And I am not getting much done these last few months…
There have been a lot of losses with a lot of aftermath.
I’ll get back to my collection at some point…
Wish me luck.
*****
Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “book.” Come join us! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2016/06/03/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-june-416/
I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts over the last few days with people stating their New Year’s resolutions. I admit that I am not a New Year’s resolution person. If I need to make a change, I prefer to start when the need arises.
I’m not especially wedded to January first as a date. Which reminds me that I wrote a poem about it…
Some people chose to list goals rather than resolutions, but even that sounds too cut-and-dried to me.
Jay Dee, at the end of this Authors Answer post, asks what are our plans for 2016.
Plans are something I can get behind. Plans to me are more dynamic and able to be adjusted or revised as needed. Plans don’t have an expiration date.
My writing plan is to put together my first poetry collection.
Those of you who followed my saga of the Mass MoCA/Tupelo Press residency/workshop know that I had hoped returning to my home locale in its new phase of life would spawn a chapbook. Midway though the residency week, I realized that it needed to be a collection rather than a chapbook.
I have a provisional title.
A schema for organizing the sections of the collection.
And some poems that I have already written that will fit into the collection. Others are drafted but need revisions, workshopping, and more revision. Others are still barely ideas and there may be still others that become necessary to write to fill in gaps in the timeline or to balance the sections.
I am planning on marshaling my local resources, Sappho’s Circle and the Bunn Hill Poets, for help with workshopping individual poems. As I get further along in the process, I will probably afflict commandeer invite several writer-poet friends to critique a section or the whole collection. Other people are so much better at pointing out what doesn’t make sense or what is out of order than I am when I am so close to it.
I am ecstatic that our residency group, the Boiler House Poets, will have a reunion this fall. I definitely plan to enlist their help, although I’m not sure in what capacity. It will depend on where I am in the process in the fall. I may need more workshopping help, or organizational assistance, or help navigating the submission process, or may need some more art poems to balance the final section so that I would be generating new poems during the residency that would need feedback.
To me, that is part of the beauty of a plan. It can change and grow as needs dictate.
I know that many people would say that plans need to be written out with checkboxes and timelines and deadlines or things won’t get done.
I do understand that logic, but I can’t force myself – or my poetry – into that kind of straitjacket.
My life experience has featured too many unexpected events to carve any plan in stone.
Too many things can happen.
Too many things have happened.
I am confident that I will assemble this manuscript, but it doesn’t feel safe to me to say it is a 2016 goal or worse – shudder – resolution. It is a plan with roots in 2015 which will grow in 2016.
The fruit will ripen when the time is right. Whatever number gets attached to that date is not mine to say.
It’s not in the plan.
*****
Join us for Linda’s Just Jot It January! Find out more about it here: http://lindaghill.com/2016/01/04/just-jot-it-january-4th-dachshund/
I’m sure all my poet friends will want to read this interview with Tara Betts – and read her new chapbook 7×7 kwansabas.
7 x 7: kwansabas (Backbone Press, 2015)
What are some of your favorite chapbooks? Or what are some chapbooks that have influenced your writing?
Right now, I am excited about Amber Atiya’s chapbook, and I am looking forward to reading Fatima Asghar’s chapbook. I just got a stack of chapbooks from dancing girl press, but I have enjoyed some from Belladonna, Button Poetry, and Carolina Wren.
What might these favorite or influential chapbooks suggest about you and your writing?
I think it’s a good way to explore a suite of poems or an idea, but I also think there’s not the same sort of pressure that foments when you are trying to develop a full-length manuscript. It allows you to zero in on a theme without feeling like it has to be 50-100 pages. I think that’s what I’ve loved in particular about Barbara Jane Reyes’ chapbooks Cherry and For…
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The Mass MoCA/Tupelo press workshop ended yesterday morning, but I’m not home yet.
One of our cousins picked me up and B met us later at their home in Stamford, Vermont, which is his hometown. For the weekend, we are staying at the home of a high school friend, who was my classmate and B’s lab partner for physics.
The local connections and tour continue. Today, B and I went on a car trip back to my hometown, Monroe Bridge, MA. We stopped and took some photos of where my house used to be, where Rowe Yankee used to be, where Sherman hydro station, the dam, and Tower Brook still are, where the town office and library still are, although the rest of the building which was my elementary school up through eighth grade is now offices for whichever power company it is that now owns what was New England Power when my father was superintendent for the upper Deerfield.
I keep having ideas and little fragments of poems pop into my head, so I scrawl them in my journal. I have also had some chance to tell B some of my experiences, which is helping me to process. I am looking forward to talking to some of my poet friends at home. I also want to share some of my drafts of Monroe Bridge-North Adams poems with my mom and dad. There are some details that they can provide to help me be historically correct.
I realized that the chapbook I had hoped to write from this experience probably needs to be a collection instead. I find myself thinking of prospective titles and ways to organize the collection into sections, even the placement of some of the poems I have already written which will fit into the collection. It’s exciting! It will be a big project and I’m not sure how long it will take to write, revise, and assemble it.
I told Jeffrey he could be the first one to reject it when it is done. 😉
Joanne Corey 