Category Archives: 30 Poems in November

What’s In a Name

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Juliet might have said, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but in the writing world titles matter.

Yet, up to now, I’ve been pretty blasé with my titles. Sometimes I can come up with a good title that adds some extra layers or a bit of wit, but when I can’t do that easily I often resort to something that’s succinct and just descriptive enough without giving away the store. And even then, I haven’t spent as much time as I might on a line of prose or poetry to make sure I’ve gotten exactly the words I want.

Maybe this is because I’m not that much of a title-reader. I often jump right to the first line to see if that draws me in.

But I’ve recently learned that if you send a poetry or short-story manuscript, editors will make snap judgments on the titles in your Table of Contents before they read a word of your prose. It’s a marketing world out there, and much as I might hate that, titles can be another form of clickbait. So, as I’m slogging through revisions for 30 Poems in November, I’m giving a bit more attention to titles and changing more of them than I usually do.

Poem #1: Becoming is now Evolution. Poem #5: The Answer is now Chasing Asclepias. Poem #13: Characteristics of Life is now Impossible Hope. Poem #27: In This Letter… is now In This Bottled Letter Bobbing in the Sea… And Poem #17: Family History is now Stick Figures on the Fascist Horizon.

I did have a few poems whose initial titles I liked as is: Van Gogh and Power Outages; Seeking the Moon; Fathers, Plants, Birds; I Am More than Seeds; and What Keeps Me Sane During Insane Times. As well as one I can’t take credit for because it was given in the prompt: Poem Set in the Present Moment Featuring My Mother’s Voice. 

Most of the rest of my 30 Poems in November titles are okay, but definitely on the mediocre side of okay. Hopefully I’ll be able to come up with a few more improvements–and I’ll make that a point for any I’m serious about and might want to put in a manuscript.

As for the rest, I hope there are other people like me out there who ignore the titles and jump right into the words.

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Spiders and Rocks and Poems, Oh My!

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Once again, I’ve signed up to write 30 Poems in November to benefit the Center for New Americans, which provides English classes and many other types of advocacy for immigrants here in western Mass. And once again, as October draws to a close, I’m feeling that trepidation of adding one more item to my to-do list, wondering how I’m ever going to churn out 30 poems in a month–even poems that are unfinished and far less than stellar.

It hasn’t helped that my writing life has slowed to a crawl. Paperwork related to my father-in-law’s death, last minute election volunteering, putting the garden to bed, health issues with relatives, the Jewish holidays, my grandchild’s birthday, editing deadlines, and a flurry of visits with friends and family have made it hard to get to my desk as often and regularly as I’d like. Even this blog post–which I usually aim for mid-week–is late. (I just got a warning post from SubStack, letting me know that I had only two more days to fulfill my pledge of blogging weekly, LOL!)

But one of the things I love about writing 30 Poems in November is that permission to slow down. To make writing practice front and center again.

I find I’m most successful at birthing poems when I can be out of my to-do list and into what I think of as the fuzzier part of my brain. Then, I just let the pen flow and the words come–sometimes easily, and sometimes with a bit of effort, but the trick, for me, is not to try too hard to construct *a poem* as much as let myself sense what I’m sensing and free associate from there. And from that pile of words, I can often sift through and find the gems, threading my path forward.

The hardest part is to let the chaff fall away–the distractions, the judgment– and let myself fall into the “wow” of whatever is underneath all that detritus.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And lately, when I need lessons in falling into the sensual wonder of discovery, I get them from my two-year-old grandchild Manu. Recently, he’s been entranced with the abundant display of Halloween decorations in his neighborhood: the furry spiders perched on the hedges, the life-sized dragon with the blinking red eyes, the pumpkin faces, the creepy hands sticking out of the ground, the lanterns hanging from the trees.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

Every day, he asks to see the dragon and the spiders. He takes his time, exclaiming, Oh, there’s another spider! before rushing over to investigate and dig his little hands into the fur.

 

After the “spider house,” we go next door to the Japanese rock garden, where he watches the brightly colored fish, and rains handfuls of small, cool rocks, listening to the pleasing sound they make when they hit the ground.

Poems are everywhere. Hopefully, some will come to me this November.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

And yes, please consider contributing to my fundraising page for this worthy cause. No donation is too small! Many thanks. Happy Halloween and Happy November!

 

Immigrants, Centos, and Celebrations

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Last night I read at the annual 30 Poems in November reading, an annual event where each writer who participated in the fundraiser is asked to read one poem. Meanwhile, I’ve been overwhelmed by my writing/book-marketing to-do list, at the top of which is wrestling these poems to have something to send to donors by the end of the month, and continuing to spread the word about Immigrants through my web of connected networks while taking the first dips into investigating blogs, podcasts, social media sites, etc. where I don’t have a personal connection. (NOTE: Any suggestions are welcome!!!)

Most moving at last night’s reading was hearing from three of the students at the Center for New Americans who shared heart-felt writing in both English and their native languages, as well as their deep gratitude for the hard-working teachers at CNA who are helping them build their new lives.

As the negative rhetoric around immigrants starts to build again, with Republicans in Congress demanding changes in immigration policy in exchange for aid to the Ukraine that would make it even harder for people threatened by violence to escape to the safety of our country, I’m remembering a writing workshop I co-led for women in the border camp. We introduced the beautiful picture book, Somos Como Los Nubes (We Are Like the Clouds) by Salvadoran poet, Jose Argueta, which talks about the hopes and dreams of Central American children walking thousands of miles in search of safety.

Then we asked the women to write or draw their response to the book. One woman sat and started to cry. “I can’t write,” she told me. Having heard this many times from leading writing workshops for most of my adult life, I mustered up my Spanish to give her a pep talk on writers’ block. But she wasn’t talking about writers’ block. She was talking about illiteracy. I felt so embarrassed as I asked a more fluent Spanish speaker to act as her scribe, but recognized that my embarrassment was nothing compared to hers. And when it was time for her to share, her story, like every story we heard that day about kidnapping, lost livelihoods, rape, threatened or dead children broke our hearts.

While only one of the stories in Immigrants is about the border, I wrote the book to showcase all the ways that immigrants interface in our lives. While some of the stories are more political than others, in all of them, the human story takes center stage. As I worry about all the ways the U.S. is becoming less safe, it feels like an impossible nightmare to think about leaving my home to go somewhere strange and potentially unwelcoming, especially today as the winter sun is slicing a comforting wedge of light through my large porch windows. Yet, that’s what the immigrants coming to this country did–an act of incredible bravery to leave everything you know. And that’s what people displaced in wars have to do, with no opportunity for choice.

But I didn’t read a poem about politics last night. My poem, a cento, was about loving the world despite its difficulties. A cento, which is a collage of lines from other poems, might be a bit of a cheat, but hey, when you have to write 30 poems in a month, sometimes you need to take some shortcuts. And the fun thing about this one was that I only used poems for source material from the prompts that were sent out every day to participating writers.

So next time you’re stuck, leaf through some poems and write down lines that strike you (best if you’re not sure why) and then try to meld them together. I guarantee, this will be fun, even if you’re just tasting other people’s words, whether or not you come up with a poem of your own. Here are the first few lines of my cento. Poetic sources are from Mary Oliver, Dean Young, Mahmoud Darwish, Winnie Lewis Gravitt and Richard Fox.

VOCATION

My work is loving the world.
Because of you, I’m talking to crickets, clouds.
I have a saturated meadow,
where, like plants sprouting where they don’t belong,
sorrow, grief and trouble sit like blackbirds on the fence
scanning the topography of prayer

Mindfulness and Found Poems

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We’re a week into 30 Poems in November, and I have eight poems. The days leading up to this practice (as I wrote about last week) always feel like the hardest, especially in those moments before I squeeze out the first poem and realize, hey, it isn’t so bad. I can do this. And suddenly something shifts. I enter November, a month that’s always been a downer for me due to the sudden onslaught of afternoon darkness, in a new state of mindfulness that starts to mitigate the pressure to produce. I can’t explain exactly what that is, but the practice of capturing something in a poem every day puts me in a headier zone, and I start to look at things differently. Even today, when I sat down to try to write Poem #9 and came up empty (so I started to write this blog post instead), I found myself intrigued by the leaves’ dance outside my window in that brilliant, but all-too-fleeting  sun.

Knowing that I’m impacted by Seasonal Affective Disorder raises the stakes on my personal to-do list. Not only do I have to write 30 poems in November, I have to get outside every day, targeting the time when the sun is at its strongest. This puts a crimp in my writing schedule since the morning light is the best. There’s nothing more demoralizing than watching the sun beginning to sink over horizon at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. But morning is also when my writing brain is at its best, so something has to give.

Still, outdoors is a great place to be mindful. When I’m out with my 13-month old grandchild, I try to tune in to what he might be noticing: the birds tweeting, the random ding dong of the wind-chimes, the thrill of a spread of cool garden rocks to sift through, and hold, and fling down, listening to the satisfying clink. These were some of the images that made it into my poem yesterday.

And even though I strongly recommend it, you don’t really need to go outside if that doesn’t call to you. Today, one of the prompts I received in my Zoom writing group was to use found words to create a poem. Simply open up a book and circle random words, or pick a passage and erase sections of it, creating a poem out of what’s left. Or, make a poem out of random newspaper headlines (if you can stand writing something that’s likely to be depressing). Or, as I started to do, list what you notice about your surroundings. My cat, who has taken over my yoga mat, is SO content basking in the sun. And those fuzzy empty slippers by the porch door sure look cozy.

I didn’t end up using these images this time, but I did write a found poem from a cookbook I have called Flavors of Jerusalem, which helped me process a lot of the difficult feelings I’ve had about the conflict without the need to be didactic or even mention the war. Metaphors are great in that way. I’d much rather write about cumin and paprika than airstrikes. And mindfulness is a way of thinking about what these spices evoke, and tuning in to which images: spices, cats, slippers, or whatnot, you might need to enhance the flavor of your writing.

Pressure and Practice

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From the Center for New Americans: www.cnam.org

Once again, I’m taking on the challenge of writing 30 Poems in November as a fundraiser to benefit the Center for New Americans, a wonderful organization in our community that provides English classes and other assistance for immigrants. And once again, as the calendar reels toward November 1, I’m feeling the pressure and panic. How will I ever write 30 poems in a month? How will I even write one poem? Will I ever write a poem again? Adding to the pressure, I’ve promised to share the poems with those who’ve contributed to my fundraiser (if they want them) and I feel like I need to reach some minimal standard in order to avoid total embarrassment.

So, in the last few days of October, even though I’ve had more free time than I’ll likely have in November, where I have (on top of my regular commitments) two sets of guests, a week away for a family event, and a book coming out at the end of the month, I’ve been refraining from writing poems–hoping that whatever might be simmering will build up to a boiling overflow of precious words the minute the calendar page turns. If only I weren’t such a “good girl,” I could write today, or cheat and count some of the poems I wrote earlier in October in the mix, but the beauty of this challenge for me is in the practice of sitting down every single day in November and attempting to write something I can wrestle into a “poem” that counts in the total.

Emphasized word here is not “poem” but practice.

Some of us might practice yoga, or meditation, or a musical instrument, or our dance moves. But it’s hard to think of practicing writing. Too many of us (myself included) expect that everything we write needs to have some productive purpose. And while those of us in the wonderfully supportive writing community that’s sprung up around this annual November fundraiser often remind each other that it’s “okay if the poems are bad,” this still implies a judgment of our work, which doesn’t need to be there.

We’re simply practicing.

If this year is similar to past years, it’s likely I’ll write a few poems I’m very happy with, several others that have potential, which I’ll noodle with until I either abandon them or send them out, and others that I’ll immediately file away as inactive. It doesn’t matter, I’ll be writing. And when I send November’s poetry harvest to those donors who’ve requested it, I’ll add the reminder that these are “poems-in-progress,” not finished masterpieces. A rehearsal, not a performance.

And like in music, or dance, or yoga, practicing does pay off. I’ve done this practice for seven years, which means I’ve drafted 210 poems. 47 of them, more than 20 percent, have been published, often years after I wrote them and in versions that were quite different from my initial November drafts.

If you’d like to contribute to my fundraiser, you can do so here. Or, you can sign up and do your own 30 poems this November. It’s not too late! As bonus, you get a prompt by email every day from the marvelous 30 Poems Coordinator, Sarah Sullivan–and as I stated in an earlier post, prompts can be your golden ticket to creativity. I’ve found that doing this practice in November is a great way to keep my spirits up in the encroaching late-afternoon darkness. And I promise you, your poems don’t have to be good–or bad–or anything that carries a label of judgment. They just have to be.

Confessions of a Prompt Queen

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I’m writing this post today in celebration of being featured today in Rattle Magazine’s tribute to prompt poems.

And while I’m not a fan of bragging, I can’t help being delighted to be published in such a reputable magazine that I like so much–makes it worth all the hours of submission/rejection drudgery.

One of my writing groups calls me The Submission Queen because I spend so much time trying to get my work out there and encouraging others to submit, as well. But I’d prefer to think of myself as The Prompt Queen. Truly, I don’t know where I would be in my writing life without prompts.

I’d written all through high school and in college (as an English major with a concentration in Creative Writing) and slogged my way through a couple of drafts of a novel, but I didn’t feel like I’d even begun to find my voice until my late 20s, when I took my first workshop with the late but immortal Pat Schneider of Amherst Writers & Artists. Choose an object, Pat would say as she’d lay out a bouquet of ordinary things on the coffee table: an egg beater, a hand-crocheted doily, a jar of French’s mustard, a hammer with nicks on the handle. And if you don’t know why you’re choosing it, that’s a good thing. Then write whatever this object inspires you to write. 

There was something about the freedom granted, the atmosphere in the room to say anything (or nothing–no one ever had to share their writing) that unlocked a gate in me, and in nearly everyone that took part in this process, whether we wrote about childhood memories this object evoked or sauntered off on some surrealistic language adventure where the object had, at most, a cameo role.

Pat would usually follow up her object exercise with pictures, or lines from poems, or a collection of things to smell or touch, or a meditation to bring back a memory or dream scene. It didn’t really matter what she offered. Following the prompt bypassed my inner critic’s need to write something “good.” I could simply pick up my pen and play, and with that playfulness came surprising turns of language and metaphors and scenes from my subconscious I would have never conjured up with my mind on more active patrol. So, I’ve continued to seek prompts wherever I can find them: in writing groups, in online subscriptions, or in my own collections of poems and pictures.

This doesn’t mean that all prompts work for me or that whatever I write comes out perfect and polished. I still file away a lot of this writing in the dead zone in my computer marked “Inactive.” But often I’m able to take what I wrote in a prompt and wrestle it into a poem, or flash fiction piece, or develop it further into an essay or short-story. Occasionally I’ve used prompts to enhance scenes in my novels or longer creative non-fiction projects.

And whether what I write turns into something finished or not, I have fun! And I often get to vicariously release whatever useless stressful thoughts are gnawing at me in a creative and playful way. In these dark times, there’s a lot to be said for the value of playing.

Revital Salomon, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

So, if you choose to read it, I hope you enjoy my Rattle poem (while I enjoy my 15 minutes of fame). And here’s a link to the poem (prompt) that inspired it.  And a picture of the moon, because that also could have been a prompt that inspired this poem.

And to jumpstart your own prompt process, I highly recommend Pat Schneider’s book, Writing Alone and With Others.

Autumn Leaves

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This wonderful video of Nat King Cole singing Autumn Leaves was one of the final prompts for 30 Poems in November, last week. This is one of my favorite old jazz standards, though it’s something of an ear worm. For days afterwards the song stayed in my head, especially after I found and played not just one, but two videos that adopted Autumn Leaves to different classical styles. Of course, that made me want to rush to the piano and see what I could do with Autumn Leaves, which was still an impossibility with my broken clavicle.

But yesterday the orthopedist gave me the green light to start playing again (as long as I “let pain be my guide”–a loaded statement if there ever was one.) To make sure I didn’t overdo it, I set my timer for ten minutes and made sure to keep the left hand bass-line simple–not to play it like Rachmaninoff, or even like Beethoven. There was still a lot to explore in improvising, far more than my ear dared do. I stuck with the basics, not like the walk we took today in the woods, where map-less, we ended up on a different part of the road about half a mile from the car–a fairly typical experience when the unmarked trail is just too seductive not to follow it. I’d like to do more improvisations without a map and not be so worried about where I might end up.

Autumn is brilliant in New England in October–pure eye candy, as you can see in this picture. But in November, and often in early December, as well, the prevailing theme is brown. Chilly and cold.

Yet there’s a subtle beauty to the season, we just have to take a little more time to find it. Poem #29  touched on the varying shades of November: ochre, rust, mauve, sienna, even if at times the month feels like treading shadows. Today, a foggy rain is covering the farm. The autumn leaves, all raked up, are in the shed, eventually to be mixed into the compost to nurture spring’s new growth.

 

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Reframing A Past Mess-Up–A Lesson from 30 Poems in November

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In my “music memoir” IMPERFECT PITCH, I wrote about my first (and only) piano recital when I was nine years old: the intense sense of jittery, fog-induced isolation I felt when we arrived at the recital hall, enhanced when the emcee called my name. I walked to the dark stage where the piano waited for me. The beam of spotlight arrowed straight into my eyes, and I could feel everyone in the audience watching me, judging me, as the white notes, the black notes spread like a sea of crocodiles under my fingers. My dress itched, my legs swung in the air, and I had to squirm half off the stool to reach the pedal. I played the first note, a B, which sounded totally different from the mushy B on my piano at home: too soft. I pushed down harder, but the second phrase still sounded faint, as if it were straining to push through a dark cloud. I played the next phrase, nearly banging, and then a wrong note threw me into forgetting what came next. Forgetting everything. The entire piece flatlined.

I knew I wasn’t supposed to stop, so I kept playing, making up something that was kind of like the piece, which was also cross-handed and in b minor. As I traveled an unmarked trail through the thicket of the keyboard, I felt the audience’s eyes like the eyes of wild animals in the dark, tracking me until I finally decided I’d had enough and landed on a final b minor chord. I stood up and bowed, waiting in an endless moment of stunned silence until a trickle of applause finally came like a faint drizzle, as I steeled myself to remember to walk, not run, off the stage.

On the way home, my parents talked about other things, their modus operandi. If we don’t discuss it, it didn’t happen. It was a moment of shame for disappointing them, as well as myself.

But just last Sunday, 54 years later, at a workshop for 30 Poems in November, led by the fabulous Nerissa Nields that focused on song lyrics, in my 20-minute attempt to craft yet another new set of words to Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah I had an epiphany. I could reframe this moment as one of creativity and innovation, a moment where I used my ability to improvise to turn this looming disaster into a positive experience!

Of course, in the classical world I grew up in, improvising a prescribed melody was not what we were supposed to do. The goal was to memorize a piece and play it as close as possible to what we (or, in most cases, our teachers) believed the composer intended. And there’s validity to that, but there’s also validity to being inspired by what someone else might offer and lending the best of our creative selves to join the conversation.

Anyway, here are my lyrics. I hope they inspire you!

CREATIVITY SETS US FREE
(to the tune of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah)

My fingers stumble on the keys
My face red hot, my shaky knees
The audience so silent in the dark
I can’t remember what to play
And here I am, so on display
How can I tap into my inner spark?

Motivation, innovation, improvisation, creativity sets us free

I search the crowd for a face that smiles
Not one looms out in either aisle
I’m squirming in the spotlight’s heavy glow
And then my fingers find some keys
Play random notes, but still they please
The song inside my heart begins to flow

Motivation, innovation, improvisation, creativity sets us free

So I keep pounding the walls of doubt
Dig deep to turn my insides out
De-mine polluted landscapes filled with lies
Keep taking steps to stop the shitty
Voices reeking with self-pity
Focus on what’s hidden in the skies

Innovation, improvisation, self-acceptance, creativity sets us free

Come have a cup of tea with me
We’ll show each other how to see
The inner surge that keeps us going strong
We’ll write, we’ll sing, we’ll dance, we’ll play
No one can take our voice away
We’ll codify ourselves into our songs

Innovation, improvisation, self-acceptance, creativity sets us free

 

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