Writing Above Water

by Jeremy Enecio

There is nothing beautiful about a body struggling to keep from drowning: the panic that seizes the lungs, the hands striving to become oars, the legs kicking, kicking, and always – the head desperate for air, desperate to stay above water.

Similarly, few of us write well when panic, stress, and overwhelming pressure become a part of our writing process. When I’m writing under the gun or writing because “I feel like I should be writing” I quickly begin to feel like waves are lapping away at my words. And as Hart Crane said, “The bottom of the sea is cruel.”

With that in mind, I’ve been working on alleviating the stress and guilt I often carry with me from “the real world” into “the writer’s world.” If I am really having trouble writing a poem, I try to keep at it for 10 more minutes. If the words still feel like they’re lost in translation, I try writing an essay or a short story (or even a blog post). Sometimes a line in a poem won’t come together because the words don’t belong in a poem. So, switch gears but keep writing. If that doesn’t work, find a book and read with writing in mind.

Last night, I was a bit stumped about a poem I was working on so I took a break and read an essay by Margaret Atwood. It was a short piece about the experience of writing Oryx & Crake. While I read her essay, I tried to make a mental note of what Atwood was doing to keep me interested and how I can carry that into my own work.

The truth is that writing is a difficult challenge (make no mistake about it), but it can and should also be a pleasure. I didn’t decide to become a writer so that I could torture myself endlessly and then pass my torture on to readers.

Reading With Intent

Toni Morrison has said that she started reading very different once she started writing for a living. Books she already loved revealed themselves in a different way when she read them with a writer’s eye. I think it’s important to share what I’m reading because the act of grappling with other people’s art is a crucial part of my writing process. To understand the books I read and return to is to understand (in part) what I seek to accomplish in my own work. So, here are some of the books I’ve been reading in the last few weeks.

Writing With Intent by Margaret Atwood

Unlocking the Mysteries of Birth & Death by Daisaku Ikeda

The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 by Elizabeth Bishop

The Complete Poems of Hart Crane

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

A Hunger by Lucie Brock-Broido

I’m Reading Tonight

by James Nizam

I will be reading some of my poetry tonight at the GLBT Center in Chelsea (208 West 13th Street New York, NY 10011) along with Yvette Christiansë and David Eye. The reading will take place at 6pm and a $10 donation to the Center is your admission ticket. Come see this Southern Boy and two other great poets and support a cause.

Go here for more information.

MTV True Life: I’m Addicted to Couplets

by Brian Cooper

“To be unaware of one’s form is to live a death.”  – Ralph Ellison

* * *

A friend recently pointed out to me that I love to write in couplets. Flipping through the pages of my manuscript, I see that almost half of the poems are in fact written in couplets. Uh oh.

I think I like writing in couplets because it gives the poem a kind of neatness. Also, and this may be cheesy, but I like writing in couplets when the poem is about two people or two elements. One poem of mine in which the couplet form works well is about the first I went skinny dipping. The way I looked above and below water is an important part of the poem and couplets help draw attention to the water’s reflection.

On the other hand, I overuse couplets because I’ve gotten too comfortable.  So, here’s a bit of advice to myself: a manuscript full of poems written in couplets is like a wardrobe full of nothing but black cardigans. Sure, black cardigans are classy, but who would want to wear them everyday? With that in mind, I’m going through my poems and rethinking their form.

I’m trying to make better use of white space on the page, experiment with line breaks, and – at the very least – justify the form I’ve chosen. The point is not to eliminate couplets entirely. The point is realize that I’m making a choice when I write a poem in a certain form and I need to decide if that choice is in the poem’s best interest.

Said the Poet to the Parrot

by Emma Hack

A week ago, I met with my thesis advisor (and mentor) Rigoberto Gonzalez to talk about the manuscript I’m working on. He said that the work was solid and headed in the right direction, but urged me to keep writing “the kind of poems only Saeed can write.” That encouragement has been stuck in my head like a song ever since and I love it. Whenever I sit down to write, I ask myself “What is the poem that only I can write? What does that kind of poem look, sound, and feel like? How is that poem made?”

Rigoberto’s point, I think, is that sometimes we write great poems that for better or worse could have been written by someone else. I know that I often parrot writers I admire. Everyone does this. It helps us understand how more experienced writers do what they do so well. Now, though, I’m ready to recognize and act upon the fact that every once and a while, I bring a poem into this world that is the absolute accumulation of my thoughts and experiences.

That’s fierce. Again and again, that’s the goal.

After Life There Must Be Life.

by Ryan Browning

* Brian Turner, an excellent poet and Iraq War veteran, talks about the process of writing poems while in a combat zone. I find his thoughts on the integrity of lines in poems to be especially helpful.

* If you’re absolutely sick of Winter, feel free to commiserate with Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz by reading her poem “Choke”.

* As you might know, I’m really interested in discussions about class and poetry, Sina Queryas appears to be mulling this subject over as well.

*Designer Alexander McQueen has committed suicide and so I offer a poem “After the Grand Perhaps” by Lucie Brock Broido which concludes: “After life there must be life.”

I Didn’t Mean to Write About My Father

by Erwin Olaf

Yesterday I sat down to write a blog post about Black History Month. A few sentences in, I realized I was writing something entirely different: a personal essay about my father. I haven’t seen my father in ten years and though I have finally gotten to the point where I can talk about his absence with a relative (if forced) calm in my voice, writing about him is still very difficult.

The memory of his face is just as clear as the memory of his absence. If I sit down with the intention to write a poem or essay about him, I write in the abstract. I condemn him to allegory. I describe him with a fable about two blackbirds and a burning sun. I write about someone else’s father. Anyone but him. Any words but words I heard him say.

As such, I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t want to spend several hours re-living what I’ve lost: the way he held the acoustic guitar, the shafts of sunlight cutting through the room, the venom in my voice when I said, “I hate when you do that. I hate when you play that guitar.” Writing about that afternoon upset the sediment I thought had long since settled. Before I wrote that essay yesterday, I couldn’t quite remember the tone of his voice. Now I can. I can hear notes in the song he was playing that I probably didn’t even notice at the time.

All of this is to say: I only have so much control over my words. When I sit down to write, I think I have a plan, a subject matter, a strategy and I usually do. Other times, the sentences take me somewhere I didn’t plan on going. But who am I to doubt what I have written? Who am I to say that’s not what I meant to write?

What It Means To Be Wilde

by Olivier Valsecchi

1. On Monday, February 8 at 6pm, I will walk into the Cornelia Street Cafe and compliment Alex Dimitrov on his newest pair of skinny jeans and the amazing poem that appears in the most recent issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review. I will ask Jason Schneiderman how his dissertation is going and try my best to keep up with the conversation. I will give Tom Healy a huge hug and explain why I think of him whenever I hear “Never Too Much” by Luther Vandross. I will make my way to Angelo Nikolopoulos and start quoting lines from Steel Magnolias because he was with me when I saw that movie for the first time (admittedly, a few weeks ago). I will try to be calm when I introduce myself to Mark Doty. I am so damn happy to be a part of the Wilde Boys Queer Poetry Salon and if you’re there on Monday, you will see why.

2. When I was 10 years old, I tied scarves around my wrists and did my version of the Dance of the Seven Veils for my aunt. We had just finished watching Cecille B. Demille’s “King of Kings” and the only part of the movie that caught my attention and kept it was Salome dancing in exchange for a man’s head on a platter. At the time, I didn’t know that Oscar Wilde made up the “Dance of the Seven Veils” to suit the play he was writing about Salome. Nonetheless, if Aunt Carolyn was still alive, she would tell you that at the age of 10, I did a dance that would make Salome put away her veils for good.

3. Alex Dimitrov founded the Wilde Boys Salon at the beginning of last Summer. At the Triangle Publishing Awards Reception, he walked up to me and said ” You remind me of Grace Jones. My name is Alex.” He then told me about his dream to have a salon where young gay poets from all over the City could get together and talk about poetics. I thought his dream was cute, but still just a dream. A month later, I was sitting in Mark Bibbins’s loft with 15 other Wilde Boys.

4. Being Wilde means that you crack a joke about Alex’s size 0 jeans and then launch into a fierce debate over Reginald Shepherd’s thoughts on identity politics. (What makes a poem gay? Is a poem gay because the poet is gay? Is a poem gay because of its content? Is gay even a necessary word? What does queer mean?) Being Wilde means that I can sit in Angelo’s apartment listening to him read a Ginsberg poem before we head over to Eastern Bloc for drinks.

5. I’m Wilde because I’m grateful to have friends who know what it means to do the Dance of the Seven Veils for people you love. I’m Wilde because I’m a gay poet who isn’t satisfied with simply being a gay poet. I’m Wilde because I know what it means to be young, queer, and lonely as well as what it means to be fierce, united, and in the company of fiercely beautiful minds.

What Are You Going To Wear?

Stop what you’re doing right now & read “Civil Rights Cold Case #62 (Or The Yellow Dress” by Lolita Stewart-White.

Your favorite yellow dress is what you wore the night
before you died. The one with the hand-stitched,
blood-red roses, passed on to you by Miss Cora Lee…

After you read that brilliant poem, I would suggest you follow it up with two brilliant essays. The first of which is “Going Cyborg” by poet Jillian Weise.

On my birthday a few years ago, I taught class, called the guy I was sleeping with and then became a cyborg. I didn’t know I was becoming a cyborg. I thought I was just getting a new leg. I’ve had 12 artificial legs in my life. The prosthetist said this leg would think 1,000 times per second about the ground. My parents said if I wanted the new leg, I better act fast. I was being released from their insurance. The guy I was sleeping with, Henry, said the new leg sounded hot, like something out of “Blade Runner.” But I had never seen “Blade Runner.”

The second essay is “Listen” by Ada Limon.

Sometime around 2AM in the canyon dark, no moon, the house wailed open with a guttural yell that shook me awake on the couch. In an instant I knew what it was, that painful loud bellow that echoes around the quiet night like a siren long after the fire’s gone out. For years, this is how my stepfather, B, awakes from a bad dream. A violent yell that makes my heart beat so fast that I can’t sleep for hours afterwards. When I was a kid, I remember him coming into my room to make sure I knew he was okay. “It was just a dream,” he would tell me, “go back to sleep.” He never talked about the nightmares, but we knew what they were about.

And if you love creative nonfiction as much as I do, might I suggest you read Zeitoun by Dave Eggers?

Okay. Talk to you later.

Blank Sheets of Paper

by Brad Harris

When I asked about her writing habits, Patricia Smith told me that she writes ten pages a day, no matter what. Rigoberto Gonzalez has talked about waking up at 4am so that he has time to write before his work day begins. And James Goodman, who I’m studying creative nonfiction with this semester, has said that he’s so terrified of not being able to write that he writes incessantly to ward off that fear.

I have to be honest. I’m not sure why I keep writing. Why do I continue to write these poems about a place that doesn’t exist and never will? Why do I continue to write personal essays about the things that happen between people in dark rooms? I don’t know the answers to those questions and perhaps, I don’t want to know.

All I can say is that this weekend, I worked (and worked and worked) on another poem. When I was tired of thinking about that poem, I took a break and worked on a personal essay. Somehow the poem and the essay spoke to each other in ways that only I could hear. Writing the essay motivated me to go back to writing the poem and vice versa.

By the end of the weekend, I had broken through the fear that has been at my heels for almost all of January, the fear that my writing was forgettable and a waste of time. This weekend was about writing my way towards a kind of hope, a kind of confidence.

It takes a kind of courage to look at a blank sheet of paper and see what isn’t there yet.