Melanie, I love this. It is beautiful in rich imagery and song. All the internal rhymes make it sing, and it's remarkable how uniform and intentional it looks after being pulled apart and put back together like you describe. I thought the three, three line stanzas were to represent the Trinity. The four line stanza in my mind made a kind of Sabbath because I thought of it as three plus four equals seven. I was marveling at how you could keep that up while making it look and sound so right. It all fit without being forced. I adore the fairy tale elements! I wondered initially if there was some legend about Mary pricking her finger that I had never heard before. The snail adds to the princess motif. Anytime an animal works on behalf of a maiden it elevates the story into a fairytale landscape. I felt like I could interact with this most familiar story and see it reenchanted. This goes in my commonplace.
Thank you so much, Abigail! You are such a kind and thoughtful reader and I love your insights.
I love the idea of the threes for the Trinity and of a seven/Sabbath rest. I'll pretend that's what I intended all along. What actually happened was there was a very brief step between the thirteen line stanzas and the tercets and quatrains where I actually had alternating stanzas of six and seven lines. And my head started screaming six-seven, six-seven! (Thank you, youngest daughter's public-school educated best friend for introducing that meme to my household.) So I clearly needed to break those sixes and sevens further into threes and fours to escape the curse. The theological significance of seven was momentarily overshadowed by the silliness of the meme.
But I do think there is a grace that happened with the structure of the poem that feels incredibly Spirit-blessed: the way those new line breaks got me from a 36 line poem to a 52 line poem with an extra sixteen lines to become those quatrains. It wasn't at all deliberate, but I can recognize a happy chance when it falls into my lap.
Really, this whole poem was a gift to me and I am incredibly grateful for it. There is something so humbling about being the recipient of poems when they just fall into your lap out of the blue. I know I am contributing skill and thought in shaping them, but there is also something that is pure grace and well beyond my poor powers. Rather as you say with your Christmas Child poem, a kind of inevitability. Not every poem comes like that, but sometimes they do and all I can do is praise the Father's goodness to me, his child, upon whom he chooses to shower such treasures undeservedly.
I hadn't thought of the snail as a fairy tale motif, but oh I can see it. Thank you for that.
Melanie, there is a kind of grace on this poem that allowed all the pieces and symbols to come together through you, even unconsciously. I find that beautiful. This is why poets throughout history have talked about the muse because our writing reflects both our own efforts and intentionality at the same time that they seem able to echo a mastery and magic that would be out of our control to harness. This poem is marvelous. Every time I read it, I love it more. I like it better than any poem I have read in a literary journal in a LONG time, which gives me courage to keep writing and posting my own poems that are getting rejected from literary journals. I am very curious if you submit to journals or if you ever feel like you need to reserve a poem this good for an alternate publication. I find that I still want that stamp of approval on my writing. There's a sense of unreality in writing on my scraps of notebook paper in between correcting math problems that feels like I need an outside, "establishment" voice to validate. Laughing out loud at the six-seven reference! Yesterday as I was teaching, one persistent little boy kept working it in no matter WHAT number was said out loud. I am ready for this particular zeitgeist to reach its demise.
Yes. that sense of it coming through me is particularly strong with this poem. Yesterday I was sitting with that image of Gabriel's voice like a bell. That terrible noise-- like being in a belfry when the bells are ringing such that the sounds becomes a wall, totally overwhelming to the senses. And also with the pun on "hail," which becomes literal balls of ice crushing and killing the flowers in the garden. Those are images that came from word play and from the forms of the rhymes and from playing with the idea of silence and storm and different kinds of pentecostal theophanies. And I'm finding them totally arresting, partly because there's this sense that as the reader of this poem I don't feel like the same person as the writer. There's such a weird distance there.
I was explaining the poem to my sister and oldest daughter and my daughter pointed out that Mary is a channel of grace, the words the Word, going through her but she is the vessel holding them for the sake of the world. I feel that is exactly right for this poem. It's an annunciation in that sense of a reception of the words as a gift and as a vessel. I can't help but think of Mary continuing to pray the Magnificat with a kind of awe and wonder throughout her life at the gift of the poem that had been given to her to say and to pray.
That's a really good question. I feel really conflicted about literary journals. I mean I would love to have all my poems be featured in journals. That still feels like a major accomplishment. And back when I started posting some of my own poems on my previous blog, a poet friend suggested maybe holding some back for submission. I tried that occasionally.
But one thing is I like the immediate gratification of readers now. I like getting feedback and knowing that my poem is actually connecting with people. And that is the other thing, the one that feels especially important because I think the poems are gifts *to* me but *for* others. So there's that sense that the poems themselves want readers not to be sitting and waiting. I'm very impatient.
I do occasionally, like once or twice a year, submit a collection of poems to some journal or other and collect a rejection. I did once have a poem published in Autumn Sky Daily, which was really nice. It's a lovely online journal which publishes some excellent work.
But the other thing is that I really just do not have the emotional energy to deal with submissions. With the process of curating, with screwing up my courage to submit, with waiting, with receiving rejections. I just don't have the bandwidth for that. And it's all so much emotional labor. So by just letting that go as a feeling of something I *should* be doing, I gained lot of interior peace. I still want to be published in journals, but the very real roadblocks in my current situation feel like very clear signs from God that that's not what I'm being called to do with my art. If submission was easy peasy and I could just churn them out, then I would maybe take that itself as a signal that it's what I'm supposed to be doing. But there's something kind of humbling to admitting defeat and saying: this is just not something I can cope with.
And maybe that decision matrix will change in five or ten years as my kids age out of homeschooling and I enter the next stages of motherhood.
And maybe it's partly that I'm over fifty years old and my ambition to be published just can't compete with my basic inertia. And maybe it's also that I'm very self-critical and think no one who I really want to publish my work will want to publish my work.
But I also really like the substack community and the feedback I get here. It feels like a real readership. I would love more fame and more attention, but at the same time, I also kind of shy away from self-promotion and from competitiveness. I'd like my poems to have a greater readership, but I also don't have some kind of ambition to be a famous poet. I'm never going to be the caliber of a Frost or Dickinson or Eliot or Rossetti and that's ok. I just want to write my poems, the ones only I can write that come out of my head. And I guess that when I start thinking too much about publication, I start to slide into the trap of comparison and it becomes less about the joy of writing and sharing poems and starts to be more about wanting to be something else or someone else and it starts to feel inauthentic. But yeah I'm human enough to want that stamp of approval. It's just that I'm also a little skeptical about whether that's a good desire to feed. I have a hunch that it's not-- at least not for me. At least not right now.
I love this entire answer so much. Thinking about ourselves as the reader versus us as the writer. Yes! I have wondered if other people have that experience of rereading something they wrote and being affected by it in layers they had never seen while writing it. Amazing. (This poem is one of my favorite things you have written, along with your ekphrastic poems about Van Gogh and the poem you wrote at Easter this year about being in the tomb with Jesus.)
“The poems themselves want readers”! I love this so much. Yes, the feedback on Substack is instantaneous, and the thoughtful interaction and engagement is usually better than anything published in a journal. I keep thinking about Joffre Swait’s essay on why he doesn’t publish in journals. I am attracted to the idea of starting my own literary journal, but I have had that on the shelf for when my homeschooling years are through.
My goal for 2025 was to submit a poem once a month. I think it has been a good exercise to set a goal and stick to it, but I still don’t understand the publication process. Some of my weakest poems have been published, and some of my strongest have been rejected. The publication process seems very arbitrary. I agree that there are seasons in which something becomes possible that wasn’t possible before. My youngest just turned six, and I feel like I have wind beneath my reading life this year. Not waking up in the middle of the night has been life changing for me. I had no idea how much that was affecting me until it shifted.
Lastly, the pun on hail is brilliant. Every time I reread this poem I get more out of it.
" I have wondered if other people have that experience of rereading something they wrote and being affected by it in layers they had never seen while writing it."
I've wondered the same thing. Is it just me? Maybe I'll make a post asking other poets that question.
I've also been thinking about Joffre's post this week and I've been meaning to go back and re-read it. You and I are on the same wavelength there.
I've started to feel the germ of an idea growing that's less about publishing in journals and more about forming collections and books. I have a notion that one of these days I think I might like to gather some of my ekphrastic poems into a chapbook. I've been wondering about whether it makes sense to group them by artist: Van Gogh- inspired poems, Anna Archer poems, Carl Larsson poems. Or if they want to jostle together more, the various poems inspired by different artists. When I was in grad school I stumbled across a book of ekphrastic poems by Paul Durcan with beautiful color plate illustrations and that has always been a model in the back of my head, something I've aspired to as a poet. And I think it's one reason I've tended to write about paintings in the public domain, with an eye that if I do eventually decide to publish I might have a chance of actually being able to include the paintings with the poems.
And maybe there's a germ of another chapbook of religious poems that don't specifically go with individual images?
I'm not sure, but there's this sense of wanting to think about curating poems and putting them out into the world on paper as their own thing. Seeing fellow substack poets like Courtney making small chapbooks, X.P Callahan publishing her loteria inspired collection, Mortal Sugar, is starting to give me the itch to do likewise. And that feels like more of a tug to me than literary journals. Something that's incubating and waiting for the season to germinate.
I know what you mean about the freedom of having all your children sleeping through the night. I remember feeling like I had my brain back. I didn't realize how much the sleeplessness affected me. I'm in a weird parenting season now and I'm still trying to process it. Everyone says that homeschooling high school is all about having all these independent learners and you being able to step back and with my neurodivergent crew that is not my experience and I think I'm just starting to realize this week that I have a lot of grief that I need to process. It's very confusing to be in a place where I thought I had a clear roadmap and to find that in fact I do not have a roadmap and I'm exhausted and grieving and in burnout. And I'm still trying to settle in myself a feeling of guilt that there's also been this kind of compensatory blossoming of my writing life here on Substack. And a worry that I am shortchanging my kids by pouring energy into my poetry and writing and this community, but also a recognition of it as a gift that I don't want to take for granted. Maybe it's ok to just accept it with gratitude. I'm trying to find a way to make sense of it all.
I love this idea of an ekphrastic book, Melanie. There is most certainly a book here. I need this book on my shelf! But, I think you have too many for a chapbook. I am thinking full length poetry book with gorgeous illustrations: heavy paper fitting for all the beautiful artwork and beautiful words.
You have no idea how comforting it is to me to hear about the toll the submission/rejection process takes on you. I always tell myself not to be such a sensitive artist, but I get physically nauseous sometimes when I get a rejection. It sounds crazy. I ask myself why my brain and body interpret the rejection that way. I don’t have an answer. I love these poems we get to write. They are part of us. I know I take them WAY too seriously, but I don’t know how not to.
Thankfully since I have submitted once a month all year, my capacity to handle the rejections has grown exponentially. This month’s rejection email only brought a twinge of sadness and genuine disappointment. I reread the poems and realized I still loved them and instantly sent my favorite one out again. I think sending them back out has somehow been instrumental for me.
As you write about so beautifully here and elsewhere, our Substack community provides a group of thoughtful readership that inspires me daily to write better and more often. I think that balm gives me the courage to face the rejections too. The feedback and insight I get from readers here is unparalleled to what I have experienced before, similar to how my poetry class in graduate school was, but honestly that felt a teensy bit more like we were all jockeying to be the best poet in the class. Maybe because I was two decades younger and still had a lot of pride and image that I was working through. Now I feel so intensely grateful any time I write a poem. I have experienced dry seasons where a poem didn’t come through for years, and I thought I would never write again. In seasons where they come often, I know they are a gift.
There are seasons, as you say. And the intense season of homeschooling high school is asking a lot of you. There would be grace for the submission process if you were called to it, so avoiding the potential pitfalls and the weariness of a system we aren’t even sure we believe in is wise. I teared up when you said you need to grieve the hard things. We do. We need to name them and grieve them. I’m so grateful that our Father sees every single detail of our circumstances, the things no one else sees, even the things that are hidden from ourselves. Emmanuel is with you. I see and hear him in your writing, and what grace that he gives us these words to find him and point to him, both here and coming back for us. I have been writing this note for forever, so I will close there.
Beautiful Melanie! I love the way you let your poem breathe and find its own form, spiraling like a snail shell :-)
Your poem is also sending me down a lovely snail-trail of rare and precious Tyrian purple (made from snails!) found in a painting of the Madonna from the late 13th century.
"The use of Tyrian purple is extremely rare in easel paintings. I have been working in this field for over twenty years and the only time I have found the use of the pigment was while examining the altarpiece Madonna and Child."
"find its own form, spiraling like a snail shell" Oh Ann! What a marvelous insight! I love how you help me to see the snails and rejoice in them with me-- what delight! I'd never have spied the snails in the very form of the poem. Oh what a gift.
Thank you so much also for sharing your snail trail of Tyrian purple!!! My favorite kind of rabbit-trail. Once for a period of weeks we had on our homeschooling whiteboard a little cartoon of a guy saying "I'm from Tyre. I stink." I don't remember the full story of how he got drawn or why, but I recall watching videos of archaeologists trying to recreate Tyrian purple snail dye. I love the idea that the snail in the poem might be a hint toward's Mary's royal role as Queen of Heaven. I hadn't thought of the snail/purple connection but it's a beautiful Easter egg hiding there.
Oh, you reminded me of reading Susan Wise Bauer's _Story of the World_ series with my kids! I think there was a chapter about making purple dye from snails. Apparently it was not a pleasant fragrance, and a popular insult of the time was: "You stink like a man from Tyre!" Like yours, my kids thought that was great! :-) Thank you for this memory!
"Queen of Heaven" is such a lovely name for Mary. A special favorite of mine is "Star of the Sea". I love this song by Mediaeval Baebes, the way it keeps moving back and forth between Middle English and Latin--oh so beautiful. . . Thanks again, Melanie
I think this works so well! Reading it in this form, there were shades and nuances that leapt out, that I hadn't caught before. I think the lines have space to expand and breathe now, with the rhymes woven (sewn?) through the lines, instead of placed at the ends. Well done!
Thank you, Kate. The new form is a revelation to me too and I am seeing it and hearing it in a completely new way.
I am so grateful to you for taking the time to read the draft and for your insight as to the structure. Your comment was the key that turned the lock.
I really didn't expect it to work so readily. I suspected this was going to be a poem I'd have to labor over and that might not come out quite right.
And like I said when we chatted, I didn't think I had the mental clarity to do much. But I decided to play with it a bit anyway and then once I unformatted it, the line breaks just came to me in the same way the original lines came, like little gifts from somewhere else.
I was thrilled that after exploding it, it decided to come together in a really lovely form after all. I can't believe how it looks like this was how it was always meant to be.
I like the idea of the rhymes being woven or sewn through the lines.... now I can see them as little snail trails of silver threads.
Be warned, next time I get stuck on a poem, I'm going to bother you because I now fully believe you are my lucky penny with all the superstition a poet's heart can hold.
This is just gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, Melanie. The finish on asking Mary to hold us in her silent heart, the way the internal rhyme carries us through, that marvelous snail. All of it. It's helped me find a moment of peace this morning. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Rebecca. I am so grateful that it speaks to you so deeply and that it is a gift of peace for you. That is the highest praise indeed for a poem. It's awesome to me that this poem which was such a gift to me as a poet is also a gift given to me for the sake of others, a blessing which overflows and multiplies touching others through me. What an honor. May Mary continue to hold you in her silent heart today, my friend.
Melanie, I love this. It is beautiful in rich imagery and song. All the internal rhymes make it sing, and it's remarkable how uniform and intentional it looks after being pulled apart and put back together like you describe. I thought the three, three line stanzas were to represent the Trinity. The four line stanza in my mind made a kind of Sabbath because I thought of it as three plus four equals seven. I was marveling at how you could keep that up while making it look and sound so right. It all fit without being forced. I adore the fairy tale elements! I wondered initially if there was some legend about Mary pricking her finger that I had never heard before. The snail adds to the princess motif. Anytime an animal works on behalf of a maiden it elevates the story into a fairytale landscape. I felt like I could interact with this most familiar story and see it reenchanted. This goes in my commonplace.
Thank you so much, Abigail! You are such a kind and thoughtful reader and I love your insights.
I love the idea of the threes for the Trinity and of a seven/Sabbath rest. I'll pretend that's what I intended all along. What actually happened was there was a very brief step between the thirteen line stanzas and the tercets and quatrains where I actually had alternating stanzas of six and seven lines. And my head started screaming six-seven, six-seven! (Thank you, youngest daughter's public-school educated best friend for introducing that meme to my household.) So I clearly needed to break those sixes and sevens further into threes and fours to escape the curse. The theological significance of seven was momentarily overshadowed by the silliness of the meme.
But I do think there is a grace that happened with the structure of the poem that feels incredibly Spirit-blessed: the way those new line breaks got me from a 36 line poem to a 52 line poem with an extra sixteen lines to become those quatrains. It wasn't at all deliberate, but I can recognize a happy chance when it falls into my lap.
Really, this whole poem was a gift to me and I am incredibly grateful for it. There is something so humbling about being the recipient of poems when they just fall into your lap out of the blue. I know I am contributing skill and thought in shaping them, but there is also something that is pure grace and well beyond my poor powers. Rather as you say with your Christmas Child poem, a kind of inevitability. Not every poem comes like that, but sometimes they do and all I can do is praise the Father's goodness to me, his child, upon whom he chooses to shower such treasures undeservedly.
I hadn't thought of the snail as a fairy tale motif, but oh I can see it. Thank you for that.
I am honored to have my poem in your commonplace.
Melanie, there is a kind of grace on this poem that allowed all the pieces and symbols to come together through you, even unconsciously. I find that beautiful. This is why poets throughout history have talked about the muse because our writing reflects both our own efforts and intentionality at the same time that they seem able to echo a mastery and magic that would be out of our control to harness. This poem is marvelous. Every time I read it, I love it more. I like it better than any poem I have read in a literary journal in a LONG time, which gives me courage to keep writing and posting my own poems that are getting rejected from literary journals. I am very curious if you submit to journals or if you ever feel like you need to reserve a poem this good for an alternate publication. I find that I still want that stamp of approval on my writing. There's a sense of unreality in writing on my scraps of notebook paper in between correcting math problems that feels like I need an outside, "establishment" voice to validate. Laughing out loud at the six-seven reference! Yesterday as I was teaching, one persistent little boy kept working it in no matter WHAT number was said out loud. I am ready for this particular zeitgeist to reach its demise.
Yes. that sense of it coming through me is particularly strong with this poem. Yesterday I was sitting with that image of Gabriel's voice like a bell. That terrible noise-- like being in a belfry when the bells are ringing such that the sounds becomes a wall, totally overwhelming to the senses. And also with the pun on "hail," which becomes literal balls of ice crushing and killing the flowers in the garden. Those are images that came from word play and from the forms of the rhymes and from playing with the idea of silence and storm and different kinds of pentecostal theophanies. And I'm finding them totally arresting, partly because there's this sense that as the reader of this poem I don't feel like the same person as the writer. There's such a weird distance there.
I was explaining the poem to my sister and oldest daughter and my daughter pointed out that Mary is a channel of grace, the words the Word, going through her but she is the vessel holding them for the sake of the world. I feel that is exactly right for this poem. It's an annunciation in that sense of a reception of the words as a gift and as a vessel. I can't help but think of Mary continuing to pray the Magnificat with a kind of awe and wonder throughout her life at the gift of the poem that had been given to her to say and to pray.
That's a really good question. I feel really conflicted about literary journals. I mean I would love to have all my poems be featured in journals. That still feels like a major accomplishment. And back when I started posting some of my own poems on my previous blog, a poet friend suggested maybe holding some back for submission. I tried that occasionally.
But one thing is I like the immediate gratification of readers now. I like getting feedback and knowing that my poem is actually connecting with people. And that is the other thing, the one that feels especially important because I think the poems are gifts *to* me but *for* others. So there's that sense that the poems themselves want readers not to be sitting and waiting. I'm very impatient.
I do occasionally, like once or twice a year, submit a collection of poems to some journal or other and collect a rejection. I did once have a poem published in Autumn Sky Daily, which was really nice. It's a lovely online journal which publishes some excellent work.
But the other thing is that I really just do not have the emotional energy to deal with submissions. With the process of curating, with screwing up my courage to submit, with waiting, with receiving rejections. I just don't have the bandwidth for that. And it's all so much emotional labor. So by just letting that go as a feeling of something I *should* be doing, I gained lot of interior peace. I still want to be published in journals, but the very real roadblocks in my current situation feel like very clear signs from God that that's not what I'm being called to do with my art. If submission was easy peasy and I could just churn them out, then I would maybe take that itself as a signal that it's what I'm supposed to be doing. But there's something kind of humbling to admitting defeat and saying: this is just not something I can cope with.
And maybe that decision matrix will change in five or ten years as my kids age out of homeschooling and I enter the next stages of motherhood.
And maybe it's partly that I'm over fifty years old and my ambition to be published just can't compete with my basic inertia. And maybe it's also that I'm very self-critical and think no one who I really want to publish my work will want to publish my work.
But I also really like the substack community and the feedback I get here. It feels like a real readership. I would love more fame and more attention, but at the same time, I also kind of shy away from self-promotion and from competitiveness. I'd like my poems to have a greater readership, but I also don't have some kind of ambition to be a famous poet. I'm never going to be the caliber of a Frost or Dickinson or Eliot or Rossetti and that's ok. I just want to write my poems, the ones only I can write that come out of my head. And I guess that when I start thinking too much about publication, I start to slide into the trap of comparison and it becomes less about the joy of writing and sharing poems and starts to be more about wanting to be something else or someone else and it starts to feel inauthentic. But yeah I'm human enough to want that stamp of approval. It's just that I'm also a little skeptical about whether that's a good desire to feed. I have a hunch that it's not-- at least not for me. At least not right now.
I love this entire answer so much. Thinking about ourselves as the reader versus us as the writer. Yes! I have wondered if other people have that experience of rereading something they wrote and being affected by it in layers they had never seen while writing it. Amazing. (This poem is one of my favorite things you have written, along with your ekphrastic poems about Van Gogh and the poem you wrote at Easter this year about being in the tomb with Jesus.)
“The poems themselves want readers”! I love this so much. Yes, the feedback on Substack is instantaneous, and the thoughtful interaction and engagement is usually better than anything published in a journal. I keep thinking about Joffre Swait’s essay on why he doesn’t publish in journals. I am attracted to the idea of starting my own literary journal, but I have had that on the shelf for when my homeschooling years are through.
My goal for 2025 was to submit a poem once a month. I think it has been a good exercise to set a goal and stick to it, but I still don’t understand the publication process. Some of my weakest poems have been published, and some of my strongest have been rejected. The publication process seems very arbitrary. I agree that there are seasons in which something becomes possible that wasn’t possible before. My youngest just turned six, and I feel like I have wind beneath my reading life this year. Not waking up in the middle of the night has been life changing for me. I had no idea how much that was affecting me until it shifted.
Lastly, the pun on hail is brilliant. Every time I reread this poem I get more out of it.
" I have wondered if other people have that experience of rereading something they wrote and being affected by it in layers they had never seen while writing it."
I've wondered the same thing. Is it just me? Maybe I'll make a post asking other poets that question.
I've also been thinking about Joffre's post this week and I've been meaning to go back and re-read it. You and I are on the same wavelength there.
I've started to feel the germ of an idea growing that's less about publishing in journals and more about forming collections and books. I have a notion that one of these days I think I might like to gather some of my ekphrastic poems into a chapbook. I've been wondering about whether it makes sense to group them by artist: Van Gogh- inspired poems, Anna Archer poems, Carl Larsson poems. Or if they want to jostle together more, the various poems inspired by different artists. When I was in grad school I stumbled across a book of ekphrastic poems by Paul Durcan with beautiful color plate illustrations and that has always been a model in the back of my head, something I've aspired to as a poet. And I think it's one reason I've tended to write about paintings in the public domain, with an eye that if I do eventually decide to publish I might have a chance of actually being able to include the paintings with the poems.
And maybe there's a germ of another chapbook of religious poems that don't specifically go with individual images?
I'm not sure, but there's this sense of wanting to think about curating poems and putting them out into the world on paper as their own thing. Seeing fellow substack poets like Courtney making small chapbooks, X.P Callahan publishing her loteria inspired collection, Mortal Sugar, is starting to give me the itch to do likewise. And that feels like more of a tug to me than literary journals. Something that's incubating and waiting for the season to germinate.
I know what you mean about the freedom of having all your children sleeping through the night. I remember feeling like I had my brain back. I didn't realize how much the sleeplessness affected me. I'm in a weird parenting season now and I'm still trying to process it. Everyone says that homeschooling high school is all about having all these independent learners and you being able to step back and with my neurodivergent crew that is not my experience and I think I'm just starting to realize this week that I have a lot of grief that I need to process. It's very confusing to be in a place where I thought I had a clear roadmap and to find that in fact I do not have a roadmap and I'm exhausted and grieving and in burnout. And I'm still trying to settle in myself a feeling of guilt that there's also been this kind of compensatory blossoming of my writing life here on Substack. And a worry that I am shortchanging my kids by pouring energy into my poetry and writing and this community, but also a recognition of it as a gift that I don't want to take for granted. Maybe it's ok to just accept it with gratitude. I'm trying to find a way to make sense of it all.
I love this idea of an ekphrastic book, Melanie. There is most certainly a book here. I need this book on my shelf! But, I think you have too many for a chapbook. I am thinking full length poetry book with gorgeous illustrations: heavy paper fitting for all the beautiful artwork and beautiful words.
You have no idea how comforting it is to me to hear about the toll the submission/rejection process takes on you. I always tell myself not to be such a sensitive artist, but I get physically nauseous sometimes when I get a rejection. It sounds crazy. I ask myself why my brain and body interpret the rejection that way. I don’t have an answer. I love these poems we get to write. They are part of us. I know I take them WAY too seriously, but I don’t know how not to.
Thankfully since I have submitted once a month all year, my capacity to handle the rejections has grown exponentially. This month’s rejection email only brought a twinge of sadness and genuine disappointment. I reread the poems and realized I still loved them and instantly sent my favorite one out again. I think sending them back out has somehow been instrumental for me.
As you write about so beautifully here and elsewhere, our Substack community provides a group of thoughtful readership that inspires me daily to write better and more often. I think that balm gives me the courage to face the rejections too. The feedback and insight I get from readers here is unparalleled to what I have experienced before, similar to how my poetry class in graduate school was, but honestly that felt a teensy bit more like we were all jockeying to be the best poet in the class. Maybe because I was two decades younger and still had a lot of pride and image that I was working through. Now I feel so intensely grateful any time I write a poem. I have experienced dry seasons where a poem didn’t come through for years, and I thought I would never write again. In seasons where they come often, I know they are a gift.
There are seasons, as you say. And the intense season of homeschooling high school is asking a lot of you. There would be grace for the submission process if you were called to it, so avoiding the potential pitfalls and the weariness of a system we aren’t even sure we believe in is wise. I teared up when you said you need to grieve the hard things. We do. We need to name them and grieve them. I’m so grateful that our Father sees every single detail of our circumstances, the things no one else sees, even the things that are hidden from ourselves. Emmanuel is with you. I see and hear him in your writing, and what grace that he gives us these words to find him and point to him, both here and coming back for us. I have been writing this note for forever, so I will close there.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph ~ Help us! 😌🪡🧵
Grace and peace to you sister, onward to Bethlehem......✨🌴🌙 🌌 ⚜️
Thank you so much for reading and for taking the time to comment, Robert. God bless you in this Advent season of journeying to Bethlehem.
Beautiful Melanie! I love the way you let your poem breathe and find its own form, spiraling like a snail shell :-)
Your poem is also sending me down a lovely snail-trail of rare and precious Tyrian purple (made from snails!) found in a painting of the Madonna from the late 13th century.
https://rlttravelsblog.wordpress.com/2016/04/05/tyrian-purple-history/
"The use of Tyrian purple is extremely rare in easel paintings. I have been working in this field for over twenty years and the only time I have found the use of the pigment was while examining the altarpiece Madonna and Child."
"find its own form, spiraling like a snail shell" Oh Ann! What a marvelous insight! I love how you help me to see the snails and rejoice in them with me-- what delight! I'd never have spied the snails in the very form of the poem. Oh what a gift.
Thank you so much also for sharing your snail trail of Tyrian purple!!! My favorite kind of rabbit-trail. Once for a period of weeks we had on our homeschooling whiteboard a little cartoon of a guy saying "I'm from Tyre. I stink." I don't remember the full story of how he got drawn or why, but I recall watching videos of archaeologists trying to recreate Tyrian purple snail dye. I love the idea that the snail in the poem might be a hint toward's Mary's royal role as Queen of Heaven. I hadn't thought of the snail/purple connection but it's a beautiful Easter egg hiding there.
And that altarpiece!!! Oh glory!
Oh, you reminded me of reading Susan Wise Bauer's _Story of the World_ series with my kids! I think there was a chapter about making purple dye from snails. Apparently it was not a pleasant fragrance, and a popular insult of the time was: "You stink like a man from Tyre!" Like yours, my kids thought that was great! :-) Thank you for this memory!
"Queen of Heaven" is such a lovely name for Mary. A special favorite of mine is "Star of the Sea". I love this song by Mediaeval Baebes, the way it keeps moving back and forth between Middle English and Latin--oh so beautiful. . . Thanks again, Melanie
https://open.spotify.com/track/7sxIWHK6kNTaWm18OsNPIC?si=30972970877d4d41
Yes! That’s it exactly. We read Story of the World when my kids were little.
I love “Star of the Sea” too! Thank you for the song. I look forward to listening to it.
A terrific poem to capture the essential moment--both in the painting--and who knows--in a life?
Really graceful and composed.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment, Tony. I'm glad it speaks to you.
I think this works so well! Reading it in this form, there were shades and nuances that leapt out, that I hadn't caught before. I think the lines have space to expand and breathe now, with the rhymes woven (sewn?) through the lines, instead of placed at the ends. Well done!
Thank you, Kate. The new form is a revelation to me too and I am seeing it and hearing it in a completely new way.
I am so grateful to you for taking the time to read the draft and for your insight as to the structure. Your comment was the key that turned the lock.
I really didn't expect it to work so readily. I suspected this was going to be a poem I'd have to labor over and that might not come out quite right.
And like I said when we chatted, I didn't think I had the mental clarity to do much. But I decided to play with it a bit anyway and then once I unformatted it, the line breaks just came to me in the same way the original lines came, like little gifts from somewhere else.
I was thrilled that after exploding it, it decided to come together in a really lovely form after all. I can't believe how it looks like this was how it was always meant to be.
I like the idea of the rhymes being woven or sewn through the lines.... now I can see them as little snail trails of silver threads.
Be warned, next time I get stuck on a poem, I'm going to bother you because I now fully believe you are my lucky penny with all the superstition a poet's heart can hold.
Bring it on!
This is just gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous, Melanie. The finish on asking Mary to hold us in her silent heart, the way the internal rhyme carries us through, that marvelous snail. All of it. It's helped me find a moment of peace this morning. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Rebecca. I am so grateful that it speaks to you so deeply and that it is a gift of peace for you. That is the highest praise indeed for a poem. It's awesome to me that this poem which was such a gift to me as a poet is also a gift given to me for the sake of others, a blessing which overflows and multiplies touching others through me. What an honor. May Mary continue to hold you in her silent heart today, my friend.