November 12, 2013

I apologize for not posting for a while. Besides being sick for about a week or so, there were some other writing projects that were demanding my time. Some you might find a bit boring, like being the "scribe" for a colleague at our English Department's tenure meeting and then drafting his "P&T" (tenure and promotion) letter on behalf of the department, which will become part of his file as it makes its way to the Dean of the College of Humanities and his P&T Committee, then to the College of Arts & Sciences and their P&T Committee, and then to the Provost and his people (ah, life at a large public university). But I’m thinking that you might enjoy hearing about a couple of my other writing projects. One didn't turn out quite so well. The other did. In this post I'll tell you about the project that didn't quite turn out so well.

A few weeks ago one of the editors of a magazine, a very fine literary magazine published out of Eastern Washington University called the Bellingham Review, sent me the following e-mail after I had submitted some poems to him:

 Dear Stuart Lishan,

 I very much enjoyed reading your poem "Improvisations of the Middle Way". I think with some revision, we would gladly reconsider your submission to the Bellingham Review. I was particularly drawn to your descriptive nature imagery and love your playful diction. I think the incorporation of more of those unique qualities would give the piece a greater impact overall. I hope you will consider the revision. 

 Thank You.

"Improvisations of the Middle Way" was the longest and most ambitious poem of the bunch that I had sent the good folks at the Bellingham Review, so I was pretty pleased by this response. Given the large amount of submissions that top literary magazines receive, for one of the editors to take the time to write such a personal note is a pretty big deal.

So, now to go about revising the poem, but how, exactly, and how could I do it relatively quickly? For "Improvisations..." was a poem that I had been working on and off on for years, but I knew I didn't have years to spend revising it now. I had maybe only weeks before my dear old poem was forgotten amidst all the other more recent submissions this good magazine would receive. So what to do?

I remember reading an essay, it was years ago in I think the American Poetry Review, by the wonderful poet, Donald Hall, in which he said, and I paraphrase, "No string too short not to be saved" (In fact, it's from a book I'd recommend, Hall's memoir, String too short to be saved, Recollections of Summers on a New England Farm). What Hall meant was that we who write poems accumulate lines and phrases, lines and phrases that we like, maybe even love, but they don't quite fit into the poem that we're currently on. So we stuff them away, like unused pieces of string stuffed away in a drawer, waiting for the day in which we're working on a poem in which one or more of these lines might fit. The same might be said of some poems, too. We have poems that we like well enough, but they're not quite, as my father used to say, "top shelf" yet. Maybe they'll never be. But, still, they contain some lines and phrases that we think work pretty well. I had some poems like these, and I decided that these poems would be my "strings." So I went back to them, searching for lines that I might fit into the loose accumulation of improvisational lyric meditations about time and longing that made up the poem, "Improvisations of the Middle Time." Here's what I came up with:  

 
Improvisations of the Middle Time

            "Improvisation is a gathering together of all the evidence

              you have of how to resolve going from here to here to here."
                                           -- Dizzy Gillespie

Beside the spirit waters 

a sailboat

white as a swan sets out

beyond the orbits of your touch.
 

Slanted light revolves through the eucalyptus

like memories dredging their shadows,

their petals drifting into

the ebb tides over the mudflats,

and the glassy sheen

of it al

the glassy sheen of

it all

                                                ***

            "Don't you fresh flowers

            or baby cries in your cave want?"

            she reared her head and wept. "Don'

            you flutter love me anymore?"

            And her terrible dimples crinkled near                                                        

            her eyes, and her heart's cities, thus braced,

            buttoned down, burned in that whimpering

            planet speech of hers she sobbed

                        Then the time of near-part was past,

and we came again to live in cuddle

            time of heavy-lidded eyes,

            her knee resting in the crook of mine,

                        her breath in the kiss of my neck:                    

                        In rising, hold-on-to-each-other

                                    time, exhausted-

reconciled-time…                  

                                                            ***

Like the Braille, flecked, frail

markings of the locust tree

dreaming in a tangle of branch tips and wind.

Like the angels of the having said.

Of the wished to have done differently.

Of their wings kneaded deeply
 

among the songs of their touch,

by the verdant river,

the old shushing waters…

                                                ***     

The seed pods of the cottonwood drift

through the June afternoon.

A herd of purple dame’s rocket
            blooms at the base of its roughage of bark.

 

Earlier in the year when I pulled up wild mustard

on its slope, the cottonwood was just a prickly band of sticks

 poking up into the raw, early April sky. Now the seeds drift over

the maples, the shagbark hickory, and the pine…

                                                            ***

But the ash tree closest to it is dying.

            Only a few pom-poms of leaves sticking out from the hulls of its upper stories, its forked trunk splotched, forsaken, its innards raw, eaten out, though its leafless arms are still useful to the cardinal, thrush, sparrow, and squirrel,

and the feathery seeds sweeping overhead like a long breath toward where you imagine night is afraid to plummet…

                                                ***                                                  

            In September, in late afternoons, when runty sunshine

stuns through the window, you feel the early sting

of Winter's heart breath.

In the quotidians between summer and autumn,  

you imagine listening to Winter husk himself

awake and brush off old snow from his shaggy back

and beard, bravely folding out his bones against

the time of giant cold. You imagine him wheezing  

frost from his nostrils and shaking his wife awake,

in late September, when the meadows are still

colorful and sleepy in late summer

heaviness, in this honeyed time,

            when the kisses of bees

last like a deep thirst among the cleomes…

                                                ***

                                         

the strangling smells of the dying impatiens

the stark cherry tree that blossoms in the bee’s dream

the minutes when the light lies buttery and golden

                                                            
                                         
                                ***                                                                                                                                                     

Beyond the choirs of leaf-rattle and finch:

beyond the scumble of last year’s deer bones:

beyond the totems of broken ash and wild cherry:

beyond the bindweed and the moon glow on the violets:

a grit of hawk-screech in the distance, a “What the hell

are you doing!" and a "Get in right now!"  The tentacles of

teenagers, thinking parents gone, intermingling,

with boobs fondled into stiffened nipples and hard-ons,

and candied neck bites, and rumors taking off

among blue jeans and the tops tipsily

taken off, scattered on the sofas, the carpets, and the beds

                                                ***
                  

my love

my thirsty

luminescent rage

                                                ***

The frost will cover the grass then.

The raking time will start and end.

In November will come the first snows

and the cold stars will shine onto

the leaves turning over onto their backs…

                                                             ***

 

Well, that's the poem. I thought it was an improvement over the earlier version I had sent (which you can find at the bottom of this post, in case you'd like to compare it to the revision). I sent it out, and a couple of days later I received the following response:

            Stuart,

A few of us editors carefully considered “Improvisations” after you submitted it. We found it unique and fascinating, but we don’t feel it’s a good fit for Bellingham Review. Thanks for taking the time to revise and resubmit, though. I wish you the best of luck in finding a home for it and all your poems.

Best,

Lee Olsen

Managing Ed.

 

But that's part of the writing life, too, dear friends. You write, you revise, you send out work, in the hope that it will make its way in the world, and sometimes, most of the time even, it comes back. That's especially true with longer, more ambitious pieces. In part it's a matter of space. Magazines only have so much space to spare, and a four or five-page poem takes up valuable real estate. So unless you're someone like John Ashbery or Jorie Graham,  it's tough to publish a poem like "Improvisations." But I knew that when I was the writing the poem.  And I kept right on writing it. That's what we do, we writers, when we're passionate about a writing project, or, rather, when a writing project seems to be passionate about us and won't let us loosen our hold on it. That's part of the writing life, too.

 So, am I angry at dear Lee Olsen and the other editors of the Bellingham Review? No, not a whit. Am I still tinkering with "Improvisations..."? Yes. Was the earlier version that I had originally sent to the editors better than the revision? Well, you be the judge.

 Here's that original version below. Feel free to tell me what you think.

 

Improvisations of the Middle Time

            "Improvisation is a gathering together of all the evidence

             you have of how to resolve going from here to here to here."

                                                                        -- Dizzy Gillespie

 

            "Don't you fresh flowers

            or baby cries in your cave want?",

            she reared her head and wept. "Don't

            you flutter love me anymore?"

            And her terrible dimples crinkled near

                                                            her eyes, and her heart's cities, thus braced,

buttoned down, burned in that whimpering

                        planet speech of hers she sobbed.

                        Then the time of near-part was past,
 

and we came again to live in cuddle

            times of heavy lidded eyes,

            her knee resting in the crook of mine,

                        her quiet breath in the kiss of my neck:

                        In rising, hold-on-to-each-other

                                    time, exhausted-

reconciled-time….                 

                                                            ***                      

            I look at myself in a dream, I dream,

and the aching minutes

                                    open up like canvas sails.

                        I feel the early sting of winter's heart breath.

in the quotidians between summer and autumn….               

In late afternoons, runty sunshine stuns through the window.

                                    There are some places,

even the night is afraid to plummet.

                                                ***                                         

                        In August, in these northern climes, you can hear

Winter husk itself awake and brush off the old snow

            from his shaggy back, bravely folding out his bones

            against the time of giant cold,

even though it's hard for the trees to believe here,                                        

            You can hear him wheeze frost from his nostrils and shake his wife awake,

            in August, when the meadows are still colorful and sleepy

in late summer heaviness, in this honey time,

            when the kisses of bees last like a deep thirst.

                                                ***

The strangling smells of the dying impatiens,

like a faded moonbeam.                                                                                                         

            And the starving, lung burning sunsets,

            and the light deepening and lengthening,

            and the year slowly caravaning by,    

            and the minutes between when the breath stops

            and the time when the light lies buttery and golden

and runs wild like a barefoot boy or girl on the grass.

                                               ***                                                                                                                             

            "We all have to make our peace with endings."

The sloshed melancholy man's wife

who woke up one fine morning,

to look in the paper, to read

that her son had been killed,

told me this.

                        By the verdant banks of the river, the old shushing waters.

                                                ***                                                     

 It was the helpless foreign bones flown home in airplanes;

no,

it was the hard harloted honesty looted

            and the Emir fleeing in a sibilant helicopter;

no,

it was the hurt crack babies

            flocked into stillnesses that surround the obituary cities;

no,

it was the aches of the eighth notes and wishes pasteled in moonlight; 

it was all those years and first flirts ago.

It was the two tongue kissing

            until their hearts were crushed dry, their underwear wet;

it was go-man hormones stabbing you in overdrive;
 

it was worn skeletal vessels sailing slowly up the wooded coast,

            where wither and stand the dark discarded things of teachers;

it was "Where the hell have you been!" and "Get in right now!";

it was the tentacles of teenagers roaming the pubic hair

            in a phone booth or on a back seat with the top tipsily taken off,     

and the boobs fondled into nipples and hard-ons,

            and candied neck bites and rumors pinched into stunned stories

            taking off like rockets or the blue jeans of lovers.         

                        Daddy warm will show you how to wait. He sows the hardly-

help-me into ashes.

Throw hate want into the sea.

                                                ***

            What have you to say? But you want to say it in spirit language,

            the ancient language of alps and love, the village language

                        of touch and longing.

The frost will cover the grass then.

The raking time will start and end.

In November will come the first snows,

and the cold stars will shine

onto the leaves turning their backs to them at last.

                                                             ***

May all your lines break true

all best,

 S.D. Lishan