{"id":24011,"date":"2018-06-06T08:13:31","date_gmt":"2018-06-06T15:13:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rachelswirsky.com\/?p=1713"},"modified":"2018-06-06T08:13:31","modified_gmt":"2018-06-06T15:13:31","slug":"how-long-does-it-take-to-write-a-poem-also-inside-her-heart-and-a-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=24011","title":{"rendered":"How Long Does It Take To Write a Poem? Also, \u201cInside Her Heart,\u201d and a class!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Verses<\/a>I’m teaching an online class on writing science fiction and fantasy poetry on June 30 at 9:30-11:30 PDT. It’s a fun class because it draws people from many different backgrounds with many different goals. Some are dedicated poets, looking to sharpen their edge or find inspiration. Others are prose writers who’ve barely touched poetry before, trying something new, or hoping to pick up a trick or two to bring back to their novels and short stories.<\/p>\n

As I prepare for the class, I’ve been going over some of my own poetry, thinking about how I wrote it, and what inspired it, and that kind of thing. I wrote “Inside Her Heart” while I was in graduate school, and although the poem is ostensibly about the mother’s loneliness, I think the emotion I was tapping was my own homesickness, living halfway across the country from my parents and my (then to-be) husband.<\/p>\n

Inside Her Heart<\/p>\n

by Rachel Swirsky<\/p>\n

The morning
\nour youngest
\n<\/span>leaves for college,
\n<\/span>my wife sits down
\n<\/span>in the breakfast nook.
\n<\/span>“I’m done being a woman,”
\n<\/span>she says. “I’m going to try
\n<\/span>being a house.”<\/span><\/p>\n

She draws a sweater
\nover her chest like
\ncurtains, a wide hat
\nlike a roof perched
\natop her head. Weeds
\nspread across the linoleum
\nat her feet, littered
\nwith forget-me-nots
\nand matchbox cars.<\/p>\n

She moves from
\nthe chair by the stove
\nto one near the window.
\n“Better neighborhood,”
\nshe says.<\/p>\n

At night, she
\nopens her mouth.
\nLights pour out,
\nand scratchy music
\nlike old records.<\/p>\n

She beckons me
\nparting the curtains
\nso I can press my ear
\nto her heart and hear<\/p>\n

tiny people’s footsteps
\ninside her, dancing
\nreckless, full
\nof opportunity.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I wrote a lot of poetry in graduate school. I always joked that I was writing poetry because I was in a fiction program–I knew I couldn’t turn it in for class, so it was lower pressure than writing something that I knew would be subjected to many brilliant-but-critical glares. I say it was a joke, but it was probably also true.<\/p>\n

Poems are an appealing form because you can write them so rapidly in comparison to stories. You can start one in the morning, retype and revise it thirty times, and still send it to an editor in the afternoon if you’re feeling confident.<\/p>\n

Well, sort of. First of all, I suspect the fact that I write poems (relatively) quickly stems from the fact that I don’t make my living on poetry. Just as they were low-pressure in grad school, they’re low-pressure now. I write something; it’s fun; I hope someone enjoys it; I earn enough money for something between a cup of coffee and a nice dinner. (At least I usually get paid — I’ve heard people refer to poetry as a “gift economy,” which is nice, but I like coffee and nice dinners and paid power bills.) Poets can treat their poems with every bit as much perfectionism as I treat my short stories. Poems can live on hard drives for decades, enduring a tweak or two every month when their file gets dredged up.<\/p>\n

There’s also a lot of work that goes into writing a poem outside of the actual drafting, fingers-to-keyboard time. For me, sometimes that work happens before the poem is completed. It can arise as a kind of insistent, inchoate pressure that forms during my day-to-day experiences, from something as mundane as the ticking in my mind while sitting on a subway, to the whooshing blur of a dance floor–or, often, something shivery I’ve found in a book.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, I spend the hours in revision, obsessing over where a comma goes and where it doesn’t. I do the same thing with my fiction–which I don’t necessarily recommend; there are diminishing returns on this kind of thing. Take it out, put it in. Take it out, put it in. Sometimes I can never really decide, and whether it’s there or not depends sheerly on whether I stop revising on an even pass or an odd pass.<\/p>\n

Sometimes I hardly even notice the work I’m putting in. It seems invisible. A poem can seem to be begun and completed within hours. This poem felt like that–like something that just emerged. Of course, it didn’t–nothing does–I couldn’t have done it without years of reading and writing poetry.<\/p>\n

The real work, though, was in my life–in the homesick experience of living alone in Iowa. Sometimes living is the work of poetry. Letting yourself feel, deeply. Truly engaging with the world and with yourself. Poetry begins with the examined life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m teaching an online class on writing science fiction and fantasy poetry on June 30 at 9:30-11:30 PDT. It’s a fun class because it draws people from many different backgrounds with many different goals. Some are dedicated poets, looking to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[260,253,263,261,256,262],"tags":[148],"class_list":["post-24011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-classes","category-poetry","category-rachel-swirskys-poetry","category-speculative-poetry","category-teaching","category-verses-of-sky-and-stars","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24011"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24011\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24012,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24011\/revisions\/24012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}