From the Enchanted Tower to the World of Po-Biz

Guest blogger, Willa Schneberg

I recently completed a poetry manuscript that took me almost eight years to finish. The working title is “A Good Time To Die.” The manuscript is now in cyberspace and in hardcopy at a number of presses. I love being immersed in a manuscript. I listen for the voice that tells me an idea, a fragment, a title, or a phrase that will become the seed for a poem or a collection. Most recently, I have conceived of my poems as linked, in sequence, each one building on the next. My first two poetry collections (Box Poems, Alice James Books, and In the Margins of the World, Plain View Press) were comprised of poems untethered to each other, and only later shaped into a cohesive work. My last collection, Storytelling in Cambodia, Calyx Books, is a series of linked poems that journey from Cambodia’s ancient mythic times to the killing fields and then to the U.N. presence during Cambodia’s first free elections in the 1990s. In it I tried to bear witness to the plight of the Cambodian people and to all who have endured holocausts.

In all of my work, some poems come from lived experience, others are imagined or someone else’s story, but often research is required, whether I’m writing a poem about protection from land-mines (Storytelling in Cambodia) or the imagined meetings of my mother with the Israeli poet Abba Kovner and my grandmother with Hazel Hall, the wheel-chair bound Oregon poet (“A Good Time to Die”). In order to create these poems, I lost myself in researching land-mine statistics, the poetry of Kovner and Hall, along with their biographies. By reading a poem out loud to myself, I can often hear when the music is wrong, a line break arbitrary, a simile off… but not always. Sometimes I am so bewitched by a poem that although I have revised it a number of times, I send it to a journal too soon. I try to make a practice of revisiting a “rejected” poem as an opportunity to revise. I don’t simply put it in a new envelope and send it off again. I also must admit there are poems that, as much as I try to strong-arm them to work, they need to be abandoned.

Cover of Storytelling in Cambodia is taken
from one of Schneberg’s photographs

I have found that a peer group of poets and gifted individual readers have been invaluable to my growth as a writer. Sometimes I’m too close to a poem, and these readers can see that it is encoded, and only I know the code. A few months ago, I wrote a poem entitled “I” about Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins, which I brought to my critique group. Of course it would be obvious to my peers that I was writing in the voice of Eng longing to be his own person, free of his brother, and not physically attached. Although my critique group members found the prosody compelling, they thought I was writing about incest or the relationship of two individuals engaged in emotional conjoinment. The group feedback clarified what was needed to make the conceit that worked figuratively, also work literally.

When I felt all the poems I must write for “A Good Time to Die” were written,
I asked two poets whose work and critiquing skills I admire to look at the manuscript. I wanted them to ascertain if the structure held the movement and narrative arch that I intended. The readers understood that even successful along with not so successful poems needed to be culled from the manuscript. Those poems were outside of the scope of the narrative, but for me they were “little gems.” I wasn’t yet ready to set them aside for another manuscript. “I” was one such poem.

Last January, on vacation in Kauai, I was still tinkering with the ordering of the poems, until there was a moment, as I watched a macaw land on the Buddha head in the garden of plumeria and hala trees outside my renovated Quonset hut window, when I knew the manuscript was done. I felt exhilarated and sad, cognizant I was no longer living inside the enchanted tower of creative process, but catapulted into the cutthroat world of po-biz.

Soon afterwards I sent out “A Good Time to Die” to open reading periods with this synopsis:

“A Good Time To Die” is a series of linked poems designed to explore the life and times of one family. It is a narrative more of emotional truths than facts. The facts are my parents were born in Brooklyn, the borough they never left. My father suffered from agoraphobia and my mother had larynx cancer and received a laryngectomy. Afterward, unable to speak, she expressed her needs through writing. My parents have died. I live in Portland, Oregon with my life-partner. Although there is an attempt to construct the trajectory of Esther, Ben and Willa’s lives chronologically, a more associative logic is also at work here. This poetry collection embraces prose poems, flash fiction, imagined meetings with historical figures, ancestral appearances, and ephemera including: letters, journal entries, formal documents, and newspaper ads woven together to form a palimpsest of what binds a mother, a father, a daughter, together.

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I am still waiting to hear…

Willa Schneberg has authored three poetry collections. Alice James Books published her first book. Willa received the Oregon Book Award In Poetry for her second, In The Margins of The World. Storytelling In Cambodia is her most recent volume. Among the journals in which Willa’s poems have appeared are: American Poetry Review, Salmagundi, Women’s Review of Books and Poet Lore. She has poems in two recently published anthologies I Go To The Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, and Knocking at the Door: Approaching the Other, and poems forthcoming in Before We Have Nowhere To Stand Israel/Palestine: Poets Respond to the Struggle. Willa has read at the Library of Congress, a poem was featured on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, and she has been a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell. Willa is a social worker in private practice and also a visual artist. In 2012, her exhibit “The Books of Esther” will be displayed at the Oregon Jewish Museum. Willa’s website: threewayconversation.org.

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