Jeannine Atkins

I’m off today to see old friends, meet new ones, and put faces to people I’ve met online at the NESCBWI http://www.nescbwi.org/ conference in Nashua. The Saturday program is full, but there are spaces for Sunday, when I’ll be leading a workshop on writing poetry that draws from history. I’m excited1

Yesterday my dear friend Margaret told me she’d been waiting to see a poem or two of mine online. So, deep breath, here goes. This is one I wrote while working on Borrowed Names, which will come out from Holt next year.

The Biographer Becomes a Poet

The biographer sidesteps through library stacks,
drawn to the dustiest books. She craves pages that crackle
and spill old secrets. Can she gossip on church steps?
Smell pine branches in a forest? Tiptoe into a bedroom
and dab a finger into hand lotion?
Taste the brittle crusts of toast left on a blue plate,
pineapple juice, vanity cakes and green pumpkin pie,
baguettes with cheese or gooseberry jam?
Quietly, she examines the texture of split seconds
then stretches her legs like a gymnast to leap across years.
Facts shift as they enter particular ears, eyes,
the valves and chambers of a heart.

When no one is watching, the biographer turns a corner,
changes her clothes, though invisibility is her favorite costume.
Quietly as night slips into morning,
she examines life’s broken pieces like jewels,
holds up shards to lamps until they turn into antique maps.
The poet steels up her nerves to speak for another
who did not leave words as precise as she would wish.
She invites whimsy, with her folded wings and crazy hats,
then, instants later, shoves her toward the exit.
She fumbles through mistaken identities, skirts past the obvious,
rakes the shapes of faces from heaps of old leaves.
Cards flap on the table as she gambles
trespasses, begs forgiveness
for failing at the impossible: truth.

--Jeannine Atkins

To read more poetry and about poetry, visit the roundup of today’s posts at Lisa Schellman’s blog: http://lisachellman.com/blog

While preparing my collection of poems about three mothers and their daughters for copy editing, my editor sent an email suggesting that rather than three separate timelines, we use one big timeline, and she sent a mockup. The idea sounded good in theory; part of the book's premise is to show both how different and parallel the lives were during a historical period. But the timeline just didn’t look good in my eyes, and, trying to sleep that night, I realized why. The tiny accounts of major events looked too thin when put together. Old sentences rubbed against new ones, which made everything look slightly different. Each event needed a bit more bulk or texture to hold its own when more were put together.

So I spent the day revising the timeline. The dates stayed the same, of course, but I worked on new wording to show slightly more distinctions, without adding too many words – it is just a timeline! Now I’m happy, and I’ll probably never read a timeline quite the same way.

Maybe this is a new level of nerdiness, but I get to exist in a bigger world as the lovely Kerry Madden, mountainmist who can break your heart in two with her novels, blog entries, or essays, honored me with the Premio Dardos Award. This award acknowledges blogs that have cultural, ethical, literary and personal values. Which would describe about everyone’s blog I read, but hey, thanks, Kerry!

And tomorrow I’m looking forward to revising something without a date in every sentence.

I enjoyed spending the last two months of my writing time revising close to a hundred poems. This week I can write an email, attach the revised collection, and hit that button called: send. Even with these pleasures, I felt excited to get out a white and empty piece of paper today and to start a sentence from scratch.

Soon I’ll open a manilla folder with revisions of revisions, but first I want to take my character and her situation and see what I can do without peeking at last year’s work. Maybe something new will happen. Of course it will. So for a while I’ll move slowly forward, knowing there are blanks to be filled, and some ways to fill them in the folder I stashed out of temptation’s way in another room. (You can see laziness helps in this strategy). I want to move ahead as well as I can, them compare drafts, adding and cutting from the one that came before.

This fit the mood of the day, when the fall colors were the kind that we in New England get through maybe 360 or so others to enjoy. Lists were put aside. I headed to the woods with just one dog, the good one, Parker, who comes when called, at least most of the time, and keeps by me if I want to stop. Which I did. I brought an empty notebook and a pen and camera. I was looking all along, but these things told me now and then to stop. There’s nothing like foliage to remind you to seize the day. Except, perhaps a dog, for whom every walk is as good as the last and better than the next. And my mind wandered.







Lots of milkweed fluff here: hoping to tempt Loree to western Mass. next year, since where there's this much milkweed, there are monarch butterflies.

I spent most of yesterday on the porch with my grumpy typist, glad for her company though she’s rather stern and like me she… oh, yeah, she is me. After a few weeks of dreamy if dedicated mulling, then a while with an elbows-on-the-table editor, it’s time to tidy up. I do get a bit annoyed when the typist decides she needs to get creative or edit. Did I request a secretary with an opinion? She types a bit, then her fingers stop and she mutters: oh, no way will you get away with that.

I want to kick her off the porch. Can’t someone please invite her over for a glass of lemonade or wine? But I give in. She’s got her points, and they’re fairly small things, fixable enough so that I got a decent draft of the first section, which I’m handing to the editor in the house today. It will cycle a while with the dreamer, then back to the editor, and to the slitty-eyed typist.

Thanks again to those who cheered my method of revising my poetry collection by starting fresh on blank paper before looking at the old version. Last week I felt I’d written enough new – thirty-five pages -- and opened up the earlier draft. I’d remembered, and believe I deepened and broadened central images, but I found that some sequences and shapes were slightly different from what I remembered, and I’m playing with those. Working without looking at the page, but remembering what I could after more than half a year away, gave me new ideas for the flow of events which would follow closest to the subjects’ hearts. Having good poems from the past and good recent poems, stanzas, or lines gives me freedom to choose the best, and I’ve cut some of what I liked before.

I found a few phrass I’d kept because I loved the sound and mystery. But they didn’t quite fit. Now, gone.

A few lines clunked or needed a bit more mystery, and I’ve since nudged them around corners, away from the bright light, to let shadows do their work.

Mostly I’m having fun, but sometimes the anxious writer worms in among the dreamer, editor, and typist. She’s all for being friendly with scissors, but she wants to know: Am I cutting too much?
-- Take a breath. You have copies.
-- Is what I’m adding really any good? No one else has seen it. Am I wrecking something that was good enough before?
--Take a breath, You can begin again.

Some of this angst is about the sadness of getting close to being done, and I remind myself, you are not done-done. This is a good draft, but it’s still a draft. And don’t forget: being finished has its pleasures, too! Meanwhile, I’ll take some breaks. A sad hydrangea by the porch is waiting for a hole. And later today I’m going with my friend Ellen to see American Teen.

Last month I got an editorial letter about my collection of poems called Gallery, though not for long. I squinted when I opened the letter, skimming past compliments, tactfully phrased caveats, and incisive questions. I squinted to keep out what might sting –phew, nothing awful -- thinking yes, she’s right, yes, that can go.. oh how sweet of her to say that.. and yes, I think I can answer these questions with some hard and some dreamy thinking. Then I slipped the letter back in the envelope, waiting to read it again after I tackled the work already brewing in my mind.

Most of my August writing time was spent on the porch, dreaming up ways to close gaps, smooth edges, and extend images I thought had run their course. Blue light, doors, particular scientifically verifiable butterflies, a fire in a prairie kitchen, green felt over a desk, a silver looking glass. I peeled or cracked open some images a bit more and the poems get stronger. I accumulated about thirty pages as I tossed forth ideas, then pulled them back in for a closer look. The pattern is: daydream and critique, daydream and critique. I wrote many messy things and cleaned up after myself, both the slacker and the mom who tells her to get in gear.

After about two weeks of mostly mulling, I read the letter with eyes wide open and worked some more. Two days ago, I copied the editor’s suggestions and questions onto the thirty new pages I’ve written. Good question are a kind of grace, a nudge when you’re ready to dive. Did I do what she suggested? Are there still holes? Can an image I used at the beginning of the series come in at the end, adding a new echo? I’m daydreaming yet again and crossing out what’s overwritten. I like that slashing motion on the paper, the clean look it leaves.

Ahead of me is to actually open the manuscript I sent to the editor in winter and haven’t looked at since. I’m hoping much of what I wrote will find a place, though I know there will be more slashing and moving and adding, and soon I’ll have to stop squinting at the calendar, stop pretending that August may never end and let go of the spaciousness that illusion gives me. I have classes to prepare for. I like time to be big, not do that marching on thing. But I can still pretend that any afternoon, this lovely one now, will never end. Look, play, dream, where can this image go now?

As the dogs barked madly at the UPS truck rumbling up the hill, I didn't pay much attention. I thought my daughter had ordered another book about the Tudors or maybe the sandals she'd been talking about. It was a while before I went to the door and picked up the slight but padded envelope with those black bleary marks that look like something's run over it. My heart beat harder at the address. I just got a contract from Henry Holt for my first collection of verse, biographical poems about Marie Curie, Madam Walker, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (there is a connection) and their daughters.

I'm thrilled -- of course! I got the call on a dismal gray day, changing everything, but wanted the contract before I announced. We do get superstitious in this business, don't we? Or maybe anxious. Or both.

All the great selections made by ALA in January, where poetry was prized, nudged up my hope for these and other poems now being written and submitted. Do I still get to grumble? Oh you know I will. Grumbling may be part of the path onto the next plateau, and besides, the book won’t see print until spring 2010, in time for women’s history month and poetry month. That’s a lot of life and more writing to move through. But at the moment I’m excited. And I hope all of you waiting, hard-working creators get a call and that UPS truck (or a similar one) soon. I wish someone could spin me around with my finger pointing and I could say, "Your turn!"