National Poetry Month 2011

And so at last, a month of poems comes to an end. New chapters of my life are waiting to be written. It’s all in the journey.

When I decided to take March as a month devoted to play I did it because I was afraid of something. I was afraid that after all I had gone through in my life, all I had endured and overcome, all I had challenged myself to learn, well I was afraid it still wasn’t enough. I was finally in a safe place where I had the freedom to write, to create, whatever I wanted or needed to create. I had all the love and support a creative person could want. I had a family I loved, a home I loved, work I loved to do and friends to share it all with.

And I looked around at my wonderful life and I thought, Sheesh, here I am, finally, and I don’t know how to be happy.

That’s sorta what I had hoped the month of play would help me learn how to do . . . how to be happy. But all that thinking while I was playing with paint and collage helped me learn something unexpected. Knowing how to be happy wasn’t the problem.

I have always written/created from a place of pain and used my writing to help me make sense out of my world.

Surprise. I’m not in pain anymore.

Now I’ll have to learn to create from this new place, a place of questioning….which is always a good basis for story-telling.

Poem a Day #30
It’s really so very simple,
this job of mine.

Journey forth on grand adventures,
record the moments,
then share my findings
with those who care to listen.

The best stories will be found in bits and pieces,
focused fragments,
of a life well lived.

Susan Taylor Brown
All rights reserved

I’ve been thinking a lot about something a friend said about how I tend to focus on all the things I haven’t learned how to do yet instead of recognizing all the things I already do well.

You
are
already
a star.

How brightly you shine
(or not)
depends on you
just showing up
and doing
what comes naturally.

Susan Taylor Brown
All rights reserved

I have never had this much silence between projects, between the compulsion that often fuels my writing, so now, as I put pen to paper again, it all feels so brand new. It’s as if I am watching a barren field suddenly sprout, then grow, then blossom.

Poem a Day #24

My writing brain
is waking up
like Rip Van Wrinkle after a too long slumber.

I am surrounded by everything
and nothing that I know
beginner’s mind
beginning again.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

I’ve spent the last few days going through 15 years worth of Horn Book Magazine, ripping out articles, quotes and mostly, artwork for a special collage project. The process has tossed me backward, to my early writer years when I wanted to do it all, write it all. The energy level I had back then was different, fueled mostly by manic moments.

Poem a Day #22

I used to be haunted
by voices of characters
begging me to tell their stories
making me ignore a lot of things
that shouldn’t be ignored
in order to put words on the page.

Then it got silent
in my head.

In my heart
I worried
perhaps the lack of haunting
meant the characters had moved on to
someone else,
someone
who could give them the attention they deserved.

I hear differently now
not in such a rush
not in such a race
no need to trap the stories before they unravel.

I trust less and more
at the same time
I still listen to the voices
but I listen with my heart
instead of frantic fingertips
no longer worrying
about the silent spaces.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

Looking for directions to get out of my own way.

Poem a Day #20

I think too much.

Instead of
letting words spill
across the page
letting words fall
out of order
letting words run
their own races
I think too much
and the ink
in my brain pen
dries up.

I want to channel my inner
Annie Lamott
and write those
crappy first drafts,
the kind where you can mix your tenses like a tossed salad
and place those damn modifiers anywhere you want
but I think too much
and my fingers freeze
like an old woman with arthritis
and the trapped words
grow like barnacles beneath my skin.

I wonder
if I am trying to protect myself
from the world
or maybe it is the world
that needs protecting
from all I might say
if only I wouldn’t think
so damn much.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

Allergies slowed me down yesterday so I didn’t get this posted.

Poem a Day #16

I find it hard to take things
on faith alone.
I want proof that slowing down
being in the moment
is worth the investment of my time.

Today I follow the dog
down the garden path that ends
near the glider
where she sniffs the sage.

One ceanothus, still in bloom,
calls dozens and dozens of
bees to dance between
the blue blossoms.

Fat bumblebees
fuzzy carpenter bees
industrious honey bees
and bees that look like flies.

I stand still
let bees buzz all around me
and listen to the concert
I almost missed.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

In the weekly poetic reading/exercises that I am doing with Laura Salas I find that some weeks are easier than others. This week’s was one of the toughest for me and yet, once I made myself do it, I learned a lot. People say that if there is no joy in the writing you should just stop writing. Yesterday, today, there was much joy and I am grateful.

Poem a Day #14

Yesterday I challenged myself to call up
an old poem and listen carefully
to the sounds of the story
it spilled upon the page.

Unable to imagine success, I resisted,
like a child unwilling to take a nap.
The task was hard and made my brain hurt
in places that felt unused.

I forced myself
if only to keep from being embarrassed
when I had nothing to show
for the day.

Surprise tapped me on the shoulder
and I was face-to-face
with my old friend joy,
the one that comes with word play.

My pulse raced, just a little,
and though it was time to break for dinner
I found I couldn’t stop
I didn’t want to stop
I had to write just one more word.

I couldn’t hold the high for long,
just long enough
to create a crack, in the concrete,
of my storyteller’s soul.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

Today I was remembering a rubber band experiment about resistance. The idea behind it was that if two people are both pulling on a rubber band and neither one gives in, the rubber band is going to break and someone is going to get hurt. But if you move toward the resistance, give into it, the resistance goes away.

A friend asked me if perhaps the reason I was fighting so much with myself was that I was due for a change….that perhaps my writing would take place alongside (instead?) of something else. I had no answer for her question but it did give me something juicy to think about. What if I gave in to my resistance? What would happen then?

Poem a Day #12

I can’t help but wonder
if maybe this path I’m on,
this path I’ve walked for so many years,
is not the path I’m meant to walk forever

It’s not like I know where to turn
or what else to do
or even if I want to but still
I can’t help but wonder

what would I become
and would I even recognize myself
walking toward me on another path?

© 2011 Susan Taylor Brown. All rights reserved.

This poem is late to the table because there is some serious thinking going on in my brain. I’m looking for the off switch. Time to stop thinking quite so much.

Poem a Day #10

I’ve read just about every kind
of “how to do it” book you can read
when it comes to writing,
even if I can’t remember who said what.

I think I’ve absorbed a lot over the years.

How to write mostly boils down to
write what you know or write
what you want to know,
just pick one and get to work.

The how to write isn’t as hard as
the making yourself sit down and do it.
The world will keep on spinning
even if you never write another word.
Really.

You really just need one thing to write,
you need to want it bad.

It’s the wanting that makes it so.
It’s the wanting that makes it real.
It’s the wanting that fuels the doing.

What I forget is that wanting isn’t a thinking thing,
it’s a heart thing.
Wanting to write isn’t based on any logic,
it is born from the need to connect,
one writer, one story, one word
a bridge,
from heart to heart.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

I know many people say, and they are right to do so, that the joy is in the process of writing, not in the sale. But truth be told, once you’ve made a sale or two or three, it’s hard to focus on process instead of product. At least for me.

Before I’d ever heard of query letters or a synopsis
or even dared imagine the possibility
of signing with a New York agent,
I used to sit on the stoop of cement in my garage
and write exactly the kind of stories
I liked to read.

I didn’t have a market guide
or a critique group
and SCBWI was just a bunch of
mixed up letters from the alphabet.

Before I ever sold a single book
I didn’t wonder how many copies it would sell
or when I would earn back my advance
or whether the reviewers would be kind
if they decided to review it at all.

The Internet was still a dream
to be unfurled
so there were no worries about
blogs or websites or social media status updates.

I wrote because it made me happy
to imagine the child I used to be
in the stories I told myself.
I wrote because figuring out what happened next
was more fun than a crossword puzzle
or learning how to knit.
and I wrote because when I didn’t write,
I was (according to my kids) grumpy
until I once again picked up a pad and pen.

I don’t want to go back in time
or undo what I’ve done over the years
but I want to find a way to remember what it felt like
to sit on that cement stoop scribbling on that green steno pad
plotting stories for no one but myself.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

I’m so used to feeling guilty about something (everything?) that I wasn’t quite sure how to approach a month of play. Since I have fallen in love with collage and art journaling I decided to devote March to art. I had signed up for a couple of online classes over a year ago and finally got around to trying the first lessons. I watched video after video on YouTube. I read art blogs. I was ready to dive in. Except.

Except that I soon discovered artists have to deal with some of the very same things writers have to deal with – such as the blank page.

I had a stash of blank books (much to beautiful to write in or use for art but I had them, that was the main thing, right?) and I pulled one out and stared at the blank pages. I was just as blocked on the art side as I was on the writing side. Back to reading blogs and watching videos and going back through my notes from class. One message came through – if you don’t know what to do, slap some paint on the page. You can come back and do something pretty with it later. So I resolved that every time Cassie rang the bells to go outside (my art desk is across from her patio door) I would sit down and slap some paint, any color I grabbed, onto the page. I’d worry about what I’d do to the pages later. The 10 minutes Cassie spent outside was just enough to get the paint down and then let her back in the door.

I remember my painting teacher telling me that she had painted 40 backgrounds in her art journal before she painted one she actually liked. Just like with writing (or anything) the more we do it, the better we get at it but it had been so long since I had been a beginner at anything. I hadn’t even begun to think about second and third layers of paint. I couldn’t believe how hard it was for me to do something so simple, just cover a page in a single color.

The brush feels awkward in my fingers,
like one of those too fat pencils
we had to use in kindergarten,
and I wish I could call back that child
I used to be to hold my hand.

With spastic jerks, I push paint across the page.
I cannot count the times I drop the brush, landing
blobs of paint on the desk, my jeans, my shirt
and more than once, my chin.

The teacher makes it look so easy,
the way her brush waltzes across the page,
she spins paint into corners, pulls it back to the center,
long strokes, short strokes and then, in no time she is done,
and damn it all, she is still smiling.

Purple. Red. Yellow. Pink. Just paint
Two pages, five, eleven.
Blue. Green. Turquoise. (Hey, I mixed that.)
Don’t think. Don’t count. Just paint.

Over one hundred pages later
I hold my most favorite brush,
gently move paint across the page
and realize, I have finally learned to dance.

Susan Taylor Brown.
All rights reserved.

This is one of the four art journals I prepped during the month of March. All those juicy pages waiting for me add to them.

Kidlitosphere Central has the master list of all the poetic events going on this month.