Billboards Seen Driving to Bread Loaf

Floyd the Dashboard Frog
playing with Almost Dorothy
Photo credit: Neil de la Flor

The Poem:

Billboards Seen Driving to Bread Loaf

We’re almost out of the South.
Triangle Waffle House specializes in

ham & eggs.
Lens cap cover on.
Thousands of Wigs! Hairpieces, Wigs!
Trailer hitched to pickup tilted off the highway.

Welcome to Johnston County. Olde South billboard, decaying.
It’s metaphor, you said, and, I want to see a civil war battlefield.
Ava Gardner Museum.

How’s your coffee? It’s tea.
Vermont will have windy roads. With cliffs.
Enough that you could kill yourself,

but most people don’t
worry about their fear of bridges.
We switch drivers.
Drink tea.
Read poetry: Maureen’s, Dean's, Mr. Breadloaf.
A Sign reads, "Elephants."

We’re near the home of Smithfield Hams.
A poem with repetition: where are my wigs?
An overheight detector.
A Bible factory outlet.
Bentonsville Civil War battleground .
Want to go?

No!

-- Neil de la Flor & Cyn

The Process:
The summer after our first year of graduate school, Neil and I journeyed up from Florida to Vermont so he could attend Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and I could help my mother move in Maine. Digging through old files last week, I found a random list of one-line typo-ridden notes. I dimly recall typing them one day while riding shotgun with my laptop as we headed north. The goofy tidbits brought back travel memories -- Neil is great fun on the road, just remember to feed him every three hours -- and so I emailed the mess to Neil to begin refashioning: time for a poem. We trimmed words down and rearranged and added a smidge, and voila!, a conversational vignette on travel and friendship and how very weird the South can be (wigs!). 

Neil wanted to make a sonnet, but I apparently can't count syllables or delete (hey, my degree is in fiction for a reason), so perhaps we'll try that next, chug along with something else. 

My point is not to say, Woohoo! High Art right here! More that, unlike the Important Poems you may have had to memorize so you could recite them too quickly with no feeling and sweaty palms in 8th grade English class, formal is just one approach to wordsmithing. Another is collaborating with a friend to create an oddball trip souvenir.

Creative Cohorts



Skee ball in the basement of the Pour House.
No tickets or plastic prizes, but still:
skee ball!

I spent yesterday morning writing, that rare, crazy, joyful writing that flows out, all kinds of truth and beauty. Or so it seemed at the time. A brief review that evening left me less enthused. The spotty organization and hanging threads of which I was dimly aware of in my rush to gush glowed crazy neon in my evening critical eye. But never mind, I had the morning. Now let's see what I do with it, if the piece ever grows beyond my initial enthusiasm. If nothing else, it's long; some days, the weight of a manuscript provides enough proof of effort. 

In general, I am in a time of dart throwing. I'm working as many avenues for change as I can. From travel and tweaking resumes to submitting volunteer applications and cajoling friends into collaborative efforts, I am shaking my tail feathers trying to be in the world.

Collaborations: This blog provides an excellent excuse for pulling people into my creative funhouse. One of the many splendid things about art is that it can run solo or group. And one of the many splendid things about my friends is that they indulge my hobbies. Projects in investigative stages include a couple of interviews with artists, a collaborative poem, and, most hysterically, given my total lack of knowledge, co-writing a song. The creative whirling is spinning fast here, whipping up a goofy glee in its wake.   

creative collaborations and creative snarls...

I have collaboration on the mind, largely because I learned just yesterday that my friend & grad school classmate Neil de la Flor and friend & former professor Maureen Seaton's co-authored book of poetry, Sinead O'Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Blue Birds, won the Sentence Book Award and will be published by Firewheel Editions. It's a big year for Neil, as his solo book of poetry, Almost Dorothy, will be published in the spring. As for me, I can say I knew him way back when, drinking red wine and eating chocolate crepes on South Beach.

Aside from being a fantabulous poet, Neil is a natural collaborator. The only successful collaborative work I've done was with him, and Mario Villa, back in grad school. Of course, this was for Maureen's class, collaborative conspirator that she is. Our work ended up being published in Admit2, an online journal of collaborative work, which still pleases me, that our fun tickled someone else enough to put it out in the world.

I think about Maureen's class a great deal (particularly any time I hear the word transliminal), and the experience of building something together. It takes a certain chemistry for that to work out well, and even then, it's damn tricky. Oddly, I had the most fun not with the words, but with the piece of plywood that the three of use (Neil, Mario & I) painted while we were playing with words too. The painting was lower stress - god knows, I have no idea what I'm doing - strictly for our own amusement (well, and to have some physical element to our altar). It serves as a visual reminder of some pretty goofy conversations, an interesting starting point. I think the painting is still in Neil's garage. Gads, I hope the raccoons that keep breaking in haven't gotten to it.

Maureen & Neil's book started when they were shuttered inside during a hurricane, trapped with little to do but worry about getting blown away and write, and over several years, it grew and grew. I'm ridiculously excited to read it, as I was to read Maureen's fantastic memoir, Sex Talks to Girls. Did I remember to send her a fan letter for that? Probably not. And yet, I adored it. Sometimes my inertia / shyness grates on me.

But back to the point: the chemistry of collaboration seems, on this tiny sampling, to also require just a wee bit of stress (a deadline for class, 110 mph winds). But revealing ones' own weird little creative world generates stress too. I remember feeling outnumbered by the image hungry poets, and as a result trying too hard with my language (something I still do, overwriting, when I'm anxious or uneasy with a topic). I also remember the frustrations of simple organizing...creatives aren't known for their consistency, the phrase "like herding cats" was probably used at least once in aggravation. Still, when the time was up, we had something that each of us at least liked pieces of - not the same pieces, I can't imagine, but likeable sections for each of us.

Unlike building a bridge, there isn't a ribbon cutting ceremony when the last nail is hammered in on a poem or novel or book. There aren't blueprints, so who knows if the nails are in the right place or not. Neil told me they'd sent the book out to a couple of different places with no response, then they changed the title, and it won. Is that the way things go, if you move a nail half and inch, or pull it out and hammer in one that's longer, shorter, or a deeper color gray, and that's the difference between structural collapse? Or do you just find the right river to span, and it fits there? Who knows, and this metaphor is getting muddy, and I'm not perhaps sure what my point is. Maybe it's just that I'm happy for my friends' continuing success, and that I miss the creative energy, despite many frustrations, that colored my life in grad school. Time to go to Florida, drink some red wine, and eat some crepes.