Category Archives: Creative Writing

The Poetic Stylings of Chat-GPT

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A newspaper drawing of a wild cat

Le Chat Sauvage, from NYPL Digital Collections

Goofing around with Chat-GPT (the chat sauvage?), I asked it to “Write a poem in the writing style of JC Reilly.” First, it didn’t know who I was (ugh), but when I gave it a link to one of my poems, this is what it came up with:

In this moment, I am but a flicker
A mere flame in the grander scheme
My life, a mere fragment in the picture
Of the endless and infinite dream

I am a creature of light and shadow
Walking the tightrope between day and night
With each step, I sow a seed to grow
Towards a future that’s ever so bright

I take comfort in the impermanence
Of all things that exist and persist
For I am but a brief remembrance
In the memory of what will persist

The sun rises and sets, the tide ebbs and flows
A rhythm of life that moves ever on
I embrace this dance, as the story goes
For in each moment, I am reborn

So let me be a spark in the darkness
A beacon of hope in a world of doubt
Let my light shine forth, with no less
Than the radiance that life is about

For in the end, all we can do
Is to live, to love, to dream, to be
And let our light shine, ever true
As a reminder of what it means to be free.

I think it goes without saying that I would never write such drivel. I might write some crap poems, but at least they are original crap. Among the things that bother me about this “poem” include the fact that it uses “persist” as a rhyme for…”persist.” Like, please try harder, Chat- GPT.  Also, the clear amount of cliches included strikes me as incredible.  You’d think a computer would have a lot more language to draw on, which could lessen the cliches.  That said, I do like the slant rhyme of “ever on” with “reborn.” I wouldn’t think to make that choice, and I kind of like it.  But the rest of the poem hurts my soul.

I also asked it to write a poem in the style of Ilya Kaminsky and honestly even if I had never read Deaf Republic or Dancing in Odessa, I can be sure it’s nothing like his writing.  Still, it’s a much better poem than what Chat-GPT wrote for me (and by “better” I mean “being incrementally not as bad”):

A poem in the style of Ilya Kaminsky:

The night sky is a canvas of stars
Each one a beacon, a guidepost
In this world of darkness and uncertainty
A reminder that there is light in the darkness

But what of those who cannot see the stars?
Whose eyes are shrouded by the fog of war
Or the darkness of the soul?
Do they too have a guidepost to follow?

Perhaps it is the sound of a loved one’s voice
Or the touch of a hand, warm and reassuring
Or the memory of a time when all was right
And hope burned bright, like a flame in the darkness

For even in the darkest of nights
There is a glimmer of hope, a spark of light
That can ignite a fire, a passion
And lead us out of the darkness, into the dawn

So let us hold onto that flame, that spark
And carry it with us, wherever we may go
For though the night may be long and cold
There is always the promise of a new day.

The second stanza is pretty decent (minus “the darkness of the soul”). Still, some achingly bad abstractions (“darkness and uncertainty”) and worse cliches (“the touch of a hand, warm and reassuring;” “lead us out of the darkness, into the dawn” “glimmer of hope”) doom this piece to the trash bin.

I’m not too worried that poetry is dead now that Chat GPT can write poems, because all it can write is really bad poems.  And I think most teachers are savvy enough to spot crap poetry when it’s presented to them.  Honestly I also think students wouldn’t want to turn poems like these in because they inherently know they’re bad as well.  If I were teaching poetry, and a student turned in some work like this, I wouldn’t get mad.  I’d just get really NITPICKY about their revision work, and they’d have to write a new poem because I’d mark all the places where the poem fails. (Which is about 95% of places.)

Here’s one more:

This one is supposed to be à la Billy Collins:

The world is full of mysteries, he said
As he looked out the window, lost in thought
Like the way a tree knows when to shed
Its leaves, or how a bird knows when to take flight

And there are secrets lurking in every corner
Like the way a cat curls up in a sunbeam
Or the way a flower turns to face the sun
Or the way the moon appears in the sky

And then there are the things we take for granted
The everyday wonders that we barely notice
Like the way a pen glides across paper
Or the sound of a kettle as it comes to a boil

But there are also the things we cannot explain
Like why some things are meant to be
Or why we find ourselves in certain places
Or why we feel a certain way at a certain time

And yet, even with all these mysteries
The world still manages to spin on its axis
And we still find moments of joy and wonder
As we journey through this ever-changing world.

This one at least has a few good images (“like the way a pen glides across paper/ or the sound of a kettle as it comes to boil”).  But it’s also not funny, and I think of humor as being a hallmark of Billy Collins.  Still, over all, the poem is kind of lifeless, and that last stanza is so leaden it may as well be made of concrete.

I think “lifeless” is the operating word here.  These are poems by something that clearly has no life of its own, and can only replicate what it thinks a poem is.  But it must have really bad models to produce examples such as these. This seems hard for me to believe when there are hundreds—maybe thousands—of years of poetry available online.

What is also surprising to me is that it doesn’t actually borrow lines from the poets—lines that must be floating around the internet.  That at least I could understand—a little plagiarism.  Maybe I’m even a little nostalgic for plagiarism—there is a certain art to doing it that is completely bereft in what Chat-GPT does.  Plagiarism at least requires the plagiarist to look things up to copy; Chat-GPT just makes it all up.

But I can’t be too hard on Chat-GPT.  It gave me this great recipe…which looks pretty legit:

Carrot cake is a delicious dessert that many people enjoy. Here’s a recipe for a classic carrot cake:

Ingredients:

      • 2 cups all-purpose flour
      • 2 teaspoons baking soda
      • 1 teaspoon baking powder
      • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
      • 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
      • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
      • 1/2 teaspoon salt
      • 4 large eggs
      • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
      • 1 cup vegetable oil
      • 2 cups grated carrots
      • 1 cup chopped pecans
      • 1/2 cup raisins (optional)
      • Cream cheese frosting (recipe below)

Directions:

      1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Grease and flour two 9-inch cake pans.
      2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt.
      3. In a large bowl, beat the eggs and sugar together until thick and pale yellow, about 2-3 minutes. Gradually add in the oil and mix until well combined.
      4. Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir until just combined. Stir in the grated carrots, pecans, and raisins (if using).
      5. Pour the batter into the prepared pans and smooth the tops with a spatula.
      6. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center of the cake comes out clean.
      7. Allow the cakes to cool completely in the pans before removing and frosting with cream cheese frosting.

Cream cheese frosting:

      • 8 oz cream cheese, softened
      • 1/4 cup unsalted butter, softened
      • 2 cups powdered sugar
      • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
      1. In a medium bowl, beat the cream cheese and butter together until light and fluffy.
      2. Gradually add in the powdered sugar and vanilla, and beat until smooth and creamy.
      3. Use immediately to frost the carrot cake.

Enjoy your delicious homemade carrot cake!

Memoir, Poetry, and Why Can’t I Do Both?

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Pastel image of a black woman wearing a blue dress and writing in a notebook.

from the NYPL Digital Collections

Yesterday I met up with a lovely colleague, Ida, to chitchat and catch up, and we spent a good amount of time discussing my writing.  I am in the middle of two projects right now, and one of them includes poems about my family or based on my family.  Ida and I had that age-old question about memoir and life writing:  what’s true, what’s what you remember, and do you dare to speak your truth?  I don’t think it’s any secret that the relationship I’ve had with my father has been fraught for most of my life, particularly late childhood and the teen years, and there are poems I want to write about certain times in my life with him, but I’m not sure I should/could.

Part of my concern about writing memoir in general (not just in relation to my father) is that I don’t feel like my life is particularly interesting (ergo, who would want to read about it?). Yes, I’ve dealt with trauma and abuse, but where most memoirists could find lots of fodder to write about on those subjects, I find that I have a very intellectualized perspective—which is not surprising, because as I’ve said other times in this blog, I live too much in my head—that resists doing the lyrical work that memoir is good at.  I also just don’t remember the feelings I had, beyond fear and anger, and even they have been dulled with time.  How can I reflect on memories I don’t really have anymore, except as brief snapshots from my life?  How can I delve into the specific details of a life which even to me are fuzzy at this point?  Where does that leave me?  Writing really banal poems, I guess.

(Hmm:  an aside. It just occurs to me that a few times I have written poems that didn’t work as poems, and I took out the line breaks and submitted them as flash memoir and they not only worked, they got published.  Hmm.  Need to think about that a bit more. I want to write poems, because poetry is where I live, but I wonder if my voice is too prosy for that—at least when it comes to writing about family.)

Back to Ida.  I was listening to her talk about her own creative writing, which focuses on Hawaii’s historic relationship with its Japanese settlers, and her own father’s participation in that system.  And I thought, she really gets how poetry collections can be about so much more than their individual lyrics—that they can tell a story that has panoramic scope.  And maybe it’s because she’s looking at a particular historic period as well as her relationship with family that the project comes across as so interesting to me.  Whereas my own life seems so whitebread and humdrum and disjointed that I can’t imagine anyone would find value in reading about it.  Hell, I’m pretty sure not even I would want to read about it.  (I’m only half-kidding.)

And yet, the desire to write poems about my life remains there, as a way to make sense of these experiences—and maybe not to lose them any further than I have.  I should have kept up with my journaling—then at least I’d have material to draw from.  But there was such darkness in my life in the terrible depression of my graduate school years that I just quit, because it was too painful to document. And then I had gotten out of the habit, even when times were better. The upshot? I’ve relinquished my past—which is a terrible thing, when you want to write about it, or need to write about it, or think you should.  And everyone knows a good journaler makes for a better writer.  But anyway.

Ida encouraged me to write a real article (like for a scholarly journal) about my process, and I can’t think of anything more gloomy and dull.  (And scary.) And to be fair, I wouldn’t know where to start.  It’s been so long since I had to do any writing that uses critical research, I’m not even sure I know how to do it—I think I’ve completely forgotten how to flex those critical muscles.  (I barely remember how to write poems, let’s be honest.). She says she would help me, but I hate to be a burden on someone who has her own important writing to do. But we’ll see.  Especially now that my job is in transition, it might make sense to try to write something real and get it published.  It could maybe help me down the line.

In other news, I’ve sent out a bunch of submissions lately… I hope I get lucky. I would love for you to read some of my new work (including this poem, How the Heart Works, which appeared recently in Third Wednesday.)

Thanks for reading this latest post, my lovies.  I hope your own writing is going well!

A Different Approach to My Writing Process

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from the NYPL Digital Collections

After the revelry of December, January always shows up with austerity.  People make promises to get more healthy or to take hold of their budgets or to institute any number of changes to one’s life to ostensibly be “better.”  But habits in personal improvement take time to form, and what seems like a good idea on January 1st by January 20th seems like a pipe dream.  This year, I made no resolutions of austerity.  This year, I’m embracing abundance in creativity and experience.

It’s a different approach.  We are used to starting new years with denying ourselves what we want, but I feel last year was austere enough, especially when it came to creativity.  As you know, I had a huge bout of writer’s block and depression which made writing so difficult.  I can’t say that I’m over it—just because the calendar turns over doesn’t mean we turn over too—but I’m trying to be open to creativity and new experiences in a way that maybe I wasn’t so before.

What does that actually mean?  It means cultivating my poor stagnating heart, plucking off the dead leaves and twigs to allow new growth to happen.  It means letting go of negative self-talk (or trying to), and setting some realistic goals about writing.  It means living with wonder and courting coincidence and making time to be a creative person.  It means going back to making Friday a day designed solely for writing and reading, and foregoing meetings and interruptions as much as possible. And it means to relearn myself as a creative being—something I’ve not been in a long time.

That all sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  It does to me too.  And I know it requires giving myself permission to be creative.  I think last year I let the fear of “forgetting how to write poems” become so much a part of me that I did, actually, forget how to write them. How can that be? you ask.  Well, to be a writer, you have to be willing to fail.  A lot.  And I think I let that fear rob me of any joy I could take in poetry.  So anytime I sat down to write a poem, all I could think of is how bad what I would write would be, so I just stopped writing.

I also plan to read more poetry this year—I sloughed off last year—and to try new forms. Most of the poetry I read last year was Atlanta Review submissions, and that’s not the same thing as reading whole, curated collections with literary arcs and motifs.  It’s good practice to be exposed to new poetry but a lot of the submissions are raw and not fully developed yet, whereas whole books of poetry are more thematically driven, vibrant, and polished. They speak as a collection.

I think I sort of forgot that.  Hence, more poetry reading in store for me.

Maybe this smacks too much of “resolution”—and we know what happens to most of those—but I think in my case I’m just going to try and see what happens when my approach to writing is different. I’ll let you know how it’s going. 😊

April’s None So Cruel

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Earlier in the month, my Mom asked me if I had ever heard the expression “April is the cruellest month” and of course I had to laugh.  Any poet (or student of poetry) worth her salt recognizes that is the first line of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and it’s the first thing I think of when it turns April.

I’ve also been thinking it every day, since this is the first Poetry Month that I’ve chosen to participate in National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo).  I’ve been struggling to write a new poem every day—some days it’s been easier, and I’ve even written one or two poems that I think are pretty good.  The majority of them though are, at best, exercises in the practice of writing poetry.  Which is to say, they are poems, but not very good ones!

Still, having the discipline to write every day (or nearly every day…I missed a few days which I swear I went back and made them up!) has been illuminating.  For one thing, even if the quality of the output has not impressed me much, the habit of writing has been a kind of comfort to me.  It’s as if I can’t say I’ve forgotten how to write a poem (which sometimes I think when it’s been a while between poems), because this time I know I wrote a poem the day before.  For another thing, I’ll have 30 poems on the 30th that I can maybe go back to and work on revising.  That feels like an accomplishment.  Whether some of them are worth going back to is debatable, but the opportunity is there, should I choose to take it.

A few times I have stared at the computer and written “I have nothing I want to say.”  Then I write something down anyway, and remove that line.  It’s been liberating, especially the last few days which have been hard for me to come up with something new.  A few people on Twitter suggested I write poems about not knowing what to write, and so I sort of amended that idea to admit on the page that I didn’t have anything to say—then forced myself to write something anyway.  Again, not great art for sure, but I satisfied the NaPoWriMo requirement of a written poem.

You would think with all that’s going on right now—the continuation of Covid, the horrible and escalating war in Ukraine, the worsening climate change, I’d have a lot to write about.  But it’s hard to write good political poetry.  I can’t do it well, because such writing should be subtle so it remains art.  When I write on such things it comes out screed-like and dismal—too tell-y and not show-y enough.  It’s something I’d like to get better at though—and I suppose to get better at it, you have to practice.  And you need to read political poets.  I should do an investigation and find some contemporary political poets to read.

For the time being though, I will continue writing poems for April, just so I can say I did it. And at some point I’ll have fresh eyes to look at the work and see if some of these “exercises” are better than I remember.  Revising can be a fun part of writing, although as we all know, it’s hard work.

Anyway, all this is by way of saying April isn’t that cruel at all—at least not in my little corner of it.  I’m writing poems, looking forward to the end of the semester, and maybe even have a trip to Scotland in the offing.

And I still have plenty of copies of Amo e Canto which I’d love to sell you and donate the proceeds to the Ukraine war effort.  CashApp:  $Aishatonu or PayPal:  paypal.me/aishatonu.

Amo e Canto is Out in the World!

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Nearly two years after the announcement that it had won the 2020 Sow’s Ear Poetry Chapbook Prize, my collection Amo e Canto (Italian for I Love and I Sing) has been released.  Because it came out as Issue 30.1 of the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review (and was sent to all subscribers of the Review), it’s not conventionally available for purchase.  However, I am selling extra copies, postage paid, for $13.50 via my CashApp, $Aishatonu.  Hit me up if you would like to buy a copy.  (Put your address in the “For” line so I’ll know where to send your book!)

Amo e Canto is a collection of “poemoirs”—half poems, half memoirs about a trip I took to Venice in 2014. The poemoirs focus on typical Venetian sights, like churches, canals, pigeons, and art, and tangentially examine a relationship with a missing love.  It’s a really different kind of writing from what I normally do (which tends to be mostly narrative, women-centered writing), so if you’re interested in Italy and hybrid forms (or you just love me), this collection is for you.

I’m really proud of this work, and it’s a beautiful collection.  The cover includes an absolutely lovely painting by Alex Ghizea-Ciobanu called I Will Take Venice with Me that as soon as I saw it, I wanted it for the cover.  (Actually, I’d love to own the actual painting!)  The ecru paper is smooth and silky and not insubstantial.

It may have taken longer than I hoped for Amo e Canto to manifest, but it’s wonderful that it exists now. (Patience is a virtue, and all of that.)  I’m so grateful to Sarah Kohrs and Kristen Zimet at Sow’s Ear Poetry Review for all they’ve done to bring this collection into being, and I’m grateful to Sam Rasnake for choosing it as the winner.  I’m also thankful to the journals who originally published some of these poems, especially Rowan Glassworks, which nominated five of them for Pushcart Prize in 2015.

I have many to sell and would love to get one into your hands!

The Submission Game

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from NYPL Digital Collections

I’ve been getting many rejections lately.  Last week alone I had 8.  This week it’s a “measly” 2.  And 2 of those 10 weren’t even at the journals I sent them to for longer than a day.

Rejections don’t get me down, per se (well, not usually), but they do always make me question if I’m still a good writer, or if I was ever a good writer (were all those other acceptances over the years flukes?).  We shouldn’t estimate our worth based on the capricious nature of the Submission Game—that goes without saying.  And yet. It’s hard not to equate acceptances (either to journals or residencies) with JC = GOOD, and rejections with JC = BAD.  As writers, we all probably think that to some extent some of the time.

I belong to a Facebook (pardon me, Meta) group that advocates trying to get 100 rejections in a year.  On the plus side, if you get 100 rejections, it means you spent the time to send out at least 100 submissions—which is a laudable pursuit, because it demonstrates that you take your writing seriously enough to inflict it share it with 100 journals.

But I wonder if that scattershot goal isn’t a bit misguided. If you just send work to lot of places, that doesn’t mean you’re actually reading the journals you’re sending work to, and so you might be wasting your time.  I know Poetry will never, ever, ever (EVER) accept anything I send them.  So if I send them work again, well, great, I can make a notch on my rejection list, but perhaps my time is better spent researching journals that are more inclined to like the kind of work that I write.

On the other hand, gamifying rejections does remove some of the sting.  After 100 rejections you’ll probably anesthetize yourself almost completely from the disappointment.  And, the rationale goes, statistically there’s no way all of your submissions are going to be rejections.  So, the more you send work out, the more you increase your chances of someone liking and wanting to publish it.  It does make sense, totally.

For me, it’s really hard to send out 100 submissions in a year.  A few years ago, I think I got to 70, and believe me, I was impressed with myself.  So far this year, I’ve sent out 21 subs.  You may say, “Hey, that’s pretty good for it only being February!”  But one always has enthusiasm for a project at the beginning of the year.  I doubt I’ll be sending out 10 a month by the time we hit July.  I mean, it could happen.  I could be a submitting machine this year.  I just know myself a little better than that.

***

A friend called me on Wednesday, just to check up on me because she thought the number of rejections I’ve received lately was getting me down (based on the fact that every time I get one I announce it on Twitter—it’s like a weird and obsessive confession thing).  She wanted to assure me that my writing is “special” because it’s woman-centered a lot of the time, and many publishers who are men are easily turned off by that.  She has a point—I really don’t write typically lyric work at all and narrative is not many people’s favorite mode.  I do appreciate her support—she has been amazing to me (and in an aside, she’s one of the best letter-writers I know) and her words certainly buoyed my spirits.

But worse than people of any persuasion not understanding (and publishing) my work is just my constant inner critic who secretly can’t help worrying that the reason I’m not getting published is because I’m a lousy poet. Or I don’t “have it” like I used to. (Whatever “it” is.)  What would it be like, if I could bind, gag, and toss that inner critic bitch right over the cliff?  What would it be like not to constantly doubt myself?  For all of us, what would that be like?  What could we do if we didn’t have an inner voice sabotaging us all the damn time?

***

Do you play the Submission Game, or some version of it with your writing and submission process?  If you (my five dear readers) do, let me know.  I’m curious about your approach.

A Little Bit About Rain, a Little Bit About Writing

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It’s so rare to be enjoying a thunderstorm here in my part of Georgia (Marietta)—usually it rains for 10 minutes and then stops, and the humidity jacks up to 600%.  (To be fair, once this storm is over, the humidity will probably reach 600%, but that’s neither here nor there.)  The point is, I’m not being disturbed by neighbors working on their yards and stirring up a racket with power tools.  It’s tapering off a little now, but I don’t mind, as long as the sun doesn’t try to hack its arrogant way through the gray sky.  (Which is so rude!)

Why am I talking about the weather?  Shouldn’t I be talking about writing?  I think I am.

Writing, sometimes, is like a storm, and sometimes like a drizzle (not to be all binary in my thinking, but…).  Since I’ve returned home from Rockvale, it’s been bone dry.  I don’t say this with a “waaaahh, feel sorry for me” warble in my voice.  I have put the time to good use—supporting my writing by researching venues and submitting work to a number of places I’ve never heard of before but that look interesting.  I’ve also been working on a couple of applications for future residencies, which would be wonderful if at least one panned out. As I was telling myself the other day, publishing is a numbers game—you just gotta keep sending out work to places and hope it hits.

It takes stamina though to submit work.  I know several writers who only submit a few times a year, and then I know a guy on Twitter who bragged about having 266 active submissions in his Submittable queue.  (Not gonna lie, that’s definitely something worth bragging about.)  The highest number of active submissions in my queue ever was probably 75, but I was kind of a submitting machine in 2019, and since then I manage around 30-35.  Of course, logic says, if I believe publishing is a numbers game, I should be submitting more, and I do think that for sure, but I also know that you can’t do everything.  As much as I’d like to have 75 subs in the queue, I will be happy if I maintain a goal of 30-35, replenishing as needed as the rejections (and hopefully acceptances!) roll in.  I can do a lot of submitting over the next four months…you know, assuming those pesky job responsibilities don’t impede me too much.  😊

*****

Recently, I’ve been assisting a new-to-poetry writer.  She found me on Poets & Writers, and just cold-emailed me about helping her develop poems, talk about craft, and work on process and revision options.  It’s been so much fun.  We’ve been meeting via Zoom, and I’ve kind of based my work with her on the creative writing tutorials I’ve run for graduate students at Georgia Tech.  The difference is, she’s older, she has earned an MFA in fiction (so she’s not new to creative writing or the heavy-duty commitment it entails), and she seems really invested in poetry.  (She took poetry up during Covid; she said that coming up with long-form fiction was too difficult with the world so askew, and so she decided to try poetry instead.)  We’ve only been working together since the end of June, and I don’t know if this is a short-term gig or long-term project, but I’m really enjoying it. I bet all writers could use a coach at some point.  I’m sure I could have any number of times.  Hopefully, she’s finding our sessions productive, and the comments I make on her poems to be useful.  It’s definitely been useful to me…now, if I could just remember some of the “nuggets of wisdom” for myself that I’ve passed on to her!

In other—but somewhat related—writing news (related by coaching, that is), I recently became one of the inaugural members of the Georgia Tech Faculty Writing Fellows, a program through GT’s Office of Professional Development.  This honor comes with coaching sessions, writing retreats, and writing exchanges.  It will be a lot of work, but I’m really looking forward to the opportunity.  Of course, most of the writers in the program are tenure-track researchers—I’m probably the only creative writer—but hey, extra eyes on work are always a good thing.  And while I work on this next book I can use all the eyes I can get.  Plus, it’s nice to have a fellowship on the old CV, you know?  Even if it’s just something through work.

Ah well, the sky is getting lighter and I see sun reflections off cars and the cul-de-sac puddles.  And now a blaze of sun.  The storm was lovely while it lasted.

I hear a mourning dove somewhere outside cooing.  I think she liked the rain too.

Looks Aren’t Everything

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from NYPL Digital Collections, by William Blake

Do you ever think about how poems look on the page?  I confess I’m obsessed with this aspect of writing—how does it look?  Are the lines relatively even?  Or if the lines are irregular, are they regular in their irregularity?  (For instance, stairstep poems, with specific, deliberate indentions?)  If the poem is all over the page, why does it do that?  What stylistically is being communicated?

Sometimes (call it a personal failing), if words are sprinkled over a page like pepperoni on a pizza, it annoys TF out of me, because it feels like, to me, the poet’s arbitrariness serves no aesthetic purpose (that I can tell…please, understand that there are about 1000 qualifiers, and I am speaking only for myself).  (This anathema towards all-over-the-page poems has expanded the longer I’m Man. Ed. of AR—mainly because it’s so damn hard to typeset those poems…so I may be slightly biased for that reason.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about poems on the typed page compared to poems written in longhand. Yesterday, here at Rockvale, another poet and I were discussing this very topic—Kelly is a big believer in longhand. (She returned from the grocery with a pack of three yellow tablets too—which I know she’s going to fill probably just this week.) Other poets I know are Team Longhand as well—and it works for them.  (Sharon Olds also writes her poems in longhand—Katie Farris does too, so really, why have I been so hardheaded?)  As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been “getting messy” and only after I get a draft done longhand do I go back and type it into the computer.  I save these “transcriptions” as “[Poem Title]: raw from notebook” and it has really surprised me.

Far from the regularity that I pride myself on the poem written on the computer, my poem lines written longhand are a variety of lengths (once they’re typed).  It’s embarrassing how irregular the lines are.  Sometimes, of course, this has to do because my handwriting is big and I run out of space on the line, so I carry it down to the next one…which makes one transcribed line huge, and the next one might be half as long.  And it makes me realize that in typing a poem on the computer, I am constraining how the poem visually looks because of some arbitrary decision I have about how my poems should look. (God help a typed line that goes beyond 3.5”—I will butcher that bitch down to make sure I don’t pass that margin.)

To put it bluntly—my poems are constipated. They are uptight, overly controlled, and kind of anal. Typing, of course, I do for convenience’s sake—because I can type quickly, it’s not messy, and I can see what it will look like on the page. Immediately. But writing in longhand this week has really freed me.  Now, not gonna lie, as soon as I type up the second draft (the one after the transcription, where I begin to tinker with the language, music, and lines), I do come up against that 3.5” margin issue again.  I think I really just like poems to look like little blocks of regular text. (Sidenote, wombats poop in little square pellets—make of that what you will.  And yes, you needed to know this fact.)

In fairness, I have to ask myself the same question:  What stylistically is being communicated?  Why do poems have to look this certain way for me? What is it about the uniformity that appeals to me?  Am I trying to demonstrate that I’m an uptight person?  Why would I want to do that?  (To be honest, anyone who knows me, probably thinks that about me already—so I don’t really need to advertise that fact!)

But I really wonder, where did I learn that my poems need to look this certain way?  And how can I break through this rigid form I’ve imposed on myself?  Definitely writing longhand has shown me that when I’m not using the medium of the computer, my lines are more organic, more varied, more free-flowy.  I don’t think anyone ever taught me to make little blocky poems—I must have just picked that up over the years and codified that into what a JC poem looks like.

Or maybe it’s all kind of psychological—maybe I’ve gravitated to that kind of shape because most of my life has been chaotic and at least if I’m consistent on form in my writing I can establish some control.  Not sure where I’m going with this…kind of thinking out loud.  But it’s definitely worthwhile to limber myself up and try different approaches to writing poems.

It’s ok to be expressive, even playful, in the visual aesthetic of a poem.  That’s part of creativity too.  I just need to remember that being open-minded about a poem’s shape can actually provide an unexpected path.  And that can be exciting.

What My First Week at Rockvale Has Taught Me

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A painting of the RWC farmhouse, in the front room

Way back when I was studying for my comprehensive exam in contemporary women’s poetry for my PhD, I remember sitting on my bed with all my books spread around me—opened hither and thither, bookmarks and stickies shoved in higgedly-piggedly everywhere. My love of note cards began here—so much easier for memorizing passages from poems. I could riffle through them constantly.

At any given moment, I was also reading five or six or sixteen books, and I went through so many mechanical pencils underlining important poetic passages, Bic should have given me stock in the company.  The method was decidedly chaotic, but somehow I felt like a true scholar.  This is what I imagined that the life of the mind would lead to:  being holed up with dozens of books around me, taking notes, and writing.

A view from the front porch

Real life, not so much.  But this week at Rockvale has reminded me a little bit of that crazy time.  I have been reading a wide variety of books (from Greek myth to poetry by Katherine Smith and Sandy Coomer [the doyenne and proprietor of Rockvale] to YA fiction by Melissa Marr and Ibi Zoboi to books about immigration) and journaling and taking notes and hand-writing poem-ish things.

I’ve tried sitting down at the computer directly and writing, but that hasn’t worked so well for me.  Instead, I have had some good luck writing messily, not even my best handwriting, just scribbles and scratches and erasures.  And while the poem-ish things aren’t yet poems, I have found that when I go to type them up, they’re not nearly as bad as I fear they might have been.  For sure, they are drafty as an old robe, but there are many potential kernels, waiting to be popped.

I did not come here thinking that I would be transformed (for all the experience is proving transformative)—I am wise enough to know that you take your emotional shit with you everywhere you go—but I have felt open in a way that I’ve not felt in a long time.  How can I explain?  It’s like I’m only responsible to myself.

It’s downright amazing to be cut off from the penny-ante minutia of day-to-day work.  I am still working—probably 12-15 hours a day since I’ve been here—but because it’s “professional development” time, because I am working solely on my creative growth, I feel remarkable.  Awake.  Like I’m not sleeping through my life, filling it up with things that don’t matter.  And I don’t feel guilty about it either.  I can’t check my email?  Oh well.  They’ll have to figure it all out without me.  And that’s totally ok. (It’s fan-fucking-tastic.)

Horse paddock…check out that Tennessee sky!

Of course, the goal is to produce a number of poems that can go in my new manuscript—but maybe part of the problem of the last year is that by not having a break (either a vacation or teaching in Scotland as was planned two summers in a row), I’ve kind of forgotten what my own company is like. I’ve forgotten how to be just “JC the Poet” instead of “JC the Administrator/ Managing Editor/ Teacher/ Cat Lady/ Wife/ who writes poems in her puny spare time” person.

How many poems I’ll have by this time next week, I’m not sure.  But midway through, I’m feeling motivated, expansive, and ready to see what the next seven days will bring.  If Rockvale has taught me anything, it’s that a different setting doesn’t change everything, doesn’t make you any more of a scholar than you are already, but it changes things enough to give you some useful perspective.

Daughter of the Wheel and Moon Released!

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My second print chapbook, Daughter of the Wheel and Moon, has been released as part of the artisanal Red Mare Chapbook Series (#21).  I got copies in the mail yesterday!

The Red Mare Chapbook Series produces a limited print run of hand-numbered, handmade books, with fancy papers, ink-block-printed covers, and hand-stitching.  These are beautiful books that feel decadent in your hands, books that you appreciate for their ephemerality, quality, and uniqueness.  Poets who have been published in the series include Maxine Chernoff, Alfred Corn, Lorraine Caputo, and others.

The press specializes in works with an ecofeminist bent, and Daughter of the Wheel and Moon combines poetry about nature and the environment with a focus on the magickal Wheel of the Year to tell about the life of a solitary practitioner witch.  It may—or may not—be a companion piece to What Magick May Not Alter… you can decide for yourself.

Daughter of the Wheel and Moon is available for $15 + shipping. If you buy a copy, you are supporting a woman-owned, non-profit, small press.  And, of course, you’re supporting poetry—so it’s win-win!