Grocery Lists & Poetry Snippets

I’m not a natural poetry writer. I don’t refer to myself as a poet. I enjoy writing poetry, but I often read other writers who seem to come so naturally to imagery, who filter feeling into concrete words with such care, and I know that I have a long way to go with this craft.

That said, I do have a process. Usually my brain latches on to a small turn of phrase (the latest in my phone are ‘there’s a rhythm to forgetting’, ‘toy soldier in the roomba’, & ‘aposematism’), usually I am somewhere completely unsuited to engaging in poetic navel-gazing, so I type it into my phone notes quickly (along with ‘6 bell peppers’, ‘make vet appointment for thyroid labs’ and ‘bank- quarters’) and proceed to whatever playdate/errand/dinner plans I had going on.

Then I poke at them some more whenever I have time, like when I should be sleeping or when my son should not be napping.

I fall in love with the first version I write. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I drink tea very smugly. I rush to whatever I’m late to, but with the confidence that I have created something that is worthy of my pride.

This is where I stop. I hide the file. I edit those poems that just aren’t working, and will probably never work, because writing from the perspective of a kitchen table to explore the law of entropy is both dull and pretentious. I plod away at the midpoint of a second draft of a YA novel because I’ve come this far, but there’s so much fucked pacing that it gives me a migraine fixing.

Alternatively, I send out my genius poems and they all come back rejected, and I read them and go “Ohhhhh, right” and fix them up enough that they might publish somewhere, someday. Or, worse, a publication actually takes them, and I watch it post and wish I could replace it with the better version in my head.

Can you tell I just wrote seven poems? Two of them actually good? See me only sending them to one publication before reminding myself that first (and second) drafts always suck?

Here’s another resolution for me going into 2020 — no more sending out first drafts! I should probably apply that to this blog, but then I’d never get anything posted 🙂

2019

It’s been a year.

I started writing when most authors begin — as soon as I could hold a pencil. And then I stopped as many stop — because I had a family, a job, a diabetic dog… because I had responsibilities, and that YA space opera novel that I wasn’t even skilled enough to be writing in the first place was cutting into my sleepless nights with a newborn.

So I stopped. And then my father died. And I didn’t write about him, but I didn’t not write about him. I wrote fragments of thoughts on diner napkins, kept them on my phone along with the grocery lists.

I still didn’t have time for novels, but I began to have time for images, and those images began to connect, and then I had lumps of messy thoughts and pictures and snapshots of sensory memories.

They weren’t good enough to publish in 2018, but I began to try. I submitted six times, and I was accepted once, by a small three line poetry publication. They gave me hope and five dollars.

And then, in 2019, I started medicating my ADHD. I sought out critique partners. I learned how to sculpt poems, and how to remove their scaffolding. My first acceptance I’m proud of was in 2019, from Riggwelter, of “Pandora’s Closing Boxes and She’s Leaving Them on the Backroads”.

It’s messy and flawed and capitalized on every line like it’s crafted in the 1800s, but the imagery in the first section is some of the best I’ve done so far. It’s a benchmark for improvement.

In 2019 I submitted 47 times and was rejected the majority of the time. Rejection should feel disheartening, but so many of my 36 rejections were kind and helpful. It was a sign my work wasn’t good enough yet, so I worked harder, and sometimes it was a sign I had submitted to the wrong magazine, and instead of being upset I wasted their time, some editors actually suggested other magazines to try instead.

The poetry community is amazing.

Next year, I wanted to try for 100 rejections, or put together a chapbook, but to be honest I’m struggling with unmedicated ADHD at the moment. So I’m going to be kind to myself in the new year, and write what I can, and we’ll see where that takes me.

I hope you’re being kind to yourself, too, whoever you might be.

Happy New Year (if this is the way you measure your time, it’s all so arbitrary, isn’t it?).

-Jen