Aline Soules

Poet and Fiction Writer

Aline Soules

When Will My Poem Be Finished? How Will I Know?

Sometimes, I think writing poetry is both a blessing and a curse.  Only poets would spend hours wrestling over a word or a supposedly simple sentence.  We must be crazy.

After agonizing for days, weeks, maybe even months, are we satisfied?  No, because we’re not sure we’re finished.  We’re not even sure that the poems we get published are finished.  We look at them after they come out or, maybe, a year or two later, and see something we want to change.

Even the “greats” experience this.  I once read a poem by Eavan Boland in the New Yorker and, later, in her latest collection of poems.  I’d saved the New Yorker version and even knew where I’d put it.  When I compared it to the version in the book, I saw that she’d made changes.  So reassuring.  If Eavan Boland isn’t satisfied with a version of her poem in the New Yorker, then the rest of us have permission to tinker forever.

At some point, however, poets have to say “enough,” bite the bullet, and send out some version of their work.  If it’s accepted, it’s fixed in that moment in time.  Happily, with Eavan Boland as our inspiration, we can always change it later.

1913: The Year Before the Storm

Friends who give you great books are priceless.  I have savored and just completed 1913: The Year Before the Storm, by Florian Illies.  Sadly, my German language skills are nil, but I read an excellent translation, thanks to the skills of Shaun Whiteside and Jamie Lee Searle.  This amazing book offers a month-by-month description of selected events that took place before “the war to end all wars.”  Henry Ford put a conveyer belt in his car factory, Louis Armstrong picked up a trumpet, Chaplin signed his first movie contract, Proust began his opus, Stravinsky wrote The Rite of Spring—the list goes on.  Some quotes:

from Thomas Mann:  “And how greatly and severely war is felt as a crisis of moral cleansing, as a grandiose stride of life’s seriousness beyond all sentimental confusions.”  His reference was the war of 1870-71.

from Thomas Mann (again):  “Give us today our daily sheet of paper.”  All writers should relate to that comment. On the same subject:  “I need white, smooth paper, fluid ink and a new, softly gliding pen nib. To prevent myself making a mess of it, I put a sheet of lined paper underneath.  I can work anywhere; all I need is a roof over my head.  The open sky is good for unbridled dreams and outlines, but precise work requires the shelter of a roof.”

Illies shares a story from June 20, 1913, when an unemployed thirty-year old teacher, Ernst Friedrich Schmidt walked into a school “draped in weapons.”  He went on a shooting rampage with loaded revolvers.  Five girls, aged 7-8, died; eighteen children and five adults were severely injured.  A passer-by overpowered him.  His rationale?  He was protesting not finding a teaching position.  It seems that mass shootings are not as new as we think.

And from Illies, talking about Thomas Mann:  “…but only by the sea does one have an uninterrupted view of the soul—and of the mountains before it.”

May we all write with such grace.

Writing Practices

Finding a writing practice can be a challenge for all sorts of reasons.  Many of us have full-time jobs, families, other responsibilities that have nothing to do with writing.  Sometimes, if our full-time jobs involve writing, we come home “written out” and find it hard to write some more.  Some of us are intimidated by a blank page.  Some of us think we can only write if we have long blocks of time.  Some of us can only write in a certain place.  Some of us think that we’ll get to it tomorrow.  Some of us suffer from writers’ block.  The list of barriers goes on.

Once, I had the privilege of meeting Elmore Leonard.  He was a great writer (unfortunately, he died in 2013) and also a complete sweeper-aside of anything that sounded like “b.s.” to him.  Which included the list of barriers in paragraph one.  When he was the keynote speaker at a writers conference sponsored by the Detroit Women Writers (as it was then known) and held at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan, he gave a speech that was serviceable, but not memorable to me.

What was memorable was what happened in the Q&A after the speech.  A young man, possibly a student at the university, asked Mr. Leonard:  “What do you do about writers’ block?”  At that point, Mr. Leonard trembled with rage.  He leaned over the podium towards the student, who shrank back in his seat.  “Writers’ block?” shouted Mr. Leonard.  “Writers’ block?”  He paused. “You either want to write or you don’t.”

This has stuck with me over the years and served me well.  While I was certainly glad that I was not the target of Mr. Leonard’s rage, I felt it and I suspect so did every person in the room.  Whether it’s about writers’ block or any other issue, his point is absolute.  If we want to write, that’s what we should do—write.  Let’s do it!

Back in the Land of the Living

poems_in_progressI may have been on hiatus for six weeks, but, happily, it’s been for a good cause—writing.  I spent the first part of the year preparing extensively for the visit of Jeffrey Levine, founder of Tupelo Press, poet extraordinaire, and mentor to many of us.  Jeffrey offers experiences (workshop, conference, other words don’t justice to the process he offers) and I was in a position to immerse myself in three two-day experiences while he was here.  Jeffrey has now offered these events for four years and each time I attend, I come away rejuvenated, readier than ever to write, and more able to get at what I truly want/need to say.  

Last August (see previous posts), I participated in Tupelo Press’ 30/30 project, which helped me to generate new work at a tremendous pace (30 poems in 30 days).  I’ll throw out some of what I created, no doubt, but I have much raw material to work with and have been doing so for the last six months.  I also made the decision to spend at least one day a week generating new work rather than creating something and revising it before I moved on to the next thing.  The brain needs a mix of generation and revision, I learned—an invaluable lesson for my creative life.  

Of course, after he left, I had to catch up on the rest of my life, but I seem to be coming up for air now and am working to get into a new writing routine that balances generation and revision more equitably.  I also find I enjoy writing even more in my new routine and that feeds into better work.  I’m enjoying the upswing and will participate in Tupelo’s May conference to keep me going.

Image credit: http://www.commongoodbooks.com/event/poems-progress, accessed 9 Feb 2016.

Coming Up for Air

Just as everything else goes crazy at the holidays, so does writing and everything connected to it—or so I’ve found.  I’ve always been determined to write every day or, at least, six days out of seven.  Preparation for the holidays usually means I write less, but I still chug out something every day, good or bad.  I’ve also noticed that deadlines come in spurts and December 31 is one of them.  I hope to get ahead of “submit by” dates, but, often, I fail.  One of my annual New Year’s resolutions is submit earlier.  I expect I’ll resolve to do that again in 2016 and only succeed one or two times.

new_year_aheadThe other aspect of today’s writing is marketing, which consumes—or should I say, subsumes—me.  Dickens never had to do this.  Why do I?  Pointless question, but it nags at me.  I am a very poor self-promoter, but I need to spend more time on that, too.

As the hustle of Christmas and bustle of New Year loom large, I hope all my online readers have a wonderful season, but still manage to keep writing.  After all, fellow NaNoWriMo writers, we managed to write 50,000 words in a month.  We can make it through the holidays.

Photo credit:  http://www.propertymanager.com/2010/10/preparing-property-management-office-years-end/