March 2020 – Page 2

Life Goes On…

Creating poetry prompts is often considered an art form, one where you have to be uber creative by coming up with quirky and specific prods for the writer’s imagination.

But hold on here a minute. What about the cliché as poetry prompt? Behind every mundane phrase first uttered by, say, Aristotle, there’s a truth teeming with particulars.

Let’s take the expression “life goes on” as a for instance, shall we? Because there’s a year, month, day, hour, and minute out there with our names on it—the moment we will take our last breaths, I mean—and when that happens, life surely will go on, completely indifferent to that preciousness we know as ourselves.

Question is, if I tasked you with a list of specifics on ways life would go on (and I mean particulars that are particular to you and not, say, to Aunt Kate in Kansas), you would envision something peculiar to your own life (external geography) and mind (internal geography).

In short, by zooming in on the little things first, writing, and then going back to give these truths a dose of figurative touch-ups, you’d soon have a poem not unlike Faith Shearin’s below.

As a starting point, Shearin chooses that universal filler-topic, the weather. She cites items entire years have been famous for (droughts, floods) and items you might see on any given day (“weathervanes, dizzy on top of farmhouses”).

Either way, zooming in or panning out, it works if the imagery is sharp, specific, and treated in a novel way. Like Frankenstein’s monster, the cliché comes alive. And though weather is the overarching theme in her particular paean to life moving along, most any broad topic could be to yours.

Read it as an exemplar, then give it a go. How will life go on when you make your exit, stage left? Might as well take your chance to produce and direct it now. You’ll have little control once you’re through that exit door!

Weather
Faith Shearin

There is weather on the day you are born
and weather on the day you die. There is
the year of drought, and the year of floods,
when everything rises and swells,
the year when winter will not stop falling,
and the year when summer lightning
burns the prairie, makes it disappear.
There are the weathervanes, dizzy
on top of farmhouses, hurricanes
curled like cats on a map of sky:
there are cows under the trees outlined
in flies. There is the weather that blows
a stranger into town and the weather
that changes suddenly: an argument,
a sickness, a baby born
too soon. Crops fail and a field becomes
a study in hunger; storm clouds
billow over the sea;
tornadoes appear like the drunk
trunks of elephants. People talking about
weather are people who don’t know what to say
and yet the weather is what happens to all of us:
the blizzard that makes our neighborhoods
strange, the flood that carries away
our plans. We are getting ready for the weather,
or cleaning up after the weather, or enduring
the weather. We are drenched in rain
or sweat: we are looking for an umbrella,
a second mitten; we are gathering
wood to build a fire.

When Truisms Beget Poetry

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Sometimes, as a writer, an idea strikes you so much that you decide to honor it as a personal truism. You hold this truth to be self-evident; the job, then, is explaining how the sun rose on this dawning.

Today’s poem, by the late Jim Harrison, is a great example of one of these abstract truths made concrete. If you can build the idea to the poem’s last line as Harrison does, so much the better. And if the raison d’être is rooted in imagery (here the sounds and sights of trains powered by coal furnaces), better still.

What I like especially is the concept of something appearing to be eternal: the poet ages from boy to man (subject to both change and eventual demise), but the object of his poem seems to be eternal. For me, this idea often springs from animals and nature, but for Harrison, the old train works equally well. Let’s see how.

All aboard!

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found…
Jim Harrison

Kooser called from Nebraska to say he’d found
a large cinder on a long walk along abandoned
country railroad tracks, a remnant of steam
trains, the cinder similar to those our fathers
shoveled from coal furnaces in the early winter mornings
before stoking the fire. In your dark bedroom
you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump
when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.
Now the trains are all diesel and in Livingston at night
I hear them pass, Burlington & Northern, the horn
an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.
Some complain but I love this night music,
imagining that some of the railroad cars are from
my youth when I stood in a pasture and thrilled
to my favorite, “Route of the Phoebe Snow.”
To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.

I don’t know about you, but I love “In your dark bedroom / you’d hear the scrape of the shovel and the thump / when cinders were dropped in metal washtubs.” Even if you’re too young to have known these sounds, Harrison makes them real through his description. This talent is a must in the poet’s toolbox.

Then, the train’s horn: “an immense bassoon warning the drunks at crossings.” And the lovely flourish at the end: “To be excited by a cinder is to be excited about life.” That says it all, no? And the readers know it, because each of us could replace “a cinder” with something—seemingly small—that makes us excited about life. Think about it.

Though nowhere near as accomplished, my poem “Here and Gone” was going for the same strategy as Harrison’s: the concept of eternity in the form of something from the past (in this case minnows, dragonflies, and small-mouth bass) looking the same while time works its cruelties on its observer. It’s from my second collection, Lost Sherpa of Happiness:

Here and Gone
Ken Craft

excluding a war zone
human death remains
the mad relative
hidden from sight
while nature
files and catalogues
its dead on the public
narrative of roads

why then
looking down on these shallows
at this same school of minnows
hanging in the same green-peg balance
as last month;

looking at
this same dragonfly
stutter-flying the water’s stippled surface
as last summer;

looking at
these small-mouth bass
swimming over the same soul shadows
against gold-gilled sand
as ten years ago;

am I reminded of you

and why would this moment
choose me to endure the eternity
inherent in minnows, dragonflies,
and soul shadows

What about you? What sounds, smells, sights, tastes, or touch sensations seem eternal and timeless in your world? What simple thing makes you excited about life?

Write about it!

Life as a Submitting Author (Hint: It Ain’t Pretty)

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mail

Being a writer who submits your work has its charm. One is the perpetual state of expectation (just west of the perpetual state of Tennessee).

Remember when you were young and the Internet was still an idea-in-waiting, how you’d look forward to the postman’s visit to see if you got any handwritten letters? It’s somewhat similar, in a pale fashion, checking your inbox daily for responses from magazines and journals.

Mostly, the following happen to you:

Nothing. I mean nothing. For days. Weeks even. Sometimes months. Remember what Mama once told you: “A watched micro never waves.”
Nothing goes on for so long that you decide to submit to another five or ten markets. That’ll show ’em!
Hint: This is known as saturating the market out of frustration. It is also known as making work for yourself should one of your simultaneously-submitted babies get accepted.
Something, in the form of subject lines beginning with RE: followed by a journal’s name. Here you engage in little reindeer games. You open the other emails first and save this one for last. You act like a little kid plucking petals from an ox-eye daisy while reciting, “S/he loves me, s/he loves me not.” Then you finally click it and know immediately by the shape and length of the message.
Hint: Usually “…s/he loves me not.”
You get a form rejection from a journal that charges a reading fee. You kick yourself (no small feat, even if you have big feet). How many times have you sworn this off? And yet you continue to fool yourself by saying, “Yeah, but this poem is that good!”
Hint: No it’s not. Unless you’re already famous. Then it might be.
You get rejected by a journal two days after you submitted. Though it’s disappointing, it actually feels good. Why?
Hint: It might have something to do with submissions from 10 months ago that still read “RECEIVED” in Submittable (maybe the journal’s name, The Cobweb Review, should have served as a hint).
You agreed to subscribe to emails from the journal the day of submission. It sends you a form rejection and your babies (typically five of them) come home downcast and in tears. As retribution, you go into indignant mom mode and unsubscribe to emails from that journal. Here we go again: That’ll show ’em!
Hint: This is small-minded, but rejected poets are quick to forgive themselves.
You make a run and get three or four acceptances in a row. You’re hot. Like ham and cheese with mayo, you’re on a roll. Now the poetry world gets it! Now they finally appreciate your genius!
Hint: Do you actually think they are aware of each other’s acceptances and are jumping on your imaginary bandwagon? Hey. Whatever floats your boat, dreamer.
Your run ends with a series of rejections (say, ten), landing you back where you began, unable to break the ceiling of unknown poets (not as famous as the Sistine Chapel’s, but a very real thing).
You get a letter in your snail mail box.
Hint: Just kidding. And seeing if you’re still reading. No one gets snail mail letters in their snail mail box anymore. That is now the conquered province of bills, catalogs, and credit card application come-ons.