Seattle-Bound Confessions

Like so many writers, I am making my way to Seattle for the 2014 AWP Conference, where I'll be taking part in Thursday night reading for The Incredible Sestina Anthology and sitting in on a Friday noon panel "Verses Versus Verses," on poetry contests. I'd love to see you at either event, or on the book fair floor, or at one of these seafood restaurants, or over one of the cocktails described on Leslie Pietrzyk's blog. If your dance card is already filled and we don't see each other, just have a good time per the advice of Kelli Russell Agodon, hydrate and navigate per the wise words of Roxane Gay, and treat your hotel staff right.

It's been fun seeing everyone report what they're doing, on Facebook and elsewhere, but there hasn't been enough attention to those plans where we're simply excited to be in the audience. This year's official event schedule has some pleasing variances--discussion of writing for YA and children's audiences, the graphic novel or comic as literary work, and a spotlight on Pacific Northwest literature, including indigenous voices and Hawaiian writers. Check 'em out. Panels on the influence of Kurt Cobain and Bob Dylan? Yes. In venturing to off sites, be sure to support Elliott Bay Book Company and the Richard Hugo House; since the latter is closed on Sunday, my free day to explore, I'm going to try and make it by for the VIDA reading on Friday night.

I've only been to Seattle once before, when I was in my mid-twenties and working for a nonprofit that held its annual conference there. One of my jobs was to coordinate a set of awards that had been received by, among others for that year, Robert Pinsky. I'd studied The Sounds of Poetry. He was a former Poet Laureate. He'd been a voice on The Simpsons, for goodness's sake! What greater fame is there? I was so excited to meet him. About a half-hour before events were supposed to start, my hotel room phone rang, and I learned my father--on the other side of the country--was hospitalized with a collapsed lung, larger cause to be determined.

So. I arrived late to the proceedings; as the only poet on staff, I was the only one qualified to spot Mr. Pinsky, who had wandered the crowd, unrecognized and sans name tag or welcoming glass of wine; when I finally got to him, I had nothing better to attach his name tag than a loose paper clip from my purse; the envelope I gave him had the wrong check, made out to one of the other award recipients; I gave him a book to sign--his translation of The Inferno--forgetting I had gotten the copy from a poetry teacher past when he cleaned out his university office. That led to the awkward question "Why is [X]'s name inscribed in my book?"

This is not an AWP fairy tale. There was no networking, only profuse apologies. I revisited these a few years later, when I met him again in the context of a different award. (He had just been on The Colbert Report…the man is popular TV magnet.)

That next morning, right back to work at 8 AM. That night, I ventured to Pioneer Square to distract myself. He played bass.

My last morning in town, I went to Pike Place Market and spent $50 on a huge bouquet, the most I had ever spent for flowers: all of my remaining cash I'd saved for the trip. For my dad. I flew the six hours back to DC with them balanced on my lap.

Not going to Seattle this week? Not a big deal. AWP is a wonderful resource, but an annual professional conference is not the end-all. (The proof is that Tayari Jones is skipping it, and has been for a few years running.) I do recommend is soul-baring trips in your life, 4-5 days when you're pushed to some type of limit, times when the knife scrapes to the bone of ego and you ask--Wait, what? And when the world does not wait: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? That is AWP, for some. But a square is a rhomboid; a rhomboid is not a square. Whatever excursion defines you, tests you, and liberates you, is a lot more important than the abstract of AWP ever could be.

Pandora (on Animals in Poetry)

Last night, as the snow fell and kept falling here, I read in the Washington Post that Pandora has died. She was a matriarch of our National Zoo's invertebrate exhibits, all 15 pounds of her, all 7.8-foot arm span. Her death was not unexpected--she'd been sluggish and, at five years old, was approaching old age for an octopus. But she'll be missed. Her rosy pink hue and outgoing manner charmed everyone. Including me, who went to watch her feed on a chilly Thursday in November 2012. That was an unusual detour from my usual stops to the aviary and the cheetah enclosure. It was exactly a week after Thanksgiving, my first week of being engaged. No ring. We hadn't told anyone yet. It was our secret.

I stood with my hands jammed into the pockets of my black shearling coat, not sure what to expect. The keeper speared a bit of scallop meat on a long wire and dangled it in the water, wiggling it to make it lively. Pandora approached. 

Once she was confident of her prey, she began to waft the loose folds of skin between each tentacle, billowing her body wider and wider.

As her skin stretched, it whitened, and the bait disappeared from sight. If it had been a crab or fish, it would have had no hope of escape.

It was utter. And then she returned to her leisure, sprawling out to eye us, showing off the 250+ tentacles on each arm. 

Some years back, I wrote a poem called "In the Deep," inspired by a trip to the National Aquarium--a dank, grim, undernourished and underground box of sad-looking sea creatures--down on 14th Street. I had recently read an article on giant octopi that talked about their intelligence, their skill as escape artists. At the aquarium, I eavesdropped on  some raucous kids, bored on a Saturday, looking for anything worthy of their attention. "In the Deep" appeared first in Hayden's Ferry Review, then in I Was the Jukebox. 

IN THE DEEP 

The boys are fifteen

and fuckwild:

Fuck the glass fish, 

they say, bodies pulsing 

with injected neon;

fuck the nautilus, nursing 

its bubble of salted air.

What they love is  

this crumple of muscle 

suctioned to the tank’s 

darkest corner—

Fuck her blue rings.

Fuck her three hearts.

The octopus cradles 

a baby doll, the doll’s head 

stuffed with krill. Fuck 

yeah, they say, watching 

as she pokes one eye 

out, then the other.

#

I'd write a different octopus poem today. That's not to disown "In the Deep," but simply to admit that the heart notices different things at different times. Did you know that a mothering female strings together 20,000 to 100,000 eggs? Once she has laid them, she doesn't eat in the seven months that lead to their hatching. She cleans them, she aerates them, she broods, and shortly after their birth, she dies. 

Pandora never mated in DC's captivity. She released her eggs in April 2013, unfertilized. According to the article, each would have been the size of a grain of rice.  

There is a long tradition of animals being the subject of poems. In addition, there is a specific cohort of female poets--poets of my generation--who invoke creatures as tangible actors or omens in their first and second books. I'd argue that we do this at an unusually higher proportion or frequency. I'm thinking of myself, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paula Bohince, Traci Brimhall, and Rebecca Hazelton among others. These works are otherwise interested in the psychic interior, works where I'd argue the driving urge is to share something about one's own relationship to the world. (Maybe that's overstating the point, because isn't poetry always about such an urge? Still.) So we point to bright particulars of these beasts as if to guard against the accusation of being self-involved; or, to prove our abilities as biologists and zoologists; or, simply for the pleasure of those particulars. We resist the confessional even as we flirt with it. 

I recognize this trend without judgment, because even within it there are strong poems and weak poems, variance, individual voices. But I notice it, and I'd love to sleuth out its origins. In the post-confessional morass, is it an issue of agency--do we more easily give ourselves permission to project character onto animals than we would fellow humans? Do humans seem, in fact, a little boring by comparison? Did Disney forever change out perception of an animal's capacity to think, feel, and love? Did Elizabeth Bishop wave her magic wand above our heads? Would we have been another generation's nature writers? No answers here on this quiet day, only questions. 

The octopus was a namesake of Earth's first woman, crafted from clay. Pandora was endowed by the gods with all the gifts--beauty, cunning, mastery of music and art, and as a curse, curiosity. Despite her husband's advice she took the top off the vessel, sent by Zeus, that released the world's plagues and worries. 

Watching Pandora that feed that day at the zoo, I pictured what it would look like if a woman tried to catch all those ills, to swallow them back inside herself. She'd have to balloon, stretching herself so thin her skin changed color, turning her body into a ladle to scoop through the sea and air. Not that it'd be her job. But she'd try anyway. 

The Books We Don't Write

I'm at the Millay Colony, getting snowed in; that's Edna's barn in the distance. On the long drive up, I talked on the phone with the woman who gave me the month off in 2006 that first brought me here and yielded Theories of Falling. Once boss, now mentor, she was giving me advice toward the year ahead. 

When I open up the folder of drafts from September 2006, I find--in the unpublished slush, the also-rans--three poems in which wasps build a piñata nest around the speaker's heart. That was a metaphor I was relentlessly attached to, both in life and on the page. I also found this one, laced with the details of Hudson: 

GETTING LOST

The best towns are the ones big enough for fireworks, 

small enough to hold under the roof of your mouth;

I saunter down Route 9H past the corn, past the silo 

drooling its long red chute, past the sunny faces 

of gravestones claiming Fraternity of Polish Sportsmen, 

past the library, a church, a jailhouse—here the road 

calls itself Columbia—past a park with bronzed general, 

a gallery, a cop, the woman selling squash and eggplant 

while her daughter ties daisies around every parking meter.  

I find the pub with an adjective-name, there’s always one:  

The Spotted Dog, The Blue Clover, now The Muddy Mug, 

then order a draft of something dark and throaty.  

The man wipes the counter, lays down my napkin.

Here’s where I might begin to flirt, might make myself

at home—except this one looks up with your eyes—  

Green. Wide-set. His nose thinner, his hair wiry, 

but all I see is a boy who would hunch by a deep well,

tossing stones just to hear them hit bottom. He’d do this

for hours, for weeks, for years.  Once I kissed your hands, 

swallowed your hours, said I was full. Almost believed it.  

Miss, do you want—but I’m already settling up.  The best towns 

are only thirty miles back to main road, an hour to your life.  

If you get lost don’t trust your gut.  The gut’s no navigator.  

Your feet know where to find your shoes; your arms 

reach for familiar sleeves. But your gut will drive forever, 

if you let it, looking for the town that makes it turn

and turn, the one that never needed you in its limits.

#

I wonder if those are the same green eyes that appear in "You Were You"? Maybe. We bank these images into our memory, and they stay with us forever. 

It had been way too long since I'd curled up with a book, so my reading appetite here has been voracious. What I've most enjoyed is Ann Patchett's collection of essays, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Though she's already racked up 10 books at the age of 50 (!), we get a glimpse of a book that Patchett didn't write, both in terms of references to an abandoned project as part of her life narrative and an essay, "The Wall," which describes a summer's efforts to pass the training tests for the Los Angeles Police Department. That would have been the nucleus of experience, joining the force to create an immersive portrait of the LAPD. But as Patchett discovers in real time, for all his inspiring enthusiasm her father (a former police captain) didn't really want to be on the record in the way that's necessary for a book, and getting to know her truly dedicated fellow recruits made the experiment seem disingenuous. So she let it go. 

I'm immensely relived to see someone like Patchett admit this. I look up to her--her frank personal manner, the balance of freelance and fiction writing she uses to support herself, the ways she manages (as captured in these essays) to stay rooted in a local community even amidst traveling, traveling, traveling. That's a pretty lofty model from which to distill expectations of myself. From such admiration, it can be hard to rewind my understanding to the writer she was at 33, my age, versus the writer she is now. For applications and in everyday conversation, I'm constantly in the mode of pitching the Next Big Thing on my creative to-do list. But I'm also at the stage of needing to learn that not every big project/goal can be willed to fruition, and that is not a sign of failure. Sometimes the victory is in letting it go. 

Several friends have recently announced they are retiring manuscripts--taking them off the buyer's market or contest circuit, at least for now. They're grieving what feels like the loss of years, a failure. One of the brutalities of publishing is that a collection of worthy pieces does not make a worthy whole. Just because you've placed every poem with a literary journal does not mean the manuscript has the heft and clarity of vision that's going to win a book prize. Just because you've placed three of your chapters as personal essays does not mean your memoir proposal is going to sell. For publishers to make the forward investment of an advance, production, distribution and publicity, the work has to be not only solid, it has to glimmer. It's not enough that the editor likes the book; the editor has to fall asleep dreaming about the book. That seems like a hopelessly high expectation--"Just bottle the lightning, please"--but it's the way it is. 

Sometimes the system, cruel as it may seem, saves us from our lesser selves. Patchett's a pro, a natural and prodigious talent. She could have written a good book about a year's service on the LAPD in the post-Rodney King era. But she couldn't have written a great book, not without finding a way to commit to the experience more fully, not unless she unpacked her father's service years beyond his permission. I've taken kill fees for pieces that at the time I felt really passionate about, and realized later that, dammit, the editor really was doing me a favor. I'm really glad I wrote the poem above, because there's some craft to it (elements I'd re-use and refine in later work), and it brings back a particular place of my life. But I'm really glad it wasn't part of what I sent out in Theories of Falling, because it would not have impressed Marie Howe one bit. 

I'm fortunate to be part of a writing community filled with generative, supportive energy. Because we want to nourish each other's lives, we champion the books that reflect the labor of those lives. We cheer each other on by the dozens of Facebook "likes." It'd be odd to "like" someone's announcement that they're NOT writing a book (and in my mind, you're in the process of "writing" a book up until the very day you're holding it, bound, in your hands). Yet it's the very small population of readers--I can count them on one hand--who will say to me "this isn't working," or "are you sure this is the project for you, at this point in time?"--who are most precious. They are the ones who ground me in the mindset it will take to recognize, endure, and forgive myself for the inevitable misfires that are embedded in any writer's career. 

When the University of Tampa MFA faculty spoke to students about practical matters, one of the pieces of advice I gave was to not get attached to publishing your thesis. It's not your first book. Seriously. It's Not a Book. Look at it as a pile of pages, from which you articulate, "Okay. What's the book hiding in here, the one that I didn't write?" 

And why not? Did the structure you really wanted to try out seem too crazy--or too hard? Were you a tourist to the topic, and now you need six months of immersive research before it's steeped in the proper detail? Did you do too much research, and now you must stop "showing your work"? Is the story's deepest, darkest, least comfortable emotional revelation still unspoken? Is that what held a good book back from the world? If so, awesome. Keep going & have at it. But sometimes, the book you don't write doesn't get written because, frankly…you're a little bored with it. And it's not even written yet! If the book is not one the world really wants to read, really needs to read--if it's not a book your someday editor will fall asleep dreaming about--let it go. The pleasure and peril of being a writer is that there is always something else waiting to be written.