late for poetry month

April 1 is a very important day for me and it has nothing to do with National Poetry Month--or it has everything to do with National Poetry Month! Back in 1999 I was faced with the fact that while I seemed to be very good at growing a baby, I was not going to be good at pushing a baby out. It was disappointing to think that I had been carrying around those child-bearing hips since age 12 for nothing; on the other hand, it was fun to choose my daughter's birthday, and if you can choose April Fool's Day, whyever would you pick March 31 or April 2?

Thus arrived our little April Fool, two weeks late and by appointment--and shortly thereafter, following a hiatus of 15 years, I felt the urge to write poems again. (More on this funny twist to my writing life in my interview later this month with Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect). This year, on April 1, when I might have been posting for Poetry Friday, we were with our shiny new 11-year-old in Charlottesville, touring Monticello, eating outrageous desserts and swimming in the hotel pool.

Today I post the next two poems included in the public charter school application--the ones about reading and writing. Just see who authored the poem I chose to open the section on the place of writing in our school's curriculum...

The First Book

Open it.

Go ahead, it won't bite.
Well...maybe a little.

More a nip, like. A tingle.
It's pleasurable, really.

You see, it keeps on opening.
You may fall in.

Sure, it's hard to get started;
remember learning to use

knife and fork? Dig in;
you'll never reach the bottom.

It's not like it's the end of the world--
just the world as you think

you know it.

~Rita Dove (who, in a superb coincidence, is a professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville)


While Writing

Let the words come to you
Let the words escape you; flowing through your body to your pen
Let the words lead you through your whole life.

Let the words seize you
Let the words rip you from your world and take you to theirs
Let the words uncover your deepest thoughts

The words make feelings express themselves
The words make real life seem like fantasy
The words make us feel like nothing will ever be bad

And I love the words

~Daisy, age 10 (after Langston Hughes's "April Rain Song" )

pushing out pumpkins

This isn't the first time I've likened the publication of a new book to the birth of a baby, but the effort this past 10 days has gone beyond metaphoric labor to literal heavy lifting. Last Friday, when I should have been blogging about how excited my class got when I announced that they would be publishing their own books just like Kevin Henkes and...well, ME, instead I was loading the car with all manner of promotional accoutrements: a 10x10 Swiss Army canopy, three folding tables, boxes of books, rolls of plastic tablecloth, bags of candy corn and plates of Trader Joe's pumpkin bread, laminated book pages cut from the f&g's Boyds Mills sent me at the last minute, a big fishbowl (for the raffle tickets), and of course, three giant pumpkins. I should have had the epidural.

My first event was held on the front lawn of a Lutheran Church who agreed at the last minute to let me squat there in the middle of a local restaurant event called "Taste of Bethesda" when I couldn't find anywhere else. It didn't rain (hallelujah) and I had a steady trickle of customers: a good combination of people who had received my email announcements of book events and families just passing by. There was no opportunity for a reading, exactly, but I sold 16 copies of both books nonetheless--plenty to make all the bearing down worth it (and now the car is loaded for all the other events this month). Here's a "Taste of Pumpkin Butterfly," the first poem of the new book.

Ghosts

we haul our empty wagon to a patch of hilly earth
weighed down with heavy orange
burdened with cumbersome pumpkins

"This is the one"
"And this one"
we say

we cut the tough vines and turn to load them up

behind our backs
a gust of butterflies rises and tumbles
on hot October air

yellow-green tinged with orange
wings as weightless and angular
as the pumpkins are heavy and round:

the ghosts of our pumpkins untethered from earth

birth pangs

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

~Sylvia Plath

I’m aching in couple of unusual places right now--I just raked and dragged 13 loads of leaves from my front yard using a rake with no handle (it had already lost half its handle in an unknown incident, and then I reversed over it in the driveway and completed the amputation). Working away in unaccustomed positions may be what got me thinking about birth pangs, or maybe I was already primed to recall the anguish of childbirth by the arrival on Monday, in PDF form, of my fourth child I mean second book.

Now, I have not experienced any of the shock or grief of parents whose baby arrives premature or sick or disabled. Compared to that, my own surprise at discovering, after all those years of living with my Child-Bearing Hips, that I wasn’t going to be able to push a baby out, and then my distress at finding that, according to the cosultant at the hospital my bosom practically screams “inadequate lactation”—I’m certain that these count as minor traumas.

So I don’t know if the feelings I’m having at the first glimpse of my newborn book fall into the category of major trauma, but it feels that way at the moment. This book had an unsteady start in that I didn’t understand for a couple of agonizing months that the publisher had already informally accepted it for publication—which is the opposite of eagerly peeing on a stick and seeing the thrilling or crushing response within 3 minutes. (I first announced the happy news of Daisy’s existence to a friend in the middle of a crosswalk at 15th and Q Streets—why wait until your actual partner gets home?) The gestation period of this book has been elephantine and then some; it has been 25 months since the process began and the book will not actually appear until Fall 2009.

Along the way there have been long periods of no movement at all, leading me to panic in the same way that every pregnant woman worries now and then that the baby may be—it’s hard even to write it—dead. And recently, even with a relative flurry of correspondence regarding a possible illustrator, a change of title, a possible cover sketch, copyeditor’s queries and a request for flap copy (author bio and front flap blurb, the writing of which is like preparing a birth announce- ment with a personality description instead of the simple facts of date, length and weight)—even with all this afoot, I was not ready for my bundle of joy to arrive in my inbox all at once with a note from the editor informing me that this was my last chance for text changes and that it would ship to printer ON THURSDAY.

Even so, this should be exciting news, right? The poems are as good as I can make them, the illustrations are lovely, things are really happening now—except that the illustrations don't always match my vision for the book. “Oh, woe is me!” I wailed yesterday to a friend who casually asked how I was at the bus stop. “After all this working and waiting, this book is like a fourth child, and I want it to be beautiful!” And then I realized that to an outside eye my book probably IS beautiful, and also that I don’t care exactly that it’s beautiful—but I do want my baby to look like me. That is, I was hoping that the illustrations would match the ideas in my poems and then go on to develop the ideas in my poems, make more of my words, rather in the way that anonymous genes have created unexpected richness in my two actual children—and (with no offense to the artist), I’m afraid that hasn’t happened here.

It's almost always true that love is the best response, but what kind of love works in this delivery room?