Category: On Writing

Posted on

What Success Is (and What It Isn’t)

Poet Lindsey Alexander reading from Rodeo in Reverse at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Me reading at Union Ave Books in Knoxville the day Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford spoke before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I have friends who would say success is getting your first book published, preferably with a prize. Have a prize? A more prestigious prize. Have a prestigious prize? A more prestigious award. You can see how the bar moves.

To me, success is a bar that is level, clearing that bar. A bar I choose. Success to me is about setting one bar at a time, not sitting surrounded by bars.

My success is not a cage; my success is what I leap toward. The past couple weeks on my book tour, success has looked like:

  • Talking to a student about her career path after a class
  • Having someone ask to see a copy of a new poem I’d written after reading it
  • Answering some questions honestly and pithily after a reading
  • Watching Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford testify and then making it to a reading anyway
  • Having a woman at that reading tell me I’d read her favorite poem
  • Connecting with my friends
  • With my family’s help, creating a livable space in my basement (it was just junk in boxes)
  • Scheduling an oil change
  • Not picking fights with my husband
  • Making a good meal from ingredients we already had in the house
  • Making my pub day a day to bake and spend time with a friend, rather than trawl social media or plan a big party that would stress me out
  • When I completely spaced an appointment, apologizing and letting it go

My favorite quote about success is from Maya Angelou. I’ve shared it before, and I’ll share it again: “Success is liking who you are, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”

Yes, sometimes success is champagne floats. (I do recommend raspberry sorbet for that, by the way.) It’s effervescent and bubbling to the top, it’s beautiful and too sacred for Instagram. It’s holding a book in your hands, or a manuscript, or thirty drawings when you thought you couldn’t finish anything. It’s a scale progression you’ve finally nailed or transitioning between chords with ease for the first time. It’s a promotion, it’s talking to someone you don’t know at a party, it’s seeing your person succeed, it’s having dinner with your parents and realizing just then how much you love them and how much you are loved. It’s stopping to watch the butterflies on the bush you planted for them a year ago. It’s a slow dance in your dining room on a Saturday afternoon—just you.

We tend to write off our everyday successes (or I do), which makes us ill-equipped to see our big ones when they come. I’m trying to revel more in them. Especially the successes that might not look like success at all to someone else.

Sometimes success isn’t glamorous—and I don’t quite mean the hard work behind a finished product. I mean sometimes the world is ugly and success is ugly, too. Sometimes success is sharing with someone you love that you’ve been hurt. Sometimes success is warning women colleagues about your harasser when you hear he’s in their orbit. Sometimes success is having developed the tools to not have a panic attack when you hear an abuser’s name in passing. Sometimes success is faceplanting on the couch so that you don’t go out and self-destruct or self-medicate. Sometimes success is admitting to yourself that you’ve been hurt and that you didn’t deserve to be hurt; it’s letting yourself cry after years of promising yourself you wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s recognizing hurt you’ve caused and contemplating how to pay restitution. It’s laughing after all this when you accidentally break a keepsake, sweeping it up, and hoping you’ll glue it back together somehow. Sometimes success is “jumping in front of a train that was heading to where it was heading anyway.”*

In the American literary scene, we are in a season of awards and lists that people like to argue over. I understand why: They help careers, give visibility to writers, can give assurance that’s much needed when an artist feels at a breaking point, and also, most people have very little taste if left to their own devices—if something wins an award, they can feel comfortable calling it good. I’m happy for kind artists who win awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing—mostly because it’s nice when nice things happen to nice people. (And the inverse of this is also true for me—not liking when mean or cruel people or known abusers win these awards pretty much regardless of whether I like their writing.) Sometimes great works are awarded, sometimes they are passed over for lesser ones. An award doesn’t change the original quality of a work. And somehow, work keeps getting done with or without this validation.

If we come up with our own terms for success, as Dr. Angelou suggests, then it is maybe less surprising when worldly success is bestowed to those who are undeserving—the sycophants, the posers, and infinitely worse, our abusers, our nightmares, our Brett Kavanaughs—and that we must argue over who “success” is bestowed upon, whether it’s an award or an inevitability—an entitlement, and what success means. Often, success is just a word for putting bars around others, passing a bar, a baton, between only a few people. (The bars others set for us—by design or by circumstance—usually aren’t level.)

It can be painful to realize people I care about don’t share my definition of success—that a violent felony is a rite of passage, for instance, and not disqualifying, the strange idea that a personal failing should not affect a professional success. (Especially as I’m of the first Facebook generation, where we were urged not to post anything—even a questionable joke or a red Solo cup—as teenagers that might haunt us throughout our careers.)

Having a definition of success for myself doesn’t make the world more just—it doesn’t lessen my tears. It doesn’t make me a good person. (Dang it!) But it does lighten my load. It makes me accountable to myself.

How?

I like who I am, I like what I do, and I like how I do it. (And when I realize I’ve fallen short, I change what I’m doing and how I’m doing it to match the person I know I am.)

I may be wrong, but I do not think the Kavanaughs like who they are, what they do, and how they do it. (If they did, would they deny who they are, what they do, and how they do it? Do they even begin to know who they are?) This belief, this self-love, may be the only justice we get.

What is your definition of success for yourself? What is one success (of any size) you’ve had in the last week?

*What Dr. Blasey-Ford said of her reluctance to come forward sooner.

Posted on

Poems I’ve Loved: June 2018

Waterfall and pool, trances of the blast

I’ve read quite a few great poems in the past several months, but my favorite, the one that stuck to my ribs, is an oldie: “Frost at Midnight” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Read it, then come back here so we can discuss.)

I don’t think I’d ever read this poem, despite taking several classes that assigned Coleridge’s poetry in undergrad. To be honest, most of what I remember about Coleridge is that he took drugs (true?) and wrote Kubla Khan but came out of his stupor before he was able to see it through, he was William Wordsworth’s cool friend, an aphorism about words in their best order, and “the star-dogged Moon” and symbolism from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

“Frost at Midnight,” less fantastical, more domestic, is much more interesting to me now, as someone steeped much more in homelife than fantasy. This is a parenting poem, a poem that does that thing parents want and progeny dread: hoping children will live the life they were unable to. It’s a poem written from inside, by a fire, with a baby sleeping. If autobiographical, then, a stolen poem: up with the baby, Coleridge writes. It’s also a poem of the natural world, and for its time, the suburban world. The speaker laments growing up in the city and insists his child “shalt wander like a breeze / By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags / Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds … .” This is a 19th-century version a new or non-parent’s “My child won’t sit in front of a screen all day.”

Enter anxiety. The only thing stirring is a flame: “‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs / And vexes meditation with its strange / And extreme silentness.”

My reading is colored by how the poem came to me—through Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work, a memoir about the first year or so of motherhood. In it, she admits to having always loved the poem but never having noticed the baby in it. (This is a testament to the ways musical language, rhythm and rhyme, can hide meaning without a closer look. See: every pop song you sing along to until one day you realize the lyrics are awful.) After becoming a parent, she did see it. Here is some of what she has to say:

It is a poem about sitting still, about the way children act as anchors on the body and eventually the mind. … These memories arouse in [the speaker] the profoundest feelings of love for his child, as if every separation he has endured in his life can be mended by this moment of their closeness. … This love is a restitution; it is like a new place, from which the old country, the unhappy past, can safely be viewed. … Coleridge does not mention nappies, noise, bits of old food. I don’t think this is just because it’s the night shift. His poem is written in the present tense; it describes a moment, surrounded, by implication, by other moments, by noise and disarray. Perhaps moments, now, are all there is. But this is a moment to which he brings his gift, which is language, a moment in which his love finds a voice. … In this moment he experiences an elemental greatness.

As her reader, the baby is the first thing I saw, it’s where she pointed me.

Oh, but the second thing. The second thing pleases me to no end. Here it goes.

One of my favorite living poets is Mary Ruefle. A recent book of hers is Trances of the Blast. Reading the book in 2013, I kept wondering at that title.

“Trances of the blast.” Which, what does that even mean? I disliked the title but wanted not to dislike it, to know what was there.

I looked up trances, and it meant only what I thought it did: a state of being entranced, sleep-like, hypnotized. “Sleep-like states of the blast.” I know being literal doesn’t always help, but sometimes it does.

Could it mean what resounds?

Then here, 5 years after reading the Ruefle book, I came across this poem somewhere else, totally by accident, and for hours one afternoon I remained in a pleasant trance of the blast. There was the phrase in its original context, and I’m not quite sure I understand the image fully, but it was literal.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the trances of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Whether those eave-drops that have collected fall and last as long as the trances of the blast—perhaps the ripples in a puddle, perhaps the silence after the blast of a drop hitting the ground and splitting or whether they coalesce with coldness by the hand of that “secret ministry of frost” who could “… hang them up in silent icicles, / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.”

(“Quietly shining to the quiet Moon” may be one of my favorite lines in the English language. To me, Coleridge is a poet of great moons.)

The blast is maybe what happens if the eave-drops (here, actual droplets from the eave of a building) hit the puddle or the ground below. To call a single drop hitting the ground a “blast” must speak to how quiet the night must feel to this speaker, or how sensitive the speaker is, how attuned. The trance though—is it the aftermath?  The quiet after the boom? That “reflection in tranquility” business his friend Wordsworth prattled on about? In that case, this drop is a literal “spontaneous overflow.” Each poem a trance in the after-blast of a reading life or some other event? Or is it the trancelike state the speaker would be in, staring at it, all night up with the baby, unless of course, that “secret ministry of frost” uses its coldness to freeze it.

And it’s fun to think of added modern meanings: blast in all its strength, sure, but also as in an email blast. (Actually, the trancelike state after receiving email blasts makes a lot of sense.) Or better yet, having a blast, the trance we’re drawn into having fun. To blast to destroy, as with dynamite and the catatonic state that might surround it. But I’m most drawn to the sonic meaning, most likely because of a talk Ruefle gave on tone earlier this year. She talked mostly about bells, yes, bells (hell’s bells, to get specific). She quoted Basho: “Coolness / the sound of a bell / leaving the bell.” Trances of the blast.

And of course, the blast of Coleridge’s work, of the Romantics, and the trances we’ve found ourselves in since, especially as poets. Maybe it is that Ruefle’s trance is one of awe and absorption. Maybe that word, part of trance’s definition, a state of absorption is it—having fallen from the roof, a drop blasts on the ground and is ultimately absorbed.

Then the third thing, much less domestic, back to that wild world Coleridge so often seemed more entranced and absorbed by: the sublime, the otherworldly, grandiose nature. (Okay, I do remember some stuff about Coleridge.)

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind*, Suzuki Roshi offered the metaphor of a waterfall—much more dramatic than a drop or two from an eave, but, I think, related. He said that visiting Yosemite he saw a massive waterfall, and it caused him to think about how as the river the water is one whole. As it falls, it separates into groups, drops, and spray—when it is separate, set apart, we notice it, it causes feelings and appears (and even feels) different. The waterfall, he argues, is akin to individual lives. “It takes time, you know, a long time for the water finally to reach the bottom of the waterfall. And it seems to me that our human life may be like this. … Only when it is separated does it have some difficulty in falling. … Whether it is separated into drops or not, water is water. Our life and death are the same thing.” Eventually, the waterfall joins the river below, no longer separate entities, in many ways the same as it just was but now indistinguishable, less intense, less alone, a trance of a blast.

In Ruefle’s book, from the poem “Saga”:

Everything that ever happened to me
is just hanging—crushed
and sparkling—in the air,
waiting to happen to you.
Everything that ever happened to me
happened to somebody else first.
I would give you an example
but they are all invisible.
Or off gallivanting around the globe.
Not here when I need them
now that I need them
if I ever did which I doubt.
Being particular has its problems.

My final thought for now: Such joy in not understanding a thing then receiving a little understanding sideways, years later, even if incomplete (especially, maybe, then).  The initial impact, the release, the return: to more trances of the blast. (You know I couldn’t resist.)

What is a thing you read and didn’t understand, then came to understand newly a lot later? Let me know in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

*Which I just recently learned about and have yet to read. I heard this waterfall anecdote on a podcast, driving, at a time when it was helpful to me.

Posted on

Ancestors and Self-Acceptance, Honor and Joy

Forested mountains

Then in my heart I wanted to embrace
the spirit of my mother. She was dead,
and I did not know how. Three times I tried,
longing to touch her. But three times her ghost
flew from my arms, like shadows or like dreams.

—Odysseus, The Odyssey trans. Emily Wilson, Book 11, lines 204-8

I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.

—Oprah paraphasing Dr. Maya Angelou

Joy is the happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens. And, usually, we have the idea, well, when something nice happens, then I’m happy, and when something bad happens, of course I’m unhappy. Well, you can be unhappy, and yet joyful. We don’t think of that. But there is a deep inner peace and joy in the midst of sadness. If we feel our way into it, we know that.

—Brother David Steindl-Rast (in this excellent episode of On Being)

Forested mountains

The other day, driving home from work, I was listening to our local public radio’s classical hour and thinking of my grandmother. It was a beautiful blue-sky day, and on my route, when the sky is clear, you can see the mountains both ways. Around the bend and the view revealed them, in their purple-blue relief, the road peeling behind me. My grandmother loved a view. Then, on the radio, something odd happened. Listening to this show on the way home was part of an old-pat routine: instrumental music, no lyrics (except occasionally opera, in languages I do not understand) to wind down, an occasional misplaced CD and the commentator trying to think fast in that way that makes local public radio even more enjoyable.

But as I moved in my hunk of metal toward the mountains, a chorus began singing “Morning Has Broken,” a song played at my grandmother’s funeral. (She wasn’t religious, but she did like Cat Stevens.) For almost a whole minute, I could swear to you she was there. We were there together. In that moment, I felt all-the-way-full—not overwhelmed but totally at peace and totally realizing joy.

Since my grandmother passed in April, something that has dawned on me is all the amazing places I’ve been able to take her. I don’t mean physically. I never took my grandmother on a vacation; I never even took her to dinner—when we ate together, she always made the food or footed the bill. Instead, I mean that once she passed, I realized that thing people say about someone living on in the hearts and memories of those they love isn’t just a saying. It’s a truth. She died practically a shut-in, but someone who loved views. Whenever I see a beautiful view, I think of her. I’ve felt so connected to her since she’s been gone—I’ve shown her rolling vineyards, embankments, and cliffs in a country she’d never been to, hills unfurling terra cottas against greens; to a fog-dense mountaintop where the deciduous trees stand, branchless, upright; to who knows where next. I truly believe she’s seeing it too. (Every person I’ve confided this to has said they also experience some version of this, and I don’t think they’re saying it just out of niceness.)

You see, in the words of Dr. Maya Angelou, “I come as one, but I stand as 10,000.”

The more time I spend with that sentence, the more I realize it is not a sentence but a blessing.

A gift of my grandmother’s passing has been a form of self-acceptance, acknowledgment of all the places I’ve taken and am taking her, and all the places I’ve taken and am taking my younger self—not to mention the women my grandmother loved and missed. It’s easy to dismiss accomplishments, shrug them off, belittle them or one’s self for not being enough. For years, I wished I were in a different profession, something that people got more excited about when I mentioned it at parties or that proved I was a hard worker or smart or caring, or a different kind of artist—a musician, or a different type of writer—a bestseller, or even a different sort of poet—Twitter famous yet award-winning, a professor or New Yorker, a homesteader or L.A. muse, the best homemaker or a single devil-may-care gal (which, just by writing that phrase, probably means I’m not built to suit).

But someone’s got hip New Yorker covered. And someone else has got single Nashville singer-songwriter covered. And yet another person has West Coast Instagram personality covered. Idol is covered (largely by pop icons and serial killers). “Famous poets” is covered: mostly by dead people. I’ve got to cover Whatever This Is, and, like an actor worthy of her salt, discover something new in the role every day that I can.

In accepting myself and my lot, I honor my grandmother and the places I take her. I would never demean her intentionally, or my younger self, and so I should not diminish myself because I carry them.

They see what I see. And art is an attention to, a way of seeing, and so they help me make my art.

I used to think honoring someone meant writing a poem about them, making something for them, dedicating something to them, or doing what they’d have me do. I’m beginning to realize (my grandmother is teaching me and I’m teaching myself) that honoring myself is honoring everyone I carry with me, everyone who carried me until I got here, where I could walk so far, so high, I could sit inside a cloud and remember.

Who do you choose to honor and how will you honor them today? Leave a comment below and let me know.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my thoughts on creative living and staving off impostor syndrome, plus updates on my book Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

I Prefer My Poets Dead: Why ‘Making It New,’ or Anything New, Is So Dang Hard

The movie you watch in English class when you have a sub is not called ‘Living Poets Society.’

Virginia Woolf on why we prefer our poets dead:

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why the poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry; and it is because of this difficulty that one cannot remember more than two consecutive lines of any good modern poet.

—A Room of One’s Own, p. 14

Stan, from Mad Men:

Everything good I have is from a long time ago.

When an earnest thread on Facebook emerged asking for good work by contemporary poets, I responded by paraphrasing the Woolf quote above. When the friend who started it asked me for recommendations, I came up with a list of favorites and highlighted what might be a best fit, only to have A Random Dude respond that Bob Dylan and Tom Waits were better than any contemporary “self-identified” poets. (Please insert eyeroll here and also a note that I am pretty sure Bob Dylan would lose it if he could no longer walk out to the “Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll” introduction you know he approved.) This annoyed me, but also gave me a good laugh, because clearly Random Dude, according to Woolf, who has earned more of my trust, might say he just longs for how Dylan and Waits were able to make him feel a long time ago.

With respect to Dylan and Waits, many of us can only keep our dead poets alive in our hearts. It’s what brings us such magical imaginings as Mary Ruefle’s “My Emily Dickinson.” It’s why some poets (asininely) opine about dying young, like Keats, or part of why Plath skyrocketed to fame quicker than some of her contemporaries. (Dead longer.) And it’s why those of us poets who still count ourselves among the living are awful cagey about the subject. “We’re working here!”: a rough translation of so many Twitter posts and essays on the non-death of poetry. The dead poets are rich compost people can use to make their daily lives flower and give fruit; us living sods’ works are the pile of eggshells, mown grass, and aromatic vegetables left in the back of the fridge too long, waiting to help. One’s a tool; one’s an eyesore that will someday be a tool. (And if you love Dylan, which, ugh, I do, you’ll know his “folk process” often involves churning up the words of obscure dead poets in his own lyrics, only to be called a poet while he’s living.)

Maybe it’s unfair that readers ask death of us to consider our poems as ones that have “passed the test of time.” But so it is. It’s nice to be a martyr.

As a modern (lowercase m) poet myself, I can even feel this way about my own work. Longing for old writing styles of when I felt or perceived differently—almost as if by another person. Often, poets at readings will say something like, “Many poets will tell you their new work is their favorite; I am no exception.” I guess I am an exception. Which I’m recognizing especially now as I begin work that is not for my debut collection, Rodeo in Reverse. I’m suspicious of new work; sure, loveable maybe, the sounds it makes especially, but I long to do work as good as my old work—and sometimes worry I won’t.

Yes, I worry I peaked at 17 when I wrote a sexy villanelle about hooking up in a car that inverted lines about volume, wheel, up, down; the lines were short—two or three words apiece maybe? My teacher, a favorite, not an effusive praiser, read it out loud to the junior class, which made me elated—my poem was good and maybe the junior class would not think I was a virgin. To me, it’d felt important not to seem like a virgin but also to try and be one then.

Been chasing the ghost of that poem, which is lost to floppy disk and trash heap, for years since.

And if nostalgic for my own past work, one might imagine the case for others’.

Maybe 5 years ago I read an essay on the internet that argued every book you read before age 25 affects you more deeply than those that come after. This is an unfortunate view. I’m not far enough out from 25 to a- or disa-gree, but I wonder how many people are able to read many books after age 25, by which time career and family and responsibilities are likely to be settling in.

I count myself among the lucky few and look at each blank page, each new title askance—in suspicion and flirtation. Who knows? This might be the one I’m looking for. If not, it still does its work in the compost pile.

Besides, dead poets have everything going for them but life, which is a great advantage. Whatever you make today will be old in no time.

Support a living poet! If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

Elegy for 2017: Right Poem, Right Time

My view during this instance of right poem, right time, and elegy

On my last day off, I was doing one of my favorite things: reflecting on the past year and planning for the coming one — essentially, writing. (In the third grade I created homework for myself. This is who I am.) The radio was on — some background music, the tea was hot, a chance of snow that never came; it was a woo-woo person’s cozy dream. I sat with my head tilted like a confused dog and stared; wrote and wrote. The radio program changed to Fresh Air, and I turned the sound down so I could remain focused. Yet.

I didn’t recognize the name of the guest, Patrick Phillips, immediately, but I did recognize the book he’d written, Blood at the Root. Terry Gross and Phillips talked about Forsyth County, Georgia, its history of racist violence, and Phillips’ upbringing there. I drifted in and out of the conversation, in and out of my writing. Specifically, I was reflecting on my father’s heart attack and open heart surgery.

Gross typically lands transitions (I take notes as someone who’s not), but in a bit of a stretch, in what felt like out of nowhere, she asked Phillips about his father’s open heart surgery. My head shot up. What?

She asked him to read the poem he wrote about it.

I hadn’t made the connection he was the poet Patrick Phillips. I had never heard this poem. This episode was a re-run, and what an odd coincidence it aired on the same day, at the same moment, I had been writing about my own father.

Writing is powerful in that it makes us pay attention: Phillips’ poem changed me, if only for an afternoon; my own writing put me in the place (literally) to hear his poem.

I sat at the dining room table, staring into the radio’s yellow fog — ON — and the feelings came.

This is the first sentence from the poem he read, “Elegy outside the ICU,” as it appears in his collection Elegy for a Broken Machine:

They came into
this cold white room
and shaved his chest

then made a little
purple line of dashes
down his sternum,

which the surgeon,
when she came in,
cut along, as students

took turns cranking
a tiny metal jig
that split his ribs

just enough for them
to fish the heart out —
lungs inflating

and the dark blood
circulating through
these hulking beige machines

as for the second time
since dawn they skirted
the ruined arteries

with a long blue length
of vein that someone
had unlaced from his leg.

To me, this poem shows strength in its willingness to observe, its looking at and saying what is. Like most courageous acts, this poem is evidence of vulnerability. (What he does with syntax is worth another post for another day.)

I did not witness any of this in my family’s experience. I saw my dad the night before his surgery and hours after — waiting, not watching, being my chief role.

*

In my family, someone cracking her knuckles who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone crying who must be stopped is an emergency. Someone missing an earring is an emergency. Painting a room only hours before guests arrive is an emergency. An actual emergency, however, is anything but.

Shortly after I found out my dad was having a “heart event” (his words), I learned from my sister that he had talked with her to make sure she could stop by and feed the dog dinner. In the same way in which he might if he were working late. It wasn’t until they told him he would need a procedure that he decided to alert us.

Certain members of my family would tell you this sort of stoicism is a show of strength; they loathe criers and huggers and direct conversation, and after three years of art school, I can’t blame them. But often stoicism isn’t stoic — a radical acceptance of reality — at all; instead, it feels like denial, the opposite of strength. Our weaknesses may be what allow us to weather a crisis. Weakness (if unconfessed) may be one sort of salvation.

Once doctors determined my dad would need open heart surgery, my sister leveled with me that it would not be overreacting to come home.

There, the situation was far from humorless: For instance, the night before the surgery, my dad had a second “heart event” much more painful than the first. (Not the funny part, I’m getting there.) As the nurse rushed to her computer coordinating with a doctor, checking whatever nurses check in these situations, my dad’s roommate kept calling for the nurse — not his nurse, using the call button, the nurse trying to stop my dad’s “heart event.” She told him time again to use his call button. Finally, peeved, she said, “What do you want?”

“Could you, uh, get me a Heath bar and some apple juice?”

*

After my dad’s surgery, it took me a while before I wanted to walk into the ICU to see him. My mom had warned us: He won’t look like himself. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to. (He was unable to speak, and for the most part, he was asleep anyway.) When I walked into the ICU, I was nervous. He would be in Room 1. Room 1 was just inside the automatic doors. I looked to my right. There, my father, hair shocked gray, face gray-brown, swaddled in a bud of blue blankets. My eyes opened wide and welled with tears, made hopeless eye contact with the nurse, who whispered, “Your dad’s in Room 7.”

Oh.

The sight of my dad was still humbling — intubated, like a submarine full of portholes, swimming through what? the man who had carried me until I was too big to carry lying drugged on a bed, waiting to make certain small gestures as a sign of maturation, of health. But after Room 1, what a relief. He was the basic peach of many white people — not his colors, tanned leather and red, but a color of the living.

*

By the time my dad was moved out of ICU, my immediate family was exhausted and on each other’s nerves. One edgy, irritable, unable to stifle any comment or let any errant noise go; one traditional and a bit of a martyr; one cruel because she is the most fragile of us all. At one point I used pantomimes for eating cheeseburgers when my dad tried to blame my mom for his dietary habits. We are not people whose great strength reveals itself in times of trouble. But we are people who show up for one another. We sit in waiting rooms and endure rude doctors and frantically demand nurses switching shifts give showers pre-op and work our ways through mazes to find bathrooms and then attempt to relay directions. We drink and eat like gluttons because we are gluttons and know we will not eat like this again for a long time. Food has been there for us. For me, so has poetry. My dad’s life restored to us, given, gifted, like this poem was to me, except I would have never known the difference if the poem hadn’t arrived in my little house. This revelation, a paper dressing gown, leaves much to be desired, some embarrassment, more questions than answers — EKG, meter, heart, syntax, morphine, mystery. Enjambment for now instead of end-stop.

Phillips’ elegy for a father still living is really an elegy for a moment, a certain understanding of self and relation to mortality and parents. An elegy more like a notch nicked into a tree trunk or a glance at a watch — realization at the time it is: incredible and brutal and here already. It’s usually our understanding of time, our marking of it, that adds meaning and heartache. But an elegy isn’t just mourning loss, it’s freeing space for what is and what is to come. One year passes and another, like a lizard tail ripped off and growing back, comes to take its place. One view of the self passes and another, like skin over a scab, grows over. I love my family newly now; I love writing newly, too; love a never-ending autotomy; the elegy for what once was opens, like a cavity in a chest, like ribs, “just enough … to fish the heart out.”

You can listen to the full episode of Fresh Air with Patrick Phillips here.

If you enjoyed this post, sign up for my monthly newsletter, and get my editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, favorite poems, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse. Pre-order it here.

Posted on

Poems I’ve Loved This Month: November 2017

Tulip poplar in full fall color: golden

“The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson.

“One way to put off loneliness is to interpose God.”

Corey Van Landingham posted this poem on Facebook. Like everyone else, I’m a fan of Anne Carson’s work — except I hadn’t read this one. It’s long and worth being long. I am glad I did not read it before writing my first book or else there would have been no first book to write.

In it, Carson’s speaker weaves together a biography of Emily Bronte, a trip to the moors with her elderly mother, and the time spent in heartbreak. To oversimplify, this is a break up poem. It’s also an ars poetica. Why do some people get hurt? Why do some people observe? Why become an artist? Why become angry?

Or, as the poem puts it: “What is prior? // What is love? / My questions were not original. / Nor did I answer them.”

And it’s these questions, unoriginal but essential, that map themselves onto the moors for the speaker, the curtains her mother wishes she’d draw, the “glimpses… of soul” the speaker comes to call “Nudes,” the idea of Bronte’s idea of God, the characters of Wuthering Heights, sexuality.

It was about this time
I began telling Dr. Haw

about the Nudes. She said,
When you see these horrible images why do you stay with them?
Why keep watching? Why not

go away? I was amazed.
Go away where? I said.
This still seems to me a good question.

…

Why keep watching?
Some people watch, that’s all I can say.
There is nowhere else to go,

no ledge to climb up to.
Perhaps I can explain this to her if I wait for the right moment,
as with a very difficult sister.

‘On that mind time and experience alone could work:
to the influence of other intellects it was not amenable,’
wrote Charlotte of Emily.

The word “question” is repeated 12 times in the poem; the word “Nude” 25 times. There are 54 question marks. No answers in the poem, but glimpses of soul; the images those soul-pieces project themselves onto.

And in all of this, the self-indictment, the hurt feelings, the cold confusion of loving and no longer being loved. The line Corey quoted:

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is / to watch the year repeat its days.

Seriously. This one. Read it.

(Also Wuthering Heights is one of my favorite books and one of the few novels I’ve re-read.)

From “Oil” by Fatimah Asghar.*

We got sent home early
& no one knew why. I think we

are at war! I yelled to my sister
knapsacks ringing

against our backs. I copy
-catted from Frances

who whispered it when the teachers
got silent. Can’t blame

me for taking a good idea.
I collect words where I find them.

Read this poem on the Poetry website to see it in its true form (which I was unable to achieve here), or in the print edition (November issue). I think print actually enhances it a bit — all the white space, a full page, around each part presented in its glorious quiet, the threat and suffocation of the quiet, the whispering “bombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbombbomb” into sheets as a child whose “people might / be Afghani” post-9/11. This narrative poem, about identity formation, agency, and the collection of words, what one person can accumulate over a lifetime or in mere weeks, how the speaker scavenges for words, “know[s] that word’s not meant for [them] but [they] collect words / where [they] find them.”

This poem is a lesson in narrative poetry — how to hook with clarity and concision — and is the reason her book If They Come for Us is one I’m excited to read in 2018.

“Rastros Corporales: Blood on Canvas: Ana Mendieta: 1982″ by Leslie Sainz^.

… it is near-game, this tracking of pulse and surplus/
when your country says give, you drain despite the clots.

I actually read this poem first a few months ago and have returned several times since: it holds so many mysteries, reading it is intoxicating. Poem as lure, me as fish. I felt not smart enough to talk about it then, and probably am not now, but if I wait until I am, I’ll never tell you about it, which would be a major loss for you.

Another ars poetica. This ekphrastic poem ironically reminds me of a watercolor because of its form — impressionistic, unassuming: a prose poem with line breaks hatched in, as one might write in a notebook. (See the art it takes as its subject here.) But the form is interesting because of the tension it creates with its subject: both the Ana Mendieta artifact (paintings made in a performance art piece in which slid her forearms down blank paper) from “Body Tracks” and the images the speaker shares.

As the title suggests, the corporal is central here — even the dice are “tooth-shaped.” But the speaker floats from body to body, an imagination more than a self (or the imagination is the self, the body is what’s imagined and experienced), the “you” she’s speaking to slippery — a beloved but what kind of beloved — the kind you’d paint a canvas with blood for, the kind who would bleed themselves for country “despite the clots” — a country, a mother, a lover, the reader? Why choose?

The genius of the poem — much of it in the syntax, the accumulation of meaning or allowance for different readings through commas and breaks — is how specific it is while letting in so many alternate realities — the speaker and the “you” transmorph into “dehydrated eels,” “polizia nacional rolling tooth-shaped dice,” from experience into image into sound.

In the past few years, poems in columns that can be read in different order for different meaning have come into vogue (and some are truly great), but here readers get many of these benefits in a sleeker shell; there is constraint and restraint, but it’s masked in a certain ease. More tension. Despite the slipperiness of image, of language, this speaker doesn’t let anything slip, even “blood on canvas” looks effortless without knowing the performance, the life, the politics that put it there. Factoring in not only the painting but Mendieta’s life as an artist, her death (a suicide, an accident, or a murder by her then-boyfriend and fellow artist), and the feminist response to all of the above, and “Body Tracks” and blood imbue meaning.

^I already told you all Leslie Sainz is a genius and saint. I meant it. Read her work now and say you knew it when.

“Woo Woo Roll Deep” by Angel Nafis.

… You can’t tell us
shit. We always down for the miracle.
The regular-as-fuck dawn making brand new
the farm of our hearts.

This poem is a joy. Reading it is a joy, it displays joy, howling it aloud is a joy. Calling or IMing your girlfriends about it is a joy. (And as Toi Derricotte says, “Joy is an act of resistance.”) Here, I mean joy in its fullest sense: that belly laugh heartbreak, the tattoo of dead lovers, the combination of unabashed support, astonishment, touch, and eyeroll that is female friendship. In the world of this poem, the police still kill citizens, but “A week after the 314th police killing this / year, Jenna mixes up a tincture…” Everyone reads their Chani Nicholas* horoscope and collates her affirmations with their upcoming periods. Walls are painted “miss-my-daddy red.” There’s tea and crystals and hopes for solutions and superstition and no guilt. As a proud-of-herself weirdo, I love other proud-of-themselves weirdos, of which this speaker is certainly one. I bow to the light in this poem. Woo woo.

*If you are not already, you really should probably be reading your horoscope from Chani Nicholas.

If you like this, sign up for my monthly newsletter to get my favorite poems I’ve read, editing tips, thoughts on the creative process, and updates on my book, Rodeo in Reverse (Hub City Press, 2018).

Posted on

Title Changes and Impostor Syndrome

Concrete donkey statue behind a wire fence.

Hi. My name is Lindsey Alexander, and I’m here today to talk about impostor syndrome.

In August, I found out that my manuscript, after seven years of work (and rejection), will be published with Hub City Press as a New Southern Voices Prize winner.

Once the prosecco wore off, I dove into revisions. I reworked, rewrote, and tinkered with poems, based on the suggestions of my editor, Leslie Sainz, who is brilliant and who should also be sainted. (Follow her so you can read her poems first.) The biggest suggestion was to change the title. Leslie sent 10 new potential titles, and then explained several that piqued my interest.

After much fretting, I sent back the manuscript revised, retaining the original title, which included the word “impostor,” and sounded like it belonged in a different genre. I hit send with a smug, comfortable satisfaction.

My publisher responded to (kindly) explain its reasoning for the change, in the way one might try to talk down a hissing cat from a tree, and at that moment I knew I had to kiss it goodbye. I emailed them that I understood and was ready to “come to Jesus.” And then I sent an immediate follow-up email to clarify, the hallmark of true confidence and sanity.

Meanwhile, instead of acknowledging to myself that I’d been wrong in trying to keep the title, I worked at convincing myself I’d been right. (As Kathryn Schulz writes, being wrong feels a lot like being right.) It took a while (and this in the Bible Belt) to find Jesus. I went for a long walk, fuming, certain my dog, who is a food mercenary, was the only one I could trust. It did not initially occur to me that (duh) my publisher wanted my book to sell well (likely sales matter more to them than to me). It did not initially occur to me that a team of smart people who were dedicating hours of their lives to sharing my work and who had read my book could understand its context, especially in the market, better than I did. No. I had selected the hill I was going to die on: Having the word “impostor” by my name on a cover. This is how overidentified I was with seeing myself as a phony. (I swear I must’ve read Catcher in the Rye too early in life.)

After an afternoon sulking, I was assuaged by a well-reasoned email from a friend, pointing out some of these fallacies. Oh, right, I had been granted a wonderful team, publication with a press I admired, and a big opportunity, and I wasn’t letting myself feel the glory of that gift.

I created word lists and theme lists and began creating titles I’m sure a bot could’ve come up with based on keywords from the manuscript. I conducted straw polls. Finally, a friend (fantastic writer Natalie van Hoose) with fresh eyes landed on Rodeo in Reverse. There it was: it had been between the manuscript and the word list and Leslie’s suggestions the whole time. I loved it. My publisher did too.

*

The only editorial work left was responding to a few new comments on the manuscript in a final round of revisions. A couple weeks later and I was receiving emails—you know the ones: polite, asking how a project was going, the kind from a kind person after you’ve missed or pushed a deadline.

Thing is: I was pretty much finished with revisions on the manuscript and had been for several days. At this point, I had a couple (just two) lingering small edits (whether to cut or retain a line, whether to add or leave out a short stanza), and in both cases I knew what I’d end up doing. I was creating false dilemmas for myself.

Chief among: searching phrases from my book to be sure they weren’t plagiarized. Taking small phrases and whole sentences and running them through Google, with quotes. If it didn’t return results, I’d look it up without quotes. If it did return a result—even a coincidental match on a random blog, I’d spin out, having proven to myself I was a fraud, not a real writer, much less a poet.

Which phrases was I searching? Any phrase I thought was good.

Why did I do this?

I felt uncomfortable. I mistook that discomfort for guilt, for having done something wrong, one of the grave sins of writing being plagiarism.

*

After some consideration, I recognized it for what it was: impostor syndrome.

I couldn’t be convinced I came up with anything good; therefore, if I like part of the book, it must be from somewhere, and someone, else.

I had insisted (gritting my teeth) on holding onto a title that my publisher felt it would be best to change. It had the word “impostor” in it.

Luckily, I’ve spent the last few months reading all the Brené Brown. (I don’t mean that as Internet speak. I mean I read all of it.) So I knew that “shame thrives in secret.” I needed to name it (impostor syndrome: done) and tell someone.

Being a good Millennial, I chose to share on Instagram Stories (which is private and only my really good friends and the occasional bored scroller would see), then after 24 hours it would disappear. Oddly, this medium mirrored the anxiety I was feeling: once named and shared, my shame (in this instance) no longer made sense.

Many friends reached out with an encouraging word—one even to say she’d had the same issue when she had a story accepted for publication at a Fancy Magazine.

Reading a section from Rising Strong helped me understand why I battle impostor syndrome in the first place: I have trouble accepting gifts—from others, from the universe. Like many women, it’s hard for me to accept even a compliment without reversing it thoughtlessly or mentioning where I got my dress for how cheap. A gift that’s a talent, unearned, an inkling honed into something bigger than the self—which I believe each one of us has—well, that’s nearly impossible to accept.

The thing about gratitude is, it isn’t hard to feel grateful once you allow yourself to feel joy, to accept goodness (including your own). But that means actually that gratitude is tough to access until it isn’t. Denying gifts isn’t a higher plane of maturity or understanding—it’s the road to ruin. Being kind to myself is oddly brave for me.

*

The title of my debut book, a poetry collection, is Rodeo in Reverse. I get to work with a caring, badass team of women to make it. I’m a writer and no more or less of an impostor than anyone else, which is to say, I’m human.

I wake every morning trying to lean into and learn from joy, to feel my gratitude. This means I am working on things like “being a hugger” and doing things like tearing up when I see my husband reading or thinking of how good my friends are. I say “I love you” to friends and acquaintances who are used to me not saying anything at all, or maybe “yeah, man.” I go to parks and sing with strangers at jams. (Okay, I did this once.) I thank the roof above my head for holding steady. I thank my stars for bringing me here. It’s the hardest and most embarrassing work I’ve done, and I don’t know where it will lead, but I trust it.

*

Have you ever experienced impostor syndrome? When? How were you able to turn the corner?

*

Want to stay in touch? Sign up for my newsletter (only one or two emails a month) at the bottom of this page.

Posted on

Poems I’ve Loved This Month: September 2017

Photo of the back of a cream-colored brick building with a gray door. The diagonal wrought-iron (cream, rusting) of the fire escape and balcony extend as diagonal shadows on the wall.

After working on my own manuscript in what seemed like in total solitude the past several years, I realize I need to get back to reading more poems. Now that my book’s getting published, the whir of excitement was quickly followed by the clunk of recognition: It’s time to return to reading new poetry. I miss it. I don’t recognize it (in a nice way). I’m starting this monthly post in an effort to read more and think more deeply about new poems, and also to share ones that I find especially resonant.

Selection from Rosalie Moffett’s Nervous System

I’ve enjoyed collecting the bits and pieces of this longer work as I’ve seen it spin out and out over the past year or so (more?) in journals. This piece features a spider dream that the speaker interprets to being about her mother and her mother’s health. As the mother’s health deteriorates, doesn’t some part of the speaker?

         … the idea of a spider the brain holds

like a lit match, a little request
for venom, a little
like my mother: her blue arm, her self

which held my self, an idea
of me, until I was real.

Facticity holds this poem (and its speaker) together: spider facts, Google-able dream interpretation facts, dog agility facts. It moves between a tender honesty, a searching frankness, a speaker who wants to be told how it really is while maybe avoiding how it really is if how it really is is too bad. I love this poem, in all its pieces, especially this one. (Also, I cannot get the lineation right on this (Coding!), so please do read the whole poem as it’s written.)

Read the rest here at Beloit Poetry Journal.

If you like it, buy her collection June in Eden.

*Rosi is a friend, but isn’t it great when you can admire a friend’s work?

Allison C. Rollins’ “Word of Mouth”

This floored me. I read it in the print issue on a Friday night after seeing someone on Twitter hyping it. (See? Twitter is not a total waste.) It tells the history of America and a life through teeth, beginning with George Washington’s (the facts about his false teeth are incredible), and takes us (where else?) but to memory and to the library, where the speaker tracks changes and thinks of faces as abacuses, of her mother and grandmother, of the future through the past. This poem sews together beauty and ugliness or rather, just refuses to separate them, which is one of the best (truest) things maybe an artist can do. “The darkening of fractures is rather curious,” the speaker says, and I’m still thinking about the fractures in my understanding of history and the fractures in this poem—the two places where it stops to begin a new section.

… The forgetting makes the
present tense possible. Memory is the gravity
of the mind. All the icebergs have started to
melt, milky objects left hanging by a
string, the doorknobs means to an end.

Read the rest at Poetry.

Erika Sanchez’s “Saudade”

For my own learning purposes, I’m especially interested (though haven’t yet parsed out) how this poem builds and moves. This sensual stunner begins in ordinary (if synesthetic) moments in “the republic of flowers”—rain sounds, hanging clothes—and ends with this marvel of language and texture and image:

… sealed honey never spoils
won’t crystallize I saw myself snapping
a swan’s neck I needed to air out
my eyes the droplets on a spiderweb
and the grace they held who gave me
permission to be this person to drag
my misfortune on this leash made of gold

I first read the word saudade, a Portuguese word without a direct translation into English, in a note almost 10 years ago. (It actually appears a few times in my forthcoming book.) Since, I’ve been drawn to it wherever I hear or see it.

Read the rest at Poets.org.

Lessons on Expulsion is headed to my mailbox stat. Take my money.

Katie Condon’s “On the Seventh Day God Says: What You’ve Got Is Virgin Charm & a Knife in Your Pocket.”

When I read this poem I laughed, gasped, and sighed. It was a really weird noise. Appropriate, as this is a poem of great weirdness. The speaker has the kind of intimacy with God that allows for irreverence, but still, at the end of the day, if only half-heartedly, haphazardly, but maybe with a little wishing, still telling God what you want—maybe just in case. Haphazardly because, well, God never gets it right. Or God does but a little too. This poem, maybe also like “Saudade,” and maybe not, is about the nostalgia for something that never was or at least that won’t be again. How nostalgia (both looking forward and back, as Rollins’ poem reminds me “Memory is about the future, not the past“) is inherently sensual, corporeal, and a little lonely.

God says, Thou shalt not kill.
& I’m like, But what about with my eyes.

I never asked for the capacity to love
ugly things, but here I am.
…
I say, I like my men smooth & far away, reticent
as a bookshelf.

& God butts in: I can do that for you.

Read all of this poem at BOAAT.

*Katie is also a friend. Here, too, grateful to be in the position of admiring a friend’s work.

Selection from Wendell Berry’s “Prayers and Sayings of the Mad Farmer”

Here’s one of my great-aunt’s favorite poems and now one of mine. The last year has been a bit rough, and this is one that I might as well get tattooed on the back of my eyelids, except it’s small enough to learn by heart quickly and big enough to fill it.

When I rise up
let me rise up joyful
like a bird.

When I fall
let me fall without regret
like a leaf.

Posted on

Good Me, Bad Me, and Interview with The Mondegreen

Mondegreen literary journal logo

One of my favorite online magazines is The Mondegreen, named for “a kind of misunderstanding: you mishear a word or phrase in a way that gives it a different meaning.” Their content is lively, fun, weird. Yes!

It’s nice to have the chance to have some of my favorite writing–a series of poems about the adventures of Good Me and Bad Me–up at one of my favorite sites. They also interviewed* me.

In this same issue the featured fictioneer, W. Todd Kaneko, writes about Rockgod and Metalhead, who form a kind of rad Midwestern Good Me–Bad Me duo.

*If one is interviewed on record, one most certainly confesses her dying love of the Louisville Cardinals. That information will surely be disseminated weeks later during the height of the team’s prostitution-ring imbroglio. Who can tell when one will earn the designation super fan?

Posted on

On Dolly the Dog, Liv Tyler, Shibboleths, & My Favorite Part of Speech

Photo of editor dog

When I’m feeling resistant to Strunk & White and other style shibboleths, I love to remember Schoolhouse Rock. During the American Copy Editors Society’s May tweetchat, we gathered to discuss “what to sweat.” This discussion led to the pet peeves of others by which we cannot abide. (Refusing to end a sentence with a preposition? Check.)

I forgot to say: I am fighting the good fight against generations of writers who disparage the adverb.

Adverbs can be slashed (visibly wounded on many cutting room floors) for brevity’s sake. Adverbs can be very, very bad. How bad? Extremely bad. The stuff of blockbuster film trailers.

But adverbs are the Liv Tyler of language. You can’t put them in everything. Apply sparingly. But when perfectly cast: Well, what can be added to That Thing You Do or Arwen in the LOTR movie series or Corey Mason in Empire Records? They are the strange part that makes the whole better, richer, somehow more credible.

Adverbs, when applied well, are evidence of a language full of quirks, of a writer’s great (or not-so-great) diction. An adverb is a tell.

I’d like to stand up proudly for the pulverized little guy who often sports an -ly or dark in cognito bug-eye sunglasses. Many afternoons I take a dance break with my dog and sing the song above: “Dolly, Dolly, Dolly, get your adverbs here.” Dolly the dog also enjoys the occasional adverb, as it is frequently accompanied with a treat. (What? She is my workplace proximity acquaintance.)

Dolly the Dog: My relatively new workplace proximity acquaintance. No, I don't normally work from bed. But Dolly does.
Dolly the Dog: My relatively new workplace proximity acquaintance. No, I don’t normally work from bed. But Dolly does.