What We Find in the Dark

Today is Memorial Day, but the weather isn’t cooperating: it’s too cold to enjoy the lake. I had planned to take the day off and post tomorrow instead, but it feels like any other Monday, so here I am.

However, it’s not just any other Monday. It’s a special Monday because my niece came to pick up her senior prom dress that I tailored for her, and I finished my Portable MFA, and started it again from the beginning.

Today’s Poem

Today is Quadrille Monday at dVerse Poets Pub. Today’s prompt is to include in our poems of forty-four words some form of the word “dark.”

The Light in Every Dark

We seldom inhabit complete darkness—
lights at night so bright we can barely see stars
little red indicators, computers in everything.
The dark is permeated by electricity
In the ocean, in the deepest dark
under immense pressure, an inner light
squids into the world.

Poetry MFA Week Eight Review

This week felt like things were really coming together. While writing into the heart of my first draft, I realized the heart of the poem I chose was conformity vs. nonconformity, and that opened my eyes to how my contradictory abstract noun study fits into my revision process. It was exciting and eye-opening. It changed how I look at revision.

Writing: Though I only think a few lines from my second draft will make it into the final draft of the poem, discovering that the heart of my poem was a pair of contradictory abstract nouns opened the world of the draft into something I wanted to dive deeper into. It changed it from a quick draft I didn’t care much about to a poem I care a lot about, and want to give much more time.

I looked at the other drafts from April that I had chosen to revise, and quickly identified the pairs of contradictory abstract nouns at the heart of each of them. So exciting!

Reading: After making my discovery of contradictory abstract nouns at the heart of each of my poems, I started reading through the collections I have from the library, and quickly identified the contradictory abstract nouns at the hearts of them as well. I found this very exciting. I think that’s why I decided to go straight into a second round of The Portable MFA_{(assoc link)} poetry chapter.

Portable MFA Second Round: Week One

This week is about starting again: repeating the first week, but this time knowing I can get through the whole eight weeks, and understanding what to expect. My focus is on putting the time into the things I didn’t do, or only put minimal effort into, the first time around. This time I won’t have the stress of the April daily challenges of National Poetry Month, and I should be home the whole time. I’ll have guests from Sweden, so I may be reminiscing to when I lived in Sweden, becoming a teenager. I may study a Swedish poet or two, and bring some of that beautiful language into my work. In other words, I expect this second round to be very different from the first.

I hadn’t planned to continue these Portable MFA posts in this manner, but we’ll see how it goes. If I feel like the experience continues to be different the second time around, I’ll keep sharing in this review / expectation format. But if I don’t feel that I’m adding much to what I posted over the last couple months, I’ll move on to something else.

Writing: This week I’ll be back to trying out different writing times and places. I signed up to try a writing workshop that meets Wednesdays from 8 to 10 pm to force myself to write at night and see if I like it. The other thing I didn’t try last time, that I want to try this week is writing away from home: in a cafe, the library, the park. This came up for me this week because my next door neighbors will be tearing down their house and rebuilding, and the noise of them just being there is already distracting, so I may need to find writing spaces away from home. I’ve never been one to write in public spaces, but it’s time to try it. Maybe I’ll go write at the Postmark open gallery time. I can draw my poems on the page.

Reading: I thought about going back to study Ada Limón some more, but then I found “Chopin in Palma” by Susan Mitchell in The Best American Poetry 2023 guest edited by Elaine Equi and decided to study Susan Mitchell for the next four weeks. I am excited that she relates her work and her process to classical music and piano playing.

Time is precious, and I appreciate that you spend some of your time here at Experience Writing reading and learning along with me. I set up a buy me a coffee account, so you can buy me a beverage to support what I do here. It will help a lot.

Happy Reading and Writing!