The Karma Abacus: Birthday Blooms

Another year. I used to think of it like it was over, like I’d just completed something, marking an X on the wall like I’d done time. I don’t know why; I just did. But this year I am decidedly feeling like it is a beginning. At some point in the last year I could see the trajectory of my life was not one my heart felt called to anymore. So, I threw a wrench into the works knowing it would insist on change.

I think some era’s in life begin this way—with a sense of feeling life as you’ve known it is coming to an end. Like weeding a garden that’s gone to seed. You can hear something calling to you, a far away bloom, a perfume of future creativity. If I was being honest I would say I am intoxicated with the scent of it already.

Wherever you are, I’m toasting you for reading this blog and I hope to share many more words this year with you than last.

Birthday

It’s that time of year again,

hang my flag, say it’s my day.

Bring your weak lumbar,

your wrecked knee, fading eyebrows and

fear of earthquakes —

 

acknowledge aloneness

assess the years on the

karma abacus, your finger

touching more and more beads

sliding over years one by one

 

insistent, resigned,

a birthday.

 

Still, at night

You have a hunger, a mortal wish

to uncover promises you made to

yourself, so you route around

on the silty floor of the past,

and find your life

stubbornly

still breathing

ready at long last

to be understood.

 

 

 

The blood jet is poetry, there is no stopping it

The headline is a line from Sylvia Plath’s poem, Kindness. I read it decades ago and it pops in my mind at least once a week still. Usually when I have poems caged in my chest and stuck there behind a lineup of copy I have to write for my day job. I know it’s inevitable I’ll let them out because…the bloodjet is poetry, there is no stopping it.

But what I’ve never done a good job at is sending them along into the world. Specifically, to publishers. I was knocked back, rejected and told I was shite early on in my 20’s and it really just made me feel like I was a terrible writer and though I would often perform my poetry and do plays with poems I stopped sending them out into the world to publishers or anyone else that might be in a position to knock them down and tear a hole in my heart.

That was then. Now I’m shrugging my shoulders and writing like a demon because I’m determined to find an audience. One way I’ve found this week is through Instagram. It’s so immediate and wonderful. You write a little poem and people like it, comment, and voila! Insta-poet.

If you are a proper published poet you are likely sighing and sitting back in your chair and shaking your head at me. And that is just fine. But I know some young kids who don’t care about which medium as long as its digital and will never read your beautifully bound little slim volume in a library. Sad but true. I don’t want to be a forgotten poet at the back of a dusty row of books. So I’m going to fool around with media and the medium a bit. I’m also wanting to do video poems because again, I think these are much more likely to find an audience.

It is fun to write for Instagram–it’s a very tight format, you have to fit them into one or two stanzas tops. If you care to follow me, I’m letting it all out @poemsbymeforyou. Keep in mind they’re for social media–not a literary magazine. Enjoy!

November

You must know the rain

Cannot sound like it did then—

No, it comes down now as ordinary

As a cobbler or librarian, doing a days work

And nothing more. No wild mercury elasticity

To its droplets, no mad bouncing in joy like

A love-sick puppy, laughing under an eave

Dripping down between my breasts as I call you

In Germany, hold the phone up so you can hear its silvery song. 

 

My love. It is still raining.

It no longer rains for us.

Before it’s too late…

I’ve been transformed. There I’ve said it—it may feel like I’ve just dumped an overblown heap of pseudo wellness speak or new age bullshit on you but this isn’t like that. It is the actual thing of transformation, before the word started being used in mission statements, yoga studio bathrooms or political ads.

What I’m talking about is the sense of slipping out of  your life and into another, only you are in the same body, driving the same car, with mail addressed to where you still live. But suddenly the old gimmick you used for so long to enter into the world is no longer needed, that half-truth you were telling yourself and others, about your life, about moment after moment when your heart’s subliminal, traitorous subtext was screaming at you: I don’t care. I don’t care. 

Gone. All those discouraging voices have disappeared like magic, and what is left is the actual thing you trying to discover, so easily seen now in the outline of buildings , textured and contrasted against the sky; people’s intentions appear undiluted and transparent, like veins you never noticed before. Their agenda so obviously void of you. Agree to disagree? Yes, probably a good idea at this point.

My former life, the one before the transformation, is like a nice but slow patient I must put my arm around and through the crook of its arm and walk to a bench, any old bench in a park say, at dusk. I put my hands on its shoulders and shift it onto the wood, see it firmly seated then say adieu in as cheerful a manner as I can muster.

Walking away, I remind myself change doesn’t come without something—someone— making room for its fruition, and that real transformation is a long haul, only fully complete after it is considered in reflection, a death having occurred of some kind or another.

But I’m talking around the facts. The truth is I went to an intense writing residency for ten days and it changed my life. Or rather, it reminded me of life, the one I used to live, when I wrote and performed my writing all the time. Something so important to my happiness yet year by year I let it go; sometimes on purpose, to prove I could what? Sacrifice? Not be selfish? Be a good mother. Oh, maybe it was to survive. That was it. A lot of it. For years. Like a fog bank that moves in, I could see no other way. And then I spent 10 days with poets and Susan Musgrave. Yeah, if you know of Susan then you’re nodding right now. You get it.

In the book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about just showing up at the blank page to write, chipping away at it, she urges writers to just keep staying in motion, moving towards the moment when you give your attention completely to the doing, even if it feels like you can’t wrap your arms around all you have to, the immensity of the task, its blinding and potentially life threatening call to truth, insurmountable. You write anyway.

You write anyway.

I want the habit, of writing anyway. I want to live a life that calls me to the page each day. That’s what I know now that I didn’t know then. As in a month ago.

The latin roots of transformation are trans meaning “across” and  formare meaning “to form” so I take this to mean that it affects every part of your life, the very nature of your chemical makeup is somehow altered, and a new form comes into being.

I am so grateful for the wakening to go across and to form. To have the just-in-time love affair with my own life again, my poems, before it was too late.

When a writer has had enough of words

I am craving white space on the page. Only what remains after the burning of many words can be left, and even then it should be a shadow and wake no emotion.

The crowing of words from every digital precipice is all together too much noise ‘signifying nothing’.I rest my eyes on the white snow outside, turn my head to eliminate the shivering arms of a maple.

The cat turns to me as though to say, when will we rest?

I answer, soon, soon. The holidays are soon.

Disregard Ups and Downs and Get On With Writing

I am feeling very fortunate that I have the rest of the week to write. Whatever I want. With no one lurking in the shadows with a particular agenda, criticism, or secret need for my words. They will be entirely mine to do with them as I please! Hooray! It sounds bucolic but it will be a lot of work as you can well see I’ve not been writing much as of late. Having a day job really puts a crimp in one’s writing but that is the age-old conundrum of any writer. I have a friend who is writing a novel and subsists on packaged noodles and a part-time job that doesn’t nearly pay enough to live even close to the poverty line. But he is a dedicated writer and finish his novel he will. I can’t say the same for myself. But while my son still lives with me, I’m obligated to put a good shelter over our heads and write when and where I can.

Recently, I picked up the journals of Virginia Woolf for inspiration and was once again struck by the similarity in her challenges as I myself have in 2013 as a woman trying to carve out a writing life. One quote struck me in particular, as it nailed what I think writers often feel–that sense of total isolation that is all the more acute if the writer isn’t published far and wide. Or, at all.

 “Unpraised, I find it hard to start writing in the morning; but the dejection lasts only 30 minutes, and once I start I forget all about it. One should aim, seriously, at disregarding ups and downs; a compliment here, a silence there;…the central fact remains stable, which is the fact of my own pleasure in the art.”

As a writer, you inevitably ask yourself, what is the point? Often several times a week, or, if it is a particularly bad writing day, every few seconds. But then you are drawn into your stories and characters and realize that feeling is like no other and that the ‘pleasure in the art’ is the entire point.

So, in other words, best to just get on with it.

To that end, I am more than halfway through, at long last, a volume of poetry I will be giving directly to readers (yes, that’s you!). I have no patience anymore to run around begging publishers to read me, read me, read me so taking Amanda Palmer’s model, I’ll simply give it away and see if I get donations. What do you think of that idea? I think it is rather 2014 and I think Virginia would support it entirely. The title of the collection is called ‘Love Poems. Kind of’. Because I can’t honestly–truthfully–offer a collection of love poems and not include the denouement of those love stories. Also, I think it is a little humorous to offer this for February as a kind of tongue-in-cheek nod to all those over-the-top romantic gestures dramatized in media that are solely aimed at selling products. So, hopefully dear reader you will download it and have a good read with some heart-shaped chocolates by yours side and a wry smile or two as well.

In the meantime, I’m putting my writing boots on and escaping to forage deep in the landscape of my imagination until I have to face reality on Jan. 6th. To all of you who’ve read my words, shared your thoughts, and patiently put up with my random blogging schedule and content, I thank you and wish you– from my heart to yours–a lovely, blessed new year.

Inspiration Through a Blue Lens

I ran away from my life this weekend and it felt wonderful. I admire people who can stay put for decades in their lives, I do, but I can only take it for so long. I suppose I always find myself running away to a hotel alone because I’m searching for–what? Maybe it’s the closest thing to parents I have. Isn’t that sad you are thinking. Not really. I was an orphan by the time I was 30 and hotels for me have always been a place I felt comforted and at ease. It may also be I can have guaranteed uninterrupted silence and writing time in a hotel room. Ironically, that is harder and harder to come by it seems now that I write for a living during daylight hours.

But perhaps it isn’t so much as running away as a kind of returning. Returning to what is nudging me from under the surface while I race around life, never stopping long enough to listen to what is calling to me. For a writer, it is impossible not to start to resent all the noise keeping you from the stories that are quietly whispering for your attention. It was heaven to stare out at the city, think about my novel and lose track of time

At the end of my little tryst with myself, I didn’t feel like going back to real life  just yet and instead went to see the Palme d’Or winning movie, Blue is the Warmest Colour. I’m still in a state of speechlessness from this movie but all I can say is if you want to see a brilliant exploration of human love and the complex, interior landscape of what a broken heart looks like laid open in all its fragmented, shattered pieces, then rush to your theatre and see it before it goes to the small screen. There are few movies where an entire theatre weeps in unison with understanding and sorrow over the protagonist’s fate; this is one of them. Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux who play the couple in the movie, clearly suffered during the making of it. After the production they would both comment on the horrendous conditions, the grueling emotional toll of the love scenes, and the uncharted territory of making a film about love between two women when both were heterosexual. In an unprecedented move, the jury at Cannes awarded both actresses and the director with the best picture award. When you see this story you will understand why. Here is a scene that captures their first kiss, which anyone can relate to as it contains all the emotions of new love so poignantly in a simple moment.

Seeing Blue is the Warmest Colour reminded me that nothing of real artistic worth comes without some suffering. If it is fluid, easy to buy, grab, consume, take or give away, it is a story that can’t affect you. When I left the theatre , still wiping my face from my tears, I realized that story would stay with me forever. I hope life gives me the time to write something of worth. I won’t mind suffering for it.

Single-Chic and the Urgency of Living Well

I just finished a book called “The Art of Sleeping Alone” by Sophie Fontanel. It has been translated from French and I can just sense a lot was lost in that process. Hidden there is a chic and stylish single woman but quite often throughout the book she does not negotiate the important boundary between haughtiness and anger. There is a significant difference in tone.

I was interested in it for two reasons: I sleep alone and her first run of the novel sold 150,000 in like three days in France. I’ve been single now since January, 2012. And yes, you’re reading the subtext correct there. After the first few months of scissor-pain after the breakup, I began to feel something happening. It felt like when you come in out of a very bad storm and begin to unwrap your scarf, the rings releasing from your neck, the placing of your coat over a hook while simultaneously kicking off boots, letting your bag slump to the floor and finally sit down. The warmth settles deep into a long sigh, your hair sits happily limp, unkempt, real against your ruddy cheeks.

Indeed, you are home.

Why had this never happened before? Why hadn’t I gone inside? Why had I kept looking, furtively outside, running down the street calling out to someone else when all along my home waited for me, unknown to my own searching self?

In her book, Sophie Fontanel takes an often calculating, critical view of couples and distances herself so far from them that it tastes a little bitter at times. I don’t feel that way at all. I see them as they walk past me arm in arm, hand in hand, but barely, as though they are the same as the cashier or child walking by or a tree to be honest. It’s wonderful. I am completely content being alone and having all of my life for myself to consume now.

Gloria Steinem once said that we eventually grow up to become the men we wanted to marry. I’m not sure my image of a husband was ever that healthy but I do know when I decided to marry myself last year in Paris it felt like the right thing to do. Buy a ring, make a commitment to my life, and get on with it.

Recently, a girlfriend of mine, who is also single, didn’t want to go to visit a certain town that I also wasn’t too hip to visit. We both had the same reason: old boyfriend memories.

I said, then that is exactly where we’ll go. It is ours! We will eat, drink, dance, and celebrate. La vie est courte!

There’s a certain chicness that comes with being totally confident and comfortable in one’s skin and ironically, that is what I found missing in Sophie Fontanel’s new novel. I thought she would have had more Parisian chic between the sheets.

The Low, Wide Wave That is Coming

Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of Sylvia Plath. For those that don’t know me, I should tell you she is one of my favourite poets and I have read her throughout most of my life. In my final year of my directing degree, I chose as my final thesis a difficult play that featured five Sylvia Plath’s all converging in a sort of mind-bending, 72 – scene orgy of screaming poetry. Only a fourth year theatre student would choose such a difficult play but Sylvia’s words hold no less power for me now decades later.

I am reading a book about her and her husband, Ted Hughes, called Ariel’s Gift. It is a tough subject: two poets who just happen to be the heavyweights of their time in an intense marriage that ends in wrenching tragedy. Sylvia Plath killed herself by placing her head in an oven. She had carefully put towels under the door and left snacks for her children. Heartbreaking. As ever, she was torn desperately between the power, indeed the harrowing haunting drive, that fueled her fierce poetry and being a mother and wife. It didn’t help that her husband was sleeping with someone in their close circle and had left her in the English countryside in an old, very cold rambling house. She had moved to the city where Ted lived, hoping to shake the sinusitis that plagued her and escape the damp farm, but found no comfort in being closer to her husband. It is critical, however, not to get too caught up in the high drama of their marriage, but rather, stay focused on Sylvia’s electric, crackling clear voice and listen for the music that only Plath could produce. If there was ever a writer whose voice was cut short, it was Plath’s. I can’t even imagine how she would have been writing at 40, 50 and on. A staggering loss.

I have to go lightly in and out of Sylvia’s work, as I must do with Seamus Heaney because it is incomprehensible to me that they are so good. And then I read them and want to jump off a cliff. (Kidding..kind of).  So I read and listen to their voices in small bits. Like taking small sips of very, very expensive wine and swirling it in your mouth or nibbling on wildly decadent dark chocolate. You must go slow to savour.

One thing I noticed while reading Ariel’s Gift is that I am now longingly wanting to write poetry all the time. Reading Plath and Hughes has re-ignited something I feel is immense, like a wide, low wave coming towards me of poems I never even knew were there. Waiting all this time.

Here is a quick draft of one I’m working on today. It’s about coming into touch, into full view, with your actual self — not the made-up one you filled with air and paraded around like a balloon when you were twenty — no, this is the one you sink into as a woman in your forties. It has weight. There’s a lot of power to it. I think my poems will be exploring that more in the coming months, what it means to come awake to your essential self and be free of self-judging and the paralysis of contorting yourself to be something else for anyone.  I can’t crackle like Plath, but better to let the waves come in and do my best to capture them anyway.

At Last, The End of The Fairytale

I wonder how long it takes

before you go feral and leave

the fairytale?

A month? A year?

I’ve done that and more.

How do you know when it’s complete?

When all the sugar-spun cotton candy

Of romance is sloughed off?

 

 

You’ll know.

You’ll see your actual self —

riddled, fire-oven

bred,  a witch-like intent bent, bent into your

own towering shadow of life aching to live

before you are dead.

(copyright Margaret Doyle, 2013)

New excerpt from Mrs. Everett

My story Mrs. Everett, has still been going on I just haven’t written it down. At any rate, here’s a recent phone call between Mr. and Mrs. Everett. She’s in Umbria *really* living it up now and since she’s in such a good mood, she is uncommonly friendly to her normally freezer-cold husband who we begin to see, is human and just possibly, was once a man who loved deeply. 

E: “What does it look like?”

P: “It looks like someone tossed olive oil and lemon over the landscape and made a salad with it. ”

Long pause.

E: “Why can’t you just ever say something simply?”

P: “I’m not lonely. ”

E: “Why should you be? You’re holidaying.”

P: “I am not holidaying. That’s akin to merrymaking. It’s much more than that.”

E: “Oh, of course. You’re on a journey of the soul.”

P: “Edward…you know it’s just so.. simple to play stupid but in fact I know you are not stupid and I know that you understand everything about this but were you to admit that than you would also be admitting your culpability in it.”

E: “My culpability?Ah! Oh yes, my bank account, right, that’s right, I totally forgot for a moment who is funding this sojourn.”

P: “Did I mention I’m going to visit your sister?”

E: “Peg? Why on earth? You will hate it there. “(Starts laughing).

P: “You think I can’t go to the outback and shear a few bloody sheep? I’m much stronger than you give me credit for Edward. ” (She laughs a little finally as Edward keeps laughing.)

P: “She’s promised me free accom for exchange of some help with getting some exposure for the farm and such. And I should remind you I’ve been living off my own resources.”

E: “Yes, I did notice a rather big drop off after Paris. Your grandmother then?”

P: “Yes.” Prue goes quiet.

P: “I have to go Edward. Don’t–

E: “I won’t, have to run myself….Prue?…I am here, if you do–

P: “I’ll be fine, good night then or rather good morning over there.”

E: “Good night Prue.”

Line goes dead. End of scene.

The storyworld of your youth

I bought my first Vogue at the age of seven. I lugged it home, close to my chest, like a cultural flak jacket against my family, who I had realized early on were more focused on ball bearings, battles and my mother’s sourdough cheese biscuits. I think the storyworld of Vogue was incredibly influential to me in my experience of the world growing up and germinated core story themes that stay with me to this day. It wasn’t the fashion so much as the design that I found liberating and deeply satisfying to devour as I flipped the slim, slick pages sitting in my back yard in the shade looking at the advertising and editorial shoots. I never differentiated as one page being ‘better’ then another; they were simply colours and shapes and textures that I either liked or in very few cases, did not like. And despite what some may say, the essay articles in Vogue were incredibly well-written and opened up my young mind to a world beyond my small neighourhood and cloistered Catholic parish and community.

I remember looking at a risqué  shoot by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe once and being so transfixed that I didn’t hear my mother come up behind me. She snapped: ‘What is that?’ and I clutched the magazine in my hands and ran inside. I was so terrified she might take this precious world from me, I am quite sure I would have kept on running should she have pursued me.

The storyworld’s of our youth stay with us. They imprint, in ways both mysterious and obvious, a sort of lifelong spine of a story we can take comfort in as adults. For me, the fashion industry is doing interesting work in photography, motion, design, and converging art with technology and creativity in a way that is ever-compelling and continues to draw me into a bewitching storyworld of design, elegance, intellect, and beauty.

Below is an interesting exploration of the Vogue storyworld with one of its great editors, Alexander Shulman: