A Week of Being Snowed In, Art Date at the SAM, and a Little Poetry Catchup

Lamplight on Snow

A Week of Being Snowed In

Here in Seattle, we don’t get snow very often, but this last week brought a combination of freezing temperatures, a ton of snow over four days, black iced roads (including a 30 car pileup on the Floating Bridge) – that kept us mostly indoors all week. Root canal? MRI? Running errands? No dice.

So I got a lot of reading done. I started watching Austen’s unfinished novel Sanditon adapted on PBS (and read the original 11 chapters, which took me 45 minutes and renewed my appreciation for Austen’s funny asides.) We also had a modem go out, so one whole day we didn’t have phone, internet, or cable. So, yes, if you’re asking, I am going a little stir crazy.

Mysterious Night of the Fox by Phyllis Emmert

An Art Date at Seattle Art Museum

So, periodically, and especially after a week of being trapped in my house AND awaiting a Monday root canal, I take myself on an art date. Today we went down to SAM and waited for four different elevators (SAM could use a little work on the accessibility front – we had to wait for a staff member to call someone else to get one elevator that was the only way to access the actual Flesh and Blood exhibit we’d paid to see and that cost us fifteen precious minutes. We got there an hour and fifteen before close, but it literally took me twenty-five minutes to get to the exhibit because I’m handicapped. Not cool, SAM – not everyone can climb a bunch of different confusing stairways to get to everything!) We enjoyed the art, but not the frustratingly designed for only able-bodied journey to getting to see it. My favorite things were the Titian, Parmigianino’s portrait of a young girl named Antea, and discovering a new local artist’s work at the end of the show. Oh, and the whole reason I went to the show – this amazing and disturbing painting!

Artemesia’s Judith and Holofernes

Anyway, there was a Titian, a Raphael, and several El Greco paintings, but that painting is one I had been obsessed with since I saw a slide of it in in Art Appreciation Class when I was 19 – a painting of Judith Beheading Holfernes by Artemisia Gentileschi. The painting itself is striking, the portrayal of the female body in struggle amazing,  but the story behind it even more so – Artemesia was seventeen and an apprentice to another painter who violently raped her. Her father, also a renowned artist, took the rapist artist to court, but it was a strung out procedure and Artemesia did not find justice. She did, however, find the inspiration to paint her new subject – female saints and Biblical figures, usually unfairly attacked or in the middle of attack.  My art history teacher said that Judith is modeled on Artemesia and Holfernes on her rapist. The dark and light, the shadow, the blood, and the odd muscularity of the action would all make this a fascinating piece even without the history. They recently discovered a self-portrait of the artist and she did, indeed, resemble this Judith very much. I just ordered a book about her history because it deserves more study, don’t you think? Fascinating?

A Little Poetry Catchup – and the Benefits of Downtime

So, I’ve been writing, sending out work, sending my book manuscripts out to publishers, you know, the usual. I didn’t finish a book review I meant to do during the “snow days.” I got the proofs for my poem upcoming in Ploughshares (!!) about which I’m tremendously excited. I also found an e-mail in my junk folder that was the editors letting me know they were passing on my poems to the featured editor – but I never got the e-mail so I missed being nervous about it for months! Ugh. Technical glitches (Submittable? My e-mail service?) can make getting and receiving poetry news a tense uncertain situation.

January seems like a good time for sending out work, and I find I tend to write a lot in January too. How about you? It’s also a good time for finishing reading projects. I finally saw the new Star Wars movie too, on one of the snowy afternoons we were able to get down the street to the virtually empty theater, and am happy to report I was pleased that they showed the porgs again, albeit briefly. I read some “for fun” fiction and it felt good! I need to remember to read sometimes for fun more often. That’s what downtime is for!

I was reminded, during this week of snow days, of the importance of “poetry downtime.” The time when you don’t feel like anything is happening – you’re not actively inspired for a new series of poems, you’re not hearing back from anyone – can be the most important times for your work. These are the times when you get a chance to look at your poems without the rush – you may find the typo, or adjust your line breaks, or decide one of your poems needs a new ending. If you’re working on a manuscript (or two) like I am, this is a good time to re-check that your manuscript order still works – maybe there’s a new poem you need to put in to give the book more momentum, or something you need to take out or shift around. If you lack downtime, you never get that truly relaxed time to revise and reshuffle, to do the things that might take your work from “pretty good” to “excellent.” You can’t rush revision – for me, it happens a little at a time, usually on a poem after a week or a month after I’ve written it, when you re-read it and notice the little things that make the poem happen or slow it down. It’s also the time to research new journals or publishers you might have overlooked – poetry journals are continuously being born and closing down, so it’s hard to keep your finger on the pulse of things. Check your subscriptions – do you want to try a new journal for a while? And check the submissions times of your favorite publishers – they can shift from year to year. See? Now you’re caught up, you’ve had a little time to breathe, and you can make all those little tweaks that you might otherwise overlook. The importance of downtime, whether snow-day-induced or not! Wishing you a great writing week.