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Lesson from a Litter Box By Brandy Stoner
I lost the plastic scoop for my cat litter one day. I misplaced the regular one and the backup, actually. With no vehicle, and a child sleeping upstairs, I couldn't rush out to replace this handy tool, and was called upon to improvise. What to do? What to do? The ingenious solution I devised was to poke holes in a disposable bowl, scoop up the litter and offending chunks, and let the litter fall back through the bowl into the cat's box. It worked-- a little. I had to grab each side of the bowl firmly and shake it back and forth in order to get the litter to fall through and not have feline feces flying everywhere. My best friend called to see what I was doing, and through snorting laughter, I told her I was "panning for poop, like a prospector searching for golden nuggets." It took a year for me to find the writing lesson in that incident.
I had packed away many papers during my earlier separation and my divorce last year, and just recently gathered the wherewithal to sort through the plastic tubs that had been resigned to a top shelf of my closet. I found a notebook that contained some random rhyming thoughts I had jotted down a little more than two years ago.
Most of the things on the two pages were terrible. They reminded me of poetry I wrote in high school-- terrible, emotional, anguished diatribes. The poems are whiny and filled with angst, as I was during the heartbreaking marital separation that prompted them. Many similar poems had filled two thirteen-gallon trash bags less than two years ago, when I had decided to purge all the bad poetry and start fresh with my more well-honed skills and new experiences. (Yes, okay, I was a bit manic, but I have only regretted the purging once or maybe twice.) I kept only one small folder of poems that contained a line or two, or an idea, that I thought I could still work with somehow.
These more recently unearthed partial poems will find their place within the latter group, in an innocuous blue folder I used to use in college. While "Did you have to take part of my soul?/I have to be fake, pretend to feel whole" needs to be scooped out and dumped in the garbage bag with the cat caca, "I wish I would stop breathing/So my chest would stop heaving/And I wouldn't have to watch you leaving/With our pictures and your clothes" may just be fresh enough to stay in the tray. It is more concrete and vivid, and contains images that are usable.
The four lines that contain the words attention, apprehension, contention, mention, dimension, and intention are overkill. I won't even insert them here, out of compassion. Listeners or readers are too overwhelmed with the rhyming to have any idea what was just said in the stanza-- including the poem's author.
In another piece, the rhyme is trite and uninspiring, but a few of the lines have an everyday, earthy, easily-relatable quality that guides me toward my true voice, the one in which my poems tend to shine: "And sure there were some other things/I wanted you doing or wanted you giving/Like rinsing your dishes or earning a living/But if you will recall/These things didn't matter at all/When you acted like I mattered at all."
The idea is not that I am looking for the "golden nuggets" to keep, but more that the "nuggets" are what I need to thoroughly and methodically scoop out of the litter, in order to leave behind what is good, or at least salvageable. The plus is that there is usually more usable substance than there is the stuff of which I am disposing.
Eventually, I will have to completely empty it all out again and start over fresh-- with new words, thoughts, and ideas. If I dig around in the old stuff for too long, I might get used to the smell, and my writing will begin to stink. It is hard to talk myself into the "cleaning" at times, but it is a necessary evil to prevent my writing from becoming stale and contaminated.
The "turd words," as I like to call them, are not to be treasured and left in my poems. (The same principle can be applied to prose.) I must remove them on a regular basis. It may be a loathed task, but it's up to me to make sure the chore is completed. Hanging on to the waste ruins what is still good.
So…lesson from the litter box: It may take some effort and ingenuity, but it's important for the health and cleanliness of my writing, and the enjoyment of everyone who comes across it, for me to do regular housekeeping. So I will keep "panning" through my poetry-- using whatever tools I have in my possession at the time.
Brandy Stoner
writes on writing, for children and their parents, and poetry. She is an adjunct
poetry instructor, and is launching an online poetry journal, Subcutaneous,
which will feature an annual competition for teens, and angst-ridden verse on a
regular basis.
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