Rachel Gardner, a literary agent I’m following on Twitter, tweeted a link to an article by Daniel Menaker in BN Review, with the comment,  “A long but incredibly important article to help you understand publishing reality.”

Menaker’s article, Redactor Agonistes, is brilliantly structured and written, clear and knowledgeable.  Even if you’re not interested in understanding the publishing industry, if you’re into writing, you’ll get joy from its excellence.

I like to be graceful.  So I’ve been learning to pay attention to that need-to-get-something-out feeling before it turns ugly.

When I feel it, usually I’m outside, taking a break at work, or walking near home.  I carry a cheep (sic) Bic pen and a folded piece of paper for just such moments.  I’ll start a rough of a poem as notes on the piece of paper.  Later, I type it up.  That’s when it starts to take on form.  When I type, I don’t look at my notes.  Making the notes is enough to start a complicated, and somewhat unconscious, creative process rolling.  My fingers take it from there as I type.  Maybe the notes turn into something, like this first cut of a poem:

While you sleep, / cicadas’ fiddles / rise and fall, / a crow, calling as it goes, / flies southwest, / and rain-grey redwood / offers its sweetness / to the sun. / While you sleep, / the offshore breeze / mingles roses with salt, / as eddies of leaves / and white-winged / butterflies / with yellow spots / picturise / mountain-ash trees’ / rustling song. / While you sleep, / the summer wind / ties heat to its back / and makes the haze and clouds / that say / no boundaries / have a chance to stand, / while you sleep.

When I read a first-cut poem to myself, it’s always wrong.   A first draft is usually too emotionally heavy in some places, inconsistent in its point of view, and it has metaphors that don’t always work, or are trite or cliched.  The sound and beats are wrong.  The rhythm and texture are wrong.  And more.  This used to bother me, but now it doesn’t.   No worries.  The first draft is just a first step.

After the first draft is typed, I take a few hours away from it — or a few days, weeks or months.  The creative process continues, subliminally.

When I finally go back to the first draft, if the material still feels powerful to me, I’ll get to work on it.  I’ll cut it back as many times as I have to, and restore some of it too.  It’s interesting to see what happens when I cut it back, almost down to the bone — how it asks to have some softness and irregularities restored.  I keep a private Blogspot.com blog (you can have as many of these as you want — all free — and some can be private and others not), called Shikara, that has the first one-to-four drafts of almost any poem I’ve been working on for the past three years.  That way I can go back to the freshness (and flaws) of the original expression.

As I edit, I sometimes use Natural Reader’s free software to read my words back to me.  Boy oh boy, can that catch phrase, grammar and punctuation flaws!  See, the reader software takes one sentence into its memory at a time, and determines how to read it — where the pauses should be, how long to pause, how the voice should be inflected — based on the whole sentence (or lines, if it’s a poem).  It’s amazing to hear how the digital voice’s readings change as I edit.  When I get it right, the digital voice reads it right.

And when I’m being not truthful enough in my writing — too melodramatic or holding back — I listen once again Frederick Seidel reading a few of his poems.  His readings are an amazing experience.  I guarantee that three days after hearing Seidel read his poems for the first time, any writer will write a little differently –  both prose and poems.

How to find these resources?

Reader software from NaturalReaders.com
Frederick Seidel reading a few of his poems at NYTimes.com

And, of course, either Blogspot.com or WordPress.com for free blogs that you can set as private, to use for work on drafts.

The sense of being on the right track that I get when I use these methods — edit edit edit, digital reading aloud of my work, and when I’m out of the corral, using Frederick Seidel’s readings of his work to get me back in –  makes writing less scary, less purely subjective, less living inside my own brain case and nowhere else.  None of my originality is lost when I use these tools.  I’m still the artist.  The tools are little chisels, that’s all.

In the case of the first-cut poem above, it’s been through its edits process.  It’s pretty much finished.  The process took a week.

One of the things that happened with this poem is it became three stanzas, then the first two stanzas became one, then the first stanza became a social occasion with nature, personified in various guises, running the show.

This is what it is now:

While you sleep, / cicada songs rise and fall, / a crow flies in / from north-northeast, / calling as it goes, / redwood’s / hidden sweetness / kisses the air, / a harbor breeze / carries in drinks / of bruised roses and salt, / and eddies of leaves / and white butterflies / shadow-dance a casual piece / called / This Is How Ash Trees Rustle. // While you sleep, / winds tie heat on / like sails, / and running high aloft / shred fire / into pale haze, / softening / boundaries between / here and there.

Jeez, was that a lecture?  Well I guess it was.  Need to take a walk!  As Johanna Harness tweeted the other day, “…and push the reset button on my brain”.

P.S.  My poem above, titled While you sleep, is posted on my poems blog.  It’s a NYC 2009 monsoon rain outside.  Going to take the walk now.

War Dances, a short story by Sherman Alexie (published in this week’s New Yorker).

NY Times Op Ed by Anand Giriharadas — Letter from India: Once-Clear Thoughts Are Clouded

They spoke to each other frequently, calling out over this wing or that.  Their words were lost in the wind, or heard,  depending on how high their wings were hunched — when a sparrow was fearful or trying hard to keep its balance, its wings would hunch up high, muffling the sound of its words.

One sparrow was never fearful and was always well-balanced.  But the old boy’s wings were permanently hunched, and he couldn’t turn his head to his fellows when he spoke — age had stiffened his body.  When he spoke his often wise and reassuring words, the only one to hear him was the wind.

What were the sparrows discussing?  On the ancient lane where they usually gathered, men had come with machines, to tear down the crooked old houses and shops.  The sparrows needed a new place to gather.  So they’d called a conference amongst themselves on this particular day.

They had included the old sparrow in their talks, because they respected his wisdom.  But being youngsters, they didn’t intend to listen to what he had to say.  And in this wind, they couldn’t hear him anyway.

He knew they were like this.  But he took his responsibility seriously.  So he thought for a while, then advised them:  “There, on Candlemakers’ Lane, that’s where you should gather,” he said.  “The candlemakers’ discarded bits of wax and tallow will make you fatter.  You’ll do very well, in cold winters.   The candlemakers’ wives are happy, because candles are always needed, and their husbands are rich.  There’s no shortage of grain in those houses.  Daily they make more bread than they can eat.  Abundant stale fragments are thrown out into the lane, for creatures like us to feast on.”  And the wind heard him, and agreed.

“Hatters’ Lane, that’s the place for us,” said one of the younger sparrows.  “The lane is wide and runs north and south.  The sun will warm us early every day.  And the hats are very high-style, lovely things to look at, with shimmering colors layered over them like the feathers on our wings.  Why, I’d like a hat for myself.  Will they make hats for sparrows, do you think?”  The sparrows turned and looked over their wings at the speaker, with great interest.  Sparrows are mousy-looking birds much of the time, and a little borrowed splendor might be a very fine thing.  So, after a little chirping back and forth, the birds agreed they’d try for Hatters’ Lane.

The wind listened to their conversation and shivered.  The shivering was passed on to the sparrows, who were inexperienced enough to feel cold, not stupid.  All except the old boy.  He knew he wasn’t cold at all.

“Not a good idea, dear friends.”   The oldest sparrow knew what they did in that street.  “Do you see the third stories on Hatters’ Lane?  That’s why the street is wider, so the sun can wake the inhabitants early.  That’s where the falconers and netters live.  They go out early each day to catch birds like us, and return each night with the mangled remains, and bags of feathers they’ve stripped from the poor dead bodies.  It’s those feathers that make those hats beautiful.  And do you know what spare food is in that lane?  It’s the crisped bones of our brothers. Are we cannibals, after all?”  And the wind heard, and agreed.

But the younger sparrows didn’t hear.  And as the afternoon light turned golden and shadows lengthened, they took off in a flock.  They were never seen again.  Presumably they went to Hatters’ Lane.  Maybe their feathers are shimmering on a fine hat or two.  Hats for sparrows aren’t made, by anyone.  Sparrows are for hats, not hats for sparrows.  Starvation was an alternate possibility to being mass-murdered.   Sparrows aren’t cannibals, after all — they only eat grains (cooked or raw), a little fat of any kind, water, gravel, cicadas and grasshoppers.   Hatters’ Lane people are meat eaters.  Bird-eaters, actually.  Not a good choice, for a sparrow’s survival prospects.  We readers hope, of course, that the sparrows realized their mistake, and immediately went in search of another lane to live in.

After the youngsters left, the older sparrow swayed on the line for a while, his small oval body lonely against the darkening sky.  He looked like what he was — a sparrow, not a small crow.  He slept for a while.  When he woke, the stars were burning small holes in a midnight sky.  The wind was sharper.  He ruffled his underfeathers, and took off, wheeling over crooked houses and shops till he saw the glow of masses of candles.  The lights told him he’d found the windows and people of Candlemakers’ Lane.

After a small feast of stale bread, some fresh water, a chewy bit of wax, eight fine grains of quartz gravel, and ten pieces of broken barley, the older sparrow searched for, and shortly found, a chink in a southwest-facing wall.  It would be warm almost the whole year round, and it would be his new home.

Candlemaker’s Lane makes a good sparrow-home, despite the fact that its northeast-southwest orientation puts it at the mercy of the Himalayas’ always-chill winds.   It has a high inventory of crannies, chinks and nooks for sparrow-nesting.  The fields nearby have tangles of weeds and brush, to pluck for sparrow-nest linings.  Generous rations of spare crumbs and grains come to the birds each day, from candlemakers’ happy wives.

To the Lane, the sparrows return offerings of sweet music, performed in concert, twice a day, in the electrical wires strung up over Candlemakers’ Lane.  And images of freedom, in the flash of their flight.

Some say the old sparrow still lives in his southwest-facing chink in Candlemakers’ Lane.  If the rumor is true, the old boy has outlived his own generation and at least two that followed.  They do say it’s true.  They also say he’s beloved by the young sparrows, who take his life to heart, as showing them the wisdom of their preference of staying in their parents’ Lane, and taking their wives and husbands from amongst their cousins.

– The idea of a story is a phantom.  Hard work makes it real.   I like the fable form.   I always think it will be easy to work with, and it never is.  I don’t know if northern India or Pakistan has sparrows, or if anyone wears hats with feathers on them, in these countries.  Probably not, to both.

The connection effect was potent.  Even after I was warm in a comforter, and falling asleep again, I continued tracing his name.  This wanted a poem to tell it.   Here are three drafts:

(draft 1)

Last night I woke
(I don’t know when).
It was cold-wet outside,
and I needed a quilt.
My left cheek smiled
in my left hand’s palm.
Here you were.
My right hand’s fingers
spelled your name
on cotton sheets’ folds.
Your first name, thus,
soft, with one finger,
the rest of my hand
surprised.
Your surname I made
with two fingers
faintly tracing
cuniform lines
joined,
unjoined.
An hour
I spent
spelling your name.
Between rounds
I was touching your face.

(draft 2)

It was cold-wet outside.
I needed a quilt,
so I woke
(don’t know when),
and found myself
spelling your name
in the folds
of the sheets.
Surprised,
I tried it again,
now the surname,
two fingers, apart,
tracing your angles’
cuniform graves,
joining, unjoined.
Spelling your name
for an hour or so,
sometimes my hand
held your face.

(draft 3)

The lyrical act
of spelling your name
in the folds
of the sheets
is a poem,
a poem.
How else
can I tell
how I woke
in the night
needing a quilt,
and found I was
tracing
the cuniform grave
of your name
in the soft
cotton folds,
how it felt,
the given
and surname
both different,
both yours,
and how
sometimes
my hand
held your face?

The finished version is here and here, as well as at Grafetti.

I’m not completely OK with the finished version.  But I like its percussiveness, how that quality offsets the emotional nature of the poem.  The ending of the finished version is too meolodramatic and off the beat.

© 4 May 2009, Heather Quinn, all rights reserved

Carved jade bowls, the stony sides of mountains reflecting sunshine, translucent stone, the translucency of celadon-glazed Chinese porcelain, and the colors of thin sheets of jade and rust against light, over and over.

These represent some quality of love, to me.  I collected them in my mind, where they haunt me. It started like this:

I read a story by Tracey Taylor in the NYTimes about Heath Ceramics, a US company still manufacturing its own goods.  I went to the Heath Ceramics web site and fell in love with their work.  And not just because my nickname is “Heath.”   I’d never focused on plates and bowls — until I saw what Heath Ceramics makes.  Their shapes are simple, strong, well-balanced.  Their glazes are spectacular, to me — the surface and color interplays went to my heart, for some reason.

From that encounter came a sense of home, an ideal home that reflects me more purely than anything I’ve ever lived.

Later, outside, the sense of home came to me again.  Then a sense of my love, a guy who’s like no one I’ve ever known, even remotely, and how simple, strong, well-balanced and contrasty he is.  Then a sense of endurance, two ways: lasting through tough times, and everlasting.

And then jade: hard, glossy, fibrous (difficult to carve), and translucent. Its colors are those of the Indian flag, but subtly so.

I associate my love’s success with the peace promoted by the Buddha.  Buddhist monks collect alms in hand-made bowls.   My meditation flowed to a sense of Zen, then the Japanese approach to arts.  Then their ceramics, some of which are as translucent as jade and Chinese porcelain.  And the jade “mountains” which Chinese scholars used for contemplation.  And real stony mountainsides in real sunlight.  Tang dynasty bronzes, and Chinese ceramic horses glazed with the colors of jade.  And celadon-ware.  And finally, to jade bowls.

A bowl, holding love.

A bowl that’s strong and pure, that protects its contents from any harm.  A bowl that rings like a temple bell, in the colors of India, subtly so, with light shining through it, a bowl that won’t break, that holds and protects what’s in it without disturbing the integrity of what it holds.  This is love, to me.

So I’ve collected bowls, stone, and light, as visions that haunt me, that will become a poem, one day, somehow, one way or another.

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