Now Playing: ”Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That” by Dolly Parton
Let me remind us, darlings, that being ill sours everything. Even our perception about our writing. We must remember this or we will begin to believe our own lies about our writing abilities. Let’s not.
I have rough drafts of three blog posts from the past few days. Unposted. Obviously. They are about to end up in the great recycle bin in the sky.
I have drafts of poems, a few, that I am completely unsure I can do anything with. Ever. They’re bad. Or maybe they’re just new. Or wounded. Or all three. I don’t know.
Word Raccoon says she will tell the story and let me eat gingersnaps (Or is it ginger snaps? Sigh.). For their medicinal properties, of course.
She says this is what happened:
You read a poem you love. Admire. Adore. But haven’t had the courage to read for a long, long time. Because it gives you all the feels.
Being sick, you couldn’t resist hunting it down. There it was, archived as is pretty much everything nowadays. (Did you know that?)
You remember more of it than you thought you would, and yet you didn’t think you could ever forget any of it.
How can it be better than you remember?
Not possible.
It’s beautiful. Just gorgeous. You bawl.
Layered, both mannered and pop cultured, gently conflicted but loving. Searingly good images. It Pied Pipers, but in the best of ways. Talent for days, this poet has.
The poem answered the crucial questions it asked, as it should. It has rhythm, feelings. It has scenery, place for miles. It piques the interest and satisfies it.
Unless you’re WR, and she wants to know every damn thing. Which isn’t fair to do to a poem. Or a poet.
Its shadow follows you down the cobblestones, has for a very long time.
Images from it have lived in you for years, and no matter how you have worked on your writing, you have always known not yet. I’m not there yet.
Your poetry is heartfelt and maybe has something to it, you’d like to think, but this…this poem is a novel in a poem. A painting in a poem.
You wouldn’t change a thing. Dammit. LOL.
It sends an arrow through you, but that’s how you get better as a writer, knowing you’ve got work to do. Studying the greats, hoping they are still studying themselves.
I mean, who the hell has ever, in the history of poetry, used hyphens to such advantage: Blank-to-Blank…are you kidding me? WHERE THE HELL DID THAT COME FROM?? BRILLIANT!
WR takes the last gingersnap from my hand, bites it clean in two.
“It’s not fair to compare your poetry to someone else’s; it’s not kind.”
Oh, Word Raccoon, thank you, darling. But I know what I know.
WR has begun decorating for fall. She bought the pumpkins, hung the wreath, just in case the birbs are looking for a change of scenery.
Last night we wrote the most cynical poem about frost and fall. Frost! We should share a terrible stanza of ours here:
Don’t give me your bullshit about
The frost being on that there ‘punkin’
unless you’ve been to Riley’s house,
Had a picnic lunch on his freakin’ grave.
Yes, we have and we have. (In the South, “dinner on the ground” is something you do to celebrate those gone before. It’s considered honoring the dead to eat a meal “with” them; we weren’t desecrating his monument. We were honoring it. Even if he is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis and not the South. It was sentiment, not location, that mattered.)
WR and I were not happy about the threatening frost this week for no good reason – was it yesterday or the day before? – except we didn’t feel well and we were scared and sick and well, you don’t need to know our life’s story.
I am constitutionally unable to write a poem like that model poem. I feel like a kid with a box of crayons and a pad of ruled paper. (Am I the only one who hoarded paper as a kid? For drawing to writing, there was nothing I liked better than a pad of paper or a notebook.)
I am trying to convince myself that my kind of poetry matters, too. Sure, I have lots of emotions on the page. Fine, I could cool it down, but then would it achieve what I want? I’m learning. I think?
Word Raccoon is pacing.
First, she wants to remind us that btw, we DO have a jacket the shade of the endpapers in the new V.W. book we mentioned yesterday (we are purposely abbreviating her name because we are grateful for the visitors yesterday, but we prefer to have this temper tantrum in semi private.) It’s a fun, fuzzy jacket and we can’t wait to wear it!
We are listening to R. F. Kuang’s latest novel. We are not normally a fan of fantasy, but we are a fan of her writing and this is dark academia, and I’m invested now. I have to know what happens to Alice and Peter as they travel through…are you ready for it…Hell!
My favorite line so far? “And over there—creative writing students.” 😂😂😂😂 I mean…I can’t say we don’t belong in Hell. Especially if we switch from novel writing to poems. 💔
Well, we haven’t completely switched.
We hope you haven’t, conversely, switched completely either. Although you can/are probably/doing both beautifully, I imagine. I’d like to read it, if you are, readers of mine. We mean that affectionately, naturally, Dear Reader, Dear Writer of better poetry than ours, no doubt. Better prose, likely, too. And that’s okay.
We are not afraid of being bested; we just want to remain in the race. That paragraph above is long and tangled. But we trust you know what we mean. It’s a vibe.
Go re-read something inspiring, y’all. Then write.
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