The first time my poetry got published

Crossposted from Blogetary 2.0

When I was in junior high — Pioneer Junior High, home of the Bears — our school newspaper had a poetry contest. I had moved across town from another junior high, Orchard, home of the Bulldogs, a couple of years before.

Annuals from Orchard Junior High and Pioneer Junior High, 76-79.

It has been a long time, and I believe both junior highs are now middle schools, and neither one has newspapers anymore.

I don't think the poetry contest was a regular yearly thing. I think it was a "one off" that our school newspaper was trying out in my 9th grade year; it was a glorious "one off" as far as I was concerned.

I remember being really excited at the prospect of a poetry contest. I figured that this was it. This would be the thing that would prove I was a writer. And I think it was also the first time I actually considered sharing my poetry with others. Before this, I don't think I ever really thought about other people reading what I wrote — I mean, not really (other than silly day dreams, and Paul McCartney songs on the radio in the early morning helped with that). The whole concept that someone other than my teachers or my mom might read what I wrote was foreign. On the other hand, I knew I needed to enter this contest. And I think my mind filed the poetry I'd be submitting in the "homework" portion of my brain to keep me from freaking out about it.

So, I approached it as I would any homework, like I was working on an essay for class, and assumed that only the teacher advisor, and maybe the newspaper students, would ever see the poems I submitted.

The little house on Pear Lane.

But maybe I should back up a little — give you a little history.

When Gramma and Grampa decided to leave Wenatchee, my mom and my sister and I moved from the little house on Pear Lane with a double corner lot, a huge back garden, a little play house and a cool basement, to the tiny two-bedroom duplex on Dakota on the other side of town with a dime-sized yard. Not very far as things went, but far enough to put me in a different school district. Far enough to leave behind friends I'd made my first year of junior high, leave behind track and volleyball coaches and orchestra teachers and cute boys I had crushes on, and then have to get to know new friends or old friends from grade school again, whilst wondering if I would be able to please my new track and volleyball coaches and orchestra teachers. Would I find new boys to have crushes on?

So, what I'm trying to say is that even after being at PJH for a year, I felt the need to prove myself. I really was holding onto this poetry thing like a lifeline to do that.

When we'd lived on Pear Lane, my sister and I had shared a room in the basement. We'd built forts out of our closets and beds. We'd played "avoid the monsters on the floor" (the creamy linoleum floor had those pink, gold, and black star things on it) and other games. When I wrote it was with visions of becoming another Laura Ingalls Wilder, Louisa May Alcott, or L.M. Montgomery. In my world, I was Jo March.

My sister's bed had been by the door at the bottom of the stairs and mine had been by the small window that was high up in the wall. I'd left that window open every night when I was really young in hopes that Peter Pan would come to visit. Later I kept it open just to annoy my sister. (It was a basement window with a screen, hidden at the side of the house, in a small town, so no one cared I left it open.)

When we lived on Dakota, once again my sister got the bed by the door, and I got the bed by the window. But this time we were on the ground the floor and the windows looked over the little hedge and the yard onto the small street. We had carpet on the floors and shared a closet with a sliding door and were older, so no more did we build forts or play "keep away from the monsters on the floor." Instead, we — what would they call it these days? We were "establishing our territories." We put duct tape down the center of the room. We charged each other 1/4 of a penny every time we touched the other person's side of the room. Trouble was, my sister's side was by the door. I had to run down the short hall and do the long jump to get to my side of the room without touching hers, which was only successful about half the time since that was not one of the things I was good at in track.

I probably still owe her money from then.

I still loved being next to the window, though. It was my own little corner of the world. The windows were larger and let in more light. They only opened out a little ways, though, and I didn't leave them open at night as much anymore. I was old enough now to have seen scary movies and know about the monsters who broke into houses. I wrote messages to my friends in runes or codes, coloring the paper with mom's leftover coffee so it would look like parchment (she was so annoyed when she found out). And my bed by the window is where I sat to work on my poems for the contest that year. I remember sitting there in the early morning, and sometimes in the evening, looking out the window while I wrote and rewrote lines, crossed it all out and started over again.

I remember working on two poems that year. One I had written mostly while we lived in the little house on Pear Lane. It was simple, following the seasons of the year, and about being a kid in a small town: riding bikes, running along canal roads, running through the sprinkler in the summer, playing in the snow in the winter. I began it on Pear Lane, but I finished it on Dakota. I remember calling it "Childhood."

Then there was the other poem I worked on, but only on Dakota. It was specific to my immediate condition and was full of young teenage angst and yearning. It hurt so much to express all that that it felt good. I called it "Alone."

I had put my entire young self into those poems. And then, somehow, I had the confidence and bravery to actually enter them into the contest. A contest where people might read them who hated them, who might point at me and laugh at my ridiculousness. But at least one of them, "Alone," made it. I think I remember getting third place, but that didn't matter. It placed, and because of that was published in the school newspaper.

I was so proud! So happy. I don't even remember the other poems that made it in. I think I remember some semi-cute guy offhandedly saying to me, "cool poem" in one of my classes. It put me over the moon.

I brought home my copy of the school newspaper and swore I'd always keep it. This would always be mine. No one would take it away from me. I'd always have this newspaper as proof I'd been published somewhere.

But, well, things don't always turn out the way you think. I learned a valuable lesson — to always keep extra copies of what you've had published, to keep tearsheets, to keep the original poem or story somewhere safe. Because I lost the copy of that school newspaper with my poem in it, and the copy of the poem as well. I've moved several times in my life since then. Every time I have to go through old boxes I think, "I wonder where those poems went." I look again, just in case. Still not there. They're long gone in some landfill, probably decomposed by now.

I used to go online every so often and see if anyone had scanned in old copies of the annuals and newspaper from back then. Maybe I'd run into my poem. I even wrote Pioneer Middle School to see if they kept copies of their old newspapers (they don't). The real world is not Sunnydale and I don't have a Willow to hack in online and find things that aren't there.

While I know from the perspective I have as a middle-aged adult that these poems were probably childish first attempts at poetry, "juvenalia" as a friend calls such things, they were my first attempts at poetry. My first attempts at poetry where I actually won something. My first attempts that got published. I will always honor them. I will always miss them.

Workshopping through "Clear Out the Static In Your Attic" — A Review

Crossposted from Blogetary 2.0

When I went to a poetry reading recently, I entered a door prize raffle and won some poetry books and a book of writing exercises, "Clear Out the Static In Your Attic," by Rebecca Bridge and Isla McKetta, published by Write Bloody Publishing, September 2014.

Some of the door prize swag from the poetry reading.

Why this book?

I have enjoyed some of the poems from the poetry books I received, but I think the gold nugget in the door prize I received was this book. Previously, I blogged about getting into some of the exercises in this book as a way to self-workshop. I was going to leave it at that, but decided it might be good to leave an in-depth user review for anyone who might be on the fence about spending the money on it (hint: Long story short, I'm for it. And if the price is steep for you — $10 for Kindle or $13-15 for paperback can be steep when you're trying to make ends meet — try tracking down a used copy or see if it's available on BiblioBoard or somewhere).

If you don't have the time to track down or create a writers group or can't afford a workshop on your own, then something like this book might help keep you fighting the good fight in the writers world. "Clear Out the Static In Your Attic" (still think it's an awkwardly worded title, but there, not my book) won't replace a good comprehensive six-week course, of-er-course, which can cost anywhere from $300 to $600 or more. And going through a book will never take the place of interacting with other writers, getting critique and feedback, or reading your own or others' work aloud (great for catching all sorts of problems in your writing, especially the ebb and flow of dialogue), but for $15 this book will help motivate you to get back into writing shape or get you to start looking at what you are writing differently.

That's how I approached using this book. When I delved into it, I hadn't worked on my poetry or fiction for at least a year. While I do write some small filler articles at the community newspaper where I work or occasionally write resumes or bios or letters or other copy for clients, that's not the same as using my creativity muscles or stretching my storytelling bones. You need to have writing stamina to work on poetry of all types or specific characters or story line or plot over time. It's like any other exercise; you need practice. So, that's how I have been using this book, to help me get back into the practice of writing creatively on a regular basis. This is what I have learned.

Pros:

This book has 47 chapters, which means that if you only did one chapter a week, you would get a whole year's worth of use out of it. You might not do that. You might do several exercises in one night, skip a couple of weeks, and then go back to it. Perhaps you're setting yourself a goal to write every day, so you might also do one exercise a day, that would be a month and a half. (Note: I wouldn't recommend a hurried or slapdash method like that, by the way, as many of the exercises require the writer do some prior research or homework. So, a weekly appointment with a chapter seems the best way to go, in my opinion.) The point is, one could use this book to keep one writing for a sustained amount of time, and so get in the habit of writing regularly, just as one needs to get in the habit of exercising regularly. So, for me anyway, it belongs in the "useful" category for that alone.

Also, while this is a straightforward book of writing exercises, the writers understand how the creative brain works and have set it up so that the creative part of your mind can anchor to something to help it create. It won't get bored. So, the book is set up as if a brain was like a house with an attic with all sorts of boxes and closets of things in it. These things in the metaphoric attic can inspire writing. Each chapter looks at a different part or something stored in the attic. Here we find a secret, there we explore a lamp or a floorboard, old letters or a sewing kit. And the writer is to use that as a starting point in a writing exercise, to create a scene, poem or essay, or whatever.

Each chapter also has slightly different input from the two separate writers as to how to approach that part of the attic to accomplish the writing exercise, so it's not just one person's point of view. An example is usually included, as well as a brief list of books for further reading. Sometimes I read the example and look over the list of books, sometimes I don't. I don't always need it or want it (though they make for interesting reading).

For the most part I have found the exercises fairly intuitively based and easy for me to grasp. I think they are natural exercises for a writer to undertake. Some require doing homework, but it's the kind of homework that needs doing anyway, such as eavesdropping into conversations to hear the cadences and ebb and flow of speech patterns (writers are a nosy lot). Or looking up poems, sayings or old photographs for inspiration. In fact, one of my past exercises was to go out and eavesdrop. And my next exercise is to look for an inspiring photograph to write a story or poem on. As I write in the kitchen with photos of my family staring down at me, all I really need to do is look up on the wall to find something if I like. Or I could go open up one of several boxes I have stored. I have my pick. (I had to try a little harder to find a spare seat at a cafe and listen in on people talking. That was hard.) The point is, though, that when I was writing stories and poems regularly I didn't need to be told to go look for a photograph. Sometimes it was just necessary to go look for that picture of that garden of my Grandmother's because that was the one I was trying to describe. Again, this book is getting me back in that habit.

I haven't gotten further in than the first eight chapters, though I have peeked ahead to see what's coming. And the exercises do appear to get more difficult and demanding as one goes along, so if one keeps at it, it will make one push oneself and grow in one's writing. This is a good thing. I had assumed that the exercises would be all easy when I first began, but it's nice to know that there are challenges coming up that will push me into writing better, writing more close to the bone. To borrow words from the publishing company that put out the book, to write more bloody.

Also good is the fact that, for the most part, these exercises can be accomplished with little more than paper and pencil or pen. There are a couple that may require going to the computer or the internet to get say a photo or run a program, but mostly it's done with what's in one's head and at hand. Since I work looking at a computer screen most days, typing on a keyboard, I find that a good contrast for me. My hand sometimes cramps up with the writing while working on the exercises, but it's better to give my eyes a rest, or I wouldn't do any writing at all. And the contrast also seems to spur me to go off on jaunts that I might not otherwise give myself permission to take. And while I am in danger of repeating myself, I will say it again, a writer needs to build up stamina. If I need to build up the muscles in my writing hand so I can churn out better poetry and prose, so be it.

Cons:

The only real con I can see with this book is how people treat it. I think if the writers were asked they'd say that these exercises are meant to be jumping off points for the person going through them. These exercises are meant to be suggestions, not rules. However, there are people out there in the world who will read through these exercises and think of them as "rules." Some people are just like that. They see a recipe in a cookbook or read in a magazine what the next fashionable cut of something is and take it as "gospel," with no thought of improvising something to suit themselves, or just for the hell of it.

If you are one of these people I do believe you can still get a lot out of these writing exercises, however, I beg you, please, give yourself permission to improvise and explore, because that's what these exercises are all about. Throw the rules out the door and just treat these exercises as suggestions for mental play.

For example, you tell me you can't write about an attic because you never had one? Well guess what, neither did I. The most attic we ever had was the space between the ceiling and the roof that Grampa kept us out of because he's put insulation up there to keep down the heating bill, but otherwise it was dangerous for anyone to be up there.

But, I had a really cool basement growing up, and I have known old houses with all sorts of nooks and crannies and rooms hidden here and there. I grew up reading about wardrobes that were doorways into far off lands, and I watched TV shows where a police box was bigger on the inside and space ships could take me galaxies away. So I can imagine quite a bit for my writing exercises, et voilà! I have my inspiration, just the same as if I had my attic.

So, as long as you're willing to improvise, go with the flow, use your imagination and use these exercises in the spirit in which they are presented, as jumping off points to get you writing more, writing better, then you'll find this a very helpful book.

Teddy tells me it's time for bed.

Workshopping as a Free Radical — And Throwback Thursday

Crossposted from Blogetary 2.0 blog, a little late as it went up there yesterday and I forgot to put it up here until today. Oh well.

Trying to come up with a clever title -- like that one? Well, it's a title. It's not like I'm at work and have to fit it in a two-line one-column head at 16 or 18 pt. And here I'm Queen of my Blogetary Castle, so it can be whatever I want. So there.

So, yesterday was one of the $5 workshops at the writers country club down the street. I thought long and hard about going. I wanted to do something writing associated, but I knew if I went I'd end up feeling frustrated and ridiculous at the end of the evening again. I realized you can look up who else is attending through the Meet Up app, and saw that once again I'd be twice as old as everyone else. I'd probably end up opening my mouth and sounding like a know-it-all, but you can't help it when you happen to have that many more years experience.

So am I supposed to keep my mouth shut? Isn't this supposed to be the 21st century? If I were in my 20s and keeping my mouth shut someone would be railing and ranting against how white male culture was suppressing my expression. But now, the reason I would keep my mouth shut is to keep the peace and allow these younger women to express themselves freely without feeling shot down by the "knowitall" in the corner. *sigh*

Easier not to go at all. Hell, in a few years I can probably find a writers group in a senior center.
Looked up events that are supposed to be happening at the bookstore down the street as a friend suggested. The one last night was a reading/discussion with an author of a political book (not my cup of tea)  and the only event I'm even remotely interested in is a couple weeks from now and is $250. So, that's out.

But you know, one of those books I won as a door prize when I went to the poetry shindig/hootenanny at the writers country club, was a book of writing exercises. I got it for free and here it was sitting on my kitchen table waiting for me to use it. It's called Clear Out The Static In Your Attic. It feels like a clumsy title to me. I would have said, "Clear the Static Outta Your Attic" — but maybe there was already another book by that title or something. Anyway. Thought it was time to be creative and have my own little workshop as a free radical not attached to anything. I used to do that a LOT when I lived in Bellingham — get the Writers Digest out, or some other book, and set myself writing exercises to work on. If it worked then, it can work now. And it's FREE.
I did a couple of exercises out of it last night. The first one I had tried a few nights before, writing a few six word stories (you know that old story about how Hemingway was asked to write a story with six words?) and then linking them together in one story or poem. So, I worked on that again for a while. I think I might get a poem from that, and maybe something else as well from other phrases I worked up.

The second exercise is to take an epitaph quoted by a favorite author, or even something a favorite author wrote and write based on that. And I couldn't decide what to do. I got up and wandered around my apartment looking at books.

And here's where the Throwback Thursday ( #tbt !) comes in: I pulled "Writing Down the Bones" by Natalie Goldberg off my shelf to page through. She's coming to the West Hollywood Library at the end of the month so she's been on my mind a lot lately (so excited!). I thought I had remembered her saying "Be kind, be kind, be kind" somewhere in that book, but I couldn't find it. However, she does repeatedly say throughout her work to be kind, so maybe that's where I got it. It's what sticks in my head.

Going through that book brought back so many memories. I thought I had bought it in college, but it was actually a couple years later. I remember reading it on weekend road trips from Bham to Seattle. All sorts of bits were underlined. The cover is almost falling off. And then something I read there sent me to another old favorite book, "The Miracle of Mindfulness" by Thich Nhat Hanh. Going through that reminded me of San Francisco all over again. I used to practice breathing while I was hanging on tight to a bus or BART rail on my way too and from work in Oakland.

Eventually I settled on no quotes from either book, but instead remembered something my nurse practitioner had told me last time I'd been in. I barked a laugh, wrote it down and got a pretty good flash story from it, I think. We'll see. A good scene, anyway.

The next exercise in the book used an app on the computer and I stare at the screen a lot these days with work at the paper and at home. As I wanted this to be a computer-free evening, I skipped that exercise and came up with my own, which turned out really well for me. So, I'm sharing it here.
Take a deck of cards. It can be any deck. I used a deck of tarot cards because they have good pictures, usually, and they were close at hand. But you could use SkipBo cards or Uno cards or Creative Prosperity Cards would be good, too. (Might even be better.) Shuffle and cut the deck. Draw seven cards. Write a story based on the pictures on the cards.

Write a story or scene or poem based on random cards pulled from a deck.

I got a good three or four handwritten pages out of that one. Could be a good short story in the making.

By then the sun was setting and I was running out of natural light and I figured my free radical workshop could come to a close for the evening.

So, on the whole, it was a really productive writing workshop last night. In fact, it was so good, I think I'll go back again next week! :D

Getting out there — starting — again ...

Crossposted over on my Blogetary blog as well.

Today, for the first time in like -- FOREVER -- I went to a club. Heard some good stuff, only had one beer, but that's what $5 will get ya. The cover was $5, too, so the $10 tapped me out.
Okay, so at first, I wasn't going to stay. I was going to go with a friend, but she was feeling under the weather, so she couldn't make it. But man, I haven't been out in ages. I haven't written anything in AGES (and it does feel like eons, but it's only been like a year -- albeit of year of death and change). But nothing gets the ol' creative juices flowing like a live performance. I really needed to go out!
But-but-but — I'm not good in new places on my own unless I have a book, or a pen and a notepad.
But nothing. I needed to go.

Just around the corner. Walking distance. I live in a city for godz' sake. Time to take advantage of it. Forget the purse. Forget changing or trying to look good. I'm not some 20-something anymore trying to get laid. I'm a grown woman and this is about going and doing like a grown woman does. Lipstick — check. Mascara and eyeshadow — check. How bad do I smell? Do I smell like the curry I had for lunch? Run a comb through my hair. Where did those cool urban boots go that I used to have? When did I give up the leather jacket? Where's my China Rain? Why am I grabbing the old green cardigan to wear? Why am I so dowdy?

WHATEVER! Just stuff what I need in my pockets and go. Get OUT! Make sure I've got $5 for beer and $5 to get in. That's all I need.

Say goodbye to Teddy, once, twice, okay, now GO!
I almost turned around and went home a couple of times. But I made it through the door; it was too bright, too loud, too many people — none of them familiar. Rhythmic music pounded out over the speakers; it all felt glaring and cacophonous.

But I'd paid the $5 cover already. Too late to leave. There's a door prize, too. Go figure. I never win anything, but I'll throw my hat in the ring. Why not? It's free.

So, I made a joke with the girl by the raffle table. She was young and pretty and nice. Pretty red dress with gold 1950s-style strappy pumps. And she talked to me like a person. I mean it's her job, but she did a good job of it.

These people know each other, brought friends, or know how to walk up to strangers. Me? Someone introduced herself to me (someone running the show) and to a guy she was talking to; he and I shook hands and promptly walk in opposite directions.

*sigh*

But there's beer. Or wine. But this feels like a beer night. I'd have taken Jack if they had it, but sadly, they did not. So. Beer it was.

Now I was stuck here. The performance hadn't begun, but I could see that like all clubs, musical chairs was in force and I needed to snag one or I'd be stuck.

I chose a comfy chair in a corner, pulled out my phone and texted a friend of mine. "Okay, so I made it out. Now what?"

"Get up! Go talk to another wallflower!"

I looked around. Everyone, it seemed, was talking to someone. Lots of tall, leggy actressy/LA-looking girls (okay, women, but in my head, they're girls) with tight dresses and five-inch pumps. Guys in tight t-shirts looking around, eyeing the chicks with legs that go on forever. Except the guy I was introduced to, who was looking at his phone like I was.

"What other wallflower?" I texted back.

"Just get up and move around."

"Okay. In a minute. After I finish my beer," I lied. I tucked my phone away. I looked at my beer. I was about 3/4 of the way through. When the beer is gone, I vowed, I'm getting up and leaving. Can't stand this music and I'm pretty sure I'm going to hate everyone here. I'm not going to win anything and they've yet to start the show. I've got a Grimm episode at home with my name on it....

The Emcee bounced up to the front, played with the sound system, read a name for a door prize. Not me. I looked at my beer. There was an inch left.

He read another name. Not me, again. I took another sip.

And again. Another name. Not me. I swallowed the last bit of beer.

I needed to leave now. Except he was reading another name. And this time, it WAS me!

I was getting up now for real, to get my prize. I didn't pay attention to what I was getting. I was just so happy I got something. Then I turned around to find my seat now taken by a wallflower I hadn't seen who'd walked in late. Yup. Musical chairs was in force.

And then the Emcee was announcing the act and congratulating us all on coming out of our hovels to make it to a civilized place to hear other writers reading poetry and fiction.

Yeah. That's right. I was at a writing club — Hatchery Press. The door prize a cache of indie-author poetry books and writer doodads.

I felt like the only cavewoman in the place, except for the fact that the Emcee seemed to assume that we were all having a hard time interacting and made us introduce ourselves to each other.

But don't think this was a room full of geeks and dweebs. I mean, those were present, but so were the cool guys, the rockstars, the poetry groupies and the writer roadies. All the high school cliques were present, just in a writerly way.

Short story followed by poem, slipping into a memoir, back to poetry, then a memoir, then poetry, poetry, poetry.....

Folk, contemporary, punk, indie rock, hard driving steel guitars, soft a cappella, screaming vocals — if we'd been listening to music in a dark smoky club, that's what I'd compare the readings to. There was an appearance by James Fearnley of the Pogues reading from his book; readings by emcee Derrick Brown, one of which would have had him arrested in some parts of the world, and Brendan Constantine, who works with the Alzheimer's Poetry Project. There were also several others I just can't remember the names of now, but who all did a great job of standing there before their peers and opening up many-times folded pieces of paper to bleed out their hearts and souls in front of us.
There were times when the "poetry reading lilt" got to me. You know the lilt. Poets who read or perform their poems fall into this habit of ending each line in a lilt, an uplift of the voice. It's why I avoid coffee shop open mics. But then the young poets get better, and get rid of that, and instead every line has no intonation at all whatsoever. It's just got this weird thrust at the end. Not said like a real person talking. Better, but still annoying.

Why can't people just read the damn poem.

But most of the time, the material was good enough, and the poets were good enough (one guy in particular was really good at performing his stuff and I mean, this is Hollywood. I overheard him saying something about doing some acting.... hmm... side thought.... improv classes for poets...) — um — what was I saying? Oh, yeah; the lilt only raised its ugly head a couple of times.

So, yeah. I ended up staying. Go figure.

It was funny, walking around after the performance with my writer swag, checking things out. I got asked a couple of times, "So are you a writer?!" And my inner voice, the one who talks like Janeane Garofalo, wanted to say, "Would I be here if I weren't? I mean, come on!" But then the outer me was all polite and shit. "Yes, I write a little poetry, some sci-fi/fantasy." Usually, people's eyes glaze over at that point, though one assumed I was a screenwriter. (Cue the Janeane Garofalo scoff.)

Anyway, so, the "writers country club" (my nickname for the Hatchery) isn't so bad after all (they charge $150 to $350 a month to be a member, I mean, do you know any writers who can afford that, cuz I sure don't — although at one point they were asking if we made "less than $ XX and I kept having to lift my hand and it was kind of embarrassing. Maybe I am the only broke writer in Hancock Park). Found out I can pay $5 for the occasional workshop or class and not have to sacrifice rent, groceries and kitty litter for the occasional writing class. Besides, I live alone and have a perfectly good home office and / or kitchen table for writing. I don't need that aspect of it. I just want some inspiration to get me going again.

Just something easy to get to, you know, that will prod me into slicing open my veins and bleeding onto the page.

In Honor of Poetry Month: Geoffrey Chaucer

Crossposted from Blogetary:

It gets forgotten sometimes, I think, that most great stories from before a certain time were written in verse. So, in celebrating National Poetry Month, we're not just celebrating free verse, sonnets and haikus, we're also celebrating great authors from the past such as Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Chaucer.

Geoffrey Chaucer lived at the end of the 14th century (1343 to 1400) and is known as the "Father of English Literature" for several reasons. One was that instead of writing in French (the language of the educated and aristocrats) or Latin (the language of the educated and the Church) he wrote in English (or Middle English). He wrote in the vernacular of the people. And he also developed different types of meter and rhyme and told stories of the people. You can read more about Geoffrey Chaucer here.

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, he has a framing tale of people from all walks of life at that time traveling together in the good spring weather to go on a pilgrimage to a holy site, as people did in those days. These people were a nun, knight, miller, lawyer, wife, summoner, friar, parson, wife, pardoner, clerk, physician, yeoman, merchant, cook and manciple (and maybe a few others as well).

Within this framing tale are the tales told by each pilgrim as they go on their way. Some morality tales, some comedic, some are rather raunchy, and some are serious. Below is a first section of The Prologue, which describes the setting and the characters in this pilgrimage before going onto the individual tale. The verse on the left is in Middle English, while the verse on the right is in modern English. To read The Prologue in its entirety, go here.

The Canterbury Tales : Prologue

Here bygynneth the Book of the Tales of Caunterbury

Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury

1: Whan that aprill with his shoures soote 2: The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, 3: And bathed every veyne in swich licour 4: Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 5: Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth 6: Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 7: Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 8: Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne, 9: And smale foweles maken melodye, 10: That slepen al the nyght with open ye 11: (so priketh hem nature in hir corages); 12: Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 13: And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, 14: To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes; 15: And specially from every shires ende 16: Of engelond to caunterbury they wende, 17: The hooly blisful martir for to seke, 18: That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

When April with his showers sweet with fruit The drought of March has pierced unto the root And bathed each vein with liquor that has power To generate therein and sire the flower; When Zephyr also has, with his sweet breath, Quickened again, in every holt and heath, The tender shoots and buds, and the young sun Into the Ram one half his course has run, And many little birds make melody That sleep through all the night with open eye (So Nature pricks them on to ramp and rage)- Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage, And palmers to go seeking out strange strands, To distant shrines well known in sundry lands. And specially from every shire's end Of England they to Canterbury wend, The holy blessed martyr there to seek Who helped them when they lay so ill and weal

I've never tried it, but I imagine telling an entire story in verse (or writing a play in verse) would (to put it mildly) take some work. Maybe one day I'll try it, a really short story, more like a flash story really. Well, we'll see.

Poem to Kick Off National Poetry Month

Created on April 2, 2013 at www.jacksonpollock.org.

Black & Green
Shards of eternity embedded in their flesh —
they kept fighting —
no one to stop them.

Rachel V. Olivier
April 2, 2013

Note on Black & Green: Woke up from a dream on March 10, 2013 where two immortal beings were fighting over space and time. They looked human, sort of, but weren’t. As they fought through the blackness of space they grabbed bits of eternity, eerie green shards which they had broken into long, jagged pieces that they used to stab each other with. And no one could stop them. They were eternal and they would be fighting forever.

Friday Poetry Break

I have been going through some of my pieces recently, tweaking and revising some poetry, wondering about reviving work on a story or two I may have laid aside a while ago. Came across this poem I wrote - oh - a while ago - two-three years? Back in the days when I waited for the #10 for an hour each evening because they NEVER run on time. This was a familiar sight:



Anyway, ran across this poem and thought I would share it. I don't feel like this as much as I used to, but sometimes I still go there.

Liposuction in the City of Lost Dreams or
Beer on a Budget

Scalpel poised above –
emergency operation gots to be done!
STAT! ASAP!
I mean RIGHT NOW!
(How I hate those words.)
Infusion of hope prescribed ---
excision from this dreariness.
Soul sucking demands on a
dream-ridden, aged princess.

Credit? Cash? Coverage?
Give’r an aspirin and a bandage.
Maybe a beer ….
Maybe one or two –
A patch of anesthesia to see her through.
This is no great affliction.

And then?
Huge metal deathmonsters?
Prime property acquisition?
Class conscious status symbols
slapped on a gaping wound.

Addictive elitism stumbles on her crutches.
Ancient and treacherous,
near impossible to escape her clutches.
Staying afloat – don’t want to drown.
This is a bright and brittle
One-trick pony kind of town.

Life-rings are limited
to the wealthy and connected.
The rest --
are bound to be rejected.

Beer --
It will have to be beer.

Beer it is then.

by Rachel V. Olivier

New Poem at Everyday Weirdness...

I forgot I have a new poem up at Everyday Weirdness for January 17, 2010. You can check it out here.

Drollerie Press's April Blog Tour - Presenting Sarah Avery

Crossposted from Blogetary:

As anyone who reads my blog knows, poetry is important to me, and April is poetry month. In honor of poetry month, the folks at Drollerie Press are having an author blog tour where writers are asked about how poetry has influenced them and their writing. We are sharing those influences on each others blogs. It is my pleasure to host Sarah Avery on my blog today.

Sarah Avery, author of Closing Arguments and Atlantis Cranks Need Not Apply, knows poetry. After all, she earned a doctorate in English with a dissertation on modernist poetry before going back to her scifi/fantasy roots. After a life of travel, study, and experiences many people only think they understand, it is not surprising that she would use these two very expressive and imaginative genres for her writing.
But Sarah didn’t just get a piece of paper indicating her expertise in poetry, she also taught poetry, has seen the fear and misunderstanding some people have of poetry. She “gets” how poetry is important not just as a field of study or genre, but in every day life, as a way of expressing feelings and moments that are bigger than we are. What follows below is one of best essays I’ve read on how basic and important poetry is to everyone.

“Woof! Squeak!”

by Sarah Avery

What blew my mind the one time I got to teach a course on poetry was how terrified my students were. If my class hadn’t been specifically required for all English majors, and satisfied several requirements for the university’s core curriculum, none of those students would have chosen it. For me, poetry had been by turns a comfort, a friendly challenge, a game, and very nearly a profession–the bell before my bowl of Alpo. For most of my students, poetry had been the occasion of their worst moments in high school English classes, moments of judgment and humiliation–the buzzer before their electric shock.

What could Pavlov’s dog have to teach Skinner’s mice? To be less afraid, to perceive the thing itself despite their fears, to allow for the possibility that a poem might be delicious.

It was both more and less than I’d expected to teach them. I had a carefully balanced syllabus full of lineage, form, and technique. The day before the semester started, I’d congratulated myself on its rigor. The hour I had to face all those wide eyes in pale faces, I found myself selling it to them as a menu full of delicacies.

Things started looking up when one of the students read ahead on the syllabus and raised her hand. “You’re not really assigning Dr. Seuss, are you?”

It was the same question I’d been asked in the department copy room. One of my fellow grad students saw that I was copying pages from Green Eggs and Ham and said, “Either that’ll be the coolest thing you do all semester and they’ll talk it up for years, or it’ll blow up in your face and they’ll hate you for it. Nobody likes condescension.”

In the copy room, my impromptu answer was:

I’ll teach it flying through the air
With long lines by that dude John Clare.
I’ll teach it climbing up a tree
With paeans by that chick H.D.
I’ll teach it creeping on the ground
With Cantos penned by Ezra Pound.
To get those clueless kids to scan,
I’ll teach that book, Green Eggs and Ham.

(That's what immersion in a genre will do for you. I couldn't knock couplets off that fast now, good or bad, with my head full of novellas.)

In any case, my goofy run of couplets wasn't the answer I could give a real live student in the moment when she was deciding whether I was condescending to her or not. Instead, I said something more or less like this:

Poetry happens in the body. Everything about it is something the body does. The body has a pulse, so poetry thumps. The body breathes, so poetry pauses. What is all that sensory vividness our high school teachers wanted us to pay attention to doing in the poem? It's there because the body senses the world. If you have a body, you can get something from poetry--and bring something to poetry, too. Robert Pinsky (the Poet Laureate the year I taught the class, but long before that an undergrad at the very same big state school my students were attending), likes to say that the true medium of the art of poetry is not the page or the written word, but is rather the column of air in the body of the person speaking the poem. The instrument of the poem is the body of the reader. Dr. Seuss never tries to disguise the physicality of his poetry. That's why you get him and not e.e. cummings when you're a child first learning to read, and that's why you get him and not e.e. cummings early in the semester.

"So," I concluded, "it looks like everyone here has a body." I waited a moment. No one contradicted me. "In that case, you've all come prepared."

That was my story. I stuck to it all semester. Green Eggs and Ham, with its thumpy pulse, took all the fear out of scansion marks, which apparently had been the source of a lot of high school trauma.

The physicality of poetry is one of the things I miss. I've been writing fiction seriously for six years now, and short essays for my blog for five years. A background in poetry does help on the sentence level, and to some extent on the structural level, but the intense focus on sound and breath is very difficult to sustain in a novel-length work. You do sometimes find those weird exceptions, novels in verse, and some of them even prosper-- like Vikram Seth's charming The Golden Gate, or Toby Barlow's current werewolf hit, Sharp Teeth. But not every story wants that form, and a writer who cares about publication and audience can't expect a verse novel to find a home out in the world. I expect to return to poetry from time to time, but prose fiction's where I live now.

But back to the students. (I miss them, too.)

What could Skinner's mice have to teach Pavlov's dog?

It was something I should have known, something I'd heard and read before. The poet who mentored me often quoted Muriel Rukeyser's aphorism, "The fear of poetry is the fear." That is to say, one of the intimidating things about poetry is that, in order to understand the good stuff, you have to open yourself to it, and ours is a culture that punishes true openness. For that matter, being open to the world lets in all kinds of suffering, along with the beauty. Numbness has it advantages. The very physicality of poetry makes it that much harder to resist feeling and thinking whatever the poem offers for you to feel and think.

Ultimately, it wasn't just the memory of humiliating ignorance in front of a classroom full of peers and a judgmental high school teacher that had zapped my some of students. The ones who had been able to connect with poetry a little bit, despite their educations, had found there something that demanded they bring, and therefore find, much more of themselves than they were accustomed even to acknowledging. Prose fiction, which was much more comfortable to them, invited them to lose themselves in story. Prose fiction does that for all of us, though the good stuff drops us back off at the end with more than we embarked with. It's a sweet deal, but very different. In most poetry, especially in modern and postmodern poetry, escape is not on offer.

Now, as a fantasy writer who brazenly embraces escapism as part of what stories ought to do, I look back on my students' predicament with more sympathy than I had when I was teaching them. The tools of sound and rhythm, breath and pulse, still matter, but instead of using them to demand the body's attention, I use them to direct the body's attention into the imagined bodies of characters in some other world. What is the medium of fiction? Not the page, not words, but the reader's identity.

Poem a Day Challenge Day 10

Cross posted from my blogetary:

Today’s Poem a Day challenge was using the prompt, “Friday.”

So, here’s my entry:

Friday

Then–
Friday, Fryday, Freya’s day, FRIIIIDAY!
Day of possibilities, the unopened present.
Day when anything can happen and nothing proved wrong.
Frypan food day, Freya’s date night,
Drink with friends and dance with all your might.

Now–
Friday is laundry day, stay at home eat pizza day;
Sleeping in on Saturn’s day and wondering about Jupiter’s day.

In the end, though, Friday is my day.