Month: November 2023

Finding the Form with Susan J. Atkinson

Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time was one of those rare gems of a poem that start with a tiny spark that instantly ignites and the next thing you know the spark has exploded into a full blown fire or, in this case, a poem.

I’d been reading a New York Bestseller Rom-Com, which talked of how to judge the worthiness of a first kiss. It got me thinking about my husband and I’s first kiss, different story/different poem, but still leading to how I had always thought of our second kiss with the delight and memory of a first. When I casually asked my husband about our first kiss, having never discussed this before, it would be an understatement to say I was blown away that he, too, felt exactly the same way. I loved how after so many years he had also held close and dear, the thought that our second kiss was more like a first, and that he was able to recount, with such detail, the evening, which has now become the poem.

In that conversation I knew I had the perfect occasion poem – a second kiss that would mark the beginning of the greatest love affair of my life. It is my hope that despite the specifics and intimacy of our kiss, the poem transcends into the universal and ignites memories and moments of those beautiful occasions in each of our lives.

Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time by Susan J. Atkinson was one of the Honourable Mention’s in The New Quarterly’s 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Poetry Contest.

Susan J. Atkinson is an award-winning poet. Recently she was named Honourable Mention in The New Quarterly’s 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest and was Longlisted for The 2023 Ruth and David Lampe Poetry Award. Her work has appeared in journals, anthologies and online. Atkinson’s debut collection, The Marta Poems was published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2020. Her second collection, all things small, will be published in Spring 2024. to find out more visit www.susanjatkinson.com

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Finding the Form with Bobbie Jean Huff

I wrote what would become my short story “Generations” many years ago. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in my writing then, but I knew enough to realize that it wasn’t any good. A story about a garden party? Who cares!

When I first started writing, I focused on poetry. I’d never considered writing fiction, or, god forbid, a whole novel. Four sons and my church organ job kept me busy enough. But once, when my brother was visiting from New York City, he said, “You’ve always been good at writing. Why not try a short story?”

So I took his advice and tried, and, like most neophyte writers, my efforts were garbage. But eventually they got better and I began sending stories off to journals. A few were taken—but not “Generations.” It was the orphan I had no idea what to do with.

After my novel The Ones We Keep was accepted for publication, I revisited my earlier, unpublished writings, and “Generations” was the one story that intrigued me. I knew at once what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it. On one hand I wanted, through my main character, to show how a person can remain the same throughout life, even as joys and sorrows and contradictions accumulate. I also wanted to portray grief, and the choices people make to protect themselves when the worst happens—in the case of my main character, the death of an adult child.

The story didn’t take long to revise, once I knew where it was going. When I’m in the middle of something I don’t write to a schedule, I basically write when awake—and sometimes when I’m asleep. As for editing, it’s never finished. When “Generations” finally came out, I couldn’t wait to read it, but by the time I got to the second page, I was thinking: Damn—wrong word! How did I miss that?

The story’s structure alternates past/present/past/present during the course of a garden party held every summer for fifty years. Although the events and people are fiction, I based it on a real garden party I attended every summer at a friend’s farm in Eastern Ontario.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

During the first garden party—both the real and the imaginary one—all the characters were hippies, but over the years most went back to school or secured jobs. Their families expanded to include children and then grandchildren. I wanted the story to be a very brief slice of life, and I wanted it to end in the middle of things. I hope I succeeded. If there is a curve to the story, it’s a very gentle one, with no real climax—and no real resolution. Kind of like life.

Bobby Jean Huff ’s poems, essays and stories have appeared in Canadian and US publications. In 2022 her debut novel, The Ones We Keep, was published by Sourcebooks.

Header photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Jill Solnicki

In her Finding the Form online exclusive blog post, Jill Solnicki talks about her process, and reveals drafts of her poem “Blue Rooms”. 

Finding the form of a poem is both a conscious process, and a mysterious one. Why mysterious? Because, for me, a poem seems to arrive from above, out of air, or from below, as if emerging out of deep water. The key for me is to be “there” for this arrival.

If that sounds magical, and maybe ridiculous, the creative moment is, in my experience, one of readiness: if I’m busy, preoccupied, problem-solving or focused on whatever is required to work through a day, I’m not receptive to poetry’s momentary visit. For this reason, I’m writing much more now that I’m retired from my day-job, teaching.

On the other hand, once the poem is “captured” (sometimes I carry a notebook, or I use “Notes” on my phone, or grab a napkin or theatre program—whatever available when words and images come), editing is a more conscious process. To a much greater degree, we writers take control of a poem’s editing: removing details that seem extraneous or overburdening; trying to enter and end the poem at its right moment; and looking for words, lines and stanza length that have the sounds and shape for conveying the poem’s meaning.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

I love that rare opportunity to see the drafts of famous poems: the crossed-out lines, the inserted or removed words: what has been rejigged as the poet distills the poem to its final entity.

I humbly offer up two earlier drafts (there were more) of “Blue Rooms” for that kind of elucidation, to illustrate aspects of the journey to “finding the form”.

Looking back at these, I see my removing many of the initial details; the honing in on the stronger images; rearranging ideas; and my lengthening the lines to create the sound appropriate for an elegiac poem.

Paul Valéry said, “A poem is never finished, only abandoned.” Needless to say, I don’t pretend that this final version of “Blue Rooms” is perfect. But isn’t it interesting to observe how a piece of writing, any piece of writing but especially a poem, emerges from its initial bulk—the way a block of stone gets chiselled to its final polished form

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BLUE ROOM (Draft 1, March 3, 2021)

I rode that room—aged five to twenty-one/two—
blue walls, bedspread blue with red,
drapes the same material,/drapes like material/fabric
window looking [out] onto the backyard—

the bookcase on the left,
behind the door,
the books unread—foisted by my parents—
heavy with expectation—The Life of Marie Currie—
and ones I read again, again—the fairy tales
[and their gorgeous illustrations]:
prince, princess, horses’ heavy manes and tails
like wind, or ocean,
around them forests deep.

I loved my address:
Rosemary Lane,
as if my house were a pretty girl
sitting on its curve, its step,
her number—twenty-one—
rich in/with threshold.

But with the beauty, birdsong [at the window],
I knew, too, that the wolf hunched under the bed.
He curled/hunched each night, he waited.
I did not dare let my hands hang,
but kept them safe at night, tight to my torso/body
under the blue blanket.
And in the closet something even worse [lurked]:
faceless, nameless, a shadow inside shadows
hiding behind/among the dresses,
in the corner by the shoes—
by day eluding bright inspection,
but at night, lights out,
it watched, waited,
hovered, hooded—
sniggering at the baby nightlight
that threw its/throwing feeble beam.

And here I am, on another/different narrow bed;
the walls are the blue again —of/merging everything—
water, sea, sky
as if I floated on eternity;
[and here they come.]
And I didn’t know,
not until/till now …
that all along, they’d been with me:
the wolf in the skirts of my wedding dress/gown,
inside the stuffed animal/toy my baby chewed—
through/during all those walks in woods, in gardens,
just out of sight behind the pine,
the tall purple iris.
And from the closet, too,
the shadow in its black hood,
it has now thrown off: really a skeleton—its white/
had reached out, for me, all my life,
bleached bones the sun, its long legs and arms
had whitened/whitening the grass, the road [saw each day.]

And now they climb up,
the wolf with a leap/jump, the skeleton bending her
clanking knobbed knees,
lie, one on each side.
The wolf looks at me, its eyes devoted as a dog’s—
I bury/sink my face in his deep fur.
I take the skeleton’s hand, her fingers long,
elegant, polished as marble./
The skeleton takes my hand in with her long, lanky,
knobbed fingers.

And here we lie,
I and my two old friends
like three figures carved on a sarcophagus,
[serene,] eyes closed, deep in the well of dark wolf earth,
cool as a bone’s white stone.

BLUE ROOMS (Final draft, July 27, 2021)

In my blue room, in my childhood house,
a wolf lived under the bed.
At night he hunched, hungry.
I dared not hang my hands—tucked them
tight to my body under the blanket.

Also, in the blue room closet,
the shadow. Faceless, nameless, it hollowed
behind the pink smock dress my mother made.
By day it eluded detection;
but at night, lights out,
it laughed at the nightlight’s dribble.

The house sat on the bend
of a street named Rosemary Lane—
as if its green shutters, white birch,
winding walkway, were a pretty girl
sitting on the front step—rich with threshold…

Yet, here I am—surprised, somehow,
to find myself on another narrow bed,
in another blue room.
Not robin’s egg blue, the colour
of hatching, fledgling, flight—
this time a dissolve of water, sky…
I float.

And here they come again!
And I never knew
that all along they’d stayed:
the wolf curled in the skirts of my wedding gown,
and at the foot of my baby’s crib;
that he’d followed, like a faithful spaniel,
during walks in woods, gardens—
out of sight behind a pine, the purple iris—

and, child-blind, I never saw
that beneath the shadow hood
a skull stared out from socket hollows—
or that all these years

the shafts of sun whitening the grass,
the white lines leading the tar-black road,
were bones.

Now they climb on the bed—
the wolf with a leap,
the skeleton bending her knobbed knees;
the wolf gazes—I bury myself in his deep fur den.
The skeleton takes my hand;
how elegant her fingers—candles, cool stone.

Jill Solnicki has published two volumes of poetry, This Mortal Coil and The Fabric of Skin, and a memoir, The Real Me is Gonna be a Shock. She is working on her third poetry collection.

Photo by Steve Wang on Unsplash

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