#5: On Process
facts and hacks in poetry, the professional writer, and some books you should read
~Housekeeping~
Since the last edition, I’ve had poems out in New Moons: Contemporary Writing by North American Muslims (Red Hen Press) and The Puritan! You can also find them on Twitter if you look.
Some (relatively recent) good news!
I got into my first residency!! So thrilled to participate in the Seventh Wave’s digital residency this spring.
My poem, “this is a stadium” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize! You can also find this on my Twitter.
Tonight: I’m reading at the Riverbed Reading Series’ open mic at 7pm est! The line-up is amazing and the theme is “Right Relations during a Climate Emergency” so I will be in my element :)
Earlier this month, I wanted to submit 10 pages of unpublished work to an award opportunity (iykyk) and couldn’t include simultaneously submitted poems. I did already have plenty of unpublished work, but I couldn’t guarantee that they would remain unpublished by the end of the contest, and also didn’t want to give up on other publishing opportunites. So basically, I made the decision to write 10 poems—that would be good enough to submit, mind you—in a week.
Insane, right?
(I found out that you could simultaneously submit just before the deadline but we’re not going to talk about that lol.)
Lately, I’ve been trying to install more discipline into my life, mostly in regards to coursework, so I wondered if I could apply that same focus to writing. In the past, I’d always tried to write frequently, but waited to hit gold before I developed an idea into a poem. I accumulated phrases and images and let them cook in my head until I started freewriting. But now with this tight deadline, I had to be more clinical about the process, less romantic and less natural.
Luckily, I already had a theme in mind for the series (~animals~) that would fit in my full-length poetry manuscript (so these poems would be doing double the work haha). With this foundation, I planned the four stages of writing: accumulating, building, refining, and line-editing. For the first stage, I had a few ideas (read: animal facts) but still needed more research and to look through my collection of fragments for anything that piqued my interest. To start building each poem, I did some freewriting surrounding the fact.
Then, I hit a block. The work felt shallow. Looking back on it the day after, I was uninterested, so how could I let anyone else waste their time reading it? What I learned then was something that was emphasized during a craft talk between Jane Hirshfield and Dorianne Laux on utilizing facts in poem (which I unfortunately listened to after the deadline). The fact isn’t enough, Hirshfield said, It needs to find other subject matter.
Seems obvious, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t for me, at least not in the beginning. I had always centred awe in my practice, hoping to share some of it with the reader. I had hoped the fact would be enough—about the alaskan wood frog, the greenland shark, and the other fascinating creatures of the world. And then came this project, which showed me that pointing at something doesn’t result in someone moving in that direction. You can bring the horse to the beauty of the water, even show them their own reflection, but without creating thirst, they won’t drink. I had to consider both the reader’s and my own needs for the poems, basically for the first time.
When I approached the work over the next few days, I asked myself two questions:
What does this remind you of? (Though I had sometimes already answered this before the block.)
What does this mean to me, and why is this significant?
I tried answering them until I reached the other subject matter, and ended up writing work that was moved me, and/or made me understand myself better. This was a rare outcome of my work, since I usually begin with discovery and then explore it. So out of this sometimes grueling project came a new way to write. (Side note: writing to surprise yourself, and opening yourself up to transformation while writing is what Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets, does too. Heard this from her interview on the podcast First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing by Mitzi Rapkin.)
During the talk, Hirshfield read a poem called “Moss,” which began with a fact. She described how she forced a turn in the poem to new subject matter with the line “I think of these mosses and consider….” After applying all this consideration to my poems, I discovered that awe is not enough. How wonderful would the world be if we not only pointed in awe towards what we loved, but considered it in all the ways we were able?
The poem, Hirshfield said (and again I paraphrase), needs to break your heart. The fact serves as something the reader can trust before opening themselves up towards the other subject matter—whatever the poet has schemed and plotted and considered to wit’s end.
Although I’m not sure if I experience the aforementioned trust when I read a poem beginning with a fact, I always hope that the poet surprises me. I never want to be in the same place that the poem began (because that’s boring).
I want to end it with a broken heart.
“There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don't want to, don't much like what you're writing, and aren't writing particularly well.”
Agatha Christie
I’ve been thinking about this quote for a while now. What exactly would it mean for me to be a professional writer? I’m ambitious when it comes to writing, if you haven’t already gleaned that, but have always been torn about process. How do I live and work like a professional?
I have short- and long-term goals and soft deadlines but don’t ever want to stress or wear myself out. My natural writing practice is waiting until I need to get the poems out of my head and body but I’m also inclined to routine—there’s something so comforting and seductive about it. Writing everyday is the recommendation from the canon but gently advised against from contemporary poets I admire. There’s also that obvious difference between poetry and prose—poetry often needs time as an editor, and prose can do without.
This inner conflict is why I’ve always been so obsessed with reading interviews with writers and poets I admire. How can I optimize my process so I reach my goals? Novelists all have similar methods, the most important of which is just grinding through. They amaze me with their endurance, especially now after completing my short but exhausting project. But regardless of form, I had never really believed myself able to write everyday without burning out until I did, although it did feel a bit unhealthy.
So as someone who loves writing projects (and also wants to write what the kids call ~a little novel~), I filtered through the Creative Independent to find interviews with novelists, and found some useful advice:
Don’t be afraid to throw stuff out (Sigrid Nunez and so many others), which makes me, as someone saves literally every unused fragment, want to throw up. She also said to take responsibility for what you write and who you could hurt, and to not be anxious about the ending because the story has to and thus will end.
Use a Eileen Pollack’s “zero-draft” method, which is a draft that is exploratory and doesn’t have to make sense. You can essentially remove and add elements whenever and pretend that the past work doesn’t exist (Lillian Li).
Read your work out loud, so it doesn’t seem self-indulgent or boring (Lillian Li).
Think of it as an art project because “then, you’re comparing yourself to more of an emotional, artistic benchmark, rather than comparing yourself within your medium, which can feel a little panicky or gross” (Halle Butler).
You can write in fragments! Try accumulating them into novels and other forms (Lidia Yukanavitch). Also, the classic hero’s journey trajectory totally sucks. Kimberly King Parsons works with a “bucket” of fragments for each character and fills them up until the work connects.
Write about what makes you excited because “really at the end of the day it’s your time” (Kimberly King Parsons).
I think that in addition to optimizing your process to suit both your needs and your goals, you should try to make the rest of your life serve your process as well. For example, working effectively and efficiently at your day job / academics, taking care of your body by working out (and doing yoga for your back and shoulders), trying something new once in a while, etc.
Aside from the distant desire of writing a novel, my more immediate goal this year is to complete my full-length poetry manuscript by mid-June. So far, I have about 50 letter-size pages of drafts that I can include, so I’m on the right track to finish a shorter collection. But to stay focused on this while finishing the last few semesters of my degree, I have no choice but to be professional, in all senses of the word. I need to monitor my energy, discipline my hours, and consider my subject a little longer, a little more deeply, in addition to experimenting with other people’s methods. Wish me luck haha.
This month I realized how unsatisfied I was with my reading life, so I made an enormous and extremely ambitious reading list for myself. It included all the craft books I want to read, novels and poetry collections from the last few years, and a healthy diet of classics and nonfiction.
Two days later, I discarded it because it was literally impossible to complete. My intention now is to read everyday from a selection of library loans and my TBR stack. This isn’t going well either, so I’ll let you know in next month’s edition if I manage to figure out a realistic routine.
Anyways, of the seven books I read in January, three of them I have to gush about.
Field Requiem by Sheri Benning
I’d never read Benning’s work before approaching her fourth collection, so I was delighted to discover that she brings exactly what I love about poetry to the page: tight descriptions, grounding in place, and documentary themes, all involving the environment. It’s common to see specificity in poems—I often see it of food—but less often is it tightly wrapped in punctuation or demonstrating economy. Either one of these methods force the reader to stop, comprehend, and visualize the object before moving to the next one. Periods are more effective than lists, of course, because they don’t force you to accumulate knowledge and images for the length of the sentence. Benning often begins and/or ends with a series of statements—usually containing plant names—that operate as visual building blocks for her setting in rural Saskatchewan. The collection is, on all levels, stunningly immersive.
The poems are factual, but do the work of breaking your heart along the way. By the last line you’ll realize that the heartbreak too is fact—the collection is about bearing witness to the industrialization of farming and the history of some of the families that fell/are falling victim to it. These poems tell you what this heartbreak looks like until it disappears.
Queen in Blue by Ambalila Hemsell
I wish I read this book before I started writing my own collection because Hemsell’s writing reminds so much of my own. (Only hers is much better!) The poem below (“Rome”) was the push I needed to buy the book, and in Queen in Blue I found something that I felt like I had been looking for without realizing it.
Rome
Abalone, abalone, let me trust your slick muscle
and chambered iridescence. In the moonlight, among
the ruins, we partake of your innocence. Rome was
here. In front of this nightclub and gelato stand.
It is delicate, twinning your life to someone else’s:
like balancing two fish on a scale though the fish are
still fidgeting. I know, darling. Sometimes you want sleep,
but the oxygen is too thick. Your blood is rich with it
and impatient as the sea. Like salted urchin before
the noble octopus, we vowed to serve each other.
Itching, we bound foot to pedal and began the work.
Over many steep days found mercy, Adriatic—
My clumsy blue wounding. Your big slow heart.
Isn’t this what it means to begin with fact and awe and to look deeper? Her careful description leading to “Rome was / here.”(— like, wow, I’m going to die.) She weaves history and place and the perfection of the living thing with such subtle flow. The “you” that I default so often to in my own work Hemsell makes fresh and delicious! This is an examplary demonstration of how awe isn’t enough—you have to eat the animal too.
Alongside climate change and persona, motherhood is a major theme in the collection. Hemsell asks throughout: what does it mean to raise a child in a world that’s falling apart? Her poem “Son” that was published alongside “Rome” struck me by its relationship to the world. As if viewed from space, the world opened like a lion’s mouth, lightning, flood, and with catastrophe, as catastrophic as birth is for the body. And how the final lines echo with the use of third-person, making the mother a character of myth, doing the impossible. I for one have been bewitched body and soul.
People Want to Live by Farah Ali
I have to confess I haven’t read very many short story collections. (Although, in my defense, I feel very under-read in general.) But how could I, as a member of the Pakistani diaspora, pass up stories about people I could have seen on the street but never met? To visit the country isn’t to know or understand the highs and lows of everyday life there, the routines, how people live. These stories are as tightly crafted as poetry, and so absorbing I devoured them in only two sittings. One feature I loved was the diversity of narrators, which ranged from middle-aged women with families to young thieves. The specificity of their lives truly astonished me.
Ali made me think differently about what I knew and thought I knew—I realized that I know nothing—and made me wonder how could I pretend to, otherwise, in my life and in my writing?
Thanks for reading! Now it’s your turn to tell me about your process. How do you achieve progress towards your goals while taking care of yourself? Please give me advice :)
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