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Juggling, Dyeing & Hunting! Eggs, That Is.

Updated: Oct 3, 2018


While you can’t expect back-to-back, guest-event posts every week, this Feature Friday is a special occasion — it’s Good Friday, and my guest, The Centrifugal Eye "alumnus," Martin Willitts, Jr., just happens to be quite familiar with Easter eggs.

While many of us are also acquainted with Easter eggs, probably not nearly as many of you readers have heard of “easter eggs” as they are referred to in slang jargon by techies, geeks, and gamers (origin, Atari). This week’s blog is a nod to both Easter weekend, and to geeker eggs (my term). For a geeker egg is a secreted “gift” or perhaps a piece of trivia, hidden somewhere in a game's user interface, or on a website, as it would be in an Easter egg hunt.

While Willitts’ eggs are in one essay-basket, my geeker egg is placed somewhere for you to find within my website (a clue follows the essay). Happy Easter!


"Pysanky" eggs - Photo art by Luba Petrusha

Writing Poetry is the Same as Handling Eggs

By Martin Willitts, Jr.

Most of us understand that it’s foolish to try to juggle eggs if we are not professional jugglers. Some of us have seen egg-tossing contests, where two lines of people move further and further apart, tossing eggs back and forth, until finally someone misses and gets splatted by an egg. Or it splats on the ground. Many of us know enough to check a carton of eggs when we’re buying it to make sure some of the eggs are not cracked or broken. But the egg itself is perhaps the perfect container for the yolk which floats inside, and might become a bird. The egg does not break easily, and basically, an egg carton is designed to keep them safe. What would happen if we treated writing with the same loving care?

I am basically a one-draft poet. I edit as I write. However, I know that I have to go back and check whatever I have written. I used to be a jazz musician. I know how to improvise. In live music, you cannot correct any errors; you can only correct mistakes in a recording studio. It took years of practicing music before I could take on jazz, and make only a few minor mistakes.

Which do you think an editor would prefer: the edited version, or the raw version? I think it’s the difference between an egg you eat and an egg that is allowed to become a chicken.

Even editing and practice is not enough to guarantee perfection. Even “named” poets get rejected. Recently, Ted Kooser entered a national, poetry, chapbook contest for Comstock Review. It was a blind reading contest. What if he had been rejected? He easily could have been.

Luckily for Ted Kooser, because he has written in the same poetic voice for a long time, and he writes tight poems, he was accepted. He has handled his eggs carefully.

I know about eggs. I have been working with eggs since I was a child on my grandparent’s Mennonite/Amish farm. I had to learn to choose which eggs went to market, which chickens were slaughtered, and how to feed birds with an eye-dropper.

I learned how to boil eggs for Easter. I moved onwards to fancy egg designs, beginning with Pysanky eggs. (See references about Pysanky eggs at the end of the article.) After a while, I was adding fake jewelry to them, or hollowing out eggs with plastic figures inside. I even designed eggs, which opened with hinges. I progressed through practice, building from a foundation and expanding my knowledge. Why not apply the same system for editing and writing?

Like almost everyone else in the field, I learned the basics of poetry. I learned form and meter. This reminded me of music, and how it also had form and meter. After learning to write every form, I decided to move on to creating my own voice, my own music within poetry, and now all I have to learn is how to discern which poems of mine are not worthy of sending out.

Writing bad poems are a lot like trying out new music scales and then finding out our finger placement is all wrong, or like learning to choose the right eggs, but dropping some.

Which reminds me: I have all of these eggs (ideas) juggling in mid-thought.

I started with a suggestion by Eve to write something about writing for April, which made me think of Easter eggs and how it was the same as editing. I also was thinking of all the crazy things I do with eggs. One of which I call a “Science-Magic” trick where I bounce eggs.

Now let that sink in a minute. I bounce eggs.

It’s really Science. I’ve actually performed this science with children, so I’ve turned it into a magic trick. I even dress like a magician. It’s a part of other science projects I do live. I started this idea when I was trying to become a classroom teacher and the children claimed that Science is boring. So, I started with scientific inquiry: what would happen if I do this? I wrote down every student’s suggestion, then asked the kids to vote once for the idea they felt was right. I counted all the students, all the votes, and turned the numbers into percentages. You could see light bulbs going off in their eyes. There was no demonstrated “cause and effect” in any of their math classes.

Now, don’t you want to hear the science behind why eggs can bounce? Believe it or not, it is also what makes poetry closer to being published.

The science is called Chemistry.

You take a “normal” egg and immerse it in vinegar, and leave it overnight. Here is the tricky part: if you leave it in too long or too little, you will get either an egg that oozes (yuck) or an egg that stretches like silly putty. You need roughly 12 hours. What you are doing is changing the chemical composition of the egg. If you do this right, the egg will bounce.

When I do the performance, I tell the secret of how it works, afterwards. I am debunking myself. I offer a carton of eggs (one is the rigged egg) and let an audience member pick any egg (math concept of Chaos Theory is that the person will usually pick a normal egg instead of the vinegar-rigged one). I take the chosen one and smash it to prove it’s a raw egg. I then take the “rigged” egg from the carton, and bounce it. Everyone’s jaws drop. I use the magician’s trick of misdirection to get people to believe that all of the eggs are ordinary.

Now, why is this the same as writing and editing? If you work a poem over and over, it gets better. As it gets better, there’s no one to notice that it has been worked on, unless you send the first drafts to editors; however they always notice the errors of a first draft, and you will likely get rejected for that alone. And just like my carton of mostly raw eggs, if you send out a lot of poems, the same percentage of acceptance will occur; yes, if you send out a lot of raw poems, you also risk failure (breaking more “eggs” than you bounce).

Here is another magic trick I do with poetry.

I have an unwritten rule: If a poem is rejected X amount of times, it either needs more work or it needs to be tossed away.

Here’s a prose poem* about eggs:

The trick to balancing eggs is to make a small spill, a circle of salt, and settle the egg

on its wide bottom, letting it nest in the salt.

I am painting Ukrainian eggs. I have boiled them, stuck them with a pin, and blew

out the yolks, yellow as sunflowers. I take my eggs to the Ukrainian church with the

Russian, onion spire. I also bring spongy babka, with its double twisted bread of

black and yellow swirls topped with chocolate, and decorated with fruit pieces. I

bring these items for the traditional blessing in three languages: High Latin; English;

and Ukrainian.

The Pysanky symbols I have designed are eight crowns of roses — the sign of loving

and caring. I decided long ago, all caring begins with one person reaching out to

strangers. Always make a nest of love.

*The poem is part of a full-length collection of nature poems in a “druid calendar.”

General information and history of Pysanky eggs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pysanka

Written instructions on how to make Pysanky eggs: http://www.learnpysanky.com/steps.html

Video instructions on how to make a Pysanka egg:

(I have used a heated sewing needle and regular straw to create suction. I have used penny nails to draw with hot candle wax. I have used a regular small pan to melt the wax. I have also used string to make lines. I did finish with varnish.)

Martin Willitts, Jr., has been nominated for 15 Pushcart and 12 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; the Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award, and provided "Poetry on The Bus," which had 48 poems in local buses, including 20 bilingual poems from 7 different languages. He has over 20 chapbooks, and earned the Turtle Island Editor’s Choice Award for his chapbook, The Wire Fence Holding Back the World (Flowstone Press, 2016). He also has 10 full-length collections, including National Ecological Award winner for Searching for What You Cannot See (Hiraeth Press, 2013). His most recent book is Dylan Thomas and the Writer’s Shed (FutureCycle Press, 2017).

 

Editor Hanninen's note: Writers & Poets, look for my "geeker egg" throughout my site's pages for a timely gift from me to you. Hurry! It expires after next Wednesday, like eggs will, eventually. Hint #1: It's not on a blog page. Hint #2: It's cool to get schooled, especially in art and writing.

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