The Assassin’s Lament

At TweetSpeak Poetry, we’ve arrived at the last weekly discussion of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. Our discussion leader Lyla Lindquist has bravely led us through a veritable forest of counsel, advice and assignments for not only writing poetry, but it writing it better, writing it well, and even applying what we learn to all kinds of writing.

It’s a book that’s well worth your while to read.

This last section is entitled “Toward mastery,” so you know the assignments are going to get really serious. Here were but a few of the possible writing assignments we could undertake (and Addonizio thinks we should do them all):

Write a sonnet (remember that old iambic pentameter your English teacher talked about in high school? Well, it’s time to dust the iambs off.)

Write a deliberately bad sonnet (which, in my case, might not be difficult at all).

Do a close reading of a poem you love.

Perform your poem (as in, stand up in front of a live audience and read your poem and perhaps perform it). (That’s what I want to do – make a spectacle of myself.)

Make a broadside (like a one-page ad or tract or sheet with your poem on it, complete with drawings or art or designs). (I’m almost as bad an artist as I am a designer.)

Collaborate on a poem. (Possible; I’ve actually done something like that with TweetSpeak Poetry. It’s called a Twitter poetry jam, and you should try it sometimes.)

I decide I would write a sonnet. And I developed an idea that I borrowed from some fictional work in progress that just might see the light of day in about four or five weeks. The form is the traditional English sonnet (abab cdcd efef gg) (and those pesky iambs pentametering around the place).

I’ll let you decide if I wrote a sonnet or a deliberately bad sonnet (hint: both answers may be correct).

The Assassin’s Lament

So much of each assignment was a bore,

to wait, to watch, to think a plan straight through;

of all the skills required to do the chore,

to see the time was right was clearest cue.

And so he watched the pair so deep in love:

a golden boy with fame so broad, so far,

a golden girl with face from far above;

he felt regret and rued this bloody war.

The day arrived when he was told to act;

the wait was done, the price was paid to kill;

a plan of vengeance to become a fact,

his role, his fate he knew he must fulfill.

He’d watched too long, he’d seen the love so shared;

His heart of ice did melt, for now he cared.

To see what Lyla is up to and if any other iambs are roaming out there, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.

Necessary Coldness

I’ve completed the revisions to the manuscript of A Light Shining, the sequel to my novel Dancing Priest. The basic structure and concept of the original manuscript is there, but the finished story turns out to be something different, and it is due primarily to two things: a dramatic shortening of what had been the final section (dramatic as in a reduction of some 10,000 words; some will be saved for other projects); and the creation of a new character.

The new character doesn’t have a large role, but he does have a sufficient role, and it lasts throughout the story. In creating the character and the scenes he appears in, I did something I didn’t know there was a name for – necessary coldness.

In Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, author Kim Addonizio describes the technique of  “writing it colder,” which is a way (or technique) to handle emotion on the page, a deliberate underwriting or stripping out of emotion that actually has the opposite effect. She quotes a letter by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov:

“When you want to make the reader feel pity, try to be somewhat colder—that seems to give a kind of background to another’s grief, against which it stands out more clearly. Whereas in your story the characters cry and you sigh. Yes, be more cold…the more objective you are the stronger will be the impression you make.”

Pity is not the emotion I am aiming for with this new character. It is something altogether different. I introduced the character in a blog post entitled “Watching” in August, and also mentioned him a little later in “Where did he come from?”

But the idea of coldness permeates the scenes in the book with this character. And by writing the emotion down, I believe the reader’s emotion is dialed up. When I went back (several times; make that numerous times) to reread those scenes, I kept rereading and rewriting, and rerwriting in the direction of less is more.

By the time the manuscript was finished, I understood what I had done. When I read the section in Addonizio’s book, I realized there was name for it – necessary coldness.

I would tell you this character’s name except he doesn’t have one.

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, LylaLindquist has been leading a discussion of Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius. This week we’re covering Part III – “The poem’s progress.” While she’s focused on poetry, what she’s writing – and the exercises you can do – apply broadly to all kinds of writing. To see what’s up with the discussion, please visit TweetSpeak Poetry.

I Am Halves, I Am Pieces

We’re reading Kim Addonizio’s Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within over at TweetSpeak Poetry. We’re into Part 2, “Inner and Outer Worlds,” and the author has continued to come up with a whole array of exercises to stimulate thinking, inspiration and creativity.

One exercise she suggested, however, went a bit over the top. Encouraging the reader to rethink gender roles, she suggested that men apply makeup – or have someone apply it to them, and put on women’s clothes, to see what it felt like. And then write about the experience.

Uh, no.

I noted various exercises that I could do (or be willing to do), and then came to the suggestion to “write about your relationship with your racial/cultural identity. When were you first aware of being Asian, Caucasian, Jewish, ‘different’ from other people? Did you grow up within a certain group, and/or as an outsider to other groups? See if you can recall a specific incident when you experienced your ‘otherness.’”

That was it.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in segregation. I remember the separate water fountains and bus seating. I remember the separate bathrooms for “white and colored.” I remember the segregated schools, which were giving way just as I was entering high school.

As significant as racial differences were, other differences were equally profound for me – religious ( I know what it is to be a religious minority amidst a religious majority), ethnic, and economic – and the difference between living in a region more akin to the Caribbean than to the United States yet growing up in a what was a very Americanized suburb.

Sometimes the differences and conflicts were so pointed that you didn’t feel “whole.”

I Am Halves, I Am Pieces

I am half redneck and half coonass

I am half north Louisiana and half south

I am half Southerner and half New Orleanian

I am half city and half suburb

I talked like Indiana in a town full of yats and chawmers

My family was half Catholic and half not

I grew up Protestant in a Catholic sea

My Americanized suburb was full

of French and Spanish names

The ground felt solid but rested on liquid

My family still fought the Civil War

(and still lost)

I am smorgasboard and melting point

I am English and Irish and French and German

with African-American cousins

I learned Beatles in a place of jazz and blues

I have half-brother and half-sister

from twice-married mother and thrice-married dad

I am halves

I am pieces

To join in the discussion and see what our leader Lyla Lindquist is up to, take a look at today’s post at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph: New Orleans Streetcar 1950 by Robert Frank.

Sign of the Harvest Moon

Over at TweetSpeak Poetry, we’re finishing up Part One of Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio. Our intrepid leader, Lyla Lindquist, has encouraged us to do as many of the exercises as possible. “As possible” is the operative word here, because there are plenty of exercises in Part one.

Addonizio tells the story of a fellow writing seminar teacher taking one photograph a day for the 12 days of the seminar, and then writing about it. Addonizio suggested doing one a day for five days, and then describing why we took it.

I took one photograph for one day. Close enough.

How the photo happened: I would like to say I was trying to experience the evening, attempting to soak up some inspiration for writing. Actually, I was putting the garbage out – real garbage, recyclables and yard waste. I looked up, and saw the full moon almost directly above the stop sign at the end of our street. Out came the smart phone. Click. And I had the photo.

The question became, what to do with it. It’s been sitting on my smart phone for a month, and we recently had another full moon, which reminded me of the photo.

As I read through the rest of Part One of Ordinary Genius, I read the section on rhythm and flow, and how a poem needs to sound “poetic.” So I started playing with the photo, and the idea of the harvest moon, and that stop sign, and this was the result:

Sign of the Harvest Moon

It shimmers in a blackened sky

mantled with a misty crown,

iconic figure of harvest end,

the time to lay the reaper down.

It soothes, it does, in its cloak

of pale shades, its iris eye;

it gazes on sleeping lights below,

willing the day to stop, to die.

Well, it’s not one for the anthologies, but it has a rhythm and rather poetic flow to it.

The fact is, I don’t usually write this kind of poetry (poetry that rhymes). But it is a good way to practice the sounds of poetry, and the flow, and how it contains movement.

Please visit TweetSpeak Poetry to see what Lyla Lindquist is up to today with the book discussion. And don’t tell her I only did one photograph instead of five. And that it was a month old, taken before I knew I would be doing the exercise.

With Apologies to Mr. Frost

At TweetSpeak Poetry, Lyla Lindquist is starting a new book discussion today – Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within by Kim Addonizio. Today’s assignment: Read Part 1 (roughly the first 95 pages) and do as many of the exercises as possible.

There are enough writing exercises in Part 1 to keep a normal person busy for at least three months. The book is packed with simple and not-so-simple exercises you can do to help you with your writing. While the focus is poetry, the exercises actually apply to writing broadly.

I combined two of the exercises. I took the first line of a well known poem (it won’t be hard to guess which one) and imagined it going in another direction. That’s one exercise. The second: before I wrote the first word, I left the room. And I really left the room – going on a 20-mile bike ride along a trail that includes two longish stretches of woods. As I biked, I worked the first line into another first line, and then into the framework of a poem, and then into a rough draft of a poem. This was the result:

Post-Modern Man

Whose woods these are I do not know;

I vainly search for a village, though,

or even a single house but find

only woods, foreboding and forming

a filtered canopy over what may not

be a path through but only into.

With a touch of frost upon my face,

the proprietor, if he is, sends his minions

to effect the changing of the guard of leaves,

the red and the gold taking

the place of the green and fading.

I pause to rest against a tree,

and hear his whispers in my sleep,

and hear his whispers in my sleep.

“When I started to write poetry,” Addonizio says, “I had no idea how to begin to learn about it.” I had been reading poetry for more than 25 years before I thought of writing any poems myself. I didn’t think about learning to write poetry; I was reading poetry to help me become a better speechwriter. And yet those 25 years were a kind of learning time or preparation.

And then, in 2009, I started writing it. With a general sense of terror, I eventually posted a poem on this blog.

Like Addonzio, I’ve written a lot of bad poems, and some not-so-bad, and a few really good ones. And I’ve broadened the poetry I read, and now read as much contemporary poetry as I do poetry from the “canon.” The poetry I feel a particular affinity for is the poetry from the modern period, roughly 1900 to 1950 – poets like T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sara Teasdale and others. I suspect it has to do with the fact that these were the first poets I was taught in high school, and the poets who had most influenced my English and literature teachers.

Consider joining us with the discussion. Or simply stop by TweetSpeak and see what’s happening.