Anthony Watkins's Blog, page 40

There was a Hospital

It sat out on the grasslands

low and long, a wing to each side

doctors and staff at leisurely pace

 

Not the stinking butchers

we have here who chop off

pieces for a dollar or two

 

kind chunky matrons

and a couple of old doctors

younger than me now,

 

but old then,

with kind hands

that smelled of tobacco.

 

Each room opened onto a field

almost pastureland

only missing cows

 

I didn’t get well there

nor do I improve here

in the city with the butchers

 

but illness had

a peace about it.

 

Let me die in the city on the grasslands.

 

 

There was a Hospital, revised

 

On the grasslands

low long wing each side

doctors, staff, leisurely pace

 

stinking butchers

here, chop off

pieces for a dollar

 

kind chunky matrons

old doctors, younger now,

but old then, kind tobacco hands.

 

Rooms opened to fields

pastureland minus cows

 

I didn’t get well there

nor here with butchers

but illness had peace.

 

Let me die: city on grasslands.

 

How I Forgot to Write Poetry

I don’t know

what words mean

too tired to write poems.

 

You work!

Work is easy,

hardly matters.

 

Don’t remember words

noticing

length of lines.

 

Notice shapes in fire,

cannot smell smoke

genetic disposition

e-n-e in the ear.

 

Danish: slowgna,

maybe Swedish

“ta-shaka-de-seka.”

English: sandspurs

in my mouth.

The Challenge

Poem, home, cardboard box.

Miami, nights aren’t too cold

Though a few February nights

air nears freezing

as do I.

 

A dirty blanket

flecked with waste, vomit,

spilled food, dirt,

grease from the ground

sturdy box

mashed in places,

corrugation collapsed,

torn and blackened smears.

 

Words, roof, heavy paper,

not enough, as with all,

they are all.

Cottonmouth Boy

Hershey kiss tattoos

up both arms,

eats cowboy bread,

hums a bar of

Red River Valley

before losing the tune,

 

then says “red lights

are just lights

that used to be yellow.”

 

He has no bars

around his mouth

only around his brain.

 

Green-cot-night

-fan-pulls-mugginess

in the room

on cricketback.

 

How to START Writing

Because I am both a writer and a publisher, and because I have a very active social presence, I often get a question as to how to start writing, usually couched in something like, "Oh, I love the way you write, I have been thinking about trying to write for years, but I just can't seem to get started."

There are a million places one can go to learn how to write, to write better, to write a best seller, to write the world’s best business report, the greatest resume, and countless other things.

I will not, and probably could not tell you how to do any of these things. Over the past 53 years of writing, I have written a few good resumes, that and being a moderately pleasantly looking affable white male, have landed more than one job I probably didn’t deserve, but as a rule, I am not what some would call a successful writer.

In fact, my first point is to suggest that the traditional definition of a successful writer is not and never has been a reliable yardstick. First of all, most writers are not published, and most published writers don’t make any money, I mean they earn well under $1000 per year, maybe under $1000 for their entire “career.” Success, in writing, like in most things, means does it accomplish what you intend it to.

So, if you would like to be able to share your thoughts with friends, and maybe leave something for your children and grandchildren to read someday so they can better understand the life you have lived, then I can help you.

If you want to make a million dollars writing, I can help you, too, but not as well. Let’s get the million dollars out of the way first: You can either become the world’s greatest hack writer, (in the old sense of the word), or you can write however you want, and possibly, the odder, the better. Either way, you are going to need to do a lot of things BESIDES write to “succeed” if you write novels, you will need tons of luck. It’s like writing screenplays, for every superstar, there are 1000 writers just as good who did not catch a lucky break, AND have the gumption to take advantage of it properly.

If you can write ABOUT something, food, fashion, health, business, or even, I suppose, writing, though I haven’t made any money at it, you have a better shot at this thing people call success. But often it helps if you work at it backwards. Become wildly famous and successful at doing something, and then start writing about that thing. Ok, I am tired of talking about “writing for success” it bores and frustrates me, and if that is what you want to know, there are slightly less than a million people already writing those pieces. I don’t know if they give much in the way of solid advice. I am pretty sure the best advice about writing for money, is “don’t!”

So now, to talk about what I love, the REAL success of writing is to write something that you appreciate and are proud of, whether you ever persuade a soul to pay you a penny for your efforts or not.

A couple more things to get out of the way. Grammar, spelling and punctuation, and basic storytelling. First the grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I rarely capitalize anything, I punctuate as the spirit moves me, I write one long sentence. Dropping in commas and periods as seems appropriate, but if it was up to me, I wouldn’t use any, most of the time. But if you are a little concerned about your “editing” ability, don’t be. First, it doesn’t matter, and second, Word cleans up almost every mistake you can make, suggests other corrections, so you can look passable if you simply follow its suggestions. The worst problem in this area is using the wrong word, but even that is sometimes caught by today's word processing.

Now, the serious part of editing is storytelling structure, both in word choice, and story arc and believable dialog and a list of other items, if you are trying to be a professional and commercial writer of fiction.  Poetry has always been my favorite form of writing, because if I write something, no one, not even my Ivy League professor of poetry (who actually knows these sorts of things) can tell me I am wrong. Of course, there is bad poetry, but if someone writes a poem, as long as they are happy with it, and especially, as long as they don’t insist you agree that it is “better than Shakespeare,” then it is fine and it succeeds in making the writer feel better!

If you are struggling to START writing, you probably want to be able to express your thoughts about life, and possibly want to share your story. Someday, maybe even right away, if you are both really good and really lucky, you might have some of the types of successes I mentioned. But, you first need to get comfortable thinking with your fingers. I do everything on my laptop these days, and even though I am a terrible typist, I type 30-40 words per minute, which is about as fast as I can compose, anyway. If you prefer, and if, unlike me, your handwriting is legible, you can fill up steno and note pads. Edit and type them up later. I used to write all my poems that way, but I got tired of not being able to figure out what I had written.

Here is a list of things you have my permission to NEVER worry about again:

Spelling

Punctuation

Story arc

Precise facts

Humor

Or…

literally anything else.

You can start by putting a few of your random thoughts down any way you like. Even in the manner of a grocery list. I sometimes do this when I have a poem idea, but it isn’t fully formed. I can then pick it back up at a future date and write it out. Or as is actually more common, I never touch that note again. Either way, it is a prompt, if you ever need one, and if not, it is a good exercise and clears your head for a better thought that will eventually be your story, essay, poem, or whatever.

Writing is also a lot like sports or music or nearly anything else, the more you write, the better you write. So, start out with a story about what you did today. It’s okay, I mean REALLY okay, if your day was extremely boring, (though, if it’s that boring, you might want to reevaluate your current lifestyle… or maybe not, some of us have already had a lifetime’s worth of excitement) tell how you either did or didn’t sit down with a cup of coffee, and what you did or didn’t have time or feel like reading or watching on TV, what you ate, who you had a fight with, or didn’t.

You also have 100% permission to make crap up. And you can use the truth as a jumping off point. Whatever is in your head, in whatever jumbly-trite-whatever method and manner you can and want, to use to get it out and down “on paper.” That’s it. If you do this every day, for a couple weeks, then all the sudden one morning you will wake up and say, “I don’t want to write this crap anymore, it’s boring, I want to write “X”!

So, you do, you may be great at it, but probably not, especially at first, but that doesn’t matter. How good were the first week you took piano, started bowling, or played softball? The more you write, the more the doors of your mind will open and you will find better ways to say what you want to say.

One last piece of advice, okay, it is kinda multi part: Be honest, but not too honest. If your aunt is screwing around on your uncle with their preacher, don’t name names. Write what you know, as the old saw goes, except, don’t be limited by what you don’t know. Between google and Wikipedia, you can have a good working knowledge of most things, people and places in less than 30 minutes, and often in less than 5 minutes. Don’t worry about what other people think. If you ever get to where you like what you are writing, share it with a friend or two. But if they don’t like it, even if they savage it, ignore them. They are probably totally ignorant about what you are doing.

If you can find a mentor, that is great, but if not, give yourself lots of permission do screw up things. Sometimes our screw-ups are our masterpieces. Usually not, but they are often our best teachers. Learn from others, learn from yourself, but most of all, learn from doing. So, start writing, without fear. The day you write it down, no matter ow poorly and disorganized, you have already succeeded, because a successful writer, is only and above all, one thing: a person who writes!

I wrote this for a friend who is struggling to get started, but it occurred to me, there are a lot of people in that position. If you are in that position, or know someone who is, please read, and share, and let me know if this helped.

Fetch the Pig

No, we are not

eating it today

take a dollar

pay Mrs Jones

for her corn it ate.

 

Drive him home

and fix the fence

fetch the pig

and make

him secure.

 

As anyone who has been reading much of my poetry lately knows, I have spent a great deal of time and effort over the past three years letting the concepts I have learned through my ModPo experiences infuse my poetry. This is an interesting (for me, at least), throw back to when I wrote poems for that moment, not with any thought to what the poem might mean. It almost seems like cheating. I hope you will respond in a positive or negative way to this abberation.

On Bourbon, Again

Hear about Fat Billy?

What?

Caught a ball of snakes.

Where? Was HE drinking?

Not on bourbon.

 

What was he doing?

Trying to get somewhere

bumped into them, rattle snakes

say it scared him, bad,

say they was all gray,

first thing he thought:

elephant trunks,

ball of Republicans down here drowned in the shit they made.

I know that’s right! You mean cottonmouths?

Rattlers don’t like water.

 

They were DEAD

 

Why you reckon they gray? And rattlesnakes?

Fat Billy reckons they were trapped under a porch.

What’d he do with them?

Ate’em. I told him they might be poison. You know what he said? Ever thing else is. You know, he’s right.

 

They got six on

Danziger bridge

last night

Black?

Yeah…

A Stone for your Journey

I struck a stone, a foot down where there should only be sand.

I will dig it out, no matter how large. I began to wonder, about stories of my childhood, Holiness preachers declaring God buried dinosaur bones to confuse the wicked, buried then down in that 6000-year-old earth. I think of God, a young boy, or a girl…. While her mother sews a magical garden of leaves, (Mother of God) this little god-child, this merry trickster crafts dinosaur bones, not bones, there were no dinosaurs, only a prank.

She buried them in soft sand of young Rocky Mountains. She named them that, Rocky Mountains. She liked the way it sounded. I like it, too. She swept her hands together like Micky Mouse in Sorcerer’s Apprentice and piled slabs of rock over them, her mother called, she forgot about them, then she was old, and had a long flowing beard, for who is to say an old woman, being god can’t have a long beard? By then, she had so much wisdom she had little room for memories.

You know this time, when she gave birth to her twins, Adam and Eve, the ones she told the story about the rib, the apple the snake and all those tales!

What she was thinking when she buried large flat stones in the fields of the New England farmers. Did she say, someday, they will dig these out and make lovely fences? Did she think of people all pretty on horses, a mess of beagles chasing some fox to its bloody red end? Did she like fox hunting? One might think so. Maybe she was more into steeple chases, with occasional broken bones and horses to be put down, no intent to kill. Unless she read Dick Francis, man loved to kill.

I will dig it out and take it to heaven and exchange it one day for a crown, no that isn’t right. Is this stone an emblem of suffering and shame? Will she look at it and smile and tell me about being a little girl in Alabama making mud pies with baby Jesus. I will stop her and say, but aren’t you his mother? I mean father, aren’t you God the Father? She will throw her old, old head back and laugh and laugh. Well no, remember my twins? Adam and Eve? Yes, but Jesus has always been my baby brother. Well except for that time he wanted to be a girl. She looks at some point far away and says softly “Lady Baby Jesus” and I stand there astounded, almost agog. “Oh, yes”, she will continue.

I will take this rock to Heaven. Maybe it is like the rock, like one of the rocks they built the theater out of, up north where dad fell through the floor. He was working on the wooden stage. He fell though, smashed his kidney, but got better later, until old when he had kidney stones. It made him think of stones on the outside the theater. Rockville Maryland, but it was a long time ago, I think he said Rockville because of stones. I could ask God when I get there, but her memory, oy vey.

Is God a Jew? No, really? Or a Muslim? Hard to imagine God a Holiness preacher, sweating, black suit, unairconditioned tabernacle, later, a fancy mega church, fat, smooth fingers, no sweat now, fake patting his dry brow. I am sweating. I will dig out the stone.

Three parts John Ashbery and one leftover bit from Rae Armantrout, like a morning biscuit shoved back in the oven, wrapped in a dish towel to be eaten later and now is later.

Two for Ms Armantrout

After listening to a Poemtalk that featured Rae Armantrout’s The Way, I was moved to write the first poem in a rather intellectual response to her wonder poem, then, pretty much as these things happen, the second poem came to me while making coffee and toast and taking a shower. I hope she isn’t horrified, if she ever reads these.

 

Do You Have the Jesus-bug Inside?

 

Jesus is the Way

Jesus is away

“Away with Him!”

Jesus Aweigh

Poor dead Jesus

slips over the rail

But Jesus walks

and the tiny

Jesus-bug

spreads Jesus wings

 

And flies into

the heavens

no pew cards

no cue cards

no trees

where Jesus-bugs

sit and sing

no Jesus-bugs

there.

 

 

Jerusalem Butter

 

Went down to Jerusalemtown

to get some butter

Mary and Joseph

had taken it all

down to Egyptland

‘cause Pharaoh’s acoming

looking for firstborndead.

 

They say

Jesus is coming

coming real soon

with butter, bread loaves,

fishes, too.

 

I’m sitting here

Jerusalemtown

waiting for Jesus

and a breadloaf

perfectly brown,

butter, too.

 

Hard Okra

I’m leaving

mywordstogether

as your path

 

crawdad holes

mosquitoes

slow motored boats

dusty green smell

old ponds

hanging moss

 

at hard okra

and seed pod trees

you stand like

on a bronze star

 

where I stood

and smelled woods

smelled dewberries

still alive

 

no snakes, tomatoes, coffee

no Texas

 

little bronze marker