Poetry

As I write this, I am eating breakfast and hoping it will take only another hour to write this post and get the car packed, the garbage tossed, the dishwasher emptied and reloaded...etc, so I can head out to pick up Robin and point the car north to Ellison Bay and The Clearing for Poetry Camp. (We'll drop Jed, who's been here for two weeks at the UW Memorial Union to catch the bus to O'Hare.)

But when the message is posted, tomorrow, I will be trying to write poems, along with our Poetry Camp participants. Robin and I do the exercises--in fact the last poems I wrote, none of them worth even revising, were last year's exercises. I haven't written poetry in a year; haven't even wanted to.

The last good poems I wrote, collected in a manuscript, "Limited Warranty," have spent the past year or more trying to get published, to no avail. One or two have made it into journals, but the rest just collect rejections--one in the past week from a press that specifically wanted poems about illness. It's been, to say the least, discouraging.

I have an idea of why no one wants to publish these poems, most of which I wrote in a rush in the months after I learned that my cancer spread. People's reactions to any writing--fiction, nonfiction, poetry--is based largely on their ability or desire to identify with the subject, or with a character. For example, a woman who has chosen to stay with her husband rather than pursue a true(r) love may be blown away by the currently popular novel, Loving Frank. Mamie, Frank Lloyd Wright's second wife and the protagonist of the novel, represents the life not chosen--wild, romantic, risky.... A reader who hasn't had an affair, or hasn't considered leaving her husband and children in pursuit of true love, may find the novel a good read, but nothing special.

And most people really resist identifying with someone who's destined to die, and soon. No one wants to confront their own mortality, in poetry or anyplace else. So some editors tell me they find my poems "very moving" and "fine writing" -- but they're not interested in publishing what they, or their readers, may perceive as a downer. (And one manuscript screener, very young by the look of her handwriting and the tenor of her comment, wrote "Thank you for giving poetic voice to your experience," which I have a hard time accepting as anything other than thinly-veiled disdain .)

So, since my subject is often death, and what everyone from Oprah to journal editors and poetry contest judges prefer is recovery, I feel as though writing and sending out poems is a colossal waste of time. Better to write the blog, which is there for the people who know me, and are therefore interested, or who find their way to the writing through the magic of the internet.

Where would I be without cyberspace?

And now, I'd better get to the dishwasher!