Tag Archives: Open Link Night

Dear Sir or Madam:

I would like to complain to you about so many things,
like the sunlight that still butters the edges of leaves,
some of which are still green. It’s November; if
everything is going to die, I would rather it be soon.
For weeks, I’ve braced myself for it, and yet, I still
see a flower here and there, hanging in, and its
unwinnable fight hurts me more than if it would
just die already, so I could mourn a little, move on,
make myself ready for ho ho ho’s and the exchange
of good cheer. It takes me a while to make myself
feel that, you know, though eventually I do, at least
a little, even in the worst of years. I am not unmoved
by public sentiment, no matter how frothed it is by
advertisers, manufacturers of things. I like things
as much as the next person, maybe more, and I can’t
lie: I especially like things that are not necessary, ones
that are apple-heavy in my palm and make their own
starlight. I would like the world to turn a little, all of us
to suffer now in darkness and cold, because winter
can’t end before it begins. This anticipation, it’s like
waiting for a blood test, sitting there in an awful room
with a TV you can’t turn off (there’s a handwritten
card that says so, in Sharpie, no less—it’s permanent,
you know), and you can’t imagine that your name will
ever be called, the test ever be done, your blood
remaking itself before you even get up to go home.
You can’t imagine home, not when all of you is
wrapped up in dread, suspended animation.
It’s like that, dear sir or madam.
That’s just what it’s like.

 

For NaBloPoMo, Open Link Night at dVerse Poets, and PAD Challenge, Day 13 (prompt: write a letter poem).

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Protection

Left and right,
holding up a crystal platter
of cream puffs, maybe,
or porcelain angels, their wings
already chipped from
a bumpy ride in the back
of a rattling panel van.

Left and right,
holding up a fragile realm
like that, keeping broken things
mostly stable, lest anything
break further, though everything
breaks at least a little in this
unpadded world.

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets, PAD Challenge, Day 6 (prompt: left and right), and NaBloPoMo.

 

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OK, I Changed My Mind … PAD, Day 1

As soon as I finish this post, I’ll do another one, for Day 2 of the Poem-a-Day Chapbook Challenge (aka PAD). That’s right — I’ll be posting all 30 of the poems I write this month. Wait … Didn’t I say just a few days ago that I wasn’t going to do that, for a number of eminently sensible reasons?

Yep. I sure did. Yes. But then I realized that:

1) It’s really depressing and isolating to write a poem based on a community prompt and then not share it with that community.

2) The poems I write for these things are often very “prompt-y” and not necessarily what I’d want to submit, anyway.

3) Last year, I talked to a couple-few editors at reputable literary publications who don’t think this kind of thing warrants the scarlet PP (for “previously published”). At least one of my PAD poems (maybe more — how is it that I forget these things?) actually found a home in print.

4) I’m more interested lately in submitting chapbooks and full-length books, and for those, no one cares about PP for the individual poems, as long as you acknowledge where the PP occurred.

5) It’s good to be less precious with poems and to realize that you really can make more. Even if all the poems I write in November are down the well, December will come.

6) This type of challenge, while I do work at it, is also play. If I’m going to play a game, I want to really play it — to go balls to the wall (which, by the way, I recently learned does not mean what I thought it did), as it were.

One thing I didn’t like about PAD last year is that it lives in the comments on someone else’s blog, not on my own. But there’s no reason I can’t post my PAD poems here, too. I also recently learned about NaBloPoMo, which is a challenge to blog daily all this month (you have until the 5th, if you want to sign up and do it, too).

So … I’m going to post daily here and at Poetic Asides (home of PAD). I’m going to link to Open Link Night at dVerse Poets on Tuesday afternoons, as usual, and I’m signed up for NaBloPoMo. If I’m going to PP 30 poems, I might as well PP them all over the place and have a good time doing it.

That’s a lot of talk … Here’s my Day 1 PAD poem, based on the prompt to write about some kind of match:

 

Match

Whittle it down to matches;
the tree is only the start of fire,
sunlight locked in its heart
like a memory of leaves.
No leaves now, it is wood
in a box; strike sulfur tip,
bring to wet, lichened log.
Cousin!, the match says.
I have returned.

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November: No More Contests! and To Post, or Not to Post?

October filled up quickly — I put together a book manuscript and entered it in five different contests (was going to be four, but I couldn’t resist that last one) and also entered a contest for individual poems.

It was fun to dream, but now I have to write. I find I’m either writing a lot or submitting a lot — can’t do both at the same time and give both the kind of focus I’d like.

After some thought, I’ve decided I’m going to do the poem-a-day chapbook challenge again. If you don’t know what this is, Robert Brewer of Writer’s Digest posts a prompt on his blog, Poetic Asides, each day in November. Many people post their poems each day in the comments of his blog, and I did that last year, too.

If you’re less “publishy” than I am, either because you’re content to post poems and get lots of comments, or because you’re just getting started or restarted and don’t feel ready to submit to literary publications, then I would absolutely recommend posting poems there. It’s almost universally a very supportive environment, with maybe an ideological squabble here and there but lots of people who will read your work and give you very specific praise and only the most gently worded criticism.

Don’t think of it as a chapbook contest — it’s not (there’s no prize, other than acclaim). But it is a great way to make sure you write each day for a month. That’s why I’m doing it again, even though I plan to only post on Tuesdays, the same day I post for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Why hold back? While I was able to place some of the PAD poems I’d posted on Poetic Asides, different editors do have different ideas of what counts as “previously published,” and it was kind of a big deal to end the month with 30 poems that were a bit compromised.

Those who are interested in submitting for publication, I would never advise you to hold everything back and to never, ever post online in some form. Posting on your own blog, a poetry site, or some other online forum can be so gratifying, and again, you will find editors here and there who are willing to accept poems that have been posted. (Do disclose this, however, so there are no unpleasant surprises or hints of deceit — editors don’t like either of those.)

I would advise you, though, to think carefully about what your goals are, and to consider holding back a little something if you can. Do you just want to do the work and get (and give) some comments, and publication beyond the blogosphere doesn’t matter so much to you? Great — go for it! Do you write a bunch of poems, so you can easily spare one each day? Again, great — go for it! Otherwise, I would just say … think before you post, and consider maybe not giving away the whole show.

But what do I know? Ask me in a month, and I might say it felt parsimonious to follow the prompts but not share daily, and that it’s best to go into these things completely open, and hang the consequences. In any event, I intend to comment a lot and post weekly, and thus feel like I’m contributing a little something, and not just mooching the prompts.

Will I see you there? (Or will you be lurking, too?)

 

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Practical Considerations of Dancing, for Open Link Night

The mystery isn’t in the feet,
left and right or left and left,
but in hand on small of back,
silent pressure, a presence
of body through clothes.

In fourth grade, we danced
in gym class, making squares
on green tile floor, lunch tables
pushed aside; this was our barn,
the record player called our tunes,
our movements. We were the interior
of a clock; allemande left, honor
your partner. We knew nothing
about honor then, or we were
learning it. We were too young
to hurt each other much.

If you wonder how you’re dancing,
you’re dancing badly. But I could
no more abandon this watchfulness
than I could unravel my skin,
walk around like that for a while.

In eighth grade, a boy, deer-nervous
and spiky-haired, asked me to dance.
I said no because I knew he was just
making fun of me. I fled to the restroom,
looked in the mirror to make sure I was
unacceptable, all wrong, and thus, right
to decline, right that there was no way
anyone could see me on the edge
of a gyrating circle and want
to pull me closer.

Sometimes you’re wrong
when you’re dancing
or not dancing.

Sometimes you only learn
the mistake later on, once
the streamers have been
taken down, all the punch
drunk, the boy gone home
or somewhere like home.

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Broken In

When I was crazy,
I did crazy things;
I’m not going to say
I wasn’t and didn’t.

I was offended by
all those small fissures,
synapses, gaps between
tectonic plates, moving.

How dare they move?
With enough baling wire,
I could fix every place
that was cracked,

hold it all together,
keep it still so that
my children could
never fall off

the face of the earth.
What’s crazy is that
I’ve given it up now,
the whole notion of

fixing; my children
hold on however
they can. Every day,
they watch me open

the same broken gift,
the only one I ever
get, the only one
any of us need.

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Broken In, for Open Link Night

Aside

My Feather Road, for Open Link Night

My Feather Road

I mainline birds
until I can’t stop
fluttering; there is

a nonstop stream
under every word
I say. I am learning

to drive this car
made of wings,
lurching down

a street of strewn
feathers. Your car
made of stars can’t

drive my feather road.
Greater love affairs
than ours have ended

over smaller things
than this: certain
blocked exits, gaps

of little consequence
that somehow come
to mean everything.

 

 

 

For Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

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Desi Arnaz Western Hills Hotel, Palm Springs, for Open Link Night

Desi Arnaz Western Hills Hotel, Palm Springs 

Phyllis poses on the diving board, arms out
in front of her, stiff as if she’s frozen there,
a zombie in a black bathing suit. Awful.

I should have been the one; I could have
given it a real sense of motion. My parents keep
my medals in the cedar chest they’re saving

for if I ever get married someday. But I
filled out the yellow bathing suit better;
the good thing about that is, I am in

the foreground. I’ll be the one you notice first,
on my chaise by the pool, as Phyllis and I,
Donna, and the rest—I feel sorry for some,

the girls whose heads will be dots in my
background—spin on a rack in the lobby,
by the cigarettes, next year and the next.

 

 

For Open Link Night, at dVerse Poets. Also, take a minute to see if you can figure out, generally, what I’m talking about … and then click here and see how close you think I got. (And many thanks to Kitchen Retro for giving me something to write about today.)

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