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Poetry Grind update

Jeanne Obbard

So, I’m on Day 20 of the 30-day Poetry Grind exercise. I haven’t had time to post about it because I’m writing every day and I’m worn out! Woo!

There are ten people in my group. We’ve only lost one person along the way. That means nine people have been consistently sending out a draft a day, to all the others. This is completely amazing to me. These people are serious about poetry.

Some observations, in no particular order:

1. The generosity of the medium.

You can write a poem about absolutely anything. I can’t talk about what other people have written (wish I could!), but some of my topics included:

migraines

hearing aids

cosmetology school

death

my day job

12-step programs

the Poetry Grind itself

 

2. Community.

It is really, indescribably great to get to read other people’s poems every day. This will make you look forward to your inbox. Getting to see “invisible” work: the daily work of exploring a form or a theme, the daily work of hammering away at something. I get familiar with other people’s preferred forms, and I start paying more attention to my own. I see that somebody else is willing to write about x thing, and I feel like I have permission to write about x thing.

Thinking about this experience versus the classroom/workshop experience, there’s just no comparison at all. There is real value to reading someone else’s work over the long haul, in an intensive way, especially seeing the false starts and the different angles we all try in order to get inside an idea. It opens your ears to ways of thinking and approaching the work that I haven’t gotten anyplace else.

3. Conservation of energy.

You are not allowed to respond at all. GENIUS. I find it exhausting sometimes, in a workshop, to give feedback. This way, I get all the intellectual engagement but I get to reserve my energy for my own writing.

4. Discipline.

I am forced not only to generate, but I also feel motivated to get things to a respectable place. Having an audience, even if they aren’t reading what you send, pushes me to write better things. I put a lot more effort into these drafts than I would without that impetus. I don’t give up as easily. Because I feel like, if I’m asking someone to even glance over this thing, I can make it a little better. Not perfect, just a little better than I would have otherwise left it.

A friend of mine recently quoted somebody as saying that overcoming writer’s block is about the patience to keep writing even when you’re writing terrible stuff. I’ve become willing to start over and over until I get something that starts to click.

5. Cutting your losses.

Because I’m on a deadline (midnight each night) I’ve started abandoning things that don’t work, very quickly.

Having to do it every day encourages me to let go of the previous day’s effort and move on. I know I’ll come back to a lot of these pieces, but right now, I don’t have to. This is writing as a process, not a product.

6. Poetry First!*

I love my real-world writing group, but it’s a mixed group of poetry/prose, and I often write prose in it. There is nothing like having a group of just poets.

7. Conservation of momentum.

There is no slacking. Some days, you write a three-page rant. Some days, you write a three-line blurb that you wring out of your brain at the last minute. It doesn’t matter. You keep your hand in.

 

* This reminds me of Portlandia’s Women and Women First.

women and women first

Welcome

Jeanne Obbard

So I’ve been giving some thought to the function and structure of this blog. My original vision was of a communal excercise… but shockingly, all the peeps I’d like to have writing with me here are crazy busy, and also busy putting their writey goodness, rightfully, to better purposes.

Where does that leave me? Well, I still like the idea of this space as an outlet, a place to think aloud. Because I have other writing outlets, this one sometimes gets neglected for long stretches of time. I’d kind of like that to change? But I’m not sure it’s gonna? Wow, way to commit.

I’d also like this to be more personal, and more interesting, and less pedantic, because pedantic is a huge problem of mine and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

So here are the proposed changes around here.

Change the First. Blah blah blah, less precious.

Change the Second. I’m biting the bullet and migrating the blog over to my own name. Because a) Me me me. And b) I could never, ever remember the exact web address to save my life. Going forward, if you wanna look me up, all you have to do is spell my name right. We’ll work on pronunciation later.

I started The Poetic License as an outlet for writery thoughts, from which it… occasionally… drifted… off topic. Uh, oops? I still can’t promise that all my posts will be 100% germane to the writing life and its discontents. WHATEVER. Just roll with it.

A special note on the weird photos: These are most definitely not going to change. Because there is almost nothing I like better than weird photos, taken with a totally inadequate camera. There’s a metaphor here. Give me some time and I’ll write a poem about it.

There’s probably gonna be more cursing. Sorry about that.

In poetry news, there’s so much great stuff going on; mainly – that a poet friend talked me into this craziness. (It’s awesome! It’s insane! I’m losing my mind! In a good way!) Stick around to hear all about it.

Love, The City of Brotherly

Jeanne Obbard

poetry mural

 

The Huffington Post has a list of 31 reasons Philadelphia is underrated. While the HuffPo definitely hits some of the highlights, I wanted to compile my own,  personal – and completely random – list.

  1. You can cross Delancey Street and say to your friends, “Hey, look. I’m ‘Crossing Delancey.’ ” [Caution: Joke only works with persons aged 38 to 68.]
  2. “La la la, just passing through, LOOK AT THAT FUCKIN AWESOME MURAL!!” happens on a regular basis.
  3. Those pretzels are completely incomprehensible to me. Which is good. Every city should be known for at least one surreally unappetizing food.
  4. Whatever facet of modern life you may be discussing, you can say, all casual-like, “Yeah, Ben Franklin invented that,” and be right 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, most likely no one will question you.
  5. What other city has an Ivy League college whose name sounds like a state school?
  6. And speaking of which, Kelly Writers House.
  7. “The Sixth Sense.” I have no idea whether that guy ever made any other movies, though.
  8. We have a world class art museum… with a statue of a Sylvester Stallone character on the front lawn.
  9. Oh here, have another world class art museum.
  10. And we liked this one so much we decided to steal it from the suburbs. Geez, Philly, now you’re just showing off.
  11. A statue of a giant clothespin  stands in the middle of the financial and governmental center of the city, which I find totally, delightfully subversive.
  12. Finally, and most importantly, Philly is one of the stand-ins for Arrow’s “Starling City.”

 

Ganesh
Statue of Ganesha in the PMA

Revision

Jeanne Obbard

awesome accordion

Process of poetry revision:

Day 1. Write draft.
Day 2. Change the word “black” to “ebony.”
Day 3. Add comma.
Day 4. “Ebony” is too pretentious. Change the word “ebony” to “obsidian.”
Day 5. Change the word “obsidian” to “black.”
Day 6. Remove comma.

Repeat until insane.

When in doubt, add another obligation

Jeanne Obbard

Exciting news this week as I embark on Coursera’s online poetry class, taught by Al Filreis of the University of Pennsylvania.

Because, you know, when you find yourself totally overwhelmed by life, the logical response is to totally overwhelm yourself a little more. WHEN IN DOUBT, ADD ANOTHER OBLIGATION. Yep. I’m insane.

This week, we revisit the spiritual mother and father of American poetry:

Emily_D

walt_whitman

I chose this photo of Whitman on purpose. I think the most common photos of him, in distinguished three-quarters view, with the dramatic white beard – signifying Literary Fixture, Unerring Sage – have the effect of obscuring what Whitman was like in his writing. He was boundlessly energetic, innovative, and as  I write this, younger than I am now: “I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health begin” is how he launches “Song of Myself.”

So there you have them. The one discursive, effusive, earnest; the other concise, elliptical, and wry . Talk about flipping the gender expectations. Dickinson and Whitman both embraced their own nature with intense self-scrutiny; they both bent their circumstances to fit their lives rather than the other way around. That’s an example to all of us, not just poets.

Related articles

Beginner’s mind

Jeanne Obbard

Overheard at the “faces” fountain:

Girl (about four years old): “What are they?”

Nana: “Faces. What happened to them?”

Girl: “They’re old.”

face in water

Natalie Goldberg talks in Writing Down the Bones about “beginner’s mind.” What is beginner’s mind exactly? That brief conversation I overheard was an unfiltered moment that, like poetry, held a lot of condensed meaning. What happened to the faces? The girl’s assessment was, “They’re old.” Old happened to them. Not old like Nana, as she clarified a moment later, but a different kind of old that she reacted to viscerally. I have many times sat by the faces fountain and thought about their peacefulness, their aura of kindness-in-death. There is something soothing about them, and also something final. I think that both the four-year-old and I were reacting to that quality. Her interpretation was rather more concise though.

arc

It reminded me of when a co-worker of mine said, “My kid says the weirdest things. He calls Center City ‘the New City.’ ” I thought, well, yeah, it is the new city. Layers of shiny skyscrapers hide the older brick and stone buildings like City Hall. “The New City” sounds hopeful and superficial both, spangled with lights and the reflections of all those mirrors. My co-worker’s son was conveying his impression very concisely. He wasn’t asking, “Does anyone else call it ‘the New City?’ ” He wasn’t filtering or censoring. He was saying what he saw. It can be very instructive to listen to the ways that children assess the world, because theirs is the “beginner’s mind” that all artists need.

house

We must unlearn the way we see things as adults. We must peel back the layers of assumption and cynicism. We must hold off on the moment of judgment. Judgment closes things down, it shuts down perception. We make judgments and assumptions as a kind of shortcut, to cope with the complexity of life, but the downside is that we then see only what we expect to see.

shadows

To get at those “first thoughts” we must become enthusiastic, vulnerable, open to our senses and to our reactions. This can be disconcerting. We may potentially be embarrassed. We may be thought eccentric or labeled “weird.” But as we practice this quality of attention, we find we can hold our senses open for longer. That “first thought” leads to another first thought. Something original sneaks though the cliches we’ve learned to apply to everything. Opening up our perception is how we begin to create original art.

clouds

Adrienne Rich, political poetry, and a confession

Jeanne Obbard

shadow

A debate on the qualities of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, and an even bigger debate on the nature of political poetry.

Ange Mlinko’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems is here.

And Carol Muske-Duke’s spirited defense of Rich is here.

I don’t totally disagree with Mlinko’s assessment of Rich’s poetry: it is cool, careful, intellectual. But it also cares intensely about women’s experience of the world. I was lucky to read Rich in college, and while I didn’t fall in love with her writing, I took away something perhaps more valuable: a sense of respect for women’s intellects. Rich was serious: she took her thoughts seriously and she opened up the possibility that I could take my thoughts seriously as well. I can’t overstate how important this was for me as a twenty-something-year-old woman.

Did I think Mlinko was trashing Rich? Not as much as Carol Muske-Dukes did. But Muske-Dukes gestures towards perhaps a bigger issue: what she sees as a particular style of writing poetry – “indeterminacy” or “playfulness,” manifesting as apolitical poetry.

It’s a debate that certainly resonates for me. Even as my admiration for women poets was cemented by Adrienne Rich and the anthology No More Masks, I was aware that my own poetry was hardly ever explicitly feminist in either subject or theme. As a college student, I wrote about rejected love, and depression, and family drama. My own assessment of my work was that it was all too inward, too minor. Those women poets who wrote to all women were my heroes; I felt I didn’t measure up.

Twenty years later, I think it’s time for me to stop feeling like a failure.* I mean, I’ve been a feminist for as long as I’ve had a coherent thought in my head; everything I write comes out of that viewpoint. Feminism means I get to take my thoughts seriously; but it also means I get to take my sensitivity and my ambivalence seriously.

I am thinking of two poems that found a home in a small literary magazine** this past year. Both were about the experience of being a teenage girl. Yes, I did the emotional work of writing about difficult memories. But I also did the intellectual work of making those fragments into poems – bringing to bear whatever skill I have to make them accessible, well-shaped, and true. These two kinds of work are both necessary to the creative endeavor; each is pointless without the other. And sometimes, finding ways to talk about the political turns out to be the same as finding ways to talk about the intensely personal.

*About this, anyway.

**Shameless promotion of a very nice journal.