A special interlude post. Four updates:
1. Part 14 found a home in the Via Negativa Poetry Digest. Grateful to Dave Bonta for picking it. It’s so wonderful that parts of the story stand up as individual poems and find little homes for themselves.
2. Am sharing the reading of Part 7. Reading the poems is actually bringing me closer to them – like discovering them anew. Hope you enjoy the audio.
3. A reader @curiousindia (Instagram) created a picture using an AI art generator tool using keywords he picked from the title and different parts. Fascinating to see the result! Thanks so much @curiousindia Certainly one way to represent the mood here!
4. On the heels of an old poem that I shared on my main blog, which was inspired by Wallace Stevens’ ‘Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird’, I found myself writing this new set – alternatively called ‘Thirteen hacks for people writing poetic memoirs’. I wonder if I follow my own advice!
Thirteen ways to tell your story
1
don’t say a word —
at least one other person
knows the syntax of silence.
2
don’t block the sunshine
with your words:
shadows tell a different story.
3
the rabbit hole of the past
has only one exit.
you have to come back
the same, painful way.
4
write poems soaked
in metaphors,
let readers find their
own stories.
5
you are the hero of your story —
bruised, broken, brazen,
beautiful. every word has
roots in your nervous system.
6
look in the mirror. often.
what do you see?
what are you writing?
7
a story cannot grow skin.
raw, bleeding, exposed,
every eye that falls upon it
must cut it a little more.
8
your story is a tragedy.
even you
must die in the end.
9
wait till the crow
returns before
you segue into a confession.
more can be said
under the cover of darkness.
10
nothing is so big
that it won’t fit
into a sentence,
a paragraph, a chapter.
50 years is only a
few pages long.
11
brevity is the red
wheelbarrow. Basho
spun the entire
Universe on a
17 syllable axis.
12
facts don’t wear
euphemisms. when life
sucks, call out the
fucking cheat.
13
tell your story
as if no one is listening.
trust me, no one is.
A story in many unequal parts, some missing 
I hope you are not so cynical – or despairing – as to follow that advice!(Anyway, I’m listening.)
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And thank you for that! Grateful! It’s perhaps the nature of this exercise that one needs to step away and find new inspiration constantly and not get too bogged down in the rabbit hole of time. Sigh!
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Oh yes, I found that so in the project I was doing recently.
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I phrased this badly, I see! Not really meaning to take issue with the ‘advice’ in these lines – well, not all of it – so much as the sentiments in the last line.
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I hear you! It is perhaps a reflection of all the muck that is getting raked up in writing this series. I hope there are rewards at the end 🙂 🙂
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I resonate with your words. I think we would write if no one at all read our words. I did, before I found online. I especially liked the stanza about the rabbit , and the coming back.
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Thank you, Sherry. I agree. And there are little books and diaries filled with scribblings to prove that!!
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Four and Five resonated the most with me, even though in some ways they are at odds with each other. I feel like pieces that do both stay a bit longer in our hearts,
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Thanks Rommy… sometimes it is just easier to work with metaphors when writing something challenging… even at the risk of readers interpreting it in completely different ways. Maybe that way everyone gets a wholly different poem to savour!!!
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