My Shadow

[Janet Navarro]

Fireside poets---i'm just getting onto this group and have been discovering wonderful magic. Here is a poem I've been working on. I offer it up for your comments.


My Shadow

Slow burn on the cusp
of a middle age
warms finger tips--
icy from standing out
in the mist
to watch the next generations play soccer
because our knees hurt
and the wind must
have knocked out
our heat.

Thus, gathered on sidelines
we cover
scrapes with gauze
meant to mend
gashes in the earth
and
build playgrounds
with wood intended for
a bridge to
Africa--
stand in still lines
at the amusement park
where whirling rides
take us nowhere
but kept us
tethered to a new status
quo
that hangs around our necks
like a noose
so we can't
dance
the waltzes
of our mothers’ dreams
even though we
were destined
to do more than twirl in place.

Yet somewhere Between the Idea
an amber light glows where
poems greet crimson-tinged strangers
and move us along
gentler passages
through scratches on
albums
or songs once
buried beneath ash
from the last campfire
where I might
have left my shadow.


jn

[Skip Zilla]

Hi Janet,

I like very much what you're trying to do in this poem. Would it discourage you, as it sometimes does me, to hear someone else's suggestions on how to improve a poem? After all expressing oneself in poetic metaphors and sounds is hardly a public, consensual matter! If what I write below crosses a boundary that might be seen by you as dividing meddling from helpfulness, then say so, and I'll remove it.

I don't want to get down to every detail, just one question and a sample of a revised first section.

You've titled the poem, "My Shadow," and conclude it poignantly in the first person singular. Throughout most of the poem, you speak for "our" and "we" in a collective (experiential) sense. My question is: Shouldn't you keep it, either singularly "my," or commonly "our" experience throughout?

Rather than point to phrasing that is a little more complicated at times than it need be, please allow me to be presumptuous to a fault by editing your first section as follows:

On the cusp of middle age
a slow burn
keeps our finger tips
from numbing in the icy wind
blowing the heat out of us.
Standing on the sidelines,
stiffened knees hurting,
we watch our daughters
running the field
kicking forward the ball
we did.

I greatly admire your courage to create openly before us all. Even more important, what you've composed here has a personal meaning directly experienced by you--i.e., it's not about some made-up affect about something that has no relation to what's real in your own experience and active in your own imagination. It takes a lot of self-confidence to risk going public. Like you, I'm an amateur; consequently, I just write without a self-consciousness about always other-presenting perfectly. This poetry stuff is play first, and serious work second. Let's keep playing and enjoy the sharing of our experiences and imaginations poetically!

[Janet Navarro]

Hey Skip,
Thanks for the response and the ideas. I don't mind at all. I tend to take or or not take suggestions made as they fit my own sense of authorship and my own sense of the, shall we say, poetic. I write because I have to, not necessarily because I'm good at it. I had hoped to use this group as a kind of online writing workshop but, wasn't sure of the goals of the group, beyond sharing. So, I'm glad you jumped in and welcome others to do the same. When I know that others wish the same, I'll try to add comments from that stance.

If this conversation is a "workshop" it might help to know that my current goal is to create visual images that can stand in place of words. What I mean by that is -- I'm trying not to state the obvious (i.e., loneliness, longing, love, etc.,) using the words themselves, but rather asking myself, what would, for example, loneliness look like, what does it sound like, what does it smell like, etc., and then building a poem around that image.

For example -- here's a poem where what I'm trying to do is capture the images of life in 1967, playing dress up, and riding bikes, and messing around in a time of total innocence and joy -- while at the same time DDT was being spewed out over us to kill bugs and mothers were taking DES in order to conceive, while at the same time rendering their daughters unable to do the same. Now, I could just write that and use words like innocence, and betrayal, and tragedy -- and make it all flow together beautifully and smooth. But, instead I used images from the time, laid out sort of choppy, because that's how images and memories come and then tried to show (rather than tell) the story of the betrayal. See if you think it works.


1967

Whispers of time
squeeze through
A buttonhole on my cotton blouse
Stained from torn elbow scabs and Tang
Slip sliding back – toward a summer well played
--parched pavement
--the slurping of cherry-red popsicles
Strings of muggy days when sweat pearls appeared
on our fathers’ foreheads
Just past the cool showers meant to restore their humanity.

Strawberry sunburned and blonde
we flap-snapped the
Ace of diamonds; Queen of spades; Jack of
destiny so carefully clothes pinned to the
spokes of our one-speeds.
Peddling a whirlwind – molten metal fast
sucking in the yellowish mist of the whirring fogger
leaving dead mosquitoes in its wake.

Clutching our mothers’ purses
In old lace slips and crimped up cocktail dresses
draped over our
Flat chests and bones
We clip clomp in high heels
Passing through shimmery asphalt mirages
Our giggles filling in the silence that will become her womb.


The down side of this style I'm working on, however, is that the images can be too obtuse and readers can get lost -- even though I know what I'm saying. So, in the "my Shadow" poem, which is at an early draft stage, in addition to the comments you already made, I wonder, what ideas do the images bring to mind for you? What is the overall feeling you get when you read the poem? What images stand out for you? Does a main idea or ideas jump out?

Thanks again, Skip for the time and the feedback.
I'll now return the favor by going over to the poem you added a day or two ago.

Janet

[Skip Zilla]

Thanks so much for your reply, Janet.

I was afraid, not knowing in advance how you might respond to my "criticizing" your art, that you might quit a conversation about personal creativity before it even got started. I'm glad you want to keep talking and that you hope others will join in the conversation.

I wrote my first poem on December twenty-fifth, two-thousand-four. And for several months after, woke early each morning with poetic "wordings"--not vague notions--already in mind, ready to be scribbled quickly (before forgotten) and without regard for keeping those scribbles aligned and within the narrow space of college-ruled lines on a blank page of a spiral notebook. When two boyhood friends with whom I had been communicating via email and telephone--one now a Northwestern professor emeritus, the other a New York/Hollywood art director/film-maker--first learned that I was unexplainably now "scribbling" and were curious to know more about what was happening to me, I started to type my morning musings directly into emails, skipping the manuscripting altogether, and sent them to the both of them. Gary--the art director--began sending me back digital images of photos of this paintings and collages, calling our exchange a "poems for art" program; Bernie--the now retired dean of music--called what I sent him "nuts," which I heartily agreed to be correct in all its intended and unintended connotations. And, although not as uncontrollably, I've been scribbling in notebooks and typing into my laptop since.

I don't "construct" poetry; it happens. Mostly on waking in the morning. If I wait overnight for my sleeping mind to gather its senses about something and let what it's gathered come out unrefined when I wake, then it happens in a way that seems as natural as childbirth. When I'm really amazed by what I discover comes out on its own, I may spend time working it into more artful form, right then, later in the day, or even days or weeks later, but I'm generally at the mercy of what is literally out of my control.

I became so curious about what was so strangely happening to me, that I started to look for descriptions of it by real artists and found most described, somewhere in their personal journals/writings, the experience as I discovered it. The most interesting thing I learned was that I had thought of myself as a "constructor" of things all my life and thought that was how to be "creative;" but this experience over the last four years is a "me" whose "expressiveness" can be, neither understood in consciously and experientially constructionist terms, nor accomplished solely on account of performance skills and experience of the world. I know there is no artful accomplishment, even as an amateur, without developed skill and knowledge of materials of construction. But even the youngest child knows that merely being presented with materials and following instructions hardly what doing art is. In fact, knowing how and why it (should) happen. kills art from a personal creative perspective.

I'm going to stop here and later respond to the questions and suggestions you've left for me. Thanks so much. I haven't written a new poem for a while, and I miss the discovery of a me I don't learn in any other way.