Poet as Novelist (Or Not)

Plot? Not so much. Story? You bet.

Photo by Luis Felipe Lins on Unsplash (I cropped it a little, sorry Luis,)

This poem is as far as I got on the second novel I tried to write. There were reasons I didn’t get further. Libby Atkins was not one of the reasons. Libby Atkins is a badass who deserves to be the heroine of a bestseller, if I wrote bestsellers. What I write, it turns out, is poems, so she gets to be badass in a poem.

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CHARACTER SKETCH


Libby Atkins, pushing forty,
a short woman with nothing small about her:
not her thighs or her eyes,
not her belly or her brains,
not her belly-laugh or her fears,
not the heat in her heart
or the hole in her chest, dark as a cave
when she lies down alone at night;
not her memory,
not her despair.

Libby Atkins, not small,
who lived twenty years before she knew she was short;
who reaches always for size L from the clothes-rack,
who knows that M is usually big enough,
who can’t buy something labeled S,
even when it fits.
Libby Atkins, pushing forty,
who hates to shop for clothes.

Libby Atkins, nothing small about her:
broad in the cheekbones and the knuckles,
wide in the foot, round in the waist
that quivers with giggles and tears;
green eyes deep as lakes,
appetites curious and hungry as wolf-pups,
a voice like a huge old house
with just three rooms open and lived in.

Libby Atkins, nothing small
about her daydreams: the American Book Award,
the passionate and intuitive lover,
the half-acre garden on the edge
of an untamed forest. Nothing small either,
nothing soft or kind, about the demon screamers
who batter her dreams with cries like a reeking wind:
-	lazy, flabby, do-nothing coward,
  	nothing to look at, nothing accomplished,
  	nothing to hope for.
Nothing small
about Libby, doubled over
after daring to dream too long; nothing small
about her when she stands up straight,
damns the screamers to hell through her tears,
and takes a step forward against the wind.

Libby Atkins, short-but-not-small of bone,
generous of flesh, both the soft and the firm,
broad in the hands and the hips;
breathing deep into her belly when she sits alone in her body,
stopping her breath when someone touches her,
as if a touch were a fawn or a butterfly
that would startle away if it saw you notice.

Libby Atkins, pushing forty,
who sleeps sometimes with a hot-water bottle
between her breasts, in that warm sweet curve
where no child, no lover’s face, has yet been cradled;
who dances salsas in her kitchen,
who sings show tunes in the shower
with a voice that sets the tile walls humming;
who learned years ago to laugh
(also to cry) without making a sound,
whose laughter unsilenced sounds like creekwater in springtime,
or like a shout.

Libby Atkins, not a small woman,
not tall either—this height, no more,
not slender—this shape, not another one,
not (God knows) moderate
in hungers, griefs, or hopes;
not stingy either,
except in trust,
and in praise of herself.
Libby Atkins, a woman pushing forty,
nothing small about her. Nothing meant to be.

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[You can hear an audio version of the poem using the little widget above the photograph. Recorded on a friend’s computer while I house-sit, so there’s less crackling; same nine-year-old-up-past-her-bedtime voice, however.]

I wrote my first novel sometime last century — a mystery novel, because I love them and because I wanted to write something salable. It had an actual, decently constructed plot (a first for me!); also, though, it was written in prose that skated over the top of what I was asking my characters and my readers to feel and experience. It wasn’t awful, it just wasn’t alive. If it had been someone else’s book I’d have probably read a polite fifty pages or so and then put it down.

Part of the trouble, I realize now, is that I hadn't paid a ton of attention to my main character. Oh, I could describe her looks and name her feelings and talk about her back-story, but she was never entirely real to me. She was a point-of-view at the center of this plot that I’d somehow (actually! me!) come up with … but I didn’t know her well enough to write her more deeply than that.

I started a rewrite, set it aside, eventually started scribbling notes about the protagonist for another novel. Libby became very real to me; I even got to know a fair amount about the pair of recurring main characters in the mystery novels she wrote. (Writes, probably.) What I never got hold of was what should actually happen in a story about Libby. I didn’t have a plot.

I hardly ever do have a plot (once, I’ve had a plot one time); that’s one reason I’m not a novelist. Also, though, nearly all of my poems tell stories. That poem upscreen is overflowing with stories of Libby-in-the-moment, and it soaks the reader in experience and emotion — no skating on the surface. I didn’t get the “What happened next?” part of Libby’s story; I got the “Hey, look” part. It’s not what I thought I wanted at the time, but now I call it a win.

Any time you pay close attention to a landscape or a conversation or a feeling or a cat or a tree or a woman pushing forty, story will declare itself. Plot? Maybe. Story? Count on it.