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I'd Cared Too Much
Since my epiphany on the airplane during our trip from California, I’d been doing a bit better at protecting some time for writing. I’d finished and submitted a poem, my first attempt at publication, to Byline Magazine. It was inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s book of poems I’d found in St. Augustine.
Upon Reading “The Complete Poems of Ernest Hemingway”I sat in Northgate Burger King
with Ernest Hemingway;
washed in concentration,
shades of “oily weather” gray.
Complete Poems this book claims.
I wish I could agree.
They’ve resurrected his every word?
Not one thought scrambled free?
Wasn’t there a phrase, perhaps,
from his repertoire deleted?
I’d like to think just one
unbound sentence floated,
incompleted,
to piles of crumpled paper
liberated by revision.
The scratchings of his pencil
sent it flying from submission.
I’d like to think his wastebasket
was full from time to time
of pieces of young Hemingway’s
attempts to make words rhyme.I’d barely managed to finish the poem before we were on the road again, and our last stop in Atlanta to run the Peachtree Road Race brought the flurry of social activity to a halt as we prepared to return to Costa Rica. Jim went on a quick trip to San Jose because he’d shipped one of the company’s beat-up F-150 pickup trucks there so we’d have our own vehicle. It took me two of the four days he was gone to settle into the modicum of quiet his absence brought to life. I spent the mornings finishing May Sarton’s book, which I’d put aside during the crazy travel time because it was difficult to read about her dropping into the quiet of her writing life when I had few opportunities to do the same. Not that I wanted to see another writer suffer, but her struggle showed me there was someone else in the world that felt as deeply as I did, and this soothed me. “Cracking open the inner world again, writing even a couple of pages threw me back into depression…How to summon the vitality needed?” she wrote in mid September. How many times had I asked myself that very question?By early October, she declared, “Once more poetry is for me the soul-making tool. Perhaps I am learning at last to let go, and that is what this resurgence of poetry is all about.” In her next entry—made the next day—she lamented, “It has been stupidly difficult to let go, but that is what has been needed. I had allowed myself to get overanxious, clutching at what seemed sure to pass, and clutching is the surest way to murder love, as if it were a kitten, not to be squeezed so hard, or a flower to fade in a tight hand…It’s a real break-through. I have not written in sonnet form for a long time, but at every major crisis in my life when I reach a point of clarification, where pain is transcended by the quality of the experience itself, sonnets come.” I continued to read about and study poetic forms, making notes in my writer’s notebook about the poets I’d been reading. I studied the structure of the sonnet and felt it was far beyond my ability. I made notes about other poets’ preferences. “Frost was given to quatrains, couplets, and other set forms, not inventing new measures,” I wrote, though unfortunately I didn’t record where I’d read it. Quotes like these are wedged between my fumbling attempts to turn my own ideas into poetry: …The chimneys impale
a night-washed sky,
forcing themselves
on the velvet darkness.
They are symbols
I cannot touch;
the laughter gone,
I’d cared too much… If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Interruptions, Nourishing and Maddening
I had mapped out the details for a second trip to California in celebration of our wedding anniversary. It would be an orchestrated drive down the Pacific Coast Highway from San Francisco to Huntington Beach, staying in bed-and-breakfast inns along the way. I was eager to walk the beach in Carmel again, and I had decided to take Robinson Jeffers’ poetry with me—intending to read his words during our drive south. This, as it turned out, was impossible because Jim took the undulant coastal road at record speed, always the one to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible rather than to stop and “smell the roses” (or in this case “snap any photos”) along the way.
I was fascinated with the outcroppings dotting the coastline—the dark gray rocks dribbled artfully with runnels of dried white excrement beckoned me to photograph them, especially when the crescendo of Pacific waters slapped at their sides and plumed skyward in the stiff breeze. After the first few stops I managed to wrangle, Jim began playing hardball, telling me that I’d already taken a photo of a view exactly like the one we were zipping past. If he’d been able to gauge nuance, he’d have seen that this was simply not true. The queasiness from the first day’s drive didn’t let up until after dinner when I settled in with Jeffers between the cool, crisp sheets in our room. The language was the perfect complement to the day’s drama. In “Clouds at Evening,” he wrote: Figures of fire on the walls of to-night’s storm,Foam of gold in gorges of fire, and the great file of warrior angels:
Dreams gathering in the curded brain of the earth…As I drifted off to sleep with his images in my head, I thought about how I’d imaged the trip being the starting point for a host of languid memories. As it was going, I surmised it would likely be one big blur and in the end I was right. It wasn’t until I took my seat on the plane for the trip home that I felt steady again. Though we’d be going much faster than Jim’s driving took us, at least there was the illusion that I was relatively still for more than a few minutes. I wanted to journal about the trip but the experiences coalesced into one log hopscotch. As we reached cruising altitude, what came spilling out surprised me: “There is a journey that can be taken if one has the insight to hear its call. Once the journey has begun, there is no turning back because the sense of awareness that is gained cannot be reversed. Once the knowledge has been absorbed, the mind cannot throw it back without repercussions.” Oddly enough, my next sentence was, “There is something you’re not telling me.” I’d packed May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude for the trip home and I opened it with the peevish feeling that I was at the cusp of a precipice. This, from the first page of her book, took me closer to the edge: "I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That is what is strange—the friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and ‘the house and I resume old conversations.’"Though I had been feeling there was no balance in my life for a while, awareness ripped through me like a bolt of lightening. Perhaps it was hearing a successful, published author say it that made a difference, but it was suddenly clear that because the quiet, creative times were missing, I couldn’t possibly enjoy the social whirlwind of my life, regardless how fun the activities were. Until I found some type of equilibrium, there was no way this would change…If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for taking the time to read this post!
