Never have I anticipated New Year’s Eve so much. Usually it’s the kind of night I would prefer to hang out with someone special, doing something a little out of the ordinary but without major festivities. This year, I’m not sure yet what I’ll do, but I’m certain that 2006 wins as Most Unpleasant Year for Katie Bowler. I returned last week to a section of my poetry journal scribbled as I drove away from New Orleans on New Year’s morning. The images of the city still a wreck, of the bridge still under construction, fog so thick windshield wipers were necessary — and then King Kong on top of a fireworks store in the moment the fog lifted. A few miles later, a man drove onto the interstate from a rest stop with his dog running behind the truck. I scribbled on the back of my directions YOU FORGOT YOUR DOG! and when I held it to the window as I passed him, the look over his face would be an apt expression to kick off this year. So long, 2006. It’s not even November, and I’ve never been so ready for a new year. If I made a list of the crummy stuff that’s happened this year, the list would be too long and far too distressing to read. Even I have a hard time grasping the reality that these things happened. It started in 2005, of course, and although I felt a shift happening over the past month and a half that’s signalled good things on the horizon, there’s still much to be done to further those developments.

I used to have a tradition of writing a letter each New Year’s Eve and reading the prior year’s letter on New Year’s Day. That is to say that if I wrote a letter this eve, it would be opened January 1, 2008. I started the tradition writing to myself, and then continued it with a boyfriend and we wrote the letters to one another. I continued for a year after the relationship ended and then stopped the tradition. This year, it’s hard to imagine what life will be like to be more than a year away from this one, but I’m certain the letter will be written. It will start, Dear 2006, Thanks for being over. Quoting Drummond: Never will I forget this event in the life of my fatigued retinas.

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Sunday afternoon poetry workshop with Alice Notley, who is reading in the Quarter tonight and on campus tomorrow. Undecided about what to workshop, I brought something fresh and early in draft but still in need of direction, but having been thought about enough to have developed intention. I brought “An Ordinary Flower,” an observational poem in which the observer is hidden from view — not quite spying, for the observer is simply sitting in her yard watching a neighbor, but certainly not revealing herself either. Notley found a way in which the poem can turn back in on itself, the way a lot of my poems end up doing insofar as creating a loop in which the same event could happen again or appears to be happening within another event inside another. But then she used the word “pleasant,” which never sounds pleasant to me. 

Pleasant. It’s funny, the words that don’t sound like compliments because we have redefined their meanings or overused them. “Wonderful” used to sound that way, but now I’m careful to use it only when I mean something is truly full of wonder, which is to say I use it only rarely. It is true that she didn’t call the poem itself “pleasant,” but that the idea that the woman being observed would continue doing the action and the observer would continue watching — that was what she found pleasant. There’s also a sense that the action is going to continue whether or not the observer continues observing — and a sense that the action is such natural action that they’re accomplished as though body parts have become so accustomed to these movements that they think on their own without — as Sophie would say — their brain telling them to do so.

Natural action. I have always enjoyed watching natural action, which is also sometimes punctuated with deliberation. It’s hard to articulate “natural action,” but when I picture it in my mind, I can come up with two ordinary and daily actions at opposite ends of the action range — natural and unnatural. Natural: a man opens the cabinet and retrieves a glass, places the glass on the counter, and turns toward the refrigerator. He opens the door, looks back over his shoulder to say something, and without looking, reaches in and pulls out the orange juice. While pouring, the half-gallon of juice pours in a single stream, the jug moving closer and then farther from the glass as he finishes. It’s as though the jug of juice moves in parallel action, rising as the glass fills. The action, though deliberate, appears natural. Unnatural: a man at the register reaches in his pocket to pull out a pen and write a check. He knows where he is so the letters appear on the paper with deliberate form, as though he thinks more about the shape of a letter than the word itself. Even his signature is more a shape than a name. Then the pen is closed methodically and placed back where it belongs. Both actions were deliberate, and yet the intention of the actions different. And by difference in intention, I’m not talking about the difference between pouring oneself a glass of juice or writing a check, but the difference in how the actions were taken. These two images want to be part of a poem, I believe, but not sure how yet.

One woman asked Notley how she separates, or if she separates, “normal” life from poetry. She said all life is poetry — everything. “The problem with the world,” she said lightly, “is that it doesn’t know this.” As a friend once said to me, “My wife has God and church, and I have poetry. It is my truth.” I think that has to do with its intention of capturing the genuine and real — even when fabricated from fantasy. I have given a lot of thought lately to how I define “genuine,” and what’s real versus what’s not. Secrets dismiss genuine experience. And though I may be speaking more of life than poetry, it’s true in poetry too — when we write a poem and leave out the heart of the matter. When this happens, the poem lacks genuine feeling. And perhaps that’s what disturbed me briefly about the word “pleasant,” because, for me, “pleasant” has come to mean keeping material at the surface, attempting to dismiss the factual or real moments that are unpleasant but true. I don’t think that’s what Notley meant by “pleasant” in this case though, which has made me re-examine my perception of the word.

I discovered something a couple days ago — rather, someone told me something — that enabled me to revise (re-vision) how I’ve seen a series of events. Instead of seeing them with a start and end point, I see better how they are on a continuum. My first reaction on hearing a story that had occurred more than six years ago was “You must be kidding,” even though I knew I believed the story as it was being told. It certainly made everything following that event – and perhaps even what I had heard happened before — make more sense. Later, I found myself briefly annoyed that such an event had occurred but had been never been told to me before. And more than being annoyed that I hadn’t known such an event had occurred, I was annoyed that disbelief had followed subsequent and similar events. Here was someone I barely know telling me an intimate story about a situation I thought I was better understanding – how could such a story not have been shared before? And yet if I put into a hat all the stories not told, I would find that this story was not so different than any of the others. It’s as though somewhere out there, there’s a hat storing secrets and this one also fits in quite well. Each story in the hat resembles the others not only in how they happened but in how they were stored. And although I can’t make the ideas connect yet among this story and the orange juice and writing examples, they’re all related in my mind. It’s about making a shape instead of a name, making an image (or a photograph, for example) that tells a story contradicting reality.

What’s said versus what’s not said. Sometimes what’s not said is where the truth is. And when more goes unsaid, the reality created becomes less real, where “real” equals “genuine.” The untrue and fabricated is still real, of course, because it’s still what it is happening as much as myth constructs reality, but it lacks the full-bodied genuineness that what’s held back would offer. In a poem, this would be where we would ask the poet or speaker, What aren’t you saying? Where poetry differs from life, the writer can fill in the gaps and make the poem or story real and alive. In life, I expect not to have to follow up with, What aren’t you saying? This, someone recently pointed out to me, is both strength and weakness; I believe often, which is to say nearly always, that I am being told the “whole” story and the truth, and that anything contradicting the “reality” set up by a lack of information would be shared to create a better reality even if not a better reality. It never occurred to me that people deliberately create myths or leave out critical information — nor did it occur to me that myth-making can become such a normal mode of action that it becomes “real.” And somehow, all of this ties together for me in the two actions of the juice and writing. Where to start the poem from this, that’s the question I’ll fall asleep considering.

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Woke up in the middle of the night, around 4 a.m., and my mind alternated between two thoughts. One not so pleasant and destined to keep me tossing and turning for the first night in months, and the other the first line of another story. So I got out of bed and went to the computer and wrote my second short story in years. Like the last, the entire story takes place in a matter of minutes. In this case, about fifteen, twenty tops. The action starts in an office in which a man has returned, yet again, from travels and meetings to give his assistant a pile of business cards from people whose names he barely remembers. The story spends less than a paragraph there and then moves into an almost entirely imagined encounter he had on his last trip. That encounter is the one that takes only a few minutes but plenty pages to move through. Other than the similarity of an expanded sense of time, it’s completely different than my last short story. The situation is much less tense and more from my “ordinary” imagination, one that could have come from my own mind and own direct experiences, whereas the previous story required hearing about events I could not have remotely imagined based on my own experiences. I finished the story around six in the morning and returned to bed. When I woke again, I remembered the general plot of the story, but needed to re-read it to refresh the details. I was pleasantly surprised to find a solid first draft, beginning, middle, and ending. The story is tentatively titled “The Hat.” “Tomorrow’s News” is told from the first person — in fact, sometimes the second person because the narrator is so detached from the experience at hand that he turns the experience over to the reader’s ownership — and “The Hat” is limited omniscient. It’s interesting to see how the point of view needs to be different in each story, and to imagine how different “The Hat” would have been from the first person. Likewise, “Tomorrow’s News” couldn’t have maintained its tension if we hadn’t been inside the narrator’s mind through the whole experience. 

After so much time dedicated to poetry, it’s almost bizarre to find myself in fiction mode. Just months ago I recall having a conversation about how much I prefer poetry because it’s true and real in a way that I never quite find fiction to be. I can’t stray too much into the fiction world right now because the project at hand IS poetry, but it’s great to have this part of my mind turning itself on without much provocation. In both cases, the first line popped to mind and then wouldn’t go away. The previous story, tentatively titled “Tomorrow’s News,” a title which absolutely must go, had a first line that rattled in my head for days if not weeks before I had any idea what would follow. This one rattled around only a few minutes after waking. I thought to myself, What kind of man is it who remains someone we want to know despite a first line that makes him seem almost unknowable? “Tomorrow’s News” is out with Ross for a reading, and tomorrow I will give “The Hat” to another writer friend.

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