Boxed-In, Blue Humorous and Bleary-Eyed (Bildungsroman Holiday by Jessica Piazza)

I spent a lot of time today thinking about my intentions for tomorrow's feast.  The way I want the table to look, who should sit where, how I should time every dish, course, segment of our evening.  In the end, some of those intentions will be realized and some will certainly not.  Every Thanksgiving has been made both better and worse by things going off-plan.  (I think here, first, of the oft dragged-up story of the year we ate at midnight because I didn't know how to cook a turkey, and also of the time a squirrel ate the pie crust I had cooling on the porch, but also of that one Thanksgiving when we played impromtu charades and laughed hysterically for an hour.)  

More appropriately, though, I it also made me think about poetry, and how I often sit down with a prompt, or a plan, but only sometimes go that path.  Writing formal poetry is one way of working according to plan.  Thematic poems, too.  But even starting with a last line, or an organizing image...that's organization of a sort.  I rarely if ever write completely free, and I'm entirely curious about people who do.  How does anything *go* anywhere?  I couldn't do it.  Some friends I know couldn't start with a plan or everything they write feels contrived. 

But--okay, and here's my own plan veering off course--you know what, kids?  I think I might beg my wonderful hosts at BAP to give me more than a week of blogging.  Because I swear I have lots of deeply-considered and potentially interesting things to say to all of you, but right now I'm about to fall face first into the huge stock pot of autumn soup. (A recipe, by the way, I stole from my wonderful friend, the amazing poet Rebecca Lindenberg.)

Yeah.  See, my family arrived today.  En masse.  From Brooklyn.  They haven't been cooking, no, but they have been talking.  Loudly.  And borrowing my car and stealing my bed.  And arranging my furniture.  (It's already arranged the way I want it, of course.)  

God, I love them.  God, they are A LOT of a lot of a lot.  And Jillybean and I will be waking up at 5:30 to prep and cook the turkey.  Woo, Lord.  Woo, we're thankful and tired.

So, here.  I'll leave you with some fun, maybe.  And an explanation of the title.

Jilly's idea of blue (butternut) humor:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And bleary-eyed, after yet another trip to the market:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And a poem.  I love William Matthews a lot, but this poem will be filed in the "what we're NOT doing this week" section of this blog post:

On A Diet

BY WILLIAM MATTHEWS

Eat all you want 
but don’t swallow it. 
—Archie Moore 

The ruth of soups and balm of sauces

I renounce equally. What Rorschach saw

in ink I find in the buttery frizzle

in the sauté pan, and I leave it behind,   

and the sweet peat-smoke tang of bananas,   

and cream in clots, and chocolate. I give

away the satisfactions of food and take

desire for food: I’ll be travelling light

to the heaven of revisions. Why be   

adipose: an expense, etc.,

in a waste, etc.? Something like

the body of the poet’s work, with its

pale shadows, begins to pare and replace

the poet’s body, and isn’t it time?   

 

And your question:

If you write, if you art, if you music: do you start with a plan?  How does it all happen for you?  Do you think working either from a specific place or without one makes for very different work?

Comments

[JAE]

Steamed Bosoms for all!

[Rebecca]

For my part, and I'm guessing this isn't only true for me, I don't have a single way or approach or process. Like being a person - different pressures and different occasions and different enticements evoke and necessitate different behaviors. I have different poetry behaviors. Sometimes I feel deeply comforted by a kind of plan - I don't write much metrical form but I do think of myself as someone curious about the architecture of a poem. I like to find a scaffolding within which to build. But other times I find the poems have been sort of coalescing (often subconsciously) over a long time and they sort of write themselves. Sometimes writing, like being a human, feels like a negotiation between what you can influence and what influences you. And like being, in writing I think that negotiation is dynamic and various. We repeat patterns and behaviors, we find realms of comfort, we push ourselves into new and uncharted territory. We risk, we succeed, or we don't, we try again. And if we do it long enough and often enough, every now and then we make something that pleases us. Which to me is the crucial thing: Understanding what pleases us, and when we've made that or haven't. Not sure if that answers your question, Jessie, but that is my friendly attempt at a contribution to your clever, warm and thankful blog! Love to you and your fam, and snuggle Jilly for me!

[Laura Orem]

Happy Thanksgiving, J and J!

[Amy Greacen]

Much to think about, JP. I have learned over time that for myself, planning and contrivance are the agents of frustration and disappointment in my off the page life, but a salvation in writing poetry (and prose). My dinner party is never as sleek and elegant and effervescent as it was in my head; the Christmas cards NEVER get written and i feel far worse than if i hadn't decided last year tat this year i'd definitely do it. My grand designs for beauty and order in earthly life fall flat, time after time.

As a poet I am an unrepentent, unreconstructed formslut, and it's rare that I feel i've written anything worth its bits and bytes if i don't start with some kind of high concept, whether thematic, structural, both, or something else. Once in an MFA workshop a frustrated colleague looked up from a draft of one of my poems (a fussy inverted ballad form i'd invented to my own great self-congratulatory excitement) and wailed "You're so gifted with words, Amy -- WHY do you insist on putting these straitjackets on yourself?"

um... nearly 20 years later, my answer is that as hard as it is to define poetry (or art generally), one constant seems to be that it is opportunity arising from constraint. For me, most of the felicitous accidents that make the poem could not surface without having the isometric tension of a structural rulebook. A contrivance. a plan. You have to have one to break it. and that point of breakage is where all the fabulous happens. If you're lucky and able to persevere.

Off to jog in advance of culinary contrivance. And to ponder why there's such a divide for me between the on-page and off-page relationship with The Rules.

Thankful, to you, for something other than turkey to chew on. Love!