pen ink river

I decided to hunker down and send work out this morning. The current issue of Poets and Writers has quite the laundry list of contests—seems the fall is a big time for such literary events. So I've spent the better part of the past four hours sifting through my work and bundling what I hope is good-enough stuff —along with the required reading fees—into manila envelopes, figuring out the postage that will get them where they are going, first class.

As often happens after I have done this, I feel absolutely enervated by the experience. Full of doubt about my seriousness, the quality of my work. Disgusted that the world of contests and competition has to be the way the world of literature and getting published works in this 21st century US. Drained by the thought of all those submissions out there, the piles of paper, the reading eyes of strangers going through them, the first cuts, and then—in who knows what decision-making process—finalist selections to be made. So many voices, so many people writing, increasingly few people reading: I know I have to stop when I start thinking like that.

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Listening to the new Bob, Modern Times, as my backdrop soundtrack:

I let my cats run my life, refuse to move them even when my neck hurts and my legs get a cramp. I hide my handbags in a clever sauna benchmark. I lived in a church, slept in a bed next to an oil furnace. I seized opportunity, fled fancy for a state of imagined grace. I opened my eyes and the river was rising. I emptied my veins and the river dried up. I sent my shrieks to the heavens, high no higher and when no one heard, swallowed them whole again. I danced on tiptoes, tapped my way to a smooth wooden shelf. I combed my hair until the curls re-arranged themselves and straightened out. I clasped a baby not sure where to put my hands—beneath his head?

I taught myself to wake, no alarm clock, middle of the night, and scribble a record of my dreams. I ran in circles until I was dizzy crazy panting and the only thing left to do was pull my knees to my chest, fetal position.

I stared into the shimmer, Venezia ponte, calle, canal. Dragged my self from New York City, late afternoon of September 10, 2001. Escape from the heat, the muggy, the miserablenss of the difficult personality of my only child, my son. Drove into suicidal thunder, trucker-eclipsing rain and that was preferable. At the time, yes, that was. When the 17th street levee in New Orleans breached, the other heart inside me broke.

Bob is right, the world has gone berserk. For now, I sit here, cricket-accompaniment, fancying I'm exempt.

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I can't believe I forgot to note on my writing blog that two of my poems will be appearing in Margie: The American Journal of Poetry this fall. "The Weight of Too Much" and "Your Going Away Party at the Hotel Dread" were both semi-finalists for the Marjorie J. Wilson Award for 2006 judged by Molly Peacock. The winner is Jill Drumm for her excellent poem, "Just Like You Had Flown Away" ironically also about a suicide.

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...or rather not winning a contest. This one Speakeasy, judged by Jane Hirshfield who says this about Rebecca Aronson the winner: “What I admire about these poems is the quiet clarity of both their vision and their writing, and the precision of compassionate presentation. These poems observe and note down with a musical and mental calligraphy subtly yet distinctively their own. They do not insist or demand, only offer, yet the pressure of the imprinting image leaves its mark."

Make me want to read her poems. After I surrender the self-doubt and deflation that come every time another one of these crossed the electronic or mailbox threshold. It's all subjective, I tell myself. There is room for many, multiple voices. The "not good enough" has to turn into "keep trying." If, as Wendell Berry says in his essay "Damage" the work of writing is what we do, how we live, that there is no separation between the work and the life.

"If I live in my subject, then writing about it cannot 'free' me of it or 'get it out of my system.' When I am finished writing, I can only return to what I have been writing about."

Accept loss forever. Acceptance is all.

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