Playing Your Cards
“Play the hand you’ve been dealt.”
I heard this one often while earning my MFA; it was one of Mike Madonick’s informal laws for the writing life, something he said at the beginning or end of workshop. It was one of those sayings that made us nod attentively—the way grad students do when they don’t want to admit that they aren’t sure what something means.
After a while, I began to understand it as a reminder to write from my own life, from the life I was actually living (with its routine errands and embarrassing mistakes), not from some hypothetically more interesting and writerly life that I wished to be living.
“Yes,” he said, when I was rear-ended and wrote a poem about it, “play the hand you’re dealt.” He nodded again when I brought in a poem about driving home alone and stopping at a four-way stop. The cards in my “hand” were whatever circumstances and experiences and lessons life threw at me, no matter how mundane or disruptive, and whatever words I could find for them.
I finished my MFA, moved to Utah, and completed my PhD, thinking that I understood this whole “play the hand you’ve been dealt” business. Then 2020 dealt us all a giant handful of wild cards. Last spring, I moved back in with my parents and wrote about how strange that felt. And I wrote about hand sanitizer and masks and social distancing and fear and uncertainty. Those were the cards I’d been dealt. But a lot of my writing felt stale and effortful at the time. It took me several weeks and a few games of cribbage to realize that I’d forgotten the most important word in the rule: “play”.
Cribbage is, it so happens, a great game for poets. Winning takes a balance of skill and luck. The math isn’t too complicated (you earn points through combinations of cards that add up to 15, through pairs, and through runs) and you get to use rhymes like “fifteen-four and say no more” as you count your cards. Like a poem, a hand of cribbage has a bit of ritual and surprise baked in; one person cuts the deck and the other turns the card over—if the card is a jack, the one who turns it over earns two points. For me, the game is also full of family history because my dad and I play on a board made to commemorate my grandfather’s 29 hand (the cribbage equivalent of a hole-in-one), which he achieved at age 93.
The whole give and take, call and response, nature of the game feeds my poet brain. What I really love about cribbage, though, and what really makes a round of cribbage like a poem, is that it requires me to pay two different kinds of attention in close sequence. First, I have to look at the six cards I’ve been dealt and decide which four I want to keep and which two I want to discard into crib (the extra hand that goes to the dealer). This process is like discerning what goes into the poem—which events and feelings I need to write about and how they are related; four-way stop + rain + windshield wipers à slow and careful loneliness, I might think to give myself a general direction as I sit down to write.
Second, as soon as the deck has been cut and the fifth card that will contribute to both players’ hands has been revealed, I have to immediately set aside any and all calculation about how many points my hand might contain in order to focus on pegging. During pegging, players take turns laying down their cards and adding them to a running tally; you can earn points by hitting 15 or 31, or by pairing your opponent’s card, or by creating a run of three or four cards. To peg well, I have to let go of what I think my hand adds up to and pay attention to each card as it lands on the table. This is like the part of writing a poem where I have to let go of what I intend for the poem to say and focus instead on how the words and sounds are fitting together—I sometimes think of this as shifting from brain-thinking to ear-guessing. In both cases, I have a goal in mind (to write a poem or to score points), but to reach that goal I have to focus on the process as it unfolds and respond spontaneously. I can’t just count cards and call them a hand or string images together and call them a poem. I have to play. We all do, whatever we find in our hands.
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How to Revise a Poem
some thoughts on chicken broth
My dad’s cooking is easily the best perk to sharing a pandemic pod with my parents. He makes pretty much everything from scratch—including his own broths and stocks. Like writing a poem, this is a process requiring labor and patience.
The other night, we had a roast chicken dinner and he called for me to “save everything—all the scraps” as I cleared the table. Then we got down the stock pot and threw in the chicken carcass. And all the bones. And all the scraps of skin and gristle. (Full disclosure: I snuck my dog a chunk of dark meat because she was doing the Big Eyes.) And then my dad flung open the fridge and grabbed a bunch of parsley. He threw it in the pot. Then he threw in some leftover vegetables from dinner. And some freshly peeled carrots. A few ribs of celery. A withered apple, some red grapes. Anything he thought might add to the flavor. We poured in water and let it all on an extra-low simmer overnight.
And this, more often than not, is how I start a poem. I throw a bunch of scraps onto the page: the blue jay outside my window, a wise and funny thing my sister says, a fact I hear on NPR, some joy, some dread, a decades-old memory. I work fast at this stage, grabbing any available sound or image that I sense will add to the flavor of the poem. And then I leave everything to sit for a few days.
The broth simmered for hours and hours. My dog and I twitched our noses every time we walk past. Dad lifted the lid and stirred every so often, or poked the bones and vegetables around.
I open my notebook from time to time and stir the draft around. I doodle around the edges. I underline any phrases that I think are part of the poem’s essence. And I cross out words that don’t fit. I write myself questions in the margins (for some reason this helps even when I never come up with an answer to the question).
When the broth is finished cooking, it is fragrant and golden—and full of bones and clumps of vegetable. It smells good, but doesn’t look edible. It has to be strained first. It gets poured through a colander, and then through a fine sieve. Once all the bones and vegetables and parsley leaves—which give the broth so much flavor in the first place, but also keep it from becoming pure liquid—are strained out, we have an elixir far better than anything poured from a can.
It takes me a long time to properly stain a poem. I think of typing the poem, or transferring it from notebook to laptop, as running it through a colander. I catch the big stuff that doesn’t belong to the poem then. But it takes me months of reading aloud, and tinkering (sometimes you have to add salt and pepper to broth too), and setting aside, and reading again, and deleting a word, and fidgeting with punctuation, to run a poem through my revision sieve. But the poem is always deeper for it.
Nothing that goes in the pot or on the page gets wasted, only transmuted. Even the words and lines we ultimately discard help to shape and season the poem.
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