I’ve known for a few years about NaNoWriMo, which is an initiative would-be fiction authors participate in to provoke a creative burst. The idea is that over the course of a month, you spew out 50,000 words of what is probably drivel in hopes that you can eventually find some kernel of decent fiction to build on. I’ve already got 90,000 words of drivel striving from the bottom of a drawer somewhere to be the first quarter of a novel, and though I once thought about doing NaNoWriMo and even committed 5,000 words or so to disk, I never bothered to finish.

Via a newfound acquaintance’s blog, I learned this week of NaPoWriMo, a rather less organized and ubiquitous gesture in the same direction. Except that in this case, the medium is poetry. April is National Poetry month (the six people in the world interested in poetry suggest as much, at least), and so April is the month designated for this little endeavor. The project? Write a poem a day each day in April.

On the surface, this seems simple. Roses are red, violets are blue, here’s number one, next, number two. At the very real risk of sounding like an ass, I’m going to suggest that writing poems as something like art tends to take a bit more time and mental investment than it took me to come up with that example. When I was studying this stuff formally in college and liked to puff myself up and feel important about my work, I’d think about Yeats’s quotation to the effect that “a line will take us hours maybe.” If it takes a guy hours to write a single line of poetry, then a poem of more than a few lines must be quite an achievement indeed, right? Therefore my work must be pretty impressive. I guess that’s how it went. I’m sure I was all hand to brow when I thought about Yeats’s line (wonder how many hours he spent on it?) and my contribution to letters. That big digression ventured in order to not seem so pompous now as I probably did when I was younger, I’ll nevertheless propose that writing really tolerably decent poems does take some time. So while a poem a day sounds trivial, for anybody who’s interested in real craft and doesn’t just have a really astounding natural gift for it, writing a poem a day is really pretty darned impressive.

Of course, the original NaNoWriMo stresses quantity over quality. It’s about germination more than about maturation. A fragment or draft a day is somewhat more attainable than a polished nugget of wisdom laid across fine images and tight metaphors a day.

Real life permitting, maybe I’ll try it. I have been more inclined of late to try to write down some little poems (and some bigger ones). I spent two hours tonight on 84 lines that suck but may be a move in a direction toward something that sucks less.

A line will take me 1.43 minutes maybe.

At 5:06 p.m. on March 19, Finnegan Samuel Learn Houston was born by C-section after 37 hours of painful labor. Weighing in at 11 pounds and with his head craned back at a weird angle, there was no way he was coming out in the conventional way. We’re home today after a few days of recovery in the hospital.

As part of a recent book-buying spree, I purchased the (recent) new and selected poems of two poets: Robert Wrigley’s Earthly Meditations and Elaine Equi’s Ripple Effect. Wrigley I had been referred to a year or two ago by a friend, and after initially being not terribly impressed with his work, I later warmed to it, at least as manifest in his book Lives of the Animals. So he was something of a known quantity. Equi I had never heard of until reading about her new collection I forget where — linked from a link off a blog I’ve recently begun following, I believe. She’s described as being influenced by the New York school, so I should have known to expect what I got (which sounds less flattering than I really mean it to sound).

I’m about halfway through Equi’s book (all the way through the new work and into the selected) now and needed a break. The poems are all very accessible, so my needing a break isn’t a matter of having trouble reading them because they’re difficult. If anything, they tend to be lighter than what I’m really aching for these days. Some of the poems are very funny. Take the following:

Perversely Patriotic

Terrorism has ruined
S & M for me.

Now it just seems
like watching
the news.

It’s a laugh-out-loud and pretty biting observation, and I like it a lot, but its lack of heft makes it hard for me to do more than read it a few times, say “oh,” and move on. The observation is memorable but the poetry is not.

Other poems use accessible language but seem neither to mean much nor to be especially artful, and I find these puzzling. For example (excerpted from “1 + 1 = 3″):

Heard
enough
of your silence

Gold
fisheyes
in aquarium glasses

Lightgeist
iceberg
blackboard and cigarette

River
runs
through a bullet

The stanzas each contain lines of one, one, and three words, so she’s imposing structure on her poem. It’s interesting as wordplay in some cases (”lightgeist”) but seems a flirtation with the cliche in others, and I just don’t understand what Equi is doing here or why she or her editors think some of this stuff should get past the editorial chopping block. She’s by her own admission influenced by the New York school and by Eastern forms, and those influences are certainly in evidence within these poems. It’s distinctly possible that my lack of particular interest in the sorts of poetry that influence her colors my reception of her work. In any case, there are enough little “oh, neat” moments that I’ll go back to her book soon, but I predict that I’ll find very little among the pages memorable as poetry. But then, I warmed to Wrigley on a second reading, so perhaps I shouldn’t write her off so quickly.

I read the new poems (about 20 of them) in Wrigley’s new book in one sitting tonight and was bummed when I flipped ahead to see that only a few were left. As I wrote in an earlier review, he writes smoothly and elegantly of rustic things, and he does so in such a way that I feel as if I’ve experienced the thing when in fact I haven’t. As someone who has trouble getting drawn into movies and TV, much less stories and poems, I think it’s quite a gift for someone to write in such an evocative way.

Almost without exception, all of the new poems in Wrigley’s work are satisfying to me. They tell me stories while helping me to think about more abstract things. He writes about the World Trade Center attacks, of forging a river, of the war, of peace, of a couple of disturbing encounters. For all of his seriousness and peacefulness and quiet philosophy, he also tells a funny joke. The poem I’ll quote in its entirety and hope the copyright police will figure is fair use within the context of a review (if not, I’ll cease and desist, etc.) particularly resonated with me, and while it’s not the richest of the poems in the book, it is I think certainly a lovely one:

For One Who Prays For Me

I do not wish to hurt her, who loves me
and who asks for me only every blossom and more,

but in fact, when I say God I mean the wind
and the clouds that are its angels;

I mean the sea and its enormous restraint,
all its fish and krill just the luster of a heavenly gown.

And while it is true there are days when I think
something more must be in the wind than air, still I believe

the afterlife is dirt, but sweet, and heaven’s coming back
in the lewd, bewhiskered tongue of an iris.

Wrigley’s assessment is a little more new-agey than I’m personally willing to go in a literal sense, but boy does he say it nicely. There’s such placidity in those lines, and understated but oddly strong imagery. The phrasing is smooth, the diction entirely within reach. It’s good writing that I can hardly wait to read more of. It’s something to aspire to.

When I was in college, I did four of my five semesters toward a minor in creative writing with Michael McFee. As part of my recent renewed interest in poetry, I’ve been rereading his poetry collections, and over Christmas, I was given a copy of his recent collection of essays, entitled The Napkin Manuscripts. I read the book while on a business trip to California, and it reminded me of how dear my time studying poems in Chapel Hill was to me. It helped to kindle in me a renewed interest in writing, probably because many of the anecdotes were familiar to me already, because I felt transported back to that period of creativity. One of the essays in the book inspired me to organize what turned out to be a two-person poetry reading I previously announced. It’s a good book that came at a good time for me. The Napkin Manuscripts contains essays about being a southerner, and a southern poet, and having a sense of home; essays about belles lettres and the life poetic; essays about other poets; and the transcript of a conversation between McFee and fellow poet and friend Michael Chitwood held at a conference honoring McFee and his work. It really is a good read.

I’ve visited with McFee a few times since leaving college, once at a reading he hosted at an Asheville book store and once or twice on visits to Chapel Hill, but visits have been few and far between. So imagine my pleasure when I got the following announcement in an email today:

Michael McFee will be at Carpe Librum on Saturday, March 17 at 2:00 pm. A well known author and poet, he is a professor of English at UNC-Chapel Hill and director of their Creative Writing program.

The book he will be reading from and signing is The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview. Doris Betts did the Foreword.

He has seven or eight poetry collections to his credit and I am not sure how many more books.

Don’t drink green beer, come to Carpe Librum on St. Patrick’s Day.

Provided my impending son doesn’t gum up the works by making a late appearance, I’ll be there for sure. McFee’s a great reader and a very personable guy, and it’s sure to be an engaging event.