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Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry. →
Meditation at Lagunitas
All the new thinking is about loss.In this it resembles all the old thinking.The idea, for example, that each particular erasesthe luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunkof that black birch is, by his presence,some tragic falling off from a first worldof undivided light. Or the other notion that,because there is in this world no one thingto which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,a word is elegy to what it signifies.We talked about it late last night and in the voiceof my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tonealmost querulous. After a while I understood that,talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a womanI made love to and I remembered how, holdingher small shoulders in my hands sometimes,I felt a violent wonder at her presencelike a thirst for salt, for my childhood riverwith its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fishcalled pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.Longing, we say, because desire is fullof endless distances. I must have been the same to her.But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,the thing her father said that hurt her, whatshe dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinousas words, days that are the good flesh continuing.Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. -
Q & A: Novel Writing, Getting Started
Q: Anonymous: I love the thought of writing a book[…]and I already have some ideas. But i’m having a really hard time focusing on the storyline. The details seem overwhelming, and I just can’t seem to concentrate. All I end up writing are scenes from defferent stories. No plot. Can you suggest anything?
A: Rebecca Anne Renner: Your problem is a common one: many young writers find themselves at an impasse when trying to write a longer work of fiction. But I think you’re going in the right direction. What every good novel amounts to is a series of interlocked scenes. You have scenes, but they aren’t cohesive, so what you need to do is maintain an ongoing plot line across them. One thing I can recommend is to write down your main plot as a single sentence: A bartender and an alien must get to China before the FBI finds them. I know that’s a weird sentence, but it has what you need: characters, a conflict that involves them (ie, what they need to do or else), stakes, and a deadline. Once you have that, you’ll have a goal, your characters will have a goal, and you can know your options of beginning-to-ending plot before you even begin writing. From here, you can either get started, or make a more detailed outline of your story before writing it. I find it easier to know how a story is going to end before I start, so I can set up foreshadowing and my scenes are more tightly strung together.
Have a question? Post it as a reply to this post, or email me at renner.ra@gmail.com -
Short Story Accepted! Melusine
And I bounce back from the rejection I recieved a few hours ago. Just got an email from the editor of Melusine saying that they’re going to print my story “The Rescue Club” in the Fall/Winter issue.
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RE-jected!
Hobart (print) sent me a very generic rejection letter. IN FACT, I think I’ve sent the very same one at Barrier Islands Review. I guess I can’t be too angry, then. I just feel a little de-jected from being re-jected. Maybe tomorrow I can just be jected.
Here is an unrelated picture.
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Poems accepted at The Delinquent!
“Thunder Jar” and “(genetic) memory” were both accepted by the Delinquent! They’ll be in issue 12. Still waiting for the thirty other some-odd submissions to resurface from the ether.
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The Waiting Game
I haven’t submitted anything in a while. I’m trying to finish my novel before classes start back up again, but I’m obviously getting distracted. Also, I feel like I’m waiting for so many responses that I can’t deal with any more.
These are the places I’m waiting on:
- Cicada
- Sage of Consciousness
- Inamorata Romance Books Poetry Contest
- Aorta
- Indigo Ink Press
- Jellyfish
- Twist of Noir
- Smash Cake Magazine
- 50 to 1
- apparatus magazine
- Vocabula Review
- Off the Coast
- flashquake
- The Greensilk Journal
- Third Wednesday
- Cezanne’s Carrot
- Danse Macabre
- AGNI
- Melusine
- Hobart (Print)
- The delinquent
- Illumen
- Polluto
- New Orleans Review
- Short Story America
- Bellevue Literary Review
- Electric Literature
- Grasslimb Journal
- Unsplendid
That’s quite a few! I’ll update later as I get rejections…I mean responses.
