How
do you begin to map a trajectory that feels as if in constant motion or flux,
zigging and zagging, jumping, stalling? There are jagged lines and furious
scribbling and ellipses, lots of ellipses, & dashes and many, too many
parentheses. I begin to notice moments one might otherwise overlook, take stock
of them, begin to see them align and curl over each other, pivot and dart away
when I look too closely.
There
was quiet. After school one day in the 9th grade, I entered our apartment to
find my mom in the kitchen reading my diary. I felt the color drain from my
face as I stood there, horrified. “You’re reading my
diary?” She explained that she was worried about me and didn’t know what else
to do. I cried & yelled & vowed not to write another word.
When
I was 17, I awakened in the middle of the night to my mother talking on the
phone & crying.
The
crying & talking on the phone was familiar - I come from a long line of
dramatic Italians- but the timing was unsettling. My mother left to bring my
youngest brother to the hospital, & there I sat in the dark, bereft &
afraid. I reached for my notebook & began to write again. It was during
this time that I rededicated myself to a writing life.
Writing was a way out. A long longed-for
catharsis. I wrote often & furiously in a series of marble notebooks for
years, never sharing a word for fear the bubble might pop.
At
19, I was living on my own, working full-time & attending college
full-time. That first year, I got fired three times from a string of office jobs
for lateness, due in part to my predilection for writing poetry until 2am.
Eventually, I took a receptionist position for a large publishing company where
my main responsibilities were to buzz people into the office and answer the
phone. While there, I made lifelong friends with the fine art of office job
subsidies. I’d practice transcribing words and their
definitions to aid memory, and began to compile them in notebooks. In time,
this process would lead to an ongoing project I refer to as my autobiographical
dictionary. I continue to refer to these notebooks as source material for
writing poems and projects. In fact, a few found poems derived from this
process would later find themselves in the final manuscript of field guide
to autobiography.
After
graduation, I saved up some money & backpacked around Europe for a month,
sleeping on beaches and in hostels, arriving in new towns with no plan but to
find a place to stay & food to eat.
Hiking the mountains of Cinque Terre was a
pivotal experience in that I connected with my own resiliency, and by the time
I returned to New York I began to submit my poems, mostly to small online
journals.
After
about six months of following a daily routine of writing and revising my poems,
researching journals and submitting poems, I had my first poem accepted at an
online journal, & a few months later - a second poem accepted at another.
This felt very rewarding to someone who had resigned herself to a romanticized
post-mortem fame.
Despite
these brief interludes with a sense of myself as a poet, I grew more and more
dissatisfied with living in Brooklyn, saved money, and traveled to California
to explore another peripatetic whim. While stranded at a Greyhound rest stop
somewhere in middle California, August 2001 - I decided to move to San
Francisco.
It
was also at this point that I first met Diane Di Prima. During my film school
days, I had read Brenda Knight’s feminal anthology of
women Beat writers, Women of the Beat Generation, and had been brazen enough to
contact Brenda and several of the poets including Diane, Hettie Jones, &
Joyce Johnson about a film I was interested in making about women Beats. Sadly,
the project never came to fruition, but I felt encouraged by these amazing,
fierce women writers as new paradigms of possibility for the future.
Spurred
on by this idea of the possible, I attended a reading Diane gave at a bookstore
in Glen Park called Bird & Beckett. Afterward, I worked up the courage to
approach Diane and introduce myself. We got to talking & she invited me to
apply to Foundations of Poetics, her small, private workshop for beginning
writers.
At
this point, I had accumulated a lot of poems & decided to start making
chapbooks of my work to distribute at readings. I chose 10 or so poems, &
arranged them into my first self-published chapbook - grins and growls.
I found the exercise so rewarding that I went on to self-publish two more
chapbooks that same year (2004): belly and bone, and the winter i was
worn. While I was no closer to
making rent from chapbook sales then when I started, it felt great to be
attentive to the poems, & feel a sense of agency in doing so.
Also
that same year, I worked as a student-teacher at Balboa High, through Poetry
for the People. Originally created by the legendary June Jordan for UC
Berkeley, the program in its current iteration is led by Lauren Muller at CCSF.
P4P opened me up to the sense of urgency in poetry, and helped me expand my
awareness of many poets from diverse multicultural backgrounds. Working with students
at Balboa High felt like a gift. While it was initially challenging to gain the
students’ trust, by the end of the semester I realized the
gentle beauty inherent in teaching - I had learned so much from these amazing
students. I decided to make my writing a priority, and applied to the MFA
program at Mills College.
While
at Mills, I began to immerse myself in the craft of poetry – its composition
and structure. I also began to write poetry through a less-personal lens, and
began to explore ways to remove myself & my emotions from the poem, so as
to examine the world around me more scientifically, or “objectively.” I lost
the I, and in many ways was trying to create a new I from all these new
experiences. As a high-school dropout & a first-generation college graduate
from a socioeconomically disadvantaged background, I was also coming to terms
with class privilege, and figuring out my place among so much affluence.
On
the night of February 24, 2007, during my final semester at Mills, I began
writing visual poems about identity and genesis which were later included in my
graduate thesis, went to sleep around 2 am, & woke up four hours later to
the sound of water gushing. I was in active labor. My son, Phoenix was born a
few days later, six weeks early & ready to greet the world.
Taking
care of a preemie immediately became my sole priority, but I worried I wouldn’t
graduate on time. Thankfully - there was just the pesky matter of finishing my
thesis. I learned how to write while also nursing Phoenix, him in the crook of
my arm, paper placed on a pillow above his head.
One
trick that has helped me sustain a somewhat consistent writing practice over
the years are engaging in projects with other writers. When my son was a
toddler, I began participating in postcard poem swaps, where poets mail poems
written on postcards to other poets. This form really appealed to me as a mom
on the go, and is versatile enough to accommodate many writing styles. Another
project I participate in is (NAPOWRIMO) or National Poetry Writing Month, where
I try to write at least one poem every day during the month of April.
Participating
in NaPoWriMo in April 2014 allowed me to carve out a space to write many of the
poems that would later wind up in my first full-length collection, field
guide to autobiography.
That
month, I had written enough that I could began to see a series emerge and
possibly a book. With field guide, once I started seeing where things were
going, I began to see connections forming between and among the different
genera I was reading about in the various field guides I consulted as source
texts. I noticed where the characteristics began to coalesce and formed a
semblance of self. That was one of the initial writing processes for the book.
I like to let the work tell me where it is going, and try to really tune in and
absorb what the poem is about and what it’s becoming.
I still didn’t feel like I had a
full-length book, but during this time, I had been entering a few manuscript
contests to see what might happen and keep myself in that process, staying in
that cycle. Finally, the book was accepted for publication in June of 2016.
This
book has been a labor of love, & has changed and evolved in many ways since
I first began writing poems toward it 5 years ago. In many ways, the book truly
began as part of my MFA thesis, from granite to the oyster, back in 2006. I had
submitted the manuscript for the greater part of a year in its current
iteration, & it had previously been rejected 15 times.
How
does a person begin to distill the many fragments & fractals that comprise
a life? Sometimes we must collage our fractures & let go.
This
essay was originally written & recited for the “Pathways to Publishing
panel” at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference in 2017.
Melissa
Eleftherion is a writer, a librarian, and a visual artist. She is
the author of field guide to autobiography (The Operating System, 2018),
& nine chapbooks, including little ditch (above/ground press, 2018)
& trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020). Born & raised in
Brooklyn, Melissa created, developed, and currently co-curates The Poetry
Center Chapbook Exchange with Elise Ficarra. She now lives in Northern
California where she manages the Ukiah Library, teaches creative writing, &
curates the LOBA Reading Series. Recent work is available at
www.apoetlibrarian.wordpress.com.