situation allows, but more often than not, the result ends up feeling obvious and corny.

In high school, I experimented with formal styles, like sonnets, haiku and the like, but abandoned any hope of producing substantial work along these lines decades ago. Cummings could do it, Shakespeare created the mold many of us seek to shape our work by, but beyond those two examples, not much good, in my experience, can come from us mortals using the same rhyme patterns.

Every few years has brought a shift in my work, whether subtle or jarring. Recently, due to exposure to the work of Anne Gorrick and Adam Tedesco, to name a couple of local examples, I was inspired to try some more abstract methods. I took a workshop with Katrinka Moore, whose work transcends the seemingly simple procedure of erasure. I clipped and blacked out, drew random words from a cup, reversed lines and tore papers into shreds.

As a matter of fact, that last one is one of my favorite RANDOM WRITING exercises. I have participants work on a rough draft or a freewrite, and then ask them to tear the work up into chunks. We tape the scraps together, and examine the new, convoluted text for intriguing phrases created by juxtaposition. New poems can often emerge from these accidents. I like to use this exercise to help participants to loosen then hold on first drafts, to learn to not be married to the words as they fall on the page. More than one poet has gasped at these instructions, but warmed to the activity soon after.

I began to employ these methods with my own writing, to see where they would take me. After a couple of years, I must admit that I myself am perhaps too “married” to the basically autobiographical roots of my work to feel much satisfaction in writing from abstractions. The Ziegfeld poems I discussed last week are based on actual events, not my own life, but for the most part, my poems have been inspired by my own activities, emotions, and observations. I’ve been able to craft some pretty decent fictions from some of these exercises, but I still can’t get past the feeling that for me, they feel like parlor tricks, and not actual expressions. I’ve regarded them as a sort of lesser body of work.

I’ve tried fitting them into readings, since they are by no means works that I’m ashamed of, but they are so very foreign to the majority of my poems I’ve never been comfortable presenting them. The reaction consequently has been lukewarm. I pulled a bunch of them together into a small chapbook, creating a home for my seeming orphans. I called it Llama Love, after the longest poem, based on Facebook’s poor translations of a friend’s Egyptian posts. They sold well, but I have to attribute that to my llama sketch on the cover (see above). I only printed up a few, and even collecting them together was unsatisfying.

I’m glad I pushed the boundaries, and may go back to these experiments from time to time, but as far as where I’m at now, I’ll be to returning to my former narrative full-time. The poet I am is a reporter, a witness, and not the abstract wordsmith type. It works for many I know who produce rich, textured work, but not for me.