Writing Up A Storm

 

 Over the last four days, our power has gone out three times. The first two times it was out for over twelve hours. My Beloved rushed to put our frozen food in a cooler on the front porch. Since the temperature never rose above 20 degrees, we were safe. Our second stove, unlike the ’36 Chambers that came with Casa Diva, has a safety feature that prevents even attentive pioneers like ourselves from lighting the oven for heat. I put simmering pots of water on the burners for moisture and some warmth.

On the first day the ice storm was still in full swing, and there was no way we could have even walked up the block. A small house, we managed to keep ourselves warm by bundling up, I in my fancy plush robe that is far too bulky with its faux fur collar and cuffs to wear in anything but a dire emergency, and my Beloved in the sturdy Land’s End plaid wrapper that he has deserved and finally acquired. I read the second of L. Frank Baum’s fourteen Oz books in the span of a few hours. My Beloved began a long-postponed handcrafted clock project. We cooked something on the stovetop and just as we began to converse face to face on the couch, I heard the furnace kick on, and we were saved from ourselves.

One imagines as a writer that all they need is long stretches of undisturbed time to complete their magnum opus. Just a few brief weeks is all it would take to put all those notions into some semblance of order and suddenly Random House would be sending a limo. Soon after that, the Pulitzer people would be texting nonstop. But I know my Muse is not so predictable, not so easily appeased by a few odd hours of available time to allow my creative ambitions come to fruition.

The more aware of mortal limitations and requirements I become, the more anxiety is produced by a storm such as this. This will be one for the record books—the massive outages, the consistent low temperatures that kept the ice from fully thawing until Day Two, the ice itself thick and heavy on branches, beautiful to some. Not to me. All I could see was terror, that temporary deadliness ice and snow manifest. Summer’s lease, short as it may be, is still long enough for us to forget the winter’s struggles, long for the coolness and pretty blankets of white.

Trees too old finally to bear the excessive weight on their bare branches broke, and broke in vast numbers across our county. Lines were torn from houses, old utility poles were split in two. Tho my time was technically free and available, writing or even editing was the last thing my mind was capable of. I cleaned, napped, sorted piles that had been sitting dormant for months. Everything but something creative. Crochet hooks laid still. Mod Podge tightly capped. Only yoga, my new commitment, remained, and even then I skipped one day, one bit of ease for a troubled mind.

When I write, it’s on the sly. This has been my habit since high school. Even advanced English courses bored me, but allowed me mostly quiet time at a desk where I could compose to my heart’s content. I have tried to train myself to hit the desk first thing in the morning, before my mind has been cluttered with the day’s detritus. Many days this desk time only adds to an extended day of sitting, since my work also involves sitting. Once in a while, I’ll be able to decipher some notes I’ve hastily scribbled on a scrap the night before, or find the original thread of inspiration that caused me to jot a word or two down weeks before.

However, poems will come when I least expect them, the best poems anyway. A word or phrase will stick in my ear, and my mind will begin to run with the lines even before I put pen to paper. And yes, I could have written something on that first outage day because mainly I compose on a legal pad with a basic Bic. But it was not there. I spend the weekend proving to myself how clever I could be in a crisis. How resourceful to wash dishes with plenty of soap, rinse them with water boiled in the kettle. How smart we were to convert a woolen quilt batting into the filling for a duvet cover that keeps us warm in any weather.

Reading that second Oz book tho will doubtless come in handy one of these days. I can’t say Baum was the best children’s author ever. Knowing how hard he worked to expand his stories to stage and film somewhat takes the sheen of charm off even the cleverest of plots. But step back further, and the scope of his creation, the world somewhere beyond but not quite ours, is impressive. I have all fourteen of Baum’s Oz books, the only ones I intend to bother with after the dozens that came after his death. I will finish them this year, in neat Barnes & Noble reissue volumes suitable for bedside consumption. And indeed, they were intended to be tales read at bedtime. My sleep has been consistent but a bit shallow lately. If the CBD gummies don’t help, perhaps an adventure with Dorothy and Tik-Tok just might.

 

(photo c. Tom Romeo, tomromeo.com)

Now Comes The Hard Part: A home for GHOST LIGHT

 

 

 It’s hard to say how long it’s taken me to put together GHOST LIGHT, what I feel is a cohesive collection of poems inspired by the Ziegfeld Follies of 1919. Does a lifetime of isolating interest count? Where did it begin, you might ask? I was born in 1962, well after Vaudeville’s heyday and on the cusp of Beatlemania. Many performers had retired to the suburbs of Long Island, a fact that causes me no small amount of regret. I had neither the nerve nor the ability in those pre-Internet days to seek these treasures out while they were still with us to tell their stories. Luckily a few others did, and we have those interviews, and at very least their obituaries, to tease our hunger for more.

In 1956, The Wizard of Oz made its television debut, and by the time I started watching and absorbing it a decade later, it had become an annual event as big as Christmas. Growing up, we may have lacked for material things here and there, but we always had a great, big color console TV. Those ruby slippers practically leapt off the screen! I believe that for me, Oz and Funny Girl were indirectly my two greatest inspirations to learn more about entertainers of the early 20^th century. Up until the mid-1970s, prime time programming was heavily influenced by vaudeville, burlesque, and even the presence of many of those entertainment pioneers. From Ed Sullivan to Sonny & Cher, most shamelessly borrowed from well-loved routines, thus perpetuating the art into this century.

It is an epiphany of sorts when one discovers that Glinda was in 1939, the year Oz debuted, the middle-aged widow of Florenz Ziegfeld himself. Both Ray Bolger and Bert Lahr worked briefly for Ziegfeld. Judy Garland would star not so long after as a Ziegfeld Girl in a thoroughly whitewashed melodrama that nonetheless captures some of the magic that happened on the New Amsterdam stage. And so I went down the glittery rabbit hole.

Once I allowed myself the freedom to let the poems be inspired by history, and not slavishly document the exact color of every spotlight, I was able to make significant progress on the work. I hope that the poems breath life back into the people portrayed for a moment, some as popular in their day as Beyonce or Brad Pitt are today. I would love if one or two readers are inspired to explore these histories on their own. I’ve included short bios at the back of the book, hoping to tease and intrigue.

But now here’s that hard part I mentioned. Although I’ve had individual poems published in magazines and anthologies around the world, had several chapbooks produced by small, fine publishers, and even self-published some chapbooks on my own under the dubious “Flying Monkey Press” imprint, I have never submitted a completed, themed manuscript for consideration. It is a unique work for me in that it did require a great deal of research, and the poems although able to stand on their own individually, are intended to be a narrative of highlights. The earliest poem is set in 1896, and the latest in present day, but the bulk tell a story of the Follies of 1919, a year of radical unrest, irrational temperance, and relative calm before the coming decades terrible storms.

I consider it a version of embellished history, with a sound core and some poetical license entwined with the facts. If I didn’t think the poems were good I’d have written it all in prose, and frankly, that’s been done before and by more skillful writers than me. The days of firsthand sources have gotten away from us. Since I am moved nevertheless to write about the times, poetry became my genre of choice. My first step is to reach out to some of the university presses that deal with material close to the subject: Theater, New York City & New York State History, Early 20^th Century Music. I have a proposal letter in the works, and I do think the unique nature of the manuscript could be in my favor. I don’t seem to be able to locate much other poetry about the Follies, although one or two pieces showed up in Google searches.

I am willing to self-publish again if need be, but I would like these poems to reach as wide an audience as possible. It is the collection I have invested the most time, effort, and research into, and I am proud of it, flawed as it is. I suppose Ziegfeld felt the same way, but it will never be the grand performance of epic scope that I first envisioned. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me so long to complete. The Pandemic, for the most part, did not afford me any extra time to complete this task. Between working from home, fretting about finding new work, and finally working at several new jobs that were not a great “fit,” my hour or so in the morning before the world began to spin was all I could spare. But circumstances have certainly been driving me to take up long unfinished tasks and bring them to some kind of closure. So it has been with GHOST LIGHT, and so it shall be with other endeavors that have been cluttering up Casa Diva for years.