"I will always, always, always wasting away the time."

Photo credit: Quiet Delusions

This summer has been one of dabbling--I've been playing guitar, learning to cook a little, and for whatever reason, I've been working on three different writing projects all at once.  Not, probably, the best strategy when it comes to building focus and digging down deep into a story and making it big and real and saleable and full of high stakes and layers and awesome. 

It is, however, a pretty good strategy for getting back to the fun of writing when all that stuff starts to feel a little bit scary and serious.

So one of the projects I'm working on is this fantasy story I drafted a while back--before I had an agent, before I had a book deal.  I drafted it in between two revisions of KISS THE MORNING STAR, and for whatever reason, writing this story was the most enjoyable experiences I've ever had writing.  I love my little trio of heroes, I love the mythology and the magic of my little world, and I love the setting of the story, which is mostly in the real-world city I live.  It incorporates many of the things I love about home--the Lake, the crazy seagulls, and the beautiful stone "castle stage," which has always seemed to me the perfect place on earth to perform a Shakespeare play, and it's where my characters are performing the comedy Twelfth Night.

Anyway, I was reading through all the files of notes and beta comments and early drafts in my folder for this story, and I came across one I had almost forgotten, which was titled "Bonsai Remix".  What craziness I found when I opened the file to see this weird, mix-and-match junk poetry version of my first draft, which...hilarious and nonsensical as it may be, yielded some interesting thoughts and some fun lines.  My hazy memory and a few google searches brought back this funny little bonsai story generator, and I picked out a few silly lines to share with you, including the title of this post, which seemed pretty apt for me, especially perhaps for this summer of dabbling. 

(But sometimes...just sometimes, not "always, always, always"...the "wasting time" is really dreaming and thinking and turning over ideas that lead to a good story.  And sometimes dabbling in an old story to find back the fun of it all is so worth it!)

So here are a few more goofy nonsense lines of my bonsai story...will you share some of yours?  :)

The noise of them!” He laughed at her feet.

She slowed down, still wheeling and she was some serious wtf.

And a little puckering mouths gaping open and snapping closed, each crooning somehow melted together said the “transition apartment” that came with vampires or pacifists or pacifists or reading or anyone who had thrown that way.

spring is like a perhaps deluge

how to think...

How to Think/We Need Time To/Be Real creators/Turn unconventional Ideas Into News./Unite Spectacular Cosmic Leaps/dance, fool, enchant/Imagine Disaster and/Survive The World/then Stay That Way

Sometimes I have these days...like today, the last day before spring break...when I decide to make paper airplanes out of my lesson plans and take a little side trip.  April is National Poetry Month, so all of my classes have been working with poetry in one way or another.  My eighth graders have been reading one poem a day, and we've had some wonderful discussions about them--about what they mean and how they're formed and how to read them.  My sixth graders have been playing with language, experimenting with poetic devices, making games out of rhyme and rhythm, and writing simile and metaphor riddles.  We've spent some time looking at the found poetry at Newspaper Blackout, and today I decided we'd make some cut-out poems using old newspapers and magazines.

I thought maybe we'd spend twenty minutes on it.  We spent the whole 80 minute block doing it, and although every student approached the assignment with a different style and level of enthusiasm, almost all of them managed to put together some interesting combinations of words and phrases.  Some of them are amazing!

I spent my own prep time today creating a found poem out of an old TIME magazine, and this week (while we're on break), I'm going to post some of my students' poems on our In the Middle (of a Good Book) blog, which has been languishing since the start of the new quarter, as I'm now lacking a blogging elective class and haven't quite figured out how to organize my bloggers into an extracurricular force of awesomeness.

In the meantime, here's a taste, with two of my favorites, from Abbey and Caleb.  Enjoy!

When you finally/ get me I turn into a/ massive disaster/

 that makes you want to/ Try harder./ Thank you

Live it that way/tough guys enjoy people who kill the/love storys that look/bigger and better/to fix/what's wrong/with/me

This is Just to Say

I am reading
the books
you've been
telling me about

and which
have kept me
from blogging
and sleeping.

Forgive me--
they are so shiny
so brilliant
and I love them.

my first time

So this week we've been doing some shuffling around of furniture in order to get me a more ergonomically sound writing space (specifically, we've shuffled a much-loved but ugly-as-sin couch and chair to the dump and shuffled in a brand new set of chairs and side table...), a process which involved hauling an old desk downstairs to the living room.

The point?  Oh, yeah.  So the process of cleaning out my old writing desk has been a lovely trip down memory lane--I haven't actively used this desk for about ten years, and the drawers were chock full of nostalgia!

Among the treasures I found was this--evidence of my first time ever sending out a piece of my writing, in this case a tribute poem I wrote for the beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

You have NO IDEA how thrilled I was to receive this (and to find it again after all these years!)  The paper is a form letter from City Lights Books, and it says the usual kind of thing:  "Lawrence Ferlinghetti appreciates your asking for his comment on your work but he has found it impossible to keep up with such requests, and must decline.  Good luck with the publication of it," but I was thrilled beyond belief to see the signature of one of my idols along with the personal message, "Thank you for the tributes!"  He also signed the back of the postcard ("For Elissa"), and let me tell you, this made me fangirl almost as much yesterday as it did ten years ago!

I never expected a response from him at all.  I mean, the man is a legend.  At the time, I was as entranced by the beat writers as Anna and Kat in my novel, Kiss the Morning Star, and the thought of the man signing a note for me, no matter if he read the (bad) poems or not, was enough to make me weak in the knees.

Anyway, all of this has made me think about how far I've come in this journey of becoming a writer in the last ten years, and how deeply in debt I am to so many writers--those who have come before me and those who read my blog and talk to me on twitter and those who are in my middle school classes, wowing me with their amazing words at an age when I was still mucking around with angsty rhyming poetry.  It also reminded me again that even though it's a little embarrassing at times to think that I sent this awesome poet my little tribute, it's just possible that it actually made him smile, and in any case, the act of contacting him impacted me--and continues to today.

The poem I wrote, by the way, was a riff off (not a rip-off, haha) of Ferlinghetti's own poem, "I am Waiting" from his amazing book, A Coney Island of the Mind.  I'm not sharing much of it (it's looooonnnng.  and bad.), but I'll give you the opening stanzas.

A Renaissance of Wonder

I am waiting
     in fact I am quite impatient
     and there are weeks when I lose faith
     altogether
     and crumble off bits and pieces of my
     belief in the goodness of people.
I am waiting, and I tell you there are weeks,
     weeks where I can barely contain
     my optimism--
     my hope has no restraints.

I am waiting for these weeks to grow in number.

don't look now! it's bad poetry!

No, really. Don't look.

My students are doing this thing I do every year where we read a bunch of American Literature, and then I give them a thousand (or, yanno, twelve...) different creative writing prompts to spark their imaginations. Some of the prompts are for fiction, some for poetry, and some for personal essay. They can try all of the prompts or stick with just a few, but in the end, they have to hand in (or in our case, post to the class wiki) their best from each genre.

They always struggle with the poetry, and I mean, I don't blame them. It's not easy to write poetry, and it's really not easy to teach people to write poetry. Sure, you can give them strict forms to try (oh look! Another haiku! A limerick! A cinquain!), but for this assignment I've tried to encourage them to try their hand at other kinds of poetry, including free verse. We've studied all the poetic devices, read Whitman and Dickinson and Emerson and Poe--the whole unit is based on the Romantic Period, by the way--and then I turn them loose. Every year, I'm amazed at the fact that kids can actually produce some pretty awesome poetry when all I give them is advice like, "Don't worry. Break rules. Think about the sounds. Make us feel it. Give it a try. Start with a metaphor, maybe?"

This year's class is by far the most stressed out by all this, and in addition, my new student teacher needed an extra day to prepare his very first lesson, so this morning I had fifteen extra minutes and decided to break down and give them more guidance for a poetry prompt. We've been reading excerpts from Thoreau, both from Walden and Civil Disobedience, so I decided to ask them to do a sort of acrostic poem using the word "SIMPLIFY."

And then I sat down and wrote an example, and I like it. So despite the fact that I don't write poetry anymore (it's true; prose is all that flows now), I thought, "Hey, I'm asking them to do the impossible (they think) and write poetry. The least I can do is try, too."

But then I said to one kid, "You can do it. Look. I wrote one, right there on the board."

And he said, "Yeah, but you don't have to put it on the wiki for everyone to see."

And I said, "Yeah, but I put it right there for all of you to see. You don't think that's hard?"

And he said, "Well, maybe a little. But it's harder when the people reading it are, like, your friends and peers and stuff."

Okay, so. Point taken. So, gulp. Here's my poem, friends and peers and stuff.

...A tSunami of stuff...
.......Impressions of who I was and what I needed to buy--
.......More! More! More!
....disPosable
.........Life in excess--
.........I gather it into one great pile.
.The Fire takes a while to catch, but
.........Years later, I still feel the warmth.

Grocery Shopping Poem

To the two women fighting

in the cart corral this evening,
maybe there's something wrong with you
that I cannot see--
a tricky hip,
a faulty ticker,
weak ankles that act up on sunny days
like today.

Peering between the motes in my own eyes,
I hesitate to judge you.

But I watched you sprint
the twenty feet outside the door,
racing to reach
the motorized cart
set aside for people
who struggle with walking
the width of this store.

I stood there in the checkout line,
my toddler in my arms,
and saw your feisty hips
collide
bouncing each other
out of the way
to reach the prize.
You giggled and shouted and shrieked,
and finally one of you
sank into the seat,
victorious.

Your daughter or niece or neighbor girl or friend--
a girl of about seven--
stepped through the doors
just as you threw the cart exuberantly
into reverse,
and she had to step lively
to avoid
getting hit
by your highjinks.
She did not look impressed.

I wonder.
Would you have hip-checked
my grandma
for that motorized prize?

Maybe there's something wrong with you
that I cannot see,
but I'll admit
that I laughed
uncharitably
all the way to the car
when I saw
that the battery
was dead

and you got off
your lazy ass
and walked.

We Women

A poem that fits with my sort of pissed-off-but-unsure-why mood.

We Women

We women choose our battles--
we see the messes you men have made,
make no mistake.
We see the inequalities stacked up as far back
as your calendars reach,
and our calendars see farther, in all directions.
We are angry, yes,
but you cannot dismiss us
because of it,
write it off as that time of the month,
sprinkling jokes among your words like
stoning us with pebbles.
We are not fooled by our careers, fancy cars, or even
the occasional pair of comfortable shoes.
We know we still clean up,
we still cook,
we still make lunches and braid hair
and run coffee and kiss owies.
We wash the car
and let the dog in
and we see the dirty socks on the floor, but
we don't say a thing.

We still make less money for equal work.
We still are shown beauty in the tiniest of packages--
(the best-looking woman is so small she disappeared ages ago,
and they like it that way.)
We still compete with one another to be the best man.
We still watch our sons marching off to a battle we cannot stop.
We still still cut chasms between ourselves
with one incisive word,
Bitch!

We don't believe that feminism means
we gotta kick Man to the curb
with the garbage
he was supposed to take out three days ago.

We women know that the yoke upon us is
not made of man, not formed of flesh,
but of policy,
ignorance, money, and power.
We know that we have been backed into our corner,
fenced by our own anger.
We know that the grocery stores are laughing at us
as we fill our carts with quick-n-easy.
We know that our children are raising themselves
in our busy little images,
their fingers clutching toxic toys
in all colors of plastic.
We know that we own the word poverty,
twisting in our sides--

we women stuck,
suffering, sorrow stitched into our bodies,
into our souls,
into our dreams
with insidious little needles.
we women stuck--
doing our best.

A Poem for Spring

So a while back, I was reading a post from Beverly at Homeschool Image, and she was reading and writing poems about spring. I always spend some time with my students at this time of year reading e.e. cummings' "in just spring" and "spring is like a perhaps hand" and usually we all go outside and write a spring poem, using our word jars as inspiration. OK, so then there's this year. Seriously cold, even snowing, while we were in the middle of reading poetry. Nothing was saying, "Spring is here! Celebrate her wonder!" We couldn't go outside and sit in the grass because the grass was covered in snow and ice. I suppose we still might, but of course now all of my classes are smack in the middle of some other things, and school is almost over.

In addition, I've been finding poetry writing difficult on a personal level for some time, since I finished my novel, in fact. It seems my brain got so used to paragraphs and sentences I'm just struggling to bend it and shape it into the shorthand of poetry. And honestly, it's always hard to find poetry in my head when I'm buried amid stacks of work. But I read Beverly's post and got inspired, and then I started this blog, where I really want to include poems. Top it off with the little poem I wrote earlier this week about toddler nursing, and I was starting to feel like the words were reaching back out to me again. I started musing about spring as I went for my evening walk, and of course while driving. The best poems always come to me while driving.

Still, it was stubborn, this poem. Lots of false starts going nowhere fast. Until this morning, which coincidentally (or not) is one of the first days it really feels like spring. I was driving to work after dropping the kids off at their new lovely daycare in the woods, and the first couple of lines popped into my head. Luckily, I managed to keep the minivan on the road. Poetry can, after all, be dangerous.

I arrived at work, with several lines shifting and forming in my brain, only to remember that I had a student concern meeting first thing this morning (which, quite typically for me, meant that I was about five minutes late for it already) and couldn't spare a few minutes to scribble them down. Halfway through the meeting I found myself turning to a blank page in my meeting notebook and drafting the following poem. (To be fair, I am a great multi-tasker, and I did wait until the student being discussed was not one in my class!) It's far from final, but once again, if I wait until it's perfect to post it, it will be next spring before I get it down.

subtle spring

too often I think of spring
coiled up tightly
in winter's dark breast
like an ancient clockwork
ticking inexorably on
toward a leafy explosion

I expect transformation,
a dramatic entrance
of cuckoo--
cue the blossoming!
crescendo the birdsong!
bring on the buzzing!
Spring!
Awake!

I seek the signs everywhere--
ferns uncurling to the sun,
fuzzy pussy willows softly waving
in a breeze,
a breeze that doesn't chill,
snow beating a rapid retreat
in rivulets running downhill to disappear.


too often the signs I seek
are foiled by winter's lingering--
the robin
taken by surprise,
an eighteen-inch snowfall,
the daffodils pushing
their slim green lives up
through the mud,
only to find themselves encased in ice.

spring it seems does sit
coiled and poised
in the heart of winter, waiting,
but she sets her own time,
her own season
to bloom.

Nursing You Now

Here's a first draft of a poem I "wrote" this evening while driving and while working out at the gym, for my son Monkey, age 17 months. I have a feeling it's not finished at all, but since this is like a journal, I'll post it and then rework it later if it works out that way!

nursing you now

nursing you now
can feel like embracing an earthquake,
taming a tangle
of limbs grown
suddenly, startlingly too long--
knots of knobby knees
and your daddy's long, elegant toes
(no, no, baby, they don't go in my nose!)

nursing you now
has become a dialogue
full of jokes and surprises--
your mouth, full of mischief,
chug chugs like a train
through your latch,
then pops off smiling
for a quick Choooochoooo!

nursing you now
can feel like holding a hurricane,
my wanderer waylaid
and wiggling away,
pinching and prodding and pawing
until this moment,
this instant--
now

nursing you now
is a fleeting island of calm,
your clear eyes locked with mine,
your hands softly circling my breast,
and the sweet perfect sound of you suckling--
the syllables of your satisfaction.

Monkey nursing back when a camera
wasn't so much more interesting than nummies!

The Only Thing We Have to Fear...

My son Jabberwock is deathly afraid of dogs. Heights. The coffee grinder. Automatic flush toilets. And a host of other things.

Through much of my life, I have also battled a parade of fears, and I think I have triumphed over them all, at least from time to time. I wouldn't say that I have any fears that would qualify as phobias, but I have struggled with anxiety since I was very young. When I was a kid, I remember being absolutely terrified of going into the ShortStop for a gallon of milk. My mom was exasperated at me for balking at this seemingly simple task. As a mom now, I realize that sending me in after that milk was keeping her from having to wake my infant brother and pack him up out of the car seat, haul both of us out into the freezing Minnesota winter, stand in line juggling a baby, a purse, and a gallon of milk, and then turn around and get everyone settled back into the car, a process bound to take a bit more time than me just running in. I was nine years old, and this gas station was a place we stopped frequently, probably several times a week. Most of the cashiers knew us. I can remember, though, gripping the front seat of the car and turning my face away from my mother, tears trying to squeeze out of my eyes as I shook my head, refusing to go in.

Like my son, I have a fear of heights. When I am a certain distance above the solid, comforting ground, my hands and feet go completely numb. My heart beats irregularly. Even when I watch someone on TV who is mountain climbing, my hands go numb. They start to sweat profusely.

My biggest fear is and has always been losing someone I love. To say that this fear has gotten worse after becoming a mother is a severe understatement, but I've really always had it. If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I suppose I could come up with some kind of anxiety disorder, some abandonment issues, who knows. But I can remember lying in bed at night, thinking, and suddenly it would occur to me that my dad was going to die. He lived in another state, so I really didn't know him all that well, but it would just occur to me that he was dead or dying, and suddenly I would be crying, weeping really. I was so afraid that it was true. Or instead of my dad, it would be my best friend who died. Now, of course, it is my children. Out of the blue, my brain shows me hideous images of the horrible things that could happen to them, and it hits me right in the chest, a sledge hammer of fear.

I don't know how my son got his fear of dogs. I don't know where my own fears come from. But as I've gotten older and examined my life, I see how some fears pass from parents to children. I see how afraid my own mother was at times in her life, and I see how much she has conquered those fears today. It gives me hope for myself, and for my sensitive little guy, too. I will say that I almost never pass up an opportunity to climb up high enough to make my hands go numb. I look over the edge of cliffs, ignoring the sweaty palms and racing heart, willing myself to conquer my fear. I haven't figured out how to face down my fear of loss, but I bravely love in spite of the fragility of it all.

Lastly, here's a lighthearted poem I wrote about a time when my mother conquered her snake phobia, for the love of her grandson, and Jabber offered me some words of wisdom about facing those fears.

Snake

My mother
smiles a nervous smile
and breathes
in
softly, steeling herself.

"I can do this," she whispers,
as my son smooths a cobra sticker
onto the hem of her shirt.
"Thanks, honey," she gasps,
and she takes a tentative
glance down--

the snake sits coiled
and indifferent
my son's eyes are searching
his grandmother's,
seeing more than she intends.

"It's not a snake," he offers.
He smiles, an enchantment
an enigma--
"It's just rope," he announces,
"With a head and stripes."

And that's how I am trying to see all fears, with the wisdom of a four-year-old. Not a snake at all. Just rope, with a head and stripes.

And here's my youngest son Monkey, who at sixteen months, is completely fearless.