Moon and car tracks by Peter Alexanderson via Flickr

On the Metro a surprise to look up from Mrs. Woolf and find the moon, full-faced and bold, staring at me from the other side of the tracks. (Is it to the east? I’ve left whatever tenuous grasp I had on directional geography in Chicago where the lake is always east.) As the train moves on, pushing forward through Northeast toward Maryland, the sky gathers to itself more indigo, the light softening to darkness even as we press on under the electric glare of train lights.

The woman in front of me is reading an actual book. Surprisingly few heads are dipped in prayer before cell phones though here and there the electronic loudness of Verizon or AT&T moderated conversations spikes the train car.

I’m remembering now that the other morning I wanted to write something about the moon, which had stubbornly refused to set as dawn awoke. I tumbled lines in my head:”This is not the last morning though/the moon hangs in the morning sky like a penance.” In another version I heard, “The penitent moon….” but I haven’t yet figured out what that moon was guilty of.

Like the moon, this poem too—the one that is and isn’t about the last morning—will rise again. My hand will reach for the paper, the pen, grateful that the poem before this one—wet-winged, mewling—was not the last poem.

Go here and then turn the volume up!

This idea of support can be a hard one to walk out cause let’s face it, we’re still human. And we just don’t like everybody. I definitely don’t like everybody. Sometimes for no good reason I can articulate we just don’t click. Or people just make you angry. Or you just can’t find a way into even an acquaintanceship with someone, much less a friendship.

There’s a woman at church who I used to be great friends with. Nearly every Sunday after church you could find us at Starbucks or knocking around Silver Spring. After about a year and a half of this suddenly she was busy every Sunday. She finally outright told me that it was football season and she couldn’t hang out with me at all until the end of it. (And she had no explanation why she hadn’t felt this way during the previous year’s football season.) I tried to be gracious about it even as my heart was breaking, and endeavored to mend the friendship (after football season). But though it’s been a few years now, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to trust her again, or to even muster up enthusiasm for that friendship. I completely suck at the turn the other cheek and forgiveness thing.

So is it possible to have her back when I lack confidence that she’ll ever truly have mine? And how do you forgive someone completely, wipe the slate clean, when you know from a pattern of past behavior that they will continue to let you down? How do you disciple Judas, teach him, encourage him, call him, have dinner with him, knowing that he’s going to let you down in the most profound way?

I don’t have any answers…. no, that’s not true. I know God’s answer is “Forgive anyway.” I guess it’s more true to say I just don’t have the courage to live out God’s answer on this one. But hopefully with his grace this season of unforgiveness will also come to an end. Even if I never learn to like football.

Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Art. Spring 2011

I was looking through my journals from last year for inspiration for tonight’s post. I found this poem draft written some time between February 6 and February 9, 2011. The doubt I express in the poem is still what I struggle with most in my relationship with God. I know he exists. I struggle, however, with the idea of his love as constant, consistent, as a no-matter-what kind of love. And so when we get too close, I break it off before he can be the one to break my heart.

Dear Jesus

Forgive me for keeping my heart

but I have suffered enough heart

break from those who were supposed

to love you. I can believe

you are God. I can believe

you are divine, miraculous.

I want to believe you love me no

matter what but that seems a luxury

tax I can ill afford. What if I am wrong

again? I wish 70 x 7 miracles were

enough. I wish oceans of grace were

enough. I wish…

My choice of photo will make sense—sort of—once you get toward the bottom of the post. Photo by Eva Rinaldi (Owen Wilson) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

… Mrs. Woolf said to tell you:

“No creative writer can swallow another contemporary.  The reception of living work is too coarse and partial if you’re doing the same thing yourself.”

Now, discuss. (And feel free to substitute another art for for “creative writer” if you choose.)

And it’s occurring to me that the Hemingway character says something akin to this in Midnight in Paris, something about one writer being unable to judge another writer’s work truthfully because you’re always in competition. I personally disagree. You’re only in competition with that other person if you let yourself be, if you decide to measure your success against theirs. But that’s allowing yourself to believe you have more control than you actually do over what an editor or critic or the audience is going to think. And really the only thing we can control is if we’re doing the best we can and being as authentic to our own voices as possible. (And yes, I know it’s hard not to be jealous sometimes when someone’s exploding and you’re just lumping around, but the fact that it’s a hard task is no reason not to try. I’m just saying.)

Your thoughts?

Here’s an interview with Washington, DC poet and editor and historian Kim Roberts where she talks about the importance of place.

Please note: This photo has absolutely nothing to do with this post. It does, however, prove that I went to the Montgomery County Fair this fall, you know, in case it ever comes up.

I am a poet who does not read poems.

The less hyperbolic, slightly more true version of that statement is: I am a poet who doesn’t read very many poems considering I am a poet. I love poems. I love poets. I love the camaraderie and provocation of workshops and residencies. I love buying volumes of poetry by friends and other poets I admire. (A rough guess puts my bookshelf collection at nearly 200 individual volumes, and perhaps a dozen or so anthologies.) I love finding poems in my e-mail or discovering new poems at the NEA’s annual national Poetry Out Loud competition.

But still I am poet who does not read nearly enough poems. When I read a poem, a good poem, it’s like sticking my soaking wet finger into an electric socket. My brain does one of two things: it shuts down completely, overwhelmed by the poem. The poem itself tunnels down into the subconscious and I find myself puttering around my apartment feeling that something is at work but unable to articulate precisely what that work is. The other reaction is that it immediately sends me to my own blank page, to unleash a gaggle of lines that has been lurking and now has the password to make itself visible. (I should add that the first reaction also ends up at the blank page, though it may not be till days or even weeks later.) Reading poems is not a restful activity; it’s a generative one. Poems provoke, they cajole, they urge, they flip switches. They summon, call forth, conjure. They are wild magic that I cannot afford to take lightly.

The Polish poet and Nobel Laureate Wislawa Szymborska died today at 88. You should read some of her work here.

Today I finally read The Pebble Blues all the way through. (I had only re-read the first scene, which is the only one I’ve  retyped. And yes, I did submit it to the reading series without having re-read it in nearly a decade.) It’s clear that I was trying to be the next August Wilson, though I think it still very much is in my voice. I was struck at how often I substituted lyrics from blues songs and verses from the Bible for dialogue. No, I shouldn’t say “substituted” because that wasn’t my intention. It’s just from the distance of eight years I can see the places where my courage failed me—back then I was fluent in lines (as in of poetry) but only had a good working knowledge of sentences—and instead of pushing through that fear, I collaged in other text. That’s not surprising, if I can be said to have a method, collage is it. It’s my most comfortable place from which to start. It’s also interesting that the two characters who scared me most—the husband because I had no personal experience to speak of with romantic relationships, and the mother because she was a heightened reflection of my relationship with my own mother—are the ones who have the most collaged lines.

All of the collaged text doesn’t have to go, but I am curious to see what’s liberated in the spaces I empty out. What happens if there’s just silence? Or if the character says the not-beautiful thing? What action (the building block of playwrighting I most struggle with) will inhabit the places that were filled only with language? It’s scary, and even now I’m getting a knot in my stomach because of all I don’t know how to do to make this a better play. But what’s the point of even re-opening this project if it doesn’t scare me as much—if not more—than when I first decided to write a play in the first place?

I do love that there is a great kinship between this work and the poems, and I hope to honor that while at the same time learning how a play is a play is a play. I’ll leave you with some dialogue from Jeannie who, in a tense scene with her mother, is talking about what it feels like to be pregnant. (It resonates for me particularly with my ghazal “Naming,” which will maybe earn its way into a manuscript some day. If I can ever feel satisfied that it is, in fact, a proper ghazal.)

JEANNIE: I can feel all her little baby edges just cutting me up inside. Do you remember what that feels like Mama? But I still love her. What do you do when you know, when I know that once she’s joined up all her pieces, I’ll just break her all over again. I’m scared to want her too badly, Mama. To think she’ll be a kind of salvation.

Christian Kane by Raven Underwood via Flickr

1. Stop stalking Mrs. Woolf.*

2. Finish next draft of The Pebble Blues and choose cast for April staged reading.

3. Do an exercise video every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday—preferably in the morning before work.

4. Attend one literary reading.

5. Attend one non-literary event.

6. Eat as close to a vegan diet as I possibly can. **

7. Apply for a passport.

8. Send out my New Year’s cards. ***

9. Finish a top secret sewing project I can’t actually name in case the person it’s for reads my blog.

9-1/2. Post something on the Paulette Beete writer fan page on Facebook every day.

10. Kiss Christian Kane.

* Ah, who am I kidding? I’m truly madly deeply gaga for Virginia.

** The disclaimer is to allow for the fact that my end-of-the-month trip to New York for my annual watch-the-Oscars weekend with S. might result in some very un-vegan shenanigans.

*** I know, I know, I’m SMH-ing too. Sigh…

**** Doing this in my mind totally counts!

Yesterday morning I journaled for six pages, which is quite a lot for me. I usually push for three. I wrote about not wanting to write about losing weight in the middle of losing weight. I know it will help somebody eventually, but right now I think it might trigger a shame spiral. I also found myself thinking about how much hurt I’d eaten myself through and out of. Well, no, that not true. It’s more true to say how much hurt I’d buried deep deep deep with food. The whole time I was journaling that, I was thinking, no, no, I don’t want to go to this deep place. I don’t want to be sad. But it led to what I really want to share with you today, and the words I will cling to. I wrote

“I think it’s helpful to remember that [God's] promised to never give us more than we can bear. We don’t usually know just how strong we are, what depths we have to us, but God knows. He knows not just our dark caves, but also the wells [that hold] our strength, our potential, our infinite capacities for light.”

I really loved this blog post from poet Kathleen Kirk today.

I want want want one of these wonderful flowers! (That’s my wonderful high school amiga Jen Graney O’Connor holding them by the way, and selling them in her shop.)

Something blue…

Here is the setting for my one-act play, The Pebble Blues:

SETTING: Jeannie’s studio—a converted guest room. Center is one of Jeannie’s unfinished quilts: a mother and infant set against a cityscape, which is quilted in varying shades of blue. The mother figure, complete except for her face, is appliquéd in shades of brown. The infant—a luminous presence of gold, yellow, saffron—is appliquéd in such a way as to at once appear both in utero and perched on the mother’s lap. The quilt has been pieced together from richly colored and textured fabrics: silks, velvets, satins, brocades. Surrounding the quilt are enlarged black and white copies of paintings that Jeannie has used for inspiration: Picasso’s La Vie; Faith Ringgold’s The Two Jemimas and Picasso’s Studio; Romare Bearden’s Piano Lesson.  Two windows set high in the back wall infuse the room with the changing light of Chicago fall day. Lining the floor, against the back wall, are bins overflowing with fabric scraps sorted by color. On the stage right wall is an old-fashioned pedal sewing machine and also an ironing board and iron. Downstage of the sewing machine is a work table (the kind often called a “wallpaper table”) coverd with sketches for new quilts, pattern paper, in-process appliqués, etc. Both the sewing machine and the work table have their own chairs. Set against the stage right wall is a hanging rack, where jewel-toned, silk shirts handmade by Jeannie for Royal hang in varying stages of completion. A slide projects stands near the sewing machine; it should not be obvious. (When necessary a strip of wall space between the two windows will be used as a screen.) On the stage left wall is a day bed covered with an assortment of design books, artist monographs, and more fabric. The room is so completely Jeannie’s atelier that when anyone else enters, it feels like a trespass. Through a door upstage of the bed, you can glimpse a hall leading to the rest of the apartment.

I wrote this  play about eight years ago, my next-to-last semester of graduate school. I haven’t looked at it since then, except to erase all of the comments from my professor so I could PDF it and submit it to a reading series several months ago. It will have a staged reading toward the end of April. I’ve known for months now that I needed to, first of all, retype it as I have no editable electronic copy, and also to re-enter and rewrite parts of it. But I’ve resisted. It was painful to write, lays me bare in a way that even the poems do not—though I may be the only one who directly notices it. I am troubled by having to engage with the mother character, to admit to myself what she really wants, given how closely she is modeled on my own mother.

I think too that when I wrote it, I expected a husband, a baby in the near future. Now at 42, when I know menopause and I are starting to flirt with the idea of occasionally meeting for cocktails, it is harder to revisit the heroine who is expecting her first child. Still, retyping the setting just now, I was amazed at my imagination, how clearly and thoroughly I imagined the artist’s studio, how even now, I know that space so well. I forget sometimes that I can use my imagination for more than just planning a schedule of blogs at work, or telling other people’s stories. I should add that I have abruptly abandoned Mrs. Woolf in the middle of Saturday, January 21, 1933. After days of reading about her own labors, her own doubts, she’s convinced me to stop procrastinating and just start. It remains to be seen if we’ll still be best friends at the end of this. it remains to be seen if I’ll still recognize myself at the end of this.