How characters emerge: the mystery of composite selves

Photo by Gabor from Hungary / morguefile.com

Characters can be found in all sorts of places--among our families, friends, acquaintances, even strangers on the train. Yet we never borrow traits without tinging them with our own interpretation of those we observe and mixing in bits and pieces of our own imagination.

In other words, every character, even those you base on real people, have some of you in them.

I'll give you an example. The poem below I'd written as a sort of tribute to some of the ordinary yet extraordinary boys whose friendship I'd cherished in childhood.

Gilbert

My friend Gilbert
had the kind of face
you see on milk cartons
on rainy Thursday mornings
that puddle in your brain
without a grain of sense
or purpose but dripdrip drip.

Gil played games
that brought down bullies
to no-longer-larger-than-life lugs
we could look in the eye
and not cringe.

Gil's games
made emperors of roaches
and elf queens of
bucktoothed, freckled girls
who are good at math
and can't sing.

Gil thought thoughts
that entered me like garlic
and permeated blood
and lungs and skin,
reeking and lusty of life,
lingering in the pores
for days.

Laurel Garver, Muddy-Fingered Midnights p. 8. 

This fictional friend's name is, of course, an homage to Gilbert Blythe from L.M. Montgomery's Green Gables books.

Some of the details are bits and pieces of Duane, who lived next to the awesome graveyard and let me be Bionic Wonder Woman to his Bionic Batman. And also Billy, who was willing to be Pa from Little House on the Prairie. And finally Brad, who agreed that the monkeybars was totally a spaceship, and storing gobs of maple seeds for our fort's winter food supply was a dire necessity. These boys were kinder than average--and willing to give anyone a shot at joining the imaginative game of the moment.

But to be honest, I was usually the one who came up with most of the ideas when we played. You might say Gilbert is the kid I wish I'd been--imaginative, sure, but also the kind of leader who brings people together by drawing out their best selves gently and naturally.

When you build a hero or a villain, you will (mostly unconsciously) add pieces of yourself to the mix--what you admire and aspire to, what you find most loathsome, and at times even parts of yourself you most want to heal or change. This is the aspect of writing that some consider therapeutic or even mystical.

What aspects of yourself have you been surprised to discover coming out in your characters?

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Mission accomplished: reflections on the A to Z challenge

I've never taken a physics course, but I know all too well the concept of inertia. One must exert force to overcome it. Those of us who have been blogging for any length of time will hit phases of either burn-out or simply lethargy in which we struggle to generate new content. In the former situation, my strategies have been to take a brief hiatus, reuse old posts, or solicit guest posts. In the latter situation, I've usually solicited topics from readers, experimented with not-my-usual approach (film reviews, memoir shorts, lists), or sought a blogfest with a topic that interested me.

What attracted me to the A to Z Blogging Challenge this year was the camaraderie I'd seen develop among participants in past years. With many other blogfests, you get a lot of drive-bys, but often very little sustained interaction. And it's the friendships that makes blogging so rewarding. At the beginning of the year, I'd culled more than 70 inactive blogs off my reading list (haven't posted in two to three years). Realizing that so many blogging buddies have drifted away was pretty sobering. Some of my lethargy with blogging was clearly due to grieving the loss of relationships I'd once had. Coming to acceptance would, of course, involve moving on and building new relationships.

Another appeal for me was to test my ability to be radically productive. I challenged myself to write and format all the posts ahead and largely succeeded. All but one were completely written, illustrated, and formatted before April 1. The outlier was my G post, in which I'd selected a piece that was a bit of an interpretive struggle for me. Rather than ditch it, I leaned into my struggle and wrote about that, finishing the post only a day ahead. It turned out to be a good approach, because the poet I'd featured contacted me to say thanks for featuring her work and for helping others be less intimidated by poetry. So I definitely learned an important lesson there: your learning process is as important as any perceived expertise you have. Share it!

As to my topic, poetry. Well, I've always wanted to do a consistent National Poetry Month Series. The reason NPM exists is to stir up enthusiasm for a genre that's too often pushed to the margins. I had no illusions going in that talking poetry would make my blog super popular. Dislike of the genre runs deep in contemporary life, where "thinking slow" isn't valued, and depth is for nerdy, uncool people. I choose to be countercultural. Give me Hughes or Heaney over Honey Boo Boo any day. My goal was simply to provide for those brave enough to visit an opportunity to see what poetry might have to offer.

Did I come out of my turtle shell of grieving lost blogging buddies and make new ones? Yes.

Did I generate a large volume of content and meet deadlines? Yes.

Did I share my enthusiasm for an under-appreciated genre and help others see its diverse merits? Yes.

Has my faith been restored in blogging as a medium worth my time? Yes and double yes.

How about you? 
A to Z participants, what were your goals? Did you meet them?
A to Z observers, might you ever participate? Why or why not?

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Z: Zoo

Photo by GaborfromHungary, morguefile.com

Thoughts in a Zoo
By Countee Cullen (1903-1946)

They in their cruel traps, and we in ours,
Survey each other’s rage, and pass the hours
Commiserating each the other’s woe,
To mitigate his own pain’s fiery glow.
Man could but little proffer in exchange
Save that his cages have a larger range.
That lion with his lordly, untamed heart
Has in some man his human counterpart,
Some lofty soul in dreams and visions wrapped,
But in the stifling flesh securely trapped.
Gaunt eagle whose raw pinions stain the bars
That prison you, so men cry for the stars!
Some delve down like the mole far underground,
(Their nature is to burrow, not to bound),
Some, like the snake, with changeless slothful eye,
Stir not, but sleep and smoulder where they lie.
Who is most wretched, these caged ones, or we,
Caught in a vastness beyond our sight to see?

Source: My Soul’s High Song: The Collected Writings of Countee Cullen (Anchor Books, 1991).

On this final day of the A-Z Blogging Challenge, I share this riff on the heroic sonnet (they usually have an alternating rhyme scheme ababcdcdefefghghii, while this is aabbccddeeffgghhii) by Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen. Cullen's piece is a great example of what good poetry can do. It speaks into Cullen's own historic moment, when the nation was very racially divided and injustice prevailed, yet it also has a more universal application that extends beyond it. No matter the era, we tend to put other people in particular categorical boxes, not unlike animals at the zoo, and seek to contain what we consider dangerous.

I hope this month's foray into poetry has opened your eyes to new connections, like Cullen's recognition of his own caged self in the "smoulder[ing]" eye of a zoo snake.

What surprising things have you learned from this series? 

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Y: Yiayia

SUGAR
by Jessica Bell

You were Yiayia.
But I called you Zacharati.
That was your name.
It meant sugar.

Photo by Max Straeten, morguefile.com

Your parents must have known
that when you aged,
you’d litter your kitchen
bench with it,
when you’d make halva,
and wipe your hands
on your fraying apron
exactly seven times a day.

I’d count.
You’d giggle.
Papou would cross himself.

Every day I’d watch
you press baked almonds
into the squishy centers
of the diamond-shaped
brown sweets.

You were granting them hearts.

And that’s when you’d bring out the sugar.
And a sieve.

And sprinkle your name all over my world.

Source: Fabric. Edmonton, AB: Vine Leaves Press, 2012. p. 22.


Childhood memories are a powerful source for poetry ideas. Bell's piece is all the sweeter (pardon the pun) because she also weaves in a sense of place and culture, using Greek words and presenting her grandparents carrying on traditions.

Bell's collection Fabric is woven though with elements of Greek language and culture. It's a wonderful read. My review is posted here. For more on this and Bell's other poetry books, novels and writing resources, see her website.



What lines or images stand out to you? What childhood memories might you tap as inspiration for your writing?

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X: Xanadu

Kubla Khan

Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

Photo credit: alanmort from morguefile.com

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
    Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

    The shadow of the dome of pleasure
    Floated midway on the waves;
    Where was heard the mingled measure
    From the fountain and the caves. 
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
     A damsel with a dulcimer
    In a vision once I saw;
    It was an Abyssinian maid,
    And on her dulcimer she played,
    Singing of Mount Abora.
    Could I revive within me
    Her symphony and song,
    To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Source: English Romantic Writers. Ed. David Perkins. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967. 430-31.

I felt I had to throw in one of the Romantics, because they've come to define how so many conceive of poetry: strictly metered and rhymed and full of anachronistic vocabulary like damsel and thrice.

What I love about Kubla Khan is its song-like flow and dreamy quality. Coleridge himself admits this is a versification of "a vision in a dream." Now whether that dream took place during REM sleep or one of his opium benders isn't entirely clear. But clearly it does show that poetry doesn't have to be all about feelings or landscapes here and now. There's a rich tradition of exploring the mythic and fantastical in verse.

Have you ever written something inspired by a dream? If you were to write a poem about a mythical or fantasy world, which one would you choose? 

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W: The Waking

by Theodore Rothke (1908-1963)

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Photo by Alvimann, morguefile.com

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Doubleday, 1961)


This piece, unlike many I've presented during the A-Z challenge, is in a very rigid form. You might have noticed that beyond the strict rhyme scheme, some of the lines are repeated verbatim.

The form of Rothke's poem is a villanelle. Poets.org describes the form like this:

The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets [three line stanzas] followed by a quatrain [four line stanza]. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem's two concluding lines.

Complicated, right? I've honestly never attempted to write one, but I can see the puzzle-like appeal of trying to compose to such a formula and somehow have it not only make sense, but also speak truth or beauty into the world. Quite a tall order.

What ideas or images strike you?

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V: Viewing the Body

by W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009)


Flowers like a gangster's funeral;

Photo credit: Seemann from morguefile.com

Eyeshadow like a whore.

They all say isn't she beautiful.

She, who never wore

Lipstick or such a dress,

Never got taken out,

Was scarcely looked at, much less

Wanted or talked about;

Who, gray as a mouse, crept

The dark halls at her mother's

Or snuggled, soft, and slept

Alone in the dim bedcovers.

Today at last she holds

All eyes and a place of honor

Till the obscene red folds

Of satin close down on her.

Poulin, A. Jr., ed. Contemporary American Poetry. 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. 483-4.

Though written in fairly plain, workaday words, this piece is full of jarring juxtapositions that contrast who the recently departed woman was in life versus who she has become in death. I think this piece has a lot to say about today's glamour culture, and they way women are treated as if they matter only if they conform to certain standards of beauty. The sweet innocence of her snuggled under bedcovers jars with the final image of a red-satin lined coffin. In attempting to glamorize the deceased, they've turned her virginal innocence into a whorish spectacle.

What lines or images stand out to you?

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U: Untitled (morning meeting)

a concrete poem
by KD

This poem is proof that shape poems can be sophisticated, not simply clunky, childish strings of words fancied up using gimmicky typography. (There are plenty of examples of the latter online, however).

True confession: I don't exactly know who wrote this untitled piece and would love to give better attribution. I found it on someone's Tumblr page. I'd happily backlink the author if I could get an identity. My only clue is that this is someone from the Midwest or northern US or possibly Canada, where they use "anyways" rather than "anyway."

My favorite phrase here is "softer than the velvety chocolate inside of your vendor croissant."

What lines or images strike you?

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T: Technique worth stealing

Studying poetry will make you a better writer, no matter what genre you aspire to master. Poetry uses a number of techniques that I believe are quite transferable to other kinds of writing.

Today, I'd like to share a technique to "steal" from poets--using the sound device assonance (repeated vowel sounds) to ramp up the emotion in your fiction. The thinking behind sound devices is often onomatopoetic; the sound and meaning are linked.

morguefile.com

Consider these examples. Say them aloud. How do they make you feel?

1. John groped for his coat in hopes the Tylenol bottle hadn’t dropped through the hole in his pocket.

2. Lisa worried they'd think her rude if she cooed at their cute baby, so she chewed her lip while brooding on his tiny blue shoes.

3. Wading deeper into the creek, Ross felt the coldness seep through his sneakers. Shining eyes seemed to peek through the reeds. A cheeping frog sent a shriek of fear streaking up his spine, but he ground his teeth. Must stay silent. Must not be weak.


In my first example, Can you feel John's inner ache? The repeated oh, oh, aah, ahh,make the passage seem to moan and groan on the page. The repeated O sounds (both short and long) make you verbalize John's pain response.

In my second example, Lisa's entire inner monologue does coo at the cute baby, even if she refuses to do it aloud. The repeated long U sound carries it. This is an excellent, subtle way to add layers of meaning to your character's thoughts. Characters might consciously deny something while the sounds in their words convey a deeper, hidden, unconscious desire for the denied thing.

In my third example, the creepy feeling is reinforced by a series of little shrieks, like one might hear upon having a bug scurry over bare skin: Eeek! Ross is screaming inside, even if he's being tough and silent on the outside.

Your turn:
Chose an emotion you want to convey and think of the most primal sound you associate with it, such as Os for groaning with pain, Es for screaming with fright. Write a sentence, paragraph or scene in which you repeat the sounds.

Hint: a rhyming dictionary will help you identify words with the vowel sounds you need.

How might you use this technique today to improve your writing?

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S: Spoken word

Spoken word poetry is meant to be experienced as a performance, heard rather than read silently. The piece I'm sharing below is a segment from a longer TED talk by spoken word poet Sarah Kay. More of her work can be found on YouTube.

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Absorbing a spoken word poem is a very different experience from reading it on a page. If you miss a turn of phrase, it's simply gone. You can't easily "reread" and consider your interpretation. You have to take it in, interpret on the fly, absorb what you can. I think that being a listener rather than a reader also takes away some of your sense of controlling the text. You're instead a passive recipient. You can't work for the understanding, you have to let it come to you.

What strikes you about Kay's poem? In what ways do you find it better and worse than reading a poem silently?

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R: Reflections

By Deborah Guzzi

Photo credit: Gracey at morguefile.com

randomly I stare into
each reflective surface
forever pondering the
lines of age, pain and joy
each one a splendid testament
culled from a full life
teased endlessly, eternally
into distorted images
of the soul of me
never quite
seeing...I

surely, I am
not this shallow
only time can plane my cheek
insight my eyes to fade
turn the plumpness of lip to
crinkles of mirth
enlivening the gray
languishing in silver
forever seeing but parts of the
ecstasy I
reflect

Source: poetrysoup.com

You might have observed, through my use of color, that the first letter of each line, when read downwards, forms a word. This is a poetic form called an acrostic, and was used frequently in ancient poetry like the Hebrew book of Psalms. What is particularly clever about this piece is that the poet recreates the word backwards (or in mirror image) in the second stanza, reinforcing the sense of reflections.

Acrostics are a somewhat slighted form, in part because it's often one of the first forays into poetry writing for early elementary students. But as Guzzi shows, the form can be quite sophisticated in the hands of an experienced poet. Even within the confines of form, she has some striking sound patterns, like "culled from a full life" and "plumpness of lip."

What lines or images strike you?

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Q: Quelled

Holy Saturday Mourning
by Sr. Genevieve Glen, OSB

The fisherman had aged, they saw, when dawn
at last broke through that endless night.  He had
no words to strengthen them, his bluster gone
to silence. One by one they came. Grief bade
them gather there. The shadowed room was clad
in memories. Furtive eyes sought out the spot
where He had stood.  The big man’s shame burned hot.
The One with whom he’d sworn to die was dead.
And he was not.

©2011, Abbey of St. Walburga, http://genglen.blogspot.com 

painting by Carl Heinrich Bloch

This poem shows us Simon Peter in the time following Jesus' crucifixion. All his hot-headed desire to create an uprising has been quashed. He is a revolutionary quelled, struggling to come to grips with what has gone wrong.

Knowing what we do about Peter's actions in the preceding days, I can only imagine the depth of his grief and his even deeper confusion. Peter adamantly opposed Jesus every time he spoke of his death. He attacked one of the guards who came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. He then followed to where Jesus was being held, hoping for news, but perhaps also staking out the place in order to try another violent rescue.

But bravery fails him. He denies Jesus, we're told. But perhaps there's some truth in his declaration: "I never knew the man." Because Jesus didn't turn out to be the fiery revolutionary many were hoping could come and overthrow Rome. As Peter came to grips with the truth of where his hopes really lay, he was devastated.

This Jesus wasn't going to foment a rebellion. He had another plan entirely. A completely insane one: To lay down his life.

Holy Saturday is a good time to sit in this space with Peter. To come to grips with the frailty of our plans and dreams. To let the wrong sorts of dreams die so that God's dreams for us in the world can be awakened.

Wishing you all a blessed Easter!

What about Peter's life and story resonates with you?

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P: A Prodigal

by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

inset from a medieval painting, artist unknown

The brown enormous odor he lived by
was too close, with its breathing and thick hair,
for him to judge. The floor was rotten; the sty
was plastered halfway up with glass-smooth dung.
Light-lashed, self-righteous, above moving snouts,
the pigs' eyes followed him, a cheerful stare--
even to the sow that always ate her young--
till, sickening, he leaned to scratch her head.
But sometimes mornings after drinking bouts
(he hid the pints behind the two-by-fours),
the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red
the burning puddles seemed to reassure.
And then he thought he almost might endure
his exile yet another year or more.

But evenings the first star came to warn.
The farmer whom he worked for came at dark
to shut the cows and horses in the barn
beneath their overhanging clouds of hay,
with pitchforks, faint forked lightnings, catching light,
safe and companionable as in the Ark.
The pigs stuck out their little feet and snored.
The lantern--like the sun, going away--
laid on the mud a pacing aureole.
Carrying a bucket along a slimy board,
he felt the bats' uncertain staggering flight,
his shuddering insights, beyond his control,
touching him. But it took him a long time
finally to make up his mind to go home.

This piece is an extended allusion to the biblical parable of the prodigal son, a story Jesus tells in the Gospels about a son who leaves home, squanders his inheritance and ends up in poverty, taking work as a swineherd, the worst possible profession for a nice Jewish boy. In Jesus' story, the son "came to himself" and decides to return home to reconcile with his family. This piece stays at that dark period before the decision is made.

The author Elizabeth Bishop (winner of the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for poetry) generally wrote poems that seem unrelated to her life, in contrast to her contemporaries, the "confessional" poets, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W.D. Snodgrass. Yet if you read about her life, you can quickly understand why she would choose to explore this particular Bible parable. Like the prodigal son, Bishop experienced a sense of dislocation. She lost one parent, then another. Was bounced among relatives in Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. Missed a great deal of school because of bouts of asthma. Though a New England native, she spent large chunks of her life in France and Brazil, made possible in part because of a substantial inheritance from her father.

Bishop's poem is a great example of literary borrowing that's quite common in poetry. You don't need to dream up narratives on your own to explore some aspect of human nature--you are free to take existing narratives and characters and explore them in your own way.

What lines or images stand out to you? If you were to write an allusion poem, what story would you enjoy exploring and rewriting?


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O: Ode to a Dressmaker's Dummy

by Donald Justice (1925 - 2004)

Papier-mache body; blue-and-black cotton jersey cover.
Metal stand. Instructions included.   --Sears, Roebuck Catalogue

Photo credit: jeltovski at morguefile.com

              O my coy darling, still
              You wear for me the scent
         Of those long afternoons we spent,
               The two of us together,
    Safe in the attic from the jealous eyes
                 Of household spies
    And the remote buffooneries of the weather;
                         So high,
    Our sole remaining neighbor was the sky,
              Which, often enough, at dusk,
    Leaning its cloudy shoulders on the sill,
Used to regard us with a bored and cynical eye.

              How like the terrified,
              Shy figure of a bride
         You stood there then, without your clothes,
                  Drawn up into
         So classic and so strict a pose
      Almost, it seemed, our little attic grew
Dark with the first charmed night of the honeymoon.
         Or was it only some obscure
      Shape of my mother's youth I saw in you,
There where the rude shadows of the afternoon
         Crept up your ankles and you stood
         Hiding your s-x as best you could?--
         Prim ghost the evening light shone through.

Source: poets.org

An ode is typically an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual. Among English poets, Keats is considered the master of the form.

Justice, however, isn't glorifying something glorious. By writing an "ode" about a man's bizarre relationship with a dressmaker's dummy, he satirizes love poems generally. This is another instance of form/content dissonance that makes you pause, raise an eyebrow, and perhaps laugh.

What silly thing do you think would make a good topic for a satirical ode?

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N: Not Quite Away

by Laurel Garver

Photo credit: o0o0xmods0o0o at morguefile.com

Yesterday
all my troubles seemed so far
across the street my best friend
or close enough stepped on her
gerbil squish
She was walking it on a leash
like a dog pretty dumb I think
probably she forgot everything else and
burst into Tomorrow
I love ya tomorrow you’re
only a day
around the block
the Bartelli boys who like to stick
crawly things into people’s lunches
bought the gerbil guts for 50¢ &
2 red rubber balls & a swirly
marble all stuffed into
her hand too late for me
to yell cooties she smiled toothy
and wiped scritch scratch
her bloody shoe in the grass.

Muddy-Fingered Midnights, p. 20.

I wrote the initial draft of this piece for a poetry class in graduate school. As you might guess, I was experimenting on a number of fronts here: interpolating song lyrics, breathless stream-of-consciousness style, tone/subject dissonance and finally, voice. You could say my choice was somewhat in reaction to the mop-pushing megalomaniac in my poetry class who loved to use allusions to the Gilgamesh epic, among other pretensions. Being around him made me want to write real, to get past all the grad school trying-to-sound-important BS. What could be less important-sounding than some silly kid story?

I worked from of a true childhood tale a high school friend had shared about one of her neighbors who thought it would be fun to walk her hamster on a leash, then inadvertently killed it. I vaguely recall that money had been exchanged to use the rodent remains for some ghoulish purpose.

My initial inclination for telling this had been to take a knowing tone, looking on this scenario with adult eyes. But it felt entirely wrong. I realized that if I was going to be true to this story, I needed to enter into the child world—seeing the neighbor girl as the kid I imagined she was, impulsive and apt to burst into song. I mined memories for details, like what the truly evil kids did for fun. Instead of 30 pieces of silver, the beloved pet is sold off for kid treasures—the sorts of things I admired from my parents' desk drawers or my siblings' closet floors. By using onomatopoetic words, I tried make the gore concrete but not sensationalized.

The title, by the way, refers to the lyric snippets that in the original, both included the word "away." But in this context, when we're small, our world shrinks. Troubles are across the street. Tomorrow is just around the block. Not quite away.

If you've always wanted to try poetry, but don't know where to start, dip into your well of memories, and not just the shiny-happy ones. It's in the sandbox we discover some of the startling truths about life.

What lines or images strike you? How might you experiment with stream-of-consciousness or tone/subject dissonance?

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M: Magnetic creativity

If you find the idea of writing poetry completely intimidating, you might want to try out a creativity tool I rediscovered: magnetic poetry.

I recall magnetic poetry being the hot new thing back in the mid-1990s, usually sold in bookstore gift sections. Several local coffee shops near me kept cookie sheets coated with the small magnetized pieces of type you could arrange into forms of expression.

The challenge was to work with the words at hand and arrange them into something at least partially coherent. The truly patient would dig through the sticky bits to find just the right words. The impatient would sacrifice coherence. The guffawing teenagers usually left behind suggestive little ditties like this: white curve / in a window / moon rise / blush and run.

I picked up a new set of magnetic poetry at a flea market over the summer--the "romance" set, which I knew would have lots of fun additions to the two sets I already own. When we first got the set home, my daughter and I noodled around for a good forty minutes trying different combinations.

My creativity was spurred by three words that had come linked together on one of the perforated sheets: "slow," "velvet" and "dance."

Here's what resulted:


I noticed a few interesting things working in this medium. First, one tends to go light with using articles, because who wants to spend twenty minutes digging for an "a" or "an"? Second, odd combinations pop up all the time and can cause your subject and tone can shift dramatically as you compose. This piece shifted when the word "pleasure" caught my eye. I got thinking what a cliched concept it often is and let my imagination roam for new ways to conceive it.

If you haven't ever played with magnetic poetry, I highly recommend it as a warm-up tool. Seeing stacks of words randomly juxtaposed will stir your imagination in wonderful ways.

Have you ever played with magnetic poetry sets? If you were to take the words I used, how would you rearrange them?

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L: A Lot

By Scott Cairns (1954— )

A little loam and topsoil 
is a lot. 
—Heather McHugh

Photo credit: ronmerk from morguefile.com 

A vacant lot, maybe, but even such lit vacancy
as interstate motels announce can look, well, pretty
damned inviting after a long day’s drive, especially
if the day has been oppressed by manic truckers, detours,
endless road construction. And this poorly measured, semi-
rectangle, projected and plotted with the familiar
little flags upon a spread of neglected terra firma
also offers brief apprehension, which—let’s face it,
whether pleasing or encumbered by anxiety—dwells
luxuriously in potential. Me? Well, I like
a little space between shopping malls, and while this one may
never come to be much of a garden, once we rip
the old tires from the brambles and bag the trash, we might
just glimpse the lot we meant, the lot we hoped to find.
.

Source: Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (Zoo Press, 2002)

As a country girl who has put down roots in an urban area, this piece resonates with me. Even a small patch of nature "dwells luxuriously in potential" --potential to bring a bit of beauty and respite for the weary, nature-hungry soul. I like that Cairns uses poetry to look past the now of "old tires," "brambles" and "trash" to see a glimpse of possible garden space. The transformative power of the imagination makes a little patch of littered land into "a lot"--in more sense than one, encouraging the reader to expand application to other wrecked spaces, be they landscapes or relationships.

What lines or images stand out to you?

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K: Keeping Things Whole

by Mark Strand (1934 —)

In a field
I am the absence

Photo by grtguru for morguefile.com

of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Source: The Contemporary American Poets. New York: New American Library, 1969. p. 330.

Spare and deceptively simple, this poem addresses the nature of reality. What is presence? What is absence? How does the universe fit together? What is my place in it?

What lines or images strike you?

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J: A Jar of Fireflies

by Angela Felsted

Photo credit: hotblack from morguefile.com

precisely when night fingers
brush the ankles of the cherry tree

precisely when a freckled
bullfrog starts its croon
up at the moon

precisely when the screams
of children fade into the pliant mud
when splashing rocks
peruse the river bottom made of pebble dots

the shadow of breath of dusk
exhales across the gilded ground
a silver cloud sent heaven bound
aches for mother, father sun,
tries to run

on red-striped wings
past the ring of phantom sky
above a canopy of trees
where star buds nest in humid leaves

their summer
wishes touch my hand
kisses trapped by molten sand

lit up glass
etched secrets in the withered grass

Source: Poetry Pact volume 1. Eds. Angela Felsted and Richard Merrill. Fairfax, VA: Jazzy Press, 2011.


This soundscape piece takes us to that magical twilight hour of summertime when the night comes alive. Felsted is a friend of mine from a poetry critique group whose work I enjoy very much, not only because she creates such evocative images, but also because of her sense of play. There's a little rhyme, but not too much; there's a little bouncy lilt, just enough. My favorite image of the piece is "star buds nest in humid leaves" and how it juxtaposes the celestial and horticultural to speak of the insect world.

What lines or images strike you?

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by Laurel Garver

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I: Independence

by Laurel Garver (that's me)

photo by Edumigue for morguefile.com

Under a smooth moon
we watch fireworks
heave purple fluff
and spray a thousand blossoms
that petal-dance
down summer shadows
to where we cuddle,
flame-drunk, bliss blistered,
sighing, OH!
at the frantic pull
to soar away,
to be all light.

From Muddy-fingered Midnights, 2013. p. 44.

I composed this piece using magnetic poetry sets, and the image that got the whole thing going was "fireworks." I spread my collection of magnetic words across a tabletop and picked out any and every word that might connect to how fireworks look, sound, and feel either literally or metaphorically. I also thought about contexts in which one experiences fireworks and the emotion of those contexts.

Once I had a big stack of words, I got down to composing. Fluff needed a color modifier, and purple had a repeating vowel sound. Blister and flame bring to mind the fire of fireworks;  I wanted both burning terms to resonate with the romantic context, so I paired them with modifiers that give them a passionate twist. Many of my first choices weren't used; many of the strongest images needed to be contextualized, which meant digging for more words that would resonate with them.

What are your favorite tools for brainstorming and developing ideas? Have you ever played with magnetic poetry kits? 


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Goodreads Book Giveaway

Muddy-Fingered Midnights

by Laurel Garver

Giveaway ends April 17, 2014.
See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Read More