I'm home after a few days in Minneapolis which mean a few days of trying (and not succeeding) at sleeping on a bed of bricks. I slept 10-1/2 hours last night and feel myself approaching human again.

There's so much to say but right now I have to get some work done and then get to a meeting so I'll try to blog more in depth and with some pictures, later today.

One thing I will say now is that I'm 99% sure that it is time for me to move the bulk of my blogging to a different platform, away from Livejournal. I've really known this for a while but have kept my eyes closed because of all the work that I know it will entail (because of course I want to keep most of my old posts) but since Winding Oak is redesigning my website it's the right time for me to do it.

I will keep LJ for more of the friendly rants and chatty things.

Tomorrow morning I leave on an early (oh way too early) flight for Minneapolis for KidLitCon

I'm going a bit early so I can have time with my friend laurasalas and the folks over at The Children's Literature Network where I work as a web editor. I've been so jealous when all my co-workers there get together each month and this month I get to join them.

I love going to conferences where I'm not speaking because there's no pressure and I don't feel like I'm "on" the whole time I'm there. But the down side is that I tend to pull into my introverted self and sometimes spend too much time alone which is dumb when you make the effort (and spend all that money) to travel so far. On my trip to Austin last year I did a pretty good job of connecting and made some wonderful new friends. I hope I'll do as well this time too. It's a small gathering of what looks like about 100 people or so. I hope to see some of you there.

So today it's all about the craziness that is me packing and unpacking and repacking because I tend to first pack way too much and then have to edit it all down to the bare essentials, kinda like my writing.

So if all writers, novelist and poets, use imagery and metaphor and similes, if we all write with the intent to write beautiful language, is it merely the form that makes a poem a poem?

This is the thought I take with me to ponder in my dreams.

In keeping with finally claiming my poet's hat, I've been thinking about what it means to be a poet. I'm going to try and spend a few days thinking out loud about this idea and I hope you'll think along with me.

On one hand I think that being a poet is as simple as what makes a writer: a writer writes and a poet writes poems. But on the other hand I know it is much more complicated than that. I think it's a way of looking at the world around you as well as a way of recording what you see. And it is, of course, how you choose to record it. There are many aspects of being a poet but today I'm just thinking of one side of it all, slowing down so you can pay attention.

I think to be a poet you need to be willing to sit still and be. Later you can sit still and think and ponder one word over the other but there needs to be a willingness to just sit and be. And I have trouble with that. I always feel like I need to be racing off to do one thing or another (because I usually do need to be heading off to do one thing or the other) and I short-cut my way through too much of my life.

When I wrote my father poems last April for National Poetry Month I didn't try to do them in the middle of my busy day. I did them at night, the last thing before bed. My brain was full and tired. I sat on the couch, my laptop on my lap, and thought back over my childhood, forcing myself to remember as much as I could. Then I would pick an age and a scene and I just wrote. The poems came quickly, probably because they have been festering all my life. But I also think it was because I spent some quiet time before trying to write, time where I let myself just be.

If this is what I need to be a poet why is it so hard to give that gift of quiet time to myself?

I don't know the answer to that. But perhaps, like the acceptance of myself as a poet, it is enough for me to know that is something I need. That it is part of my job description. The trick, I suppose, is how to find those quiet times in the midst of our crazy days.

So what about you? What does it mean to you to be a poet (whether or not you are one?)

I've been thinking about my post the other day about claiming my poet self and went looking for a poem that might support that idea. This one by Jorge Luis Borges hit home for me.


BROWNING DECIDES TO BE A POET

In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words--
the gambler's marked cards, the common coin--
give off the magic that was their
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today's dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.

Jorge Luis Borges


Liz Scanlon is hosting the Poetry Friday Round-up today.

KidlitCon is a week away. I'm going a little early so I can have some time with friends and my co-workers at Children's Literature Network. The fantabulous Laura Salas is arranging a little hangout next Thursday night, the 21st, at 8:15 pm at the Holiday Inn Metrodome which is after we go to the Christopher Paul Curtis lecture that night at the Kerlan. If you want to join us Thursday night, please let me know.

When Cassie first came to live with us it became apparent very quickly that she hadn't been socialized around other dogs much at all. In fact, piecing together the few stories we knew about her it appeared the most of her interactions with other dogs had never been very positive. We wanted to change that. We wanted her to be as comfortable and as confident around other dogs as we were.

First we introduced her to my brother-in-law's dog, Circe. Circe is a high energy German Shepherd that truly never stops moving. Poor Circe was dying for someone to play with but Cassie, after a few cautious sniffs, preferred to stay close by our side. We introduced her to the neighbor's dogs, a trio of senior citizens who barely came up to Cassie's knees. One of them barked twice quickly sending Cassie back to her hiding spot behind my legs.

At the dog park Cassie would take a few steps toward a dog but then as soon as the other dog showed any interest in her, she backed away. Over time, on her walks around the neighborhood, she has run into some of the same dogs over and over again. Mostly one or two sniffs is enough for her but after 2 years she has, at least, stopped hiding behind us.

I've written all my life and whenever people ask me what I write I'm often a bit flip about it and tell them, "Whatever I can get paid for." In later years I've amended that to say that mostly books for kids. And it's true that I've written and published all sorts of things from working at newspapers to writing for parenting magazines to short stories and articles about the craft of writing. I've written books for kids of all ages. I've been published in a lot of places and a lot of countries. I'm a writer. I know that and I'm pretty confident about that (even if my confidence wavers from manuscript to manuscript.)

But I never said to anyone, "I'm a poet." I've never claimed it. And the less I claimed it the more it grew to be something that belonged to other people and not to me.

I think that's because most of my poetry has been written from an organic and instinctive place to help me sort out emotions behind some pretty intense life events. Through-out my career I've studied characters and plots and theme and setting. I've read poetry but I didn't study the craft of poetry. I don't understand a lot about rhyme or scansion or poetic forms aside from haiku. And when people blog or write articles about what it means to be a poet or a verse novelist or to even think poetically, well, I look at every article as though it were written about me, about my deficiences as a poet. For some reason I felt like I had to learn more, write more, publish more before I could claim that title.

For the last few weeks the lady next door has been dog sitting for her brother. Mya is a lovely, small boned Golden Lab with sweet eyes and a hunger for playing catch. She's been in the backyard a lot the past year and I'm sure she and Cassie have sniffed through the fence a time or two. Last week, when I had the front patio door open, Cassie starting barking like crazy. It wasn't her "something scary is out there and I'm protecting you" bark. It was different. She barked loudly then stopped. A few seconds later there was an answering bark. They went back and forth a few times until I finally went to check it out. I figured someone was walking their dog and had stopped in front of our house and Cassie was just confused about what to do.

But no. It was Mya on the front lawn next door, straining to get to Cassie and Cassie at the screen door straining to get to Mya. They'd never met face-to-face before but they were pretty excited about the possibility. I let Cassie out into the courtyard and my neighbor brought Mya over to say hello. I've never seen Cassie so happy to see another dog. They sniffed each other quite thoroughly (something else Cassie doesn't normally do or allow done to her) and Cassie even gave a play bow, the first I'd ever seen from her.

My current work-in-progress, like all of my stories, is a healing journey. Not an easy one as I mine my past for emotions to carry to the page. It's written in verse because, well, because that's the way the voices have come to me. Before I dug into the project in earnest, I reread many of the verse novels on my shelves. Some were free verse. Some were filled with a variety of poetic forms. Some were told in a single point of view. Some were told in many voices. Some made me cry and some made me laugh. At first each book I read made me feel like there was no way I would ever be able to finish mine. That I just didn't have it in me to do right by the story in verse. But by the time I finished rereading about 30 of them I was filled with something different than confidence. I'm pretty sure it was acceptance. Acceptance that I am a poet and poems are one vehicle I use to tell my story.

For the past few days Mya has been coming over for short visits and each time I watch Cassie greet her new friend, I am amazed at her level of confidence in approaching and allowing herself to be approached by this young and very active dog.

As a writer I am always asking why. Why does this character do this thing in this situation? Why would that character react that way?

Why would Cassie decide this was the one dog she would let be her friend?

Why now, after writing poetry (and a whole lot of other things) all my life, am I finally willing to claim that being a poet is, indeed, one part of who I am as a writer?

Maybe the why isn't really that important.

Maybe it's enough to just be who I am supposed to be.

I decided if I am going to Kidlitcon in a few weeks (and I am) and since it is a conference about and for bloggers, it might be a good idea for me to jump back into the blogging waters. Here goes.

I've probably started this blog post 20 times over the last week. I tried a Cassie post and a house post and even considered a garden post. I tried writing about the current WIP, a YA verse novel. I tried writing about the new character that just started speaking to me that has to wait. I tried writing about a lot of things but what would usually happen is that I'd get a few sentences down and I'd decide that it wasn't witty enough for a come-back-to-blogging post.

So life, the short version.

Lots of stuff done around the house. Lots of stuff not done around the house. Susan got happy. Susan got sad. Some things changed. Some things didn't. Life goes on. The end.

The slightly longer version. We now have a stair railing so Cassie won't launch herself sideways off the staircase on the way down. However the guy that installed it cut the carpet wrong and now all the carpet on the stairs have to be replace. The first arguement with the painter came over varnishing the banister (one coat is good enough, right? And who really notices the bumps in the wood when you run your hand up and down the rail?) The house interiors are painted and look beautiful. The bathroom cabinets are painted and look like crap and need to be redone by a different painter (who will also be redoing the banisters.) The colors I picked for the walls are just what I wanted, however some of it ended up in places that weren't walls. The colors on the fireplace in the new dining room, not so much. New chairs for the new sitting area are finally the ordered but the rugs are eluding me, probably because I'm not willing to pay a thousand dollars for a rug that Cassie will, at one point or another, throw up on. The wood floor is still not installed and is another month away. In the meantime furniture is bunched up in places, left from when we had to move it for the painters. Cassie's play area has shrunk by half because there are boxes of all the stuff we took off the walls for the painting and won't be put back up until the tile is demoed. It feels like we just moved in but were told we couldn't unpack for a couple of months. The built-in bookcases for the library were scheduled to be delivered/installed the weekend I'm at kidlitcon so that's being pushed out another week too. In the meantime the old bookcases in the library have been partially dismantled and moved into my husband's office for his book collection which leaves a few thousand books in the library stacked willy-nilly. 

It is, as you can imagine, exhausting.

What does this have to do with writing? Nothing and everything. The single thing I am sure about myself as a writer is that my very best writing is when I rip my guts wide open and let them spill on the page.

The book I'm writing about right now is inspired by my father poems written last April for National Poetry Month. It's inspired by finding my sister and my brothers and aunts and uncles and oh so many cousins that I found when I located my father's obituary. It's inspired by my own life and some of the questions I had as a child, questions that have never, and now, will never be answered.

While all this work has been going on around the house there have been confrontations that I have worked hard to avoid, many times I bit my tongue, telling myself to pick my battles. There have been compromises from what I wanted to have done to what we could afford to have done to what was even possible to have done considering the eccentricities of our house. Prices of things have doubled then tripled and electricians who should have been done in a couple of weeks were here for over a month.

Thank goodness I'm writer. All that emotion, all that, I'll say it, anger, it has to go somewhere.

What better place to put it in than in a book?

My friend Toni Buzzeo is offering a great giveaway for PreK and Kindergarten teachers!

You might just have an Adventure Annie in your classroom. You know the type. She bolts through your classroom door full of kinetic energy and ready to take on any adventure that comes her way...but maybe not quite ready to listen and follow those classroom rules without guidance.

Enter to Win this perfect read aloud for the 'getting to know you (and the rules)' first month of school. The book will come packed in a backpack of school supplies (as Annie always has a backpack packed for adventure).

In a 10/8/10 random drawing of Kindergarten and Pre-K teachers who register on this website, Toni Buzzeo, the author of the Adventure Annie picture book series (Dial Book for Young Readers), is giving away ten backpacks stuffed with Adventure Annie Goes to Kindergarten as well as her professional book, ABC, Read to Me.

Enter here: http://www.tonibuzzeo.com/aa_giveaway.html