Yesterday afternoon I stood around with a few old friends and a bunch of people I didn’t know, inhaling the free hors d’oeuvres, sipping on a glass of wine, all the while thinking that there has to be a better way to do this. This being welcoming a new group of people into community. The awkward mixer, as I’ve dubbed it, was for the new students joining the MFA program at the University of Washington. Held in a large room of the faculty club, people stand around eyeing each other wondering who the other is and how to start conversation. Someone walks up to join a small circle and inevitably interrupts whatever ever slight flow the conversation had. The introductions begin again and bump, someone walks away or a new person moves in.

It wasn’t too far from a middle school dance—where to put your hands and eyes was always the question.

This year I had the benefit of knowing professors and several peers, but even those interactions left me feeling unsatisfied. It was simply too hard to have any conversation without being interrupted or briefly stranded, alone, in between the food and the crowd. It was like a miniature high school reunion stumbled upon by accident. It was like stumbling upon an accident. Curious, a bit unnerving and ultimately something to be avoided.

I wouldn’t complain, but I don’t think it would actually be hard to “break the ice” as it were and facilitate connections and a sense of community. That job should fall to the organizers of the event, but writers and writing professors are a jumble of insecurities. After all, we spend a lot of time in isolation working on our craft…and the notion of a writing community takes time and work to get used to.

Those of us who have been around have plans to make up for yesterday’s shortfall. We’ve worked hard to establish a sense of community with its own dynamics and identity and we want it to continue. At the same time, I’m prepping myself for the next round of awkwardness as I’ve already forgotten most of the names I learned yesterday. Onward, with—if nothing else—feigned confidence.

I’m sitting in what must look like a rat’s nest—earmarked and torn pages tossed in heaps of a minimal order. I go by feel here because, frankly, logic is lost on this scale. It’s intuition and intention that lead me from poem to poem to poem. I’m trying to make a book.

Elle asks, “does order even matter? When I pick up a book of poems I usually flip through and couldn’t be pressed to notice its shape.” Ah yes, different readers will approach a book differently, but I’m at work on stage construction so the play will be a little more believable. Putting together a book is like putting together a juggernaut of a poem. It feels unwieldily.

I’ve put together a number of chapbooks and these seem fairly easy. They can cohere almost entirely and the mysterious arc is actually not that mysterious. But a 60-70 page manuscript, in my case, does not so easily come together. I’ve worked it over in my mind for months and months, played with pages, published a bunch of the poems and then I hit a wall. I wish I could just hand over the project to a more experienced poet and see what they would come up with. But I know I have to something solid before I’ll get any helpful feedback.

So, in my half-blind attempts at following intuition the thing begins to snowball and, at first, it is exhilarating. But then we’re picking up speed and suddenly we’re picking up more than snow—a lamp and coffee mug, the broken keys of a typewriter, old shoes, yesterday’s leftovers, bottles and bags and sand. When it finally clunks to a halt I’ve got an ugly mess before me. Hence the rat’s nest.

At these points I pause. Take a breath. Drink a beer. Smile at my wife and son. And then I come back again with a little more determination. Making a book is hard work and it is what will allow any reader to experience the poems in the way I want them to. I know I have the pages. I’ve culled the weak poems. So now I just have to keep moving toward that bigger vision. With patience.

Writers are normal people who just like to subject themselves to lots of fiddling and doubt. We toil away behind closed doors with all sorts of goofy rituals, but at some point in the life of a poem or story we have to come out and face the public—a mysterious and elusive audience that may or may not actually exist.

I’ve done a few real-deal readings of my work and I can’t say I love them. I do love people and connecting in conversation, but the performer’s mask has always felt a little tight on me. That said, reading poems aloud is a passion and if I must I will go forward sharing the good word on occasion. Two such events are nearing quickly: the book launch reading for By Way Of on October 4th in New York and the first of the 2009-10 Castalia reading series, put on by the University of Washington’s creative writing program.

Within a few days time you can find me on both coasts speaking from the diaphragm, humbly signing copies of the new chapbook, in a sort of vacant shock that at 26 I’m a broke young father who’s actually getting his work out there. If you’re able, come support me in my stupor and let me know what you think of the work. I’ll be a gracious listener too.

I came across this old sketch by my youngest brother Thom and couldn’t help but smile. I tried to picture when Thom, who just left for college a month ago, might have done this. He’s become quite an amazing artist, though he wouldn’t admit to that, especially if you put him on the spot.

I like the notion of imagining the ideal version of any number of simple things. Dream chairs. Dream desks. Dream mugs that are both sleek and keep my coffee warm. My current yearning is for the perfect wood stove to round out my writing shack, which is still under construction. I’ve been watching craigslist for weeks now and only a couple have caught my eye. The best so far, though, just sold from under me this morning.

I’m a little disappointed, worried I might not find another like it, especially for the right price. But when it comes down to it, I get to go back to the sketch in my mind. The page that still has plenty of room for my scratches, for a kind of dreaming that hasn’t heard of practicality, for the part of me that knows I’ll find just the right thing.

A favorite poem of mine for Monday….

Ode to My Socks

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Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

—Pablo Neruda (translated by Robert Bly)

Here’s a poem of mine that I liken to the folk song genre of poetry. Posted here by request.

How Marriage Is Like Baking Bread

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First we must consider soil,
how much it loves to stay together,
picturing plants called hard red winter
or hard red spring—
the steady circle of their growth—
but this isn’t about the harvest,
though we must gather some to grind.

To scoop, with both hands, the flour,
the yeast, salt and sugar.
To know that what feeds us must also be
fed by us.

With water, separate parts become
one body, and given time,
might grow, the field
warming atop the stove.

And this is the point, isn’t it?
the coming together of the disconnected,
hands doing what hands
are meant to do,
and the dough—
perhaps recognizing its own
purpose and impermanence—
rises.

(first appeared in Blue Earth Review)

I have a line in an early draft of a new poem that reads, “I sit around all evening, dreaming/of things left to do, dreaming of wasted hours/not thought wasted/until my unit of measure became scarcity.” This line came rather without thinking. It was the first attempt at a poem after River was born and I’m still gumming over this idea of what it means to use time well.

Writers think and write about this often: the mystery of process, which usually makes clear the enormous amount of time spent doddling, being distracted, drinking coffee, going to the bathroom….only to produce a few lines of poetry or a page of prose. I place no judgement on this, especially seeing as I engage in this sort of process regularly. But what measures time’s worth when we (happily) remove money from the equation. If time is not money, what is it?

There are heaps of projects I meant to have completed by now: the chicken coop (needs a roof); the writing shack (needs new windows, siding, floor, insulation, etc.); editing an anthology from a reading series which I help to curate; canning veggies and fruits…and really this list could go on.

It doesn’t include daily goals, like getting out for a run or canoeing for an hour, or even projects like getting my first full-length book together. At this point, I know a lot of people are saying, “yeah, so what? That’s life.” And I will respond by saying, “well, yes it is.”

My question, though, is what does a day add up to when you only get a quarter of the things on your list done? Where does the sunset fit? Does staring out the window at 200 year old big leaf maple bring me more joy than putting a roof on the chicken coop? Does it matter?

I’m not really seeking answers as much as trying to retune myself to this still-new life of parenthood where the first thing on my list is no longer me. It’s a fine thing to learn from, this change. It brings me back to the lines I opened with, smiling at the irony of sitting around, surely wasting time in someone’s eyes, dreaming of days when hours were more plentiful. Dreaming, I guess, of childhood.

Recording of poem draft mentioned above:

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What to say when there isn’t much going on or the story gets tragic and personal? Blogs—at least this blog—don’t seem the venue for it. Facebook and Twitter are even worse. Though I do, on occasion, see someone post a status about life’s occasional suckiness, it’s usually in a self-deprecating and humorous tone. Never too serious unless, of course, life is delightful.

So this picture we get—it’s more like the (very) cropped image of a smiling couple, beautiful and young, staring deep into each other’s eyes. The scene is pretty and makes you smile, the vicarious fragrance of it all. What you don’t see is the towering grizzly roaring above them, trying to decide which head to bite off first.

Well….you know what I mean. That bear could be money problems, a lame job, no job, a job that really asks nothing of you. It could be love problems, fear, depression, or too much of a good time drinking every night. The hidden story is, perhaps, a story we need more of—the danger, the edge—but where do we draw the lines that makes our daily lives livable? Tell too much and what intimacy is left to savor yourself? What private despair to keep you up all night long.

p.s. we’re not really going to be eaten by a bear.

Mother and Son

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The son enters the mother’s room
and stands by the bed where the mother lies.
The son believes that she wants to tell him
what he longs to hear—that he is her boy,
always her boy. The son leans down to kiss
the mother’s lips, but her lips are cold.
The burial of feelings has begun. The son
touches the mother’s hands one last time,
then turns and sees the moon’s full face.
An ashen light falls across the floor.
If the moon could speak, what would it say?
If the moon could speak, it would say nothing.

—Mark Strand

My newest chapbook, The Smallest Working Pieces, is out now included in By Way Of, the fifth installment of The Quartet Series. Chapbooks by Emily Carr, Diana Woodcock and Diana Alvarez fill out the perfect bound collection, so for one price you get four books. Of the collection, Susan Settlemeyer Wilson has said, “by a remarkable alchemy, these disparate elements merge into a single, compelling unity.”

Compelling. That’s a good word. I’m hoping many of you feel compelled to buy this book to experience that alchemical reaction. Poet Cynthia Hogue says, “Nienow’s poems are lyrically spare and mysterious, often striking a perfect balance between concrete and abstract, as in the brilliant “String Theory”: “Burnished. Bead. Spotted/ and shining. . . . What could be is only/ a limit of the mind.” If you read my first chapbook I think that this work will feel new and surprising.

We have a book launch reading coming up October 4th at the Katonah Museum in New York. I’m looking forward to meeting the other authors and getting my hands on a copy of this beautiful book. Order your copy here.

I’ve also begun making high quality audio recordings of all the poems so that I might offer those alongside the book to any interested parties…let me know if I’m talking about you.

And if you’re still not convinced, here’s the first poem in the book…the tease or trailer if you will:

In the Tall Grass

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In the field of a stranger’s mouth
In the tangled oak savanna

Under the one tree casting a shadow
Where a name entered the trunk at the end of a blade

Where bark grew around barbed wire
With no fence in sight

Where the grass could hide a child
Where the closest neighbor is the sky

Say prairie fire and mean it
Say flames devoured timothy and blue stem

Put me in your shoes and tie them tight
Light the fire yourself

I’m interested to know what happens
When earth is burning and we can’t see beyond the smoke