Land Mammal

First Earthquake

2012-01-23T13:00:00.001-05:00

Yeah yeah... I'm still here. I've been hanging out on Twitter, mostly - 140 characters is about the right length for my attention span these days! Lots going on in the ol' personal life, and all that.

Anyway, just in case anyone is still reading here, I thought I'd post a poem today. See, Bruce Springsteen released the first single from his forthcoming album the other day (and it's pretty good - you can read my review-ish thing over at Blogness on the Edge of Town), and we're looking forward to an announcement of U.S. tourdates just anytime now (you hear that Bruce and Inc.? ANY.TIME.NOW.), and that makes me think about the band, and about the much-loved band members who've passed on in the past few years - Clarence Clemons this past June, Danny Federici in 2008.

I haven't been able to write much of anything about Clarence yet - but in '08 I wrote a small elegy for Danny, which I'd like to post here in honor of what would have been his 62nd birthday today - thanks to my Twitter people for reminding me of this. Happy birthday, Danny, wherever you are.

The earthquake? True story.
(Note, you'll probably need to click on the poem to embiggen it and make it readable. Here's a PDF version you can download, in case that is easier for anyone.)

And Know This Place

2011-09-13T23:53:00.004-04:00

One foot in front of the other. Determined not to abandon this blog! It has brought me good things in the past - new poets discovered, friendships formed (that's the best part). The next thing I need to do is to start catching up on all y'all: friends, bloggers I don't know personally but like to follow - I have been missing out on a lot. Just call me the Prodigal Blogger.

But since it got late and I'm tired, this is just a quickie bit of shameless self-promotion, although it's a bit of others-promotion as well! There's a gorgeous new anthology in town - And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana, published by the Indiana Historical Society Press, edited by Jenny Kander and C.E. Greer. In the works for several years, this big (nearly 400 pages) volume includes Hoosier poets past and present, everyone from James Whitcomb Riley to Ruth Stone to Etheridge Knight to, well, yours truly. There is even a cool geographical index in the back, with a map of Indiana so you can find the places mentioned in the poems and the birthplaces of those poets who were actually born in the state.

The physical book itself (yes, this matters) is a hardcover - solid, hefty, with paper that feels good to the hand, well-chosen typography, and enough white space on the page to make the poems a pleasure to read. Bet you anything you will find some old friends here, perhaps some poets you didn't realize had an Indiana connection, as well as terrific new poets you hadn't encountered before. The poems aren't all "about" Indiana though many of them do evoke a strong sense of place; the foreword by Roger Mitchell puts this balance of inner and outer landscape in perspective as well as outlining a bit of Hoosier poetry history. It's an anthology I am very proud to be a small part of, and one I'll be digging into for quite a while.

And people, this puppy is a bargain - the list price is only $24.95. You can order it via the Indiana Historical Society's gift shop, or via the usual Barnazon & Amanoble megastores.

(Anyone out there working on a syllabus for a "poetry of place" type class or anything about Midwestern literature? This would be a fantastic title to include!)

9/10/01

2011-09-10T20:27:00.003-04:00

Yeah, I'm still here. Slowly easing my way back into poetry, and since this is supposed to be the blog in which I talk about mostly poetry/writing-related stuff, I think maybe I'll be easing my way back into blogging too. I hope so - I do miss it, and the community I found via blogging.

I've had a couple of readings lately - a featured spot in the Brick Street Poetry Series up in Zionsville, IN (really fun), and a spot on the Spoken Word Stage at the 4th Street Festival of Arts & Crafts last weekend (fun, but it was 102 degrees and the "stage" was in the middle of the street in full sun, which meant only the truly dedicated stayed to listen). I'll write a post soon about the new anthology that's just come out, And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana (it's really, really lovely). That's about all the poetry news 'round here though.

I've about had it with the media blathering on about the tenth anniversary of 9/11/01. There's little new to be said, I suspect, though if it can be cathartic or healing for some people, then I'm glad for them. Instead of adding to the 9/11 blather, I'm going to post my poem about 9/10, and that desire we all have when something terrible happens to go back to the moment before and hold on for dear life. The sestina seemed like an appropriate form for this one, since you keep going back to the same end words and using them over and over again, holding on to them. (Sorry 'bout the small font. I'm trying to keep the lines from breaking all over the place. If you have trouble reading it, you can enlarge the text in most browsers by hitting control-+ on Windows machines; I'm sure there is a Mac equivalent...)

9/10/01: Sestina

It was the day before.
I rode six miles out to sea to look for whales.
As we drifted nearly out of sight of land
we spied a small whale in the distance
alongside a larger whale, its mother, diving, lifting flukes.
As we approached the calf began to breach.

The morning sun struck the back of the calf, shining, as it continued to breach.
The boat drew closer. I’d never been so close before.
So often, as the boat pulled near, a whale would dive with one last thrust of flukes
but the morning of September 10 was a good one for watching whales.
The seas were calm, Provincetown’s monument familiar in the distance –
a reassuring glimpse of home, of land.

That small whale buoyed me as I flew home that night, my plane the last to land.
I could still feel waves rocking me, a breach
in the solid wall of my landlocked life. Traveling such a distance
alone – something I hadn’t dared before –
felt as brave as those whales,
as graceful as the lifting of flukes.

I’d bought a silver necklace shaped like flukes.
I clutched it like an amulet all the next day as news broke about “war in our own land.”
Provincetown seemed a lifetime ago, the sea, the joy, the whales.
Like everyone I stood stunned, complacency utterly breached.
What to say? How to respond? All the words I’d used before
fell away silent into the distance.

All I wanted was to return to that distance,
sun glistening on morning seas, the curve of flukes.
I held on so hard to before.
As events unfolded I felt lost in my own land,
each day’s news trumpeting some new security breach.
But somewhere out to sea there are still whales.

Part of me stayed out there with those whales,
the calf leaping into air, others in the distance,
the way he hung there for a moment mid-breach,
pure bone and muscle, fin and fluke.
I want it not to matter, what happens on distant land.
Somewhere it is always the day before.

What did I know, before I saw whales?
I was a land mammal dreaming of the distance.
Now I clutch the grace of flukes, the animal exuberance of the breach.

-Anne Haines
published in Breach (Finishing Line Press, 2008)

Chasing Angels

2011-06-22T00:52:00.004-04:00

Many thanks to those who, privately or publicly, have said kind things about "Seventeen/Forty-Seven: Darkness & Magic" which I posted the other day. I really don't normally post unpublished poems here, not so much because I'm afraid somebody will plagiarize them but because posting them publicly generally means they won't be considered for publication elsewhere. In this case, I think the work found its audience here - much more so than it would have in a literary journal or whatever. So, thanks. It means a lot to me.

I wrote an elegy for Danny Federici when he died a few years ago (it's gotten some kind comments from editors but hasn't been published yet - maybe I'll post it here sometime). For those who may be unfamiliar, "Phantom Dan" played organ and accordion in the E Street Band, and he died of melanoma in 2008. I was unexpectedly shaken by his passing - in a very literal sense, as it turns out, because my part of Indiana experienced a rare earthquake in the predawn hours of the morning after Danny's death. (Yeah, that's in the poem.) More importantly, I was unexpectedly and deeply moved by the graceful way in which Bruce and the band dealt with his loss. They were mid-tour, and the first show following Danny's funeral has taken on legendary status in the Springsteen fan community - I wasn't there (though I will admit to having investigated plane fares before realizing it was completely impossible for me to go) but I've heard recordings of it, and it was both ferocious and tender, both raging and celebratory. Springsteen's eulogy was tremendously moving, as well. And Bruce has always written about how to cope with aging and death ("you're scared and you're thinking that maybe we ain't that young anymore" - he wrote that when he was what, twenty-three or something?) but some of his most recent work, like "Kingdom of Days" and his song for Danny, "The Last Carnival," tackles it with a grace and wisdom that moves me so deeply.

I started thinking about the whole thing, and about what it meant to work with somebody in a creative situation (like in a band) for so many years - all one's adult life, really - to share all those experiences, from fighting and grubbing to work in smelly little clubs to touring worldwide, performing music that ultimately stirred millions of souls - and then to suffer that kind of loss. I started thinking about the legendary "brotherhood" of the E Street Band. It could all be a big act, you know. We fans love to believe in it; it's a fable, a wonderful story, and it means a lot to us. But they are performers, these guys. It's a show. And we know the image that's presented onstage (and in the media) is always, always, always at least partially a fictitious construction. (This goes for everyone with a public image to maintain. You don't think rockstars act like they do on stage 24/7, do you? Some of them try to, but it's a pretty safe bet that anyone who has friends that still speak to them after some years has given up and accepted that they can be a rockstar on stage but they had damn well better be a human being at home. And you know Patti Scialfa would kick Bruce's butt if he came home and announced "It's Boss time!")

Now, to be clear: I don't know anyone in the E Street Band personally. I've met Max Weinberg once, briefly, and he was very nice - but that's it. If it's all an act and they really can't stand each other offstage, or if they are jerks, I wouldn't know about it. I truly believe that it's not an act - I know enough people who know them at least somewhat, and have read & heard enough things about them over the years, to believe that the whole "brotherhood" thing is based on a deep truth. I've seen the way they look at one another onstage and I do not think any of them (Steven Van Zandt's stint on "The Sopranos" notwithstanding) is a good enough actor to fake what I see there. What's more, if Bruce Springsteen kicks puppies in his spare time, I neither need nor want to know about it. Guy writes songs like he does and gives shows like he does, he can do what he wants when I'm not looking. Even if the sentiment in songs like "Land of Hope and Dreams" were fake for him, it's very real for me. And the image of him - and of the band - that I have in my heart makes my world a better place to live in. So, consider that your official disclaimer there.

But I started thinking - what if you had a couple of bandmates who'd been together that long, and who had the whole Bruce-and-Stevie (or Clarence, but my character's a guitarist)/Mick-and-Keef "bromance" thing going on onstage, but for them it really was all an act, and they couldn't stand each other in real life? (Mind, this was before I read Keith Richards' autobiography where he says some not-very-nice things about Mr. Jagger. I thought I was making up this story.) And furthermore… what if they couldn't stand each other in real life because they couldn't stand that the love they showed onstage really did reflect something about their feelings for one another? Being afraid of one's feelings is one of those universal human things I can hook into and identify with, and wrestle with in poems. And then the characters jumped into my head and started talking to me, and since I can't write fiction worth a shit, I started writing poems.

And it was the most fun I've ever had writing poems, I think. I had some poems about them being young and playing in shitty smelly clubs, and a bunch of "on the road" poems that I hope I got more or less right (never having been a touring musician myself, you see - any actual touring musicians reading this who'd like to read a few of them and offer feedback are warmly invited to do so). Oh, and then the guitarist starts liking the rockstar lifestyle a little too much and starts missing rehearsals or showing up too far under the influence to be any good. And the singer/protagonist fires his sorry ass and they stop speaking to one another for years and it's all very, very sad. (I was listening to "Bobby Jean" and Nils Lofgren's "Keith Don't Go" a lot while I was writing some of the poems in this part.) And then the protagonist finds out through the grapevine that the guitarist is terminally ill (hepatitis, I think, though it probably doesn't matter) and in the hospital, so there's a touching deathbed-reunion scene and then a death scene - my fiction-writer friends always talk about how it's really fun, in a twisted way, to kill off your characters and boy howdy, that is really true. And then the whole coming-to-terms-with-grief part of it, which lets me make the sweeping grand "THIS and THIS about HUMANITY" sermon poems I'm unfortunately so fond of (I think a lot of poets are, though, even if they won't admit it). And because it's poems, not fiction, I really haven't spoiled anything by giving y'all the plot. Really. :)

So that's "Chasing Angels." Angels being, at first, the girls they think will pay attention to them if they become rockstars - there's always an angel or two in the front row for them to play to and fall in love with for the two hours that they are onstage, and the challenge of course is to win the audience over, to make the angels fall in love with them - and as the story unfolds, angels become something more problematic and complex.

And I haven't been working on this manuscript for the past year or two, because I'd kind of lost heart with it - but it's time for me to return to it. Because I'm thinking so much about Clarence Clemons, and about the heart and soul of E Street, and about the heart and soul of all of us (see? more sermonizing - jeez, it's too bad I'm allergic to religion; I could've gone to minister school instead of library school). Because I'm back to feeling that how rock & roll affects us says something about who we are as human beings. Because I'm all too aware that you gotta say what you need to say before it's too late.

Hopefully, you'll be hearing more.

Gratitude and the Flood

2011-06-19T22:21:00.004-04:00

So what happened for a lot of us last night was a 24-hour virtual wake for Clarence Clemons. I couldn't tear myself away from the tweets and posts and links that were pouring out from fans all over the world - ended up getting very little sleep last night, actually. Dave Lifton has a nice post about how social media has kept many of us connected, over at his blog Wings for Wheels. It sort of wrapped up this evening when many of us agreed to play "Jungleland" - as loud as we could blast it - simultaneously, worldwide, at 6pm Eastern. This unleashed a torrent of tweets and a truly beautiful sense of connection. And, as one of my Twitter friends (I'm sorry that I've forgotten who) said - when it was over, the silence felt deafening.

I have so many browser tabs open right now, and emails that I marked "unread" so I'd remember to come back to them, new Twitter followers I want to follow back, links and videos and essays and posts and outpourings of love. I don't know how I'm ever going to get to them all; this evening I had to step away from the immersion for a while and just watch the sunset.

And what I want to say is, I am so grateful. It means so much to be a part of this community, to have people in my life who understand that what happened this weekend was much more than just something sad that happened to some celebrity. Like I said in my last post, the E Street Band has stood for something so vital to me and to many of us for so many years. We've lost something that has been a part of us for a very long time. And it makes us realize that eventually, we lose everything, utterly.

Except for love.

So two things tonight. One, I keep thinking about Clarence's family, close friends, his bandmates. If people like me who never even met the guy were so sad they couldn't sleep last night, imagine how bereft they are. I've lost family members, most of us have by the time we get to be middle-aged; it sucks. Sometimes there's a strange kind of elation in the first day or two, as condolences pour in and you feel loved and as you experience the kind of temporary clarity that comes from being absolutely certain about what is and isn't important in this world. Sometimes you're just fucking exhausted. Usually it's some stupid little thing that sends you over the edge and you just crash for a while - when my dad died one of those things was seeing somebody playing the bass, as he did, and remembering how his right hand looked walking up and down the strings and realizing I was never going to see that again. (Those stupid little things can keep popping up and biting you in the ass for years, too. When you least expect it.)

Anyway, I keep thinking about his close loved ones, and I want to send love and spirit in their direction. I think about Bruce Springsteen, who spent the week by his dear friend's deathbed, and who is probably bereft and exhausted and also trying to write some kind of brilliant, comforting eulogy - and I know I can't just show up at his doorstep offering a hug and a casserole (anyway his security people would whisk me away for trying to poison him, which wouldn't be an unreasonable thing to charge me with considering my culinary prowess or lack thereof, but you can't just say "hey Boss, sorry about your friend, have a Lean Cuisine" now can you?) - we can't bring funeral casseroles, so what can we fans do for those who are hurting and grieving even harder than we are?

We can do what we've been doing these past 24-plus hours, which is to send our love out there into the world. Thousands of us all over the world have been doing this - just look at Twitter! - and I want to say, look how much love Clarence Clemons brought into this world to provoke this flood of feelings, look how much love.

And since he's not here to keep bringing the love and the light, on all those stages and all those recordings where his huge spirit could reach millions - since he's not here, let's each of us just put a little more love out there into the world than we used to. We'll never fill the void left by his passing, especially not the musical void (and don't get me started on how sad I am to wake up in a world where I'll never again stand in the middle of a sweaty crowd punching the air while the Big Man wails out the "Jungleland" solo). But we can honor his lifelong work by bringing a little more love to each day. Just a little more than we did before.

It starts ... NOW. Go.

Teardrops on the city...

2011-06-19T01:46:00.007-04:00

I know. Long time no blog. I'm sorry.

Tonight I'm here for reasons both sad and celebratory. You've probably heard by now that Clarence Clemons, who played saxophone in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, died Saturday evening a few days after suffering a massive stroke. ...Backtrack. "Played saxophone" doesn't even come close to describing what Clarence, the "Big Man," brought to the band. He was the heart and soul of all that was E Street. When he stepped onto the stage it was like a glorious sunrise. He had a smile that could light up an entire sold-out stadium all by itself, and a saxophone that followed that light with pure fire. And despite the fact that in his last years he was in near-constant pain, having had two hip replacements, two knee replacements, spinal surgery, and goodness knows what else, he still gave that beautiful smile and that music to the world.

I remember the show in St. Louis in 2009 - the next to last show I saw on that last tour - I was in the pit, about three people back from the stage, in front of Clarence. I could tell that he was physically tired, you could see the strain in his face and the pain he clearly felt anytime he moved. But he still gave his all when he played and he still beamed out at the fans, made eye contact with us, appreciated us, flirted with the women up front. And when he played his solo in "Jungleland" I knew I was in church.

Church is exactly what those shows were for me, especially in 2008-09 when I spent money I had no business spending and traveled around to shows in Indianapolis, Nashville (twice), St. Louis (twice), Kansas City, Denver, St. Paul, Chicago (twice), and Mansfield Mass (a two-night stand). Those shows meant the world to me and were the light that I held onto very tightly for a while as I went through (and am still going through) some difficult stuff.

I'll never forget a night in May 2009 when, for the first time, I was lucky enough to be in the very front row of the pit. Steven Van Zandt gave me his guitar pick at the end of the night, and yes, this perfectly rational middle-aged woman turned into a giddy fangirl over a shared smile and a little bit of plastic. Then I found out the next morning that while I'd been waiting in line for the show, my mom had been diagnosed with breast cancer. A very minor form of it (and after treatment she is completely cancer-free now as far as we know) but still, it was my MOM, and CANCER, so it shook me pretty hard. I literally held on to that guitar pick, took it out and held it tightly in my hand some days to remind me of the joy and the love and the strength of spirit that I find, without fail, in the E Street Band and the E Street Nation.

On so many dark nights over the past 35-plus years when I forgot how to believe in love, so many times it was the E Street Band that reminded me. Clarence Clemons, and his relationship (both the lifelong friendship & the musical partnership) with Bruce Springsteen, is in so many ways at the heart of what I love about E Street. There has been so much written about him, especially tonight - I won't try to replicate it; the obituary at the New Jersey Star-Ledger and the tribute at backstreets.com are the best I've read so far. (We'll also be posting links over at Blogness on the Edge of Town.) I am told that Bruce was at Clarence's side all week as he fought for his life in the hospital; I know he must be exhausted and bereft, but I hope that in his own inevitable dark nights to come, he is also able to hold on to that reminder of what is real and true.

I said earlier that when Clarence played his "Jungleland" solo I knew I was in church. That may seem hyperbolic to some, but at those concerts I was part of a congregation of souls reaching for something higher and truer than our everyday lives, something to believe in, something to help us understand how to live up to our own ideals. And isn't that church?

On that theme, I'm going to post a poem here. I don't usually post unpublished poems, but this seems like the time and place for this one. It's not specifically about Clarence, but it's about the band, about the "Darkness on the Edge of Town" and "Magic" tours and the two greatest rock & roll shows I have ever seen, thirty years apart. It's about the pact between performer and audience, a pact that I experience as nothing less than love. It is the essence of what is good in this world. It is what I hold on to during hard times. It is love. And I send this out with love to Bruce and the band and the entire E Street family, and to the E Street Nation. May we hold on to our memories of the Big Man, his beautiful music and his beautiful smile and his great big heart, and may we know that this is holy, and may we always keep on singing.

Seventeen/Forty-Seven: Darkness and Magic

I. Seventeen, The Show
(Notre Dame, 9/9/1978)

There is that moment just before
the lights go down, when the crowd
is murmuring feverishly, stamping and sweating
and I am twitching in my shitty seat
and the guy next to me lights up a doobie,
grins and offers me a toke, and I pass
it on to the friend I’m with
and I’m barely in my seat now, barely
in the real world of high
school and lousy cars and girls
who don’t understand a thing,
and I am so ready. I want this.
I count the guitars shining in their stands
on the far-off stage, watch some roadie run
over there to pluck the strings
one last time, Check Check into the microphone
and I rub my thumb across the callused
fingertips of my left hand,
all those hours of burning
up and down the neck of my only
instrument, and I am so,
so ready. I nudge my friend
and grin, I catch the eye
of my neighbor with the doobie
and I grin. I gaze down at the stage
and at the girls in the very front
row in their tight jeans and their
brand-new tour t-shirts, and the crowd
is loud and eager, the stage is set
and ready, and I don’t know
how I can bear to wait even one
minute more: the whole arena feels
like it’s going to rise up
like some great spaceship, just rise
away from the ordinary earth and fly.

II. Communion, After All
(St. Louis, 8/23/2008)

Bruce (to the audience): “Don’t you gotta be in church tomorrow?”
Steve: “We’re in church.”
Bruce: “What?”
Steve: “We’re in church now.”
-Milwaukee, 8/30/2008

The number is drawn and I’ve missed the pit.
The toe I bashed two nights ago in Nashville
throbs inside my boot. I’m among strangers—
angels, yes, with shining faces, tramps who hold
to the same hymns I do, but on this gray
and dirty street, in this disconsolate line,
strangers still – and I am waiting. I’m losing
faith, a little bit, and then it rains.
I am small and middle-aged. Seventeen
was thirty years ago, and far away.
I close my eyes, pretend to believe the rain
is a blessing, is something sweet – and my tired feet
remember that night, remember holding tightly
to the hand of a friend and rushing the stage,
remember the light that spilled over me
when I leaped atop folding chairs and danced
as you played "Twist and Shout" and the arena
was practically airborne, your kind hands
lifting your guitar, the band all blaze and thunder.
I was seventeen and believed in everything.
Now I straighten my back as the rain lets up,
take a long breath, steady my heart.
Hours yet till showtime.

And then there is waiting. And then
there is chaos and pushing and into the building
and I swear a pair of angels place tender hands
against my back, guide me into the arena. There is kindness
in the eyes of strangers, and a place against the rail.
There is the altar set with microphones
and the sweet choreography of lighting techs
ascending flimsy ladders. There is no place
on Earth or heaven I would rather be
than here, one last guitar check and chords
ring out across the room like waves
against the Jersey shore. I want to kneel.
I give myself to this.

Then sudden darkness and that moment like no other.
Then all rock and roll breaks loose.

Hours later, gratitude ringing in my ears,
you’re about to leave the stage. Then,
no: "We gotta do one for Sophie!" And you lift
your guitar into "Twist and Shout"
and all I can say is a silent "Holy…"
as the light spills over me, over all
of us. I am seventeen and forty-seven. I am an angel
dancing in the flames. There is nothing
but this night, this gift. You close your eyes
and sing, and I close mine and sing:
if there are angels they are in
this pact between us, the promises
we are keeping at this moment.
It’s only music and it’s only the night
but we are alive here, loss and laughter
crowding the lines on our faces, and I know now
that this is holy: that we are here,
blaze and thunder, still singing.

- Anne Haines

We interrupt this blog...

2011-01-22T19:47:00.003-05:00

...to bring you an important mesage. Well, important to me anyhow. My laptop kinda got bevirused with a nasty little Trojan backend thing (sounds dirty, huh? well, it IS, just not in the entertaining way). Working on a repair and wishing I were rich enough to say "gee, it's old and percrankety and its hard drive is almost full anyway, I'll just buy a new one." And yes, all my important files (including all of my writing and most, if not all, of the music & photos) were backed up.

Limping along with the smartphone and the slightly temperamental netbook; I'll respond to recent comments & post again just as soon as I can.

Meanwhile, if YOU haven't got everything on your computer good and backed up, I'm using my mom voice here: do it now!

Holding pattern

2011-01-16T23:36:00.003-05:00

Trying to fight off a cold (I thing de code is widding - achoo!). Today's post is postponed until tomorrow. Meanwhile, two videos in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A request for info

2011-01-13T23:53:00.002-05:00

I know I said I was going to blog on Sundays, but I'm going to spend this three-day weekend working on a grant application, and thinking about that reminded me that I meant to ask about something here.

The Split Rock Arts Program in Minnesota used to have a really cool-sounding online mentorship program. You'd pay x amount of money for x number of hours, and they had some good writers as part of the program. But when I checked their site a while back, thinking that would be the perfect thing to write into this grant - to have someone who doesn't know me personally, and so doesn't have a friendship stake in it, do a thorough review of my manuscript - I saw that the program is no more. Wah!

So - calling on the collective knowledge out there - do any of you know of a similar program that you would recommend? Not looking for classes or workshops as such, more of a one-on-one mentoring situation where someone would review my book-length ms.

I can think of several individuals I could ask, and I could certainly write that in as a line item on the grant - but I think the committee will be more likely to look favorably upon something that is an established program of some sort.

Failing that - I'm also willing to consider a week-long book-manuscript-focused workshop. But it has to take place between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012.

Failing all of THAT - if I do approach an individual person - how much do y'all think is a reasonable amount? Figure that we're looking at a regular book-length poetry ms., 60-70ish pages; I haven't decided yet whether I'm going to try to get this grant for my first ms. (the one that's been going around for a year and a half & has gathered some kind words but enough flat-out rejections that I think it needs to be thoroughly revised), my second one (which is pretty close to being "finished" enough for someone to look at), or the third one I think I've just barely started on.

I'd appreciate any feedback - thanks!

(Or maybe I'll just ask for money for a new laptop - this one is on its last legs - and a nice little retreat to write some new stuff. There's always that option.)

Language and responsibility

2011-01-09T22:19:00.002-05:00

Like probably all of you, I've been sickened by the shootings in Arizona. So much of what I feel about this has been said, and said better, by others - but I really do believe that it's time (well past time, really) to take a long hard look at the way we use language.

I'm not going to go so far as to say that the Tea Party et al. are directly responsible for the Arizona massacre, and it does seem pretty clear that the shooter was fairly thoroughly unhinged. Nonetheless, the messages that the Tea Party et al. have been putting out there have been so violent and so reprehensible that you can't help but think they are, if not the root of the problem, a pretty clear road sign pointing directly to the problem.

As someone I follow on Twitter said: if you defend inflammatory rhetoric with "only a psycho would take it literally," don't be shocked and appalled when a psycho takes it literally. And, I would add, don't walk around feeling like your hands are entirely clean, either.

Language. It's so much more powerful than so many of us, even us writers, give it credit for on a day-to-day basis. And I think it behooves us all - yes, even you; yes, even me - to try to be a little more aware of the language that we use and what is really at the root of it. Even sports. What kind of a worldview does it reinforce when we say something like "oh man, the Jets just slaughtered the Colts"?

Anyway. It's worth some thought.

* * * * *

Watching this winter storm roll across the country - looking at a live shot of Atlanta's traffic right now, which is just crazy. And in northern Indiana, where my mom lives, they are digging out from three to four FEET of snow.

I think the whole world has just gone bonkers, that's what I think. The politics, the violence, the weather - all of it.

* * * * *

I had another post in mind for this week, but after watching coverage of the Arizona thing yesterday, none of it seemed important. Next time, perhaps. Meanwhile I am still catching up on blog-reading, a few of you each day - at some point I may declare blog-bankruptcy and just start fresh reading only new posts, but I'm so interested to know what everyone's been up to. That's the problem, though - I'm too interested in too many things - it's just hard for me to walk away and unfollow, unfriend, unsubscribe, hide, skip over! But there's too much interesting content to ever stay caught up on all of it. When you're one of those people who wants to know everything, the Internet is a dangerous, dangerous place. :)

Resolution

2011-01-02T22:58:00.003-05:00

Oh dear. No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth (although my laptop has enough sticky/cranky keys that if I'm not careful my spelling will fall off the face of the earth). Honest.

I haven't been writing much lately, and since this is allegedly a writing/poetry-focused blog I haven't felt like I've had much to say. But I do value the community of poet-bloggers, and I'm determined to remain a part of it, even if only in a smallish way. So, at least for now, I'm going to try to post weekly, and not ask more of myself than that. And I'll get back to reading y'all's blogs too, at least weekly. Surely I can set aside an hour or so on Sunday evenings. Right? Right.

So 2010 is over, and here's 2011. Best thing that happened to me in 2010 was getting bekittened - Tamarin is growing like crazy, happy and healthy and getting along beautifully with Bear and Lotus, the older cats. Here's a video of her about a month ago. She loves to snuggle up on my lap underneath the laptop where it's nice and warm, although now she's much bigger and it's a bit of a tight squeeze for her. (Those of you I see on Facebook & Twitter have already seen this one.) Turn up the sound; there's purring...

As for poetry - I don't believe in writer's block, but I haven't been writing much lately - but I have faith that I'll get back to it soon. I'm not going to AWP this year, sadly; I really really wish I could, but I just can't swing it financially. Next year, maybe.

So... welcome, 2011. Welcome, anyone who still drops by this blog to see if anything is here. I've got some ideas for new posts, and planning to post weekly should help me be more thoughtful about content & actually write stuff up ahead of time. I have good intentions about sending poems out more often this year, too - that is if what I've got out ever comes back (my late summer/fall submissions seem to have accidentally targeted themselves to the particularly slooooooow response-time journals, sigh).

Intentions, resolutions, whatever... I know where the road goes that is paved with them, but we'll see what happens, eh? :)

Photographic evidence

2010-10-23T22:20:00.003-04:00

After some 35 years of being a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, I finally got to meet one of 'em. I didn't include this pic in my concert-review post because ... well, just because. But I'm enough of a googly-eyed fangirl to post it, so... here's Max and me. :) (I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which one is the famous rockstar drummer and which is the doofy fangirl.)

Concert Review: Max Weinberg Big Band

2010-10-23T20:37:00.006-04:00

The Max Weinberg Big Band at the Jazz Kitchen, Indianapolis IN, 10-20-2010

Ask any E Street Band member, according to Max Weinberg, about Indianapolis and they will tell you a story from the 1978 Darkness tour. Apparently the soundcheck finished early and the band headed over to a local, um, entertainment club for gentlemen – the Red Garter – for some relaxation. Clarence Clemons, being as Max phrased it “a man of varied interests,” befriended (I think that’s what you call it) several of the strippers there and, unbeknownst to the rest of the band, not only invited them to the show – but invited them onstage for what was surely one of the most memorable renditions of “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” in E Street history.

It must have been memorable, because Max recounted the story during both of his Max Weinberg Big Band shows at the Jazz Kitchen in Indianapolis this week – adding that he laughed his butt off as Clarence played directly to the strippers as if the rest of the band weren’t even there. No such shenanigans ensued at the Jazz Kitchen, though; just a high-energy, thoroughly entertaining big band show.

Of course, this was a much smaller venue than anything the Springsteen/E Street outfit ever plays, despite the fact that there were fifteen guys onstage – five saxes, three trombones, four trumpets, piano, bass, and drums. Such a small venue, in fact, that those of us at the front tables had to be grateful that the saxes were in the front row and not the trombones! I was fortunate enough to have tickets for both the sold-out early show and the nearly-sold-out late show, and what a fun evening it was. Some highlights:

Max seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He seemed relaxed and happy as he introduced songs, sometimes giving a little bit of musical history or joking around a bit (don’t worry, Conan – your job is in no danger). He played with joy, sometimes looking almost like an excited little boy behind the drums, sometimes concentrating intensely, sometimes exchanging glances with various band members or directing them with a nod. Totally Irrelevant Fashion Note: If recent pix I’ve seen of Jay are any indication, this may be the first time that Max’s hair has been longer than his son’s.
The setlist was nicely varied – everything from crime show theme songs (apparently a bit of a specialty for Max) to tunes like “The Kid From Red Bank” to the Sinatra tribute “Only the Lonely” and the smokin’ hot Buddy Rich-inspired “Parthenia,” with stops along the way for a Beatles medley (“Help,” “Do You Want To Know A Secret,” and – a high-octane highlight – “Kansas City”) and, closing out each set, a Springsteen cover (“Kitty’s Back” for the early set, “Born to Run” for the late show). While Max took the opportunity to showcase some subtlety and versatility in his own playing that he doesn’t often get to deploy with “that other band I play with,” it wasn’t a drum-solo fest by any means. Each of the band members had a chance to shine, and Max was generous with the spotlight, making sure to introduce all of the guys by name at least a couple of times.
And what a great band it was, versatile and energetic. Musical highlights included a “duel” between two of the sax players during “Rat Race,” a fantastic trumpet solo during “Kansas City,” and pretty much every note played by the phenomenal young bass player Carlitos del Puerto. Second only to Max, del Puerto looked like he was having the most fun up there, his face occasionally breaking into a grin of pure delight as he kept an eagle eye trained on Max’s beat.
The two Springsteen covers – both arranged by one of the trumpet players – were very interesting. “Kitty’s Back” worked incredibly well as a big-band number and suited the band to a tee. It’s almost as if the song had been intended to be heard this way from the start. “Born to Run,” on the other hand, felt more like a big-band tribute to the original. It was a lot of fun, and got the audience thoroughly engaged; and it was thrilling to watch Max’s drum work on this classic from just a few feet away. (And, as Max pointed out, the arrangement got a nod of approval from Bruce when he heard it on the radio a while back.) But it didn’t feel as revelatory as “Kitty” did.
I’m glad I was able to attend both shows. The early show was terrific, with “Kitty’s Back” being a particular highlight. The late show was considerably looser (Max mentioned that during the break they’d learned that the Jazz Kitchen serves “generous” drinks, which may have contributed to the looseness), with Max escalating the force and velocity of his drumming to E Street proportions at least once or twice. Several tunes were repeated from one set to the next, including “Parthenia” and the Beatles medley, but there was enough variation to make it well worth buying tickets for both.
Max mentioned from the stage that the MWBB would be the house band at the upcoming “Stand Up for Heroes” show (featuring Tony Bennett, Jerry Seinfeld, and some guy named Springsteen on the bill). Should be a fun evening for those who can splurge on tickets for this worthwhile benefit.
He also mentioned his recent heart surgery, assuring the crowd that he is now in excellent health (and to this untrained eye he appeared to be fitter than ever; I overheard him telling a fan afterwards that his doctor had estimated he can expect to live another 35 years).
And he even promised, from the stage, that “that other band I play with” would be coming back around “sooner rather than much later” – estimating that it would be in 2012, and assuring us that Indianapolis would surely be on the schedule. (Not that we Hoosiers should hold our breaths till we turn blue or anything, but Bruce, if you’re reading this, the Red Garter is ready and waiting for you!)
A note about the venue. This was my first visit to the Jazz Kitchen, and it won’t be the last. In addition to being a fine music venue – you gotta love a place with placards on the tables requesting no talking during the music! – it more than holds its own as a restaurant. I had the “not so Cajun” chicken, which was spicy and delicious, and a decadent brownie dessert. Even with a packed house, the service was excellent – my water glass and coffee cup were never empty. I was glad I’d decided to go early enough to enjoy a leisurely dinner before the show started.

If you have the opportunity to catch the Max Weinberg Big Band, by all means do so! Expect a high-energy show, though don’t expect an encore (after the late show several members of the audience were calling for an encore and I noted a couple of the band members muttering “no!” and hurrying one another off the stage). And expect Max to be very accessible to fans after the show; I’ve heard that he is making a point of doing so throughout this tour, and in Indy he was more than happy to accommodate requests for autographs, photos, handshakes, and chatting after both sets. (Fangirl note: I’ve been listening to the E Street Band since 1975, but living in the Midwest doesn’t give one as many “meet and greet” opportunities as one may find elsewhere. Thus, this was my first chance to meet and speak with any of the band members. Certainly it was secondary to the great music I’d enjoyed, but getting to meet Max, exchange a few words, and get a photo with him made me a pretty darned happy fangirl – I’ll admit it.)

A truly fun evening all around.

Autumnish

2010-10-19T20:15:00.004-04:00

I haven't posted a poem draft here in a long time. Haven't been drafting that many poems, truth be told. I'm going to post this even though it's a first draft, just for shits & giggles, and I'll take it down in a day or so (even though I'm not sure this blog has many readers anymore).

[snippety snip]

Kittenish

2010-10-18T23:52:00.008-04:00

Yes, I've been gone again. I hope to catch up with everyone's blogs soon. (Well, not EVERYone's. But yours. Certainly.)

But look! I brought show and tell!

Meet Tamarin. Yep, a few minutes after this picture was taken, she came home with me. She was 9 weeks old at the time, two weeks ago.

See, a co-worker (M.) had started feeding this skinny stray cat, who turned up pregnant. M. took her to the vet, who confirmed that kitty was a) probably only about a year old, if that; b) terribly malnourished; c) FeLV and FIV negative, and d) pregnant. (We think she was probably adopted by a student last fall when she was a cute kitten and then abandoned in May.) M. took her in, over the objections of her existing two cats, and kitty proceeded to pop out TEN kittens. One of them only made it a couple of weeks, but between mama cat's nursing and M.'s bottle feeding, nine of them were healthy and happy and eventually ready to be adopted.

I went over when they were 8 weeks old - you know, because who can resist a "come over and play with a bunch of kittens!" invitation? Truth be told, I'd resisted that invitation for a few weeks, because I knew it would be hard to resist bringing one home. By the time I visited, most of them were spoken for, so it felt a little safer.

These were, as it turns out, about the healthiest and best-socialized little kittens I had ever seen. They had the dual advantage of being nursed by a very good mamacat AND being bottle-fed and hand-raised by a very good foster-human, so they had that fearless, "of course everybody is my friend" confidence that some kittens have. When they ventured out into the living room where M.'s older cats were still seriously p.o.'d about their home being invaded by the little beasties, the kittens just blinked and went about their business. I knew one of 'em could definitely hold its own with my two ginormous bigcats.

Normally when you bring home a new cat it takes a few days, at least, for the existing cats to adapt and get over it. So it didn't alarm me when Bear and Lotus did some hissing the first night and into the next day. But 24 hours after bringing her home, Lotus and Tamarin (she's named after a type of small adorable monkey, which suits her) started negotiating the rules of play and were playing tag and hide-and-seek and Kittianapolis 500 in short order. Bear doesn't spend as much time rocketing around the house with her as Lotus does, but he's quite pleased with her as well, and will sit there patiently while she pounces on his plumey tail over and over and over.

Bear and Lotus are so good with her:

And me? I'm smitten. How could I not be?

So that's what I've been up to. I have some new (completely non-kitten-related) poem drafts, too, and maybe I'll post one here in the next day or two (leaving it up for 24 hours or so - so keep an eye out if you're interested).

Season of failing light

2010-09-10T23:55:00.007-04:00

So there was the trip to Cleveland, which I've mentioned. Then there was a longweekend of running up to Mom's. Then there was the first week of classes and the accompanying realization that summer is over. Then there was a work week dominated by talking with candidates for a brand-new position as head of our department.

Frankly, I'm worn out. I want to do this for about a week:

The work stuff has been good - the candidates our search committee brought in were very smart people and it was fun talking to them, and the process kind of reinvigorated me about my job a bit, the way talking to people with ideas often can - but to be honest I'm not used to being so emotionally invested in my job. I love my job, don't get me wrong - it is work that I believe in, that I care about, and that I'm sometimes pretty good at - but a couple of super busy work weeks don't usually drain me to the point that I collapse on the couch in front of the U.S. Open and am too tired to get up even when someone bangs on my front door, which is what happened this evening. (I'm going to assume it was somebody with some kind of a petition, or else Mormons. It's usually one of those.)

No wonder I'm not writing much right now. It's not so much that it takes enormous amounts of time to write poems, but (for me anyway) it takes emotional and intellectual focus. It takes my full attention and a level of energy that I can't muster up right now.

It'll be back. I know that.

Here's where I was two years ago:

I miss the ocean sometimes. I do have some good concerts to look forward to, though - Shawn Colvin at the end of this month, John Mellencamp's first hometown show in a decade next month, and (providing I manage to buy tickets) the Max Weinberg Big Band up in Indianapolis next month. As always - music, even just the thought of looking forward to music, revives me.

Lastly, a poem. I forget who posted this on Twitter or Facebook a while back, but whoever it was, thanks. I'm not sure why I love this poem, but I do. It came from the Vermont Studio Center's website.

The Miniature Bed

A miniature bed, and in it two tiny people
not sleeping, not able to sleep because
a small lie has flowered between them,
fragile as a new, white crocus.
The miniature bed holds them like a miniature boat
making its slow, true course to morning.
These tiny people, thoughts thrumming like mice,
are quiet as the lie blooms luminous
over them in the night, fanning its moth petals,
becoming to them like a moon hovering
over their bed, a moon they might almost touch
with their miniature hands, if they weren’t certain
that one wrong gesture might break
the spindles of their small world, if their hearts
were not drops of trembling quicksilver,
if they were brave, if they could see
that small is no smaller than big, that thimbles
are deep as oceans for any god, they might even
touch each other then, opening the dark,
like a match the sun’s flaring.

-Jenny George

Linkalicious

2010-08-29T23:03:00.004-04:00

Yes, before everyone asks, I did see the Emmy Awards opening number tonight - Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, the cast of "Glee," et al. doing "Born to Run." Video is posted over at Blogness on the Edge of Town, if your life won't be complete without seeing it... it was, well, weird.

In other linkage:

Nice interview with Catherine Bowman over at the IU News Room, about her creative process (always a favorite topic of mine).

Shameless self-promotion: the Winter 2010 issue of the Tipton Poetry Journal is now online, including a poem of mine.

How to make the Bruce Springsteen fan community collectively squeal like little girls - announce a huge, lavish, amazing-sounding "Darkness on the Edge of Town" box set, coming out in November. The documentary and the accompanying 80-page book (!) look like they will reveal a lot about Springsteen's creative process (see? we have a theme going on here!) around the album. Even if you're only a casual Bruce fan, check out the trailer for the documentary. "Words all over the place." Hee!

Bruce Springsteen - "The Promise: The Making of 'Darkness on the Edge of Town'" Sneak Peek from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

Finally, something I saw on a light pole downtown today. If this doesn't break your heart a little bit, maybe you don't have one.

Notes from the Rock Hall 2: Music and Lyrics

2010-08-17T00:06:00.005-04:00

So, you don't have to know me very long to learn that I love music. Whether it's a lovely cello recital by Yo-Yo Ma, an evening with a legitimate guitar god, or a road trip across the Midwest to experience the glorious roar that is a Bruce Springsteen/E Street Band concert, there is pretty much nothing I love more than music - preferably live.

My recent trip to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame was such a feast of memories for me. Everything from the Beatles memorabilia (the Beatles being the first rock band I really fell in love with) to the audio stations where you could listen to little snippets from various influential radio DJ's of past decades (and I remembered secretly listening to my little transistor radio late into the night when I was supposed to be asleep, sometimes pulling in stations from far-off mysterious cities like Chicago) to the extensive artifact-driven exhibit tracing Bruce Springsteen's history, I was reminded over and over of the hours I spent immersed in music as a teenager. Bruce sings "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school..." and it's true, you learn so much from anything you immerse yourself in like that, it marks you forever. Some of the guitar licks I've listened to a million times have probably managed to sink into my bones and change the actual way that I walk. (My poem in the new issue of New Madrid, "The Roar the Day After," is about being in high school and the way that music just doesn't leave your head and you walk around in it all day.)

But I realized more than anything, especially as I pored over the handwritten lyrics of a bunch of different artists, how that immersion in music is what made a poet out of me. I say that instinctively, but what does it mean? Well, rock & roll gives you permission to obsess, for one thing - to listen over and over, to pick apart the little nuances, to explore the same damn theme over and over (how many love songs are there anyway?) - and I don't think you can be a poet without understanding obsession on some level. At least I can't.

And, the songs gave me little templates to follow. Yeah, a lot of what I wrote in high school was intended as song lyrics, but even when I moved past that, the music had taught me something about sound and rhythm that I would never have understood had I spent the same amount of time strictly counting iambs or whatever. The sound and rhythm gave me a template, but they also gave me enough freedom to deviate where necessary; instead of slavishly sticking to "da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM" I had something more fluid to work with, something that felt alive. And even when I moved past writing verse-chorus-verse songs and started writing poems, music gave me a sense of structure: understanding how you move from the beginning of something to the end, how you can tell a story even while you loop back and repeat yourself now and then, and how the same words and lines repeated can carry different intent and resonance depending on where they fall in the structure of the thing - look at how the last chorus of a song can have an entirely different feeling from the first instance of the chorus, depending on where the song has gone in between times.

The music gave me, too, an instinctive understanding of how different sounds convey different kinds of meaning. How a staccato line of short syllables and lots of consonants has an entirely different emotional weight and resonance than a slow line with vowel sounds that are crooned and sustained. That's equally true in music and in poetry.

Now, I'm not going to make a case for song lyrics being poetry. Maybe sometimes they are, but I think 99% of the time they are different beasts entirely (which is why I think a lot of "poems set to music" fail). Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan - all of them write wonderful images and tell great stories, and the lyrics are often worth studying and thinking about and considering possible interpretations. And a few of the musicians I love are legitimate poets and/or writers; Patti Smith was a published poet before she became a musician, and Rosanne Cash was writing well before she took up music (though she didn't publish extensively until she'd become known as a musician - her collection of short stories Bodies of Water is worth picking up, and I've just started reading her brand-new memoir, Composed, which is beautifully written).

But songs are not poems. To say this is not to take anything away from them; the lyrics aren't any less masterful for being songs and not poems. You can read the lyrics on paper, but that's like viewing a painting in black and white. You can appreciate it, and you may even gain a new understanding and appreciation of it because taking away certain dimensions of the work lets you see things you might have missed otherwise. But you're not experiencing the whole work of art if you separate the music and the lyrics. No matter how great the lyrics are, they are meant to be a part of the larger whole.

At the Rock Hall, I spent hours studying handwritten lyrics (I looked at a lot of people's; it may not surprise you to know that Steven Tyler couldn't spell for crap when he wrote "Walk This Way" or that Jimi Hendrix had large, somewhat self-consciously ornate, very distinctive handwriting). As I stared at the pages of the actual spiral notebook in which Bruce Springsteen drafted "Born to Run" - pages upon pages of the thing; that song did not come easily for him and he wrote and revised and wrote and revised for what must have been months - the thing that struck me the most, and startled me the most, was how familiar those pages felt. I looked at Bruce's notebooks from his early twenties, and thought about my notebooks from my early twenties, and realized how very similar they really were. For just a few moments, I thought, "wow, Bruce Springsteen and I are, at the heart of it, in the same line of work."

And after all these years, I liked that a lot.

Notes from the Rock Hall, 1

2010-08-10T21:54:00.003-04:00

More substantial posts coming, but I want to sustain whatever small momentum I've found here.

So, last week I spent two full days in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, and it was fantastic. Yes, you can quibble about the induction criteria and about who's in versus who's not (the fact that Abba got inducted this year and Darlene Love, who was on the ballot, did not is just a crying shame) - but for anyone who's grown up with this music it is an absolute treasure trove of memory and revelation. So many times I found myself standing in front of an album cover I'd spent hours upon hours staring at in high school while playing the album over and over, and next to that album cover, the actual thing that was on the cover. John Lennon's costume from the cover of Sgt. Pepper. Stevie Nicks' pointe shoes from the cover of Rumours. And, of course, Bruce Springsteen's guitar and leather jacket from the cover of Born to Run. (That jacket is tiny, too. He was a scrawny little dude. So many dreams packed into that small, beat-to-hell-and-back leather jacket.)

Other than the Springsteen stuff (which I'll get to later), probably the thing that made the biggest impression on me was John Lennon's first passport, issued in 1960. When he first got the passport, he filled out all the blanks dutifully, writing "Student" in the space marked for Profession. Later on - and oh, how I wish there were some way of knowing exactly when - he came back and, with a considerably bolder and firmer pen, lined through the word "Student" and wrote "Musician."

The power of naming oneself. Just intense.

* * * * *

Also, I've pretty much decided I am going to do my damnedest to get to AWP next year. More later about why (I'm not on any panels); for now, I just want to throw out there that I will read at the drop of a hat, or a poem, so if any editors or other reading organizers would like a middle-aged Midwestern poet on their bill, you know where to find me. :)

Testing the waters

2010-08-09T23:03:00.002-04:00

So, yeah, I've been even more absent from here than usual. On the one hand, nothing momentous has happened that I feel I must blog about. On the other hand, there's a level of connectedness in the (yucky word) blogosphere, one that I do actually treasure, and which takes a certain amount of care and feeding to maintain. And I find myself, often, with words on the tip of my tongue.

I haven't been reading y'all for a while and I haven't been writing here either. I guess I've been on an unannounced hiatus. I'm back, I think, in a quiet sort of way. Starting to catch up with the blog-reading to see what everyone's been up to. Dipping my toes back in.

I've been active on Facebook and on Twitter. Those feel like very different venues of communication than a blog. Impermanent - Twitter especially, even though the Library of Congress is archiving tweets now. It's like a stream that moves on, and if you don't catch it for a while there are no repercussions. Unlike blogs, where I feel a certain responsibility to try and catch up, at least with some of y'all bloggers with whom I feel a sense of shared history. Lately I've felt more of an affinity for shallow, rapidly moving water than for the depths, I guess.

Boy, that all sounds kind of pompous.

Anyway, I am missing discursiveness and writing whole sentences. I can tell because essay ideas and blog post ideas are starting to bubble up for me. I am thinking that I will make a spreadsheet of them (because I'm that kind of a nerd) and set aside time each day for thoughtful writing. (Because, much as I love Twitter, it's not "thoughtful writing.") Some of that will, I hope, be for this blog.

So my thanks to those of y'all who haven't yet given up on me. I'm here. :)

As for the poetry part of my life. Haven't been writing that many poems - those are from the deep end too, and I've been in the wading pool soaking up some sun - but I've been sending out like crazy. (Well, relatively speaking, for me anyway.) I've had some good results, including a poem in the just-released new issue of New Madrid, and a very encouraging rejection from a very good journal I've been trying to get into since 1988. (I don't name names on rejections, sorry! Superstition, I suppose.) Meanwhile, a far newer and far less prestigious journal asked for some poems, then rejected them with a form email - just to keep me humble, I suppose, as if there were some danger of me becoming a diva at this late date! You gotta laugh. It's a silly game we play, isn't it?

Still no nibbles on the book manuscript, which I intend to pull apart and try to revise it with a fresh eye. I think it's a relatively solid manuscript, but it hasn't been catching attention, and I suspect it could be made better.

I took a little summer vacation last week and made a road trip to Cleveland to visit the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Oddly enough, I learned some things about writing there. Stay tuned. :)

Blogadoon

2010-06-24T00:01:00.002-04:00

Yeah... it's the blog that occasionally rises out of the mist then disappears again. Or maybe it's the blogger herself who's doing that. Perhaps I am mythical. :)

Got a concert review for you, but first a quick note - my poem "Cover" (which comes from "Chasing Angels," my manuscript about a fictional rock musician) is up at Hamilton Stone Review. Go take a peek if you are so inclined! Fellow blogger Jessie Carty has a couple of poems in the same issue.

* * * * *

So I was fortunate enough to have a ticket to see legitimate guitar god Jeff Beck in Indy the other night. I'd never seen him before, though I've seen videos and so had pretty high expectations of the performance. I left Bloomington in a rush just ahead of a storm rolling in - managed to outrun it, which kind of set the tone for the night. When I got into the venue I made a quick pit stop and was highly, highly amused to note that there was a line out into the lobby area for the men's room, and no line to speak of for the women's room. Yes, it was just that testosterone-laden a crowd. It's been a long time since I was at a show with that kind of audience; Springsteen crowds tend to be pretty gender-balanced.

The opening act was a singer-songwriter type with an acoustic guitar and a small keyboard, accompanied by a second guitarist. She was pretty and had a nice voice, with a pleasant Lilith Fair-ish vibe, but ultimately fairly uninspiring. And really, a crowd full of middle-aged electric-guitar geeks (I seriously overheard at least two conversations going into great technical detail about some piece of equipment or other - guitars, amps, etc.) just was not her crowd.

Finally Jeff Beck and his band (Narada Michael Walden on drums, Rhonda Smith on bass, and Jason Rebello on keyboards) took the stage. The first number was seriously rocking, and the energy in the venue increased a thousandfold. The drums kicked in and I realized it had been way too long since I'd been to a good loud concert. Sometimes, a girl just needs to rock!

The venue had folding chairs set up, and I had mixed feelings about the seated thing. The seats were narrow and close together, and it was hot & crowded. When Beck & band took the stage everyone leaped up and stood for the first couple of songs, and that felt really good, but being 5 foot 1 I can't see much in a situation like that (I was back in about the 15th row, which isn't too far back, but at my height it doesn't take much). Throughout the evening a lot of songs elicited standing ovations - it was like church up in there with all the stand up sit down stand up sit down!); when people were sitting I could see the stage nicely, but it is really hard for me to listen to music like that and just sit still. Standing up allows me to experience the music physically, with my whole body.

So we got everything from screaming rock to blues to jazz to standards: an incredibly diverse setlist. Beck's versions of some tunes, like "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," verged on - I hate to say it - "smooth jazz." That is not a compliment. But he made even those tame tunes come alive with his sheer virtuosity. When he coaxes notes like that out of his white Stratocaster, all is forgiven. "Rainbow" a real showcase for his absolute control of tone and dynamics, and the audience seemed particularly taken with it. I will admit I preferred the more rocking tunes myself. There was one song (I'm not good at titles when there are no lyrics to remind me) with a heavy, heavy bass that sounded almost Led Zeppelin-esque, and I really loved that one.

His band was wonderful. The keyboards were necessary for the more orchestral arrangements; for other songs, he could very well have managed with only the guitar/bass/drums trio. Narada Michael Walden was fantastic, very musical (something I don't always get from drummers), and his presence was buoyant, a radiant energy behind the drum kit. Rhonda Smith, who played with Prince for a number of years, was incredibly funky and soulful and versatile on the bass and occasional vocals. I love how Jeff Beck uses the bass; though I never saw his previous touring band in person, I've seen video and the bassist from that band, Tal Wilkenfeld, is also absolutely brilliant. (Look her up. I think she's playing with Herbie Hancock now.)

Oftentimes Beck would be completely absorbed in his playing, standing sideways to the audience in order to better communicate with his band. He was all about the music, not so much the showmanship - which is absolutely fine. He spoke several times to introduce songs, but not at length, and kind of awkwardly; you got the feeling he mostly just wanted to shut up and play.

During the show he played two different white Stratocasters. The Strat is so integral to his sound, the way it sustains and sings and soars. So when he strapped on a black Les Paul for a song during the encore, the audience reacted with surprise and interest. He introduced it as a tribute to the great Les Paul, who died not long ago and with whom Beck had a longtime friendship, and played "How High the Moon." It was fascinating to hear the radical difference in tone and feel between the LP and the Strat, how he played it like it was a different instrument entirely - much more staccato, with notes that popped and crackled instead of soaring and searing. A lot of fun to hear this, and he seemed to enjoy the change of pace.

All in all he played about an hour and a half, including his interpretations of "People Get Ready" and the Beatles' "A Day in the Life" among many others. Not a Springsteenian marathon show, but not half bad for a guy just a couple days from his 66th birthday, and certainly enough to be satisfying. When I finally made my way out of the venue, the sky was strobing with distant lightning, flickering like busted neon among the tall buildings of downtown Indianapolis. All the way home I was accompanied by near-constant, distant lightning and a hazy, hazy moon. It seemed perfectly appropriate, though I couldn't tell you why.

I'll leave you with a video taken by someone else at the show. The still photos above are mine; I took some videos, and you can find them on my YouTube account, but the audio on them is pretty atrocious (my camera's just not built for audio). Enjoy!

Summerish

2010-06-03T21:27:00.003-04:00

I've been awakened between 5 and 6 am by thunderstorms the past two mornings. This morning there was so much lightning I almost had a flashback to the strobelights and mirrorballs of the disco era.

* * * * *

Just sent in the final proofs for my poem forthcoming in New Madrid. Their staff has been absolutely wonderful to work with; I've had quite a bit of communication from them (mainly from Assistant Managing Editor, Jacque Day) since the initial acceptance, including the opportunity to proofread my contributor's note and my line in the table of contents. I've known exactly where they were in the process all along, I know what day they plan on sending the files to the printer, and I know when to expect the issue in the mail (late July). The level of TLC they've provided has been way above & beyond the call of editorial duty. They'll begin taking submissions again in mid-August, and if you have work that seems right for them, give 'em a try.

Also just had a poem accepted by Hamilton Stone Review - the email arrived on my birthday, which was kind of lovely. It's been a good submission year for me so far. I think I'm getting better at picking where to send.

* * * * *

Finally, I just came across this poem by Stephen Dunn, which I had not read before although it was published back in 1987. It wrecked me a little bit, in a good way. Just gorgeous stuff:

...often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it...

Seriously. Go read "Sweetness" and see if it doesn't give you a bit of a shiver.

Oldish

2010-06-02T23:28:00.002-04:00

Welcome to June. How in the hell did that happen??

I spent a few days up at my mom's for Memorial Day weekend and to celebrate the beginning of the one-year countdown to my fiftieth birthday. Fiftieth. How in the hell did THAT happen?? (I mean, it doesn't happen until next year, but... you get the idea.)

* * * * *

Does anyone have any personal experience (or know anyone who has) with the Colrain Manuscript Conference? I can't possibly afford it, but it looks like the sort of thing that would fit nicely into a grant application next year. Yeah, I'm thinking ahead.

AWP would be another great way to use some grant funds, but I don't know of any grants that would get the money to me in time for that.

Of course, right now I'd like a grant to just go and hang out on the beach (preferably one without any nasty oil globs washing up on it... sigh) for a week or two. A winning lottery ticket would do the trick. :)

Seriously, though, I am curious about the Colrain thing, so any thoughts on that would be most welcome. Feel free to backchannel if you don't want to post a comment in public. Thanks!

Poetry & mystery & a bit about Twitter

2010-05-25T23:16:00.002-04:00

For a few months now I've been on hiatus from the poetry group I belong to. When I first stepped out, I wasn't writing much at all; now I'm writing again, though a bit slowly - weekends mostly, usually drafting one or two poem(-ish thing)s. I haven't been going back to revise much, and the poems feel a little different to me. Anyway, I've realized that, right now, I just want to trust the poems to do their own thing; I don't want to go back to the group for critique just yet. I don't want to interrogate the poems yet. I don't want someone trying to make sense of them - it feels like "sense" isn't the point of these particular poems, at least not yet. It's a new place for me to be, although in a way it's a lot like where I was with poems back when I first started writing, in my teens.

That whole paragraph was more than a little self-indulgent, but that's how it goes sometimes.

The new poems seem to be about memory. I say "seem to be" but since one of them is titled "What Memory Is" I guess it's a little more than "seem" huh? It feels like the very beginning stages of a new project(-ish thing). There's the first manuscript, Land Mammal, which has been making the rounds as they say and will probably get revised some more between now and whenever; there's the second one, Chasing Angels, which I seem to have stepped away from for a while but which I'd like to go back to over the summer and pound it into some kind of readable shape; and now there is this new thing. Which may or may not actually be a thing. I'd like to get one of the first two manuscripts accepted somewhere before I push too far on the new thing, just because I can only juggle so many balls at one time... well, we'll see.

Memory seems like an appropriate thing for me to be thinking about and writing about these days. I've lived in this town for almost thirty-one years now, and there are a lot of ghosts here. I'm comfortable with most of them but they are still, you know, ghosts. And on Friday I begin the one-year countdown to my fiftieth birthday - which seems crazy to me.

* * * * *

Don't even know what to say about the awfulness in the Gulf. It's as if someone decided we weren't turning the ocean into toxic sludge quite fast enough, and figured we should speed up the process. And I know it's not going to help at all (especially since my little Corolla only eats about five gallons of gas a week), and I know none of the oil companies are particularly ethical or worthy of support, but I can't bring myself to buy gas from BP now, even though it's the most convenient place for me.

* * * * *

While I'm busy letting the new poems just sit there and be mysterious, I've been reasonably industrious about sending out the old ones. I'm pleased to note that Rattle took one for their winter issue. I suppose it's self-indulgent to announce acceptances here on this blog, but isn't that what the Internet is for anyway? Well, that and cute kitten pictures.

* * * * *

Really enjoying Twitter lately. It doesn't replace the extended musings of a blog, or the conversation of real life. It's more kinda like sitting in a room with a bunch of people, all puttering around or reading or watching tv or listening to music or whatever, and occasionally piping up with an observation, which maybe makes a couple of people say "Hmmm, interesting" or tell you about the time that same thing happened to them. And then someone will read you something interesting that they stumbled across, and maybe that will make you go look up something to find out a little more about that something. It's a low-key, ongoing multiple connectedness that appeals to me. Plus, you occasionally get to exchange remarks with people you'd probably never have the chance to chat with in real life, like the great writer Margaret Atwood, journalist Luke Russert, or terrific writer/musician Rosanne Cash (who has a memoir coming out soonish, and I can't wait to read it). I've gotten a tremendous amount of professional information from the librarians I follow, and I know that if there's any news from the Springsteen world someone will tweet about it. For someone like me who practically has a phobia about "what if something interesting happens in the world and I don't know about it??" (yeah, why do you think I went to library school anyway?) - it's pretty great. Twitter isn't everybody's cup of tea, and that's fine; I'm following as many people as I can manage right now anyway and I don't need more! But it has taken me by surprise to realize it's become an important resource for me, both personally and professionally.

Letting the world intrude

2010-05-17T22:08:00.004-04:00

Over the weekend I spent several hours at the mega-chain coffee place near campus (I know, I know... but now that many of the students have left for the summer, it's a pleasant novelty to be able to go there and actually find a seat), reading and writing. And it occurred to me that lately, say for the past couple of years, I've found it much easier to draft poems when I'm somewhere other than home. Looking over the poems I drafted this weekend, I realized why - it's that when I'm out in public, things happen. People walk past, the weather changes, unexpected music comes on the radio. Things I didn't choose and can't control.

Allowing those things to drop into the poem when they feel like they belong, without trying to overexplain what they're doing there, is a technique I've been enjoying lately. Sure, I could do it at home, but (despite my cats' best efforts) home is a lot more predictable. I love hearing a snippet of conversation, or a ringtone, or seeing a girl wearing a shiny blouse with butterflies printed all over it - and letting that image fall into the poem. I love letting go of the need for tight control over the poem's arc enough to let unexpected things fall in and shift it. Most of my writing life I've written fairly linearly (is that a word?), this happened and then this happened and then this; or at least, I saw this and it made me think of that. For years and years I kept a tight rein on my poems, tried hard to steer them. (Who me, control freak? Uh...) And I overexplained, that's for sure. Learning to let the world intrude and let unexpected details fall in and just be there has been, I think, a great exercise for me.

I was first aware of doing this in Provincetown a few years back - now there's a great place to find some interesting details to fall into your poems! I'll share a poem that was pretty heavily shaped by this kind of attention, which turned out to be one of my favorite writing-process experiences. I started writing it while sitting at a table in the window of the Adams Pharmacy, watching it rain outside, watching cranky wet tourists go by - and then some people with a dog walked by. The dog had his head high, carrying a toy of some sort, looking absolutely and utterly delighted with himself. A dog with treasure in its mouth. And that moment of serendipity & unexpected joy completely changed the direction of the poem as I was writing it.

When I left the Adams Pharmacy I had a prose paragraph thingie. Here's an early draft:

There are things that are mine, and things that never will be. You for one, with the wet loam of your gaze turning away. This day, just past the turn of summer, minutes shorter now than yesterday. It’s cliché to say how quickly a life can pass, but on this morning in my forty-fourth year it’s a question I can taste, the salt sweet shore of it. The time we take to turn away when we could be absolutely still. A red car on a rainy day, driving slow on Gosnold Street. A dog with treasure in its mouth. Everything that passes by : I want to wave my arms and make it halt : just hold there for one moment, hold. Weathered blue framed windows, voices saying yes, the words that water says. Rain comes down harder, generous, saying yes, yes to the black and shining street.

I left the pharmacy then, intending to go get some clam chowder at the Lobster Pot for lunch, but they weren't open yet - so I wandered over to the Provincetown Public Library (which I adore) and settled in to work on revising for a while. My hair was damp from the rain and I had to take my rain-spattered glasses off to work, which became I've salt in my eyes, in my hair. I'd briefly picked up Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Boats when I first got to the library, and something about the tone of the title poem was resonating in my mind as I worked. Other things in the poem had been poking at my attention for the time I'd been in Provincetown - cormorants, the blue frames around the windows of a B&B across the way from the one where I was staying - and those details found their way into the poem as well. I didn't walk out of the library with the poem in its final form that morning, but it was pretty close, actually.

Here's the finished poem as it appeared in my chapbook Breach:

Hold

Everything I’ve lost, refused, or left behind
comes flooding in like dead things on the tide.
What is ever really gone? The name for this light is yes.
Drifting ghost nets, lost at sea, entangle the unwary beasts
that thrash against the current and the dream
and I’ve salt in my eyes, in my hair.
There are things that are mine and things
that never will be. You for one,
with the wet loam of your gaze turning towards home.
On this fogged-in morning in my forty-fourth year
it’s a question I can taste, the salt sweet shore of it,
the time we take to turn away.
A red car on a rainy day, driving slow on Gosnold Street,
a dog with treasure in its mouth.
Everything that passes by: I want to wave my arms,
to hold them wide like cormorants’ wings:
just hold there for one moment, hold.
Weathered blue framed windows, voices saying yes,
the words that water says.
Rain comes down hard now, generous, saying
yes, yes to the distant shore,
to the black and shining street.

-Anne Haines July 2005

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain?

2010-05-16T19:14:00.003-04:00

Quickie linkage on a damp and grayish day; I have a more substantial post brewing in the back of my mind (honest!).

* * * * *

Some of you (if there's anyone still reading this blog, that is...) will appreciate this site: Hot Guys Reading Books. It's exactly what it says it is. :)

* * * * *

It's true: Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga (who is, as it turns out, a huge Springsteen fan), Sting, Elton John, Debbie Harry, and Shirley Bassey recently got together at a rainforest benefit in NYC and performed that Journey song, "Don't Stop Believing." The awful proof lies in the video herewith embedded. I'm sorry. (Okay, not really.)

* * * * *

And on a more verifiably classic note: here's the great Miles Davis with his quintet, performing "So What" in 1959. It doesn't get much better than this. My poem based on this tune appeared recently in the online journal shaking like a mountain.

* * * * *
Finally, the happy news that my poem "What This Poem Will Do" has been picked up by Rattle. It'll appear in the December issue. Yay!

Stormy weather

2010-05-02T13:56:00.002-04:00

I think I've now heard from all my Tennessee friends, and all are safe and relatively high & dry. It's crazy out there! Floods in Tennessee, oil washing up in the Gulf, busted pipes & dirty water in Boston, car bombs in NYC, tornadoes in the South... it all makes the noisy thunderstorms that have awakened me the past two nights seem pretty tame by comparison.

* * * * *

Watched the Kentucky Derby yesterday and, as I do pretty much every year about this time, remembered the time I got to meet the great Secretariat. It was about a year after he'd retired. I was a horse-crazy thirteen-year-old, and we took a family vacation to the bluegrass country of Kentucky. After making a pilgrimage to Churchill Downs, we went to the farm where Secretariat was at stud, only to find it had been closed to the public. But my parents made a phone call and pleaded our case, and they let us in and gave us a tour of the stud barn. There are pictures (I need to scan them someday & post them online!) of a nerdy little me standing next to that huge glossy red stallion, touching his shoulder, looking up at him in awe. I also got to meet his stablemate Riva Ridge and several other stallions whose names and histories I knew well. I remember that Secretariat was enormous and stunningly beautiful; though he was no longer in peak racing condition, he'd been off the track less than a year and still looked like the tremendous athlete he was. It was a great, great day for me.

This amuses me greatly: the list of celebrities I have patted on the shoulder consists of Secretariat and Bruce Springsteen. Hee! :)

To listen...

2010-04-27T21:49:00.002-04:00

Just a quick note to mention that my poem "To Listen By Singing" is now up over at shaking like a mountain. If you like it - or, for that matter, if you don't! - you're welcome to leave a comment at the site. :)

The poem was inspired by a Bobby McFerrin concert a few years back. He led the audience in some choral singing, as he often does, and the reciprocity of singing & listening struck me in a way that it never really had before.

On another note - frost advisory! It's not that late for us, really - our average last frost is somewhere around the 20th of April, I think, and our record latest frost is in late May - but it's still a little startling to have frost after all the flowering trees have burst into bloom. But then, I live in the midwest; we specialize in startling weather.

Covering the bases

2010-04-26T01:25:00.005-04:00

It's been an eventful week, though nothing especially poetry-related. Monday night I heard Martin Sheen speak on campus - if you ever get a chance to hear him, seriously do whatever you can to get there; he's one of the best speakers I've ever heard. Funny, thoughtful, loquacious, generous with his time. I don't necessarily agree with every one of his views, but I have a tremendous degree of respect for the way in which he approaches both his art and his activism. Plus, he opened by reading a poem by Rabindranath Tagore - I don't know the name of the poem, but for you West Wing fans, it sounded so much like something President Bartlet would have chosen. And he read it beautifully, of course.

Afterwards, as he was preparing to leave the stage, a couple of people ran up to the stage wanting autographs. He started signing autographs and chatting with people, and the mob at the edge of the stage got fairly large; Sheen settled in and looked like he had every intention of signing an autograph for every single person there who wanted one (and I'd say there were probably 150-200 people hanging out looking hopeful). After speaking for a good 90 minutes, he was clearly in no hurry to leave; between that and the fact that his entire speaking fee was donated to a non-profit organization he works with - I can't recall the name offhand, but it serves as a sort of mini-Peace Corps and helps bring doctors and other folks to so-called Third World countries - the overall impression I was left with was one of generosity. He was generous with his time, and with his words (and boy, does he have a lot of words - you could probably ask him whether the sky is blue and he'd have thirty minutes of storytelling to do).

Fast-forward to Saturday night; I got to see the Indigo Girls for about the eleventeenth time (I've lost count). Girlyman opened, and they were terrific - check out this great article about them on Slate, in which they talk about "the pursuit of creative risk"; they're interesting people making gorgeous music, and it had been too long since I'd seen them in concert. (Several years!)

Musical highlights of the Indigo Girls' set for me were a particularly gorgeous rendition of "Ghost" (Emily Saliers' voice just gets better as the years go on); a great "Romeo & Juliet" by Amy Ray (I thought, at one point, that I was kind of over that song - and never liked how audiences turned it into a singalong - but this time around it was heartfelt without being over-the-top angsty, and just sounded really good to me); a great lively "Ozilline" with all the members of Girlyman joining in; and to close the show, a gorgeous, a cappella, five-part-harmony version of "Finlandia" with Amy & Emily along with Doris, Ty, and Nate from Girlyman - five singers who all have a beautiful sense of harmony.

Afterwards I decided to be one of the couple dozen fans hanging around by the tour bus. I'd kind of expected it to be pouring down rain after the show, and I've gotten autographs from them & chatted with them before so don't always feel a need to do the wait-by-the-bus thing, so I hadn't brought anything to sign - but the Buskirk-Chumley Theatre had put together lovely programs for the show, so I had that. I didn't pester them for photos, though both Amy & Emily were very graciously posing for photos with the fans who asked. They always seem like such sweethearts. Though I have to wonder if they ever get on the tour bus and trade stories about the crazy or stupid things some of us fans say to them. :) I'm sure they've heard some wacky things and just smiled patiently & moved on down the line to the next, hopefully less nutso, fan.

So the theme of the week? I guess it's the blend of art & activism, as that's a big theme for both Martin Sheen and the Indigo Girls. And generosity, both with your art and with your time.

I'll leave you with this video of "Sugar Tongue," which is on the Indigo Girls' most recent album, Poseidon and the Bitter Bug. The sound quality isn't great, but my camera wasn't made for recording music. (I nabbed videos of the first two songs, shot a few still photos during the third song; the theater manager had requested no photos after the third song, and I was just as glad to put the camera away and be fully present for the rest of the show instead of fiddling with technology.)

Good Poetry Day

2010-04-15T20:30:00.004-04:00

Quick notes on a warm spring evening.

Went to Seamus Heaney's reading on campus this afternoon (it was at 5:30, in a building very close to the library where I work - super convenient!). I dawdled outside taking a few bad cellphone pictures of flowering trees, because it was just too nice outside and poetry readings are hardly ever crowded, so there's no hurry, right?

Wrong! When I got into the lecture hall (maybe ten minutes before the reading was scheduled to start), the room was packed and people were standing in the aisles & at the back of the room. Amazing! I was able to find a seat in the very back row, but people were continuing to come in; it was definitely a standing-room-only situation. Nice!

Like other readings in this series, this one began with a short Q&A by a faculty member; Heaney was charming and funny. Both men were sitting in chairs center stage for that. When Heaney took the podium for his reading, there were all kinds of technical issues with the microphone. It wasn't on, then it was causing all kinds of horrid feedback. It was eventually squared away, and Heaney handled it gracefully, but it always annoys me when there are technical issues at a reading that could probably have been avoided by doing a proper soundcheck. Oh well. Anyway, it was a very good reading; he read old poems and newer work, and gave just the right amount of background on each poem (at least for me). Standing ovation at the end, very nice. The room was hot and I was fading quickly, so I (along with quite a few others) ducked out before what was apparently going to be a bit of an audience Q&A.

On my way back to the car I got out my phone (I am so loving my smartphone, even if it doesn't take very good pictures of poetry readings - ahem) for a quick email check. Lo and behold - an acceptance note from New Madrid for a poem from the fictional-rockstar manuscript I'm working on. Yay! It'll be out this summer.

And this isn't poetry-related, but I am very pleased with the news (just breaking in the past hour) that President Obama has ordered hospitals which receive federal funding not to deny visitation rights for the same-sex partners of patients. It's a stupid world in which something like that requires a presidential order, but since it was necessary, I'm glad he did it. (Still mad at you about the offshore drilling thing, though, Mr. President. That was not cool.)

Denverish (not)

2010-04-10T23:58:00.002-04:00

It's funny watching the twitterstream for #awp10. One evening there was a cute little blip for about 45 minutes where almost everyone who tweeted from AWP mentioned that they'd just taken a nap, were about to take a nap, or really needed a nap. This morning, the predominant theme was the hangover. Ah, AWP. Despite all the craziness, overstimulation, cranky academics, po-biz po-biz po-biz, I had a great time last year and hope I can manage it next year.

Thanks to all who've posted pictures, blog posts, tweets, whatever. If I can't be there, it's fun hearing about it!

* * * * *

My poem "So What" (based on the Miles Davis classic) is up over at shaking like a mountain (an online journal of literature about music). If you read and like it, I'd love it if you left a comment there!

* * * * *

Butler University in Indianapolis - yes, the same Butler whose basketball team came within about two inches of taking the NCAA championship from Duke a few days ago - has announced the 2010-11 lineup for its Visiting Writers series. No specific dates listed as of yet, but holy moly, Margaret Atwood! And several other poets/writers who I think will be well worth the two-hour drive for me. (They're way on the north side of Indy.)

* * * * *

Spring is absolutely glorious here. It's almost excessive, the green and the blooming and the flowering trees busting out like crazy. Is there any color more amazing than the purple/fuchsia of redbuds, especially against the brilliant green of new leaves and the heartbreaking blue of sky? This week I've been walking around with my mouth hanging open half the time. Magnolia! Forsythia! Tulip! Bradford pear! I keep thinking I need to take a few hours and run around town with my camera, but honestly, pictures will never do it justice. Here's a lovely bit of injustice in the form of a mediocre cellphone shot - daffodils in front of one of the parking garages on campus:

Seasonal

2010-04-04T20:26:00.002-04:00

So what is all this about a National Poetry Moth? They think poetry is like an insect or something? And why a moth? Why can't it be a pretty butterfly, huh? Or a unicorn! National Poetry Moth indeed. I ain't flying into no stupid flame, that's for sure.

* * * * *

oh Zombie Jesus we love you get up

Warmish

2010-04-01T22:42:00.003-04:00

I'm behind on everything, again. But I do seem, after a fairly long fallow period, to be easing back into poetry. I thought it would come rushing back when it came back, but it's been more of a trickle. Still, I'm reading poems again - that's probably the most important part - and I'm writing a bit, and I'm sending stuff out again (nothing accepted yet on this go-round, but I did get a nice note with one rejection). Even got the first manuscript (not the rockstar one, which isn't speaking to me right now, but the one that's already racked up thirty rejection notes) out to a contest. And in the process I tinkered with it just a bit, mostly pulled out a few poems, and it feels tighter now. Still want to pull it all apart and do a big revision, but that takes time and breathing room. And I also need to get my taxes done... ahem.

Wishing, wishing, wishing that I could go to AWP. I had a lot of fun last year. Ah well.

Not doing NaNoPoPoNoMo this year, either - maybe I'm lazy, or maybe I just know better than to embark on something I know good and well I'm not up to completing. Maybe next year. Or maybe in October. October sounds nice. (Happy Poetry Month, though!)

* * * * *

Very cool that Butler is in the Final Four! For those who don't know, Butler is a teeny little university on the north side of Indianapolis - I go to concerts and poetry readings there with some regularity; they have a very nice visiting writers series - and the Final Four is in Indianapolis this year, so they get to play at home. Definitely the Cinderella story of this year's tournament.

I turn into a mild basketball fan every couple years or so, just during tournament season. This way they don't kick me out of Indiana.

* * * * *

Speaking of Indiana, the Indiana University Writers' Conference (June 6-11) is taking applications. This year's poetry workshops are led by Eileen Myles and Ed Pavlic. I'm not doing the conference this year, but I plan to attend at least some of the evening readings (Eileen Myles' for sure); if you're thinking of attending and have any questions about the conference or about Bloomington, feel free to drop me a note. Bloomington's really a lovely place to spend a week - lots of fantastic restaurants, lots of trees and green space, and the locals are relatively friendly. ;)

* * * * *

81 degrees this afternoon, and lots of brilliant sunshine; forsythia and daffodils are in full bloom, & the flowering trees are starting to leap into life. I love this time of year in this town (though 81 degrees is a bit warmer than ideal). I love my job, but working in a beige-colored, windowless cubicle farm has its drawbacks when the outside world is as lovely as this.

Happy Easter, to those who celebrate! And a somewhat late Happy Passover to those who celebrate that. Spring, new life, resurrection, all that good stuff. Not to mention marshmallow peeps - and this year I found dark chocolate Cadbury mini eggs. Yum!

That right there is cause for celebration. :)

Audiovisual

2010-03-28T23:42:00.002-04:00

Still a little bit floaty and less-than-verbal following last week's Yo-Yo Ma concert (and encounter). So, just a few links to share tonight:

I made a low-tech, "aim the webcam and hope for the best" poem video.

For the past few days I've been enthralled by this nest of barn owls. There were originally five viable eggs (and one dud that got consumed by the mama); today owlet #4 hatched, and the fifth is expected in about three days or so. There is an infrared cam for night vision; during the day you can see how exquisite the female's coloring is, and at night you can watch the male depositing rabbits, gophers, mice, rats, etc. for the family to dismantle and consume. It really is a spectacle of "nature red in tooth & claw" - and I bet anything I end up with at least a couple of owl poems before the owlets fledge.
Free Webcam Chat at Ustream

Finally, just because I've been listening to it over and over on this rainy, chilly early-spring night, here is Eddie Vedder covering one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs:

The Night I Talked To Yo-Yo Ma

2010-03-24T00:12:00.008-04:00

So tonight I went to a wonderful concert by Yo-Yo Ma, with piano accompanist Kathryn Stott. I initially failed to get tickets before it sold out, but I was lucky enough to find someone selling an extra. Turned out to be a pretty good seat, even; 29th row, nearly dead center. Not a seat you'd necessarily sell your mother to get, but in the IU Auditorium even the seats back that far have very good sightlines, and the sound was very good as well (except for the guy next to me who kept scratching his beard and rubbing his face, making all kinds of annoying little noises - ugh).

(Click the image of the program to see it big enough to read.) The opening piece, a Schubert sonata, worked well as an opener - it felt comfortable, a bit familiar, but lovely; a good way to ease into the evening. After it ended they let in a whole herd of latecomers (people! Seriously! How hard is it to get to a concert by 8 pm? Some of them may have had good excuses, but there were a LOT of 'em) and as they were hustled to their seats Yo-Yo Ma chatted with the folks in the front rows, laughing, charming and relaxed. Then the Shostakovich, my favorite of the night - very textural, with some interesting pizzicato and percussive stuff, lots of interesting darknesses and lots of times when I found myself just not breathing because only perfect stillness was possible. Then an Argentinian tango by Piazzolla, which was terrific too, very different in tone from what preceded it - actually all three pieces in the first half felt very different from one another. The tango wasn't like a standard traditional tango; it was more tango-flavored, tango-based. Rich and full and layered.

The second half wasn't quite as spectacular as the first for me, but it was great - some very romantic, lovely music. Over and over again I marveled at Ma's absolute control of his tone, and how he made it look effortless as breath. The accompanist, Kathryn Stott, was very good too; in fact I had a flash of insight about what accompaniment means for a solo musician - it's like the piano provides a textured canvas, a surface to support the soloist as he plays on and above and around and sometimes dipping briefly beneath the surface. Yeah, musicians probably understand how that works pretty instinctively, but until tonight I don't think I'd ever really gotten the difference between playing a duet versus a soloist playing with an accompanist.

Standing ovation at the end, of course, prolonged, until both musicians came back out for a bow and then returned again to perform an encore. The first encore was actually one of my favorite pieces of the night - jazz-inflected (turns out it was written by a Brazilian jazz composer and was called "Cristal" - I'm going to track it down somehow) and obviously a lot of fun to play. The second encore was a piece by Elgar (don't know the name, but I'll probably be able to find it in a review somewhere tomorrow) and it ended the concert on a light note - not light as in insubstantial, but light as in light-hearted. When Ma and Stott came out for one final bow (sans cello) he didn't have a microphone so he couldn't say anything to the audience but he kept touching his chest over his heart, waving, gesturing with great appreciation and happiness, waving with both hands high over his head as he finally left the stage. Afterwards, I looked around at faces on the way out of the auditorium and people were just glowing, smiling, joyful.

It reminded me of leaving a Bruce Springsteen concert, actually. That level of pure joy and satisfaction, feeling that a musician has been generous with their time and energy, that feeling of a connection being made from the stage. The moments of looking into others' faces and having, for just a moment, that shared experience, the acknowledgement that you've shared something remarkable. So remarkable you don't even really have words for it, so you just look at each other and glow, and smile.

I've now seen three performers who reached this level of absolute presence in every moment of their performance, and absolute connection with the audience: Yo-Yo Ma, Bruce Springsteen, and the Dalai Lama. That's a heck of a trinity, there. :)

* * * * *

So I left the auditorium walking on air, feeling like I'd just been a bird for two hours. As I headed for my car (I'd found a great parking spot in the library lot), I noticed a little crowd of people hanging around outside near the backstage door. Maybe about forty people. Hmmmm, I thought, and decided oh what the heck, turned around and went back to the auditorium and joined the crowd. Sometimes I do indulge my inner fangirl. Not so inner, I guess. :) After maybe ten or fifteen minutes - not too terribly long - a woman came out carrying the cello in its case, and an audible sigh went up through the crowd (which was made up of mostly music students, I think). Ahhhhhhhhhh! The Cello! It was both funny and kind of adorable.

A couple of minutes later the backstage doors swung open and Yo-Yo Ma himself came out. The crowd erupted in applause and he smiled, took it in. He came over towards us and said that since there were so many people he wouldn't do autographs and photos, but instead would rather talk with us for about two minutes if anyone had any questions for him. One eager young man asked if he would sign just one autograph; Ma was kind but firm, saying if he did one he'd have to do everyone and there wasn't time for that. (You could tell he's done this more than a few times before.) He walked around, arms outspread, and asked again if anyone had questions.

Bunch of music students gone speechless. :) Probably most of them were trying to come up with a really fantastic question, one that would inspire Ma to drop some great musicianly insights, and make the questioner look really smart too. (I've known a lot of music students in my time. They are, in general, as competitive as students come. Which isn't a slam on them; in their field, they have to be.) So I, with nothing to lose, piped up and asked, "Which was your favorite piece to play tonight?" Several of the music students around me murmured, "oooohhhhh, good question!" Now, you'll almost never get a straight answer to that question out of any musician, but sometimes it leads them to talk about what they like about the music they play. Yo-Yo Ma looked right at me and said that he just tried to stay really in the moment with each piece; that it's such intimate music, and such a big hall, that he tries to make a connection with everyone in the audience so that they feel like they're in his living room. Although, he noted, his living room isn't anywhere near that big. :) He didn't name a favorite, but said that he really loves all of that music - and you could tell that he really does, that after all these years he is still head over heels in love with music.

He asked us what our favorite pieces had been; a lot of people said the tango, several of us said the Shostakovich. I love that he made it a two-way conversation and not so much "rockstar cellist gets interviewed by the fan gang."

He talked about the Franck that he'd played, told us that it had been written as a wedding gift and that the four movements were meant to tell the story of a romantic relationship. He talked about how amazing it would be to get a beautiful sonata as a wedding gift. Again - his absolute love for this music was just so clear, and his eagerness to share some cool bit of knowledge about the music was lovely to see.

Someone asked him which cello he'd played tonight; for the cello geeks, it was the 1733 Montagnana. (I don't even want to begin to imagine how much that beautiful beast is insured for. I can't even imagine that its value can be put into dollars.) And someone asked him what the encores had been, since they weren't printed in the program. (I was glad somebody asked that!) "Any more questions?" Someone asked, "Will you come back?" to which he responded that yes, he would. (Yay! Soon, I hope!) And someone else asked, "When are you going to collaborate with Willie Nelson?" He laughed and said "Hey, he's one of my heroes!" Which just made me grin so big. He said a few other things, asked if most people there were music students, said something about it being a beautiful night. It certainly was.

Then as we applauded him again, he got in the SUV and was driven slowly away, hanging out the window waving to fans as he left. He was clearly still on a post-performance high, and came across as being very happy, very gracious, very appreciative of his fans (who clearly appreciate him in return), and very much in his element. I'm so glad I decided to hang around and do the fangirl thing - it was a nice experience, getting to ask Yo-Yo Ma a question (omg!) and have him look right at me and respond to it (omfg!!!). The man is about as big a star as you get in the classical music world, and he could not have been nicer to that little gang of fans out there.

And the concert? The concert was pure magic.

A beautiful night, indeed.

Intensity, ghosts, Yo-Yo Ma

2010-03-23T11:34:00.002-04:00

When I was a youngun (teens and twenties), I wanted to be dark, mysterious, intense, and kind of dangerous. I wasn't very good at that (especially the mysterious and dangerous parts). Now that I'm in my late (eek) forties, I want to be one of those people who lights up a room when she walks in - people find themselves feeling happier even if they're not quite sure why. I suspect I'm probably about as good at that as I was at mysterious and dangerous, but it's good to have goals, right?

* * * * *

I've been reading Patti Smith's excellent memoir, Just Kids (about her youth, and her artistic coming-of-age, and her long complex relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe) and thinking about my own youth - both because of the artistic coming-of-age theme and because Patti Smith was one of my heroes in my aforementioned teens and twenties (and, though I don't follow her career as closely as I did then, I still admire the heck out of her). When I finish the book I'll probably write up a bit of a review.

I also spent a couple of days during spring break typing up the last of my old high school & college poems (a project I'd started on a few years ago and set aside) - I had typed (you know, on a typewriter - remember those?) copies in looseleaf binders, but hadn't finished typing them all up on computer until last week. What a trip. A lot of them were so, so, so terrible - embarrassingly bad! Someone should have come along and smacked me upside the head every time I used the words "soul," "night," and "reality" in the same poem. It happened more times than I want to count. Heck, someone should've just smacked me when I used "soul" and that would have saved the world some awfulness. Heh. It was interesting to revisit my evolution from about ages 17-20, though. Amusingly enough, the poems I was proudest of at the time were not, as it turns out, the best ones or the ones that furthered my understanding of how to write. Go figure. I suppose that's probably still true...

I've lived in Bloomington for thirty years - ever since I was 18. With the echoes of some of those (awful) old poems in my ears, I'm even more aware of how many ghosts there are for me here. I don't mind living with them, but damn, they get noisy sometimes.

* * * * *

Tonight I get to see Yo-Yo Ma perform! He's doing a solo recital, accompanied by only a pianist - something he apparently doesn't do that often. You can read about the performance, including the program, here: http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/13743.html He's going to play some Shostakovich - that should be phenomenal. Yo-Yo Ma could play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" for an hour and it would be the greatest "Twinkle" ever played, so I am really looking forward to this.

* * * * *

Attention: Do not leave your longings unattended

Promo, Congrats, & Thoughts on Online Privacy

2010-03-17T20:51:00.004-04:00

Shameless self-promotion: I'll be one of the featured readers (the other, Deborah Hutchison, will be performing both poetry and music) at the monthly Hart Rock Poetry Series here in Bloomington: Friday, March 26 at Rachael's Cafe on Third Street, 7 pm. Free admission, but do drop a couple bucks on a beverage or some food to support the cafe and thank them for offering free performance space.

Don't yet know what I'll be reading or, more importantly, what I'll be wearing.

* * * * *

Lots of good news in the poetry world lately! Big congrats to Charles Jensen and Brent Goodman, both of whom were named Lambda Literary Award finalists in gay poetry. Brent's book is terrific; Charlie's is on the very top of my to-read pile and I'm sure it will be as terrific as the rest of his work. Congrats also to poet Michael Montlack, whose anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women who Inspire Them (also on the very top of the pile!) is a finalist in the LGBT anthology category.

Further congrats are in order for Brent Goodman (again!) and D.A. Powell, both named as finalists for the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and to Lee Ann Roripaugh, named by the same organization as a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. More terrific books by terrific poets.

Yep, people I actually know and have met in real life are all over the awards this year. I love it!

Oh, and I almost forgot - Poetry Daily featured a cool poem by Eduardo C. Corral yesterday. Eduardo's blog was one of the first poetry blogs I read, way back when. He'll be in those book award lists one of these days too.

* * * * *

Speaking of real life, the New York Times published a verrrrry interesting article about online privacy. The part that made me really sit up and take notice was when they described a group that was able to accurately guess a percentage of Social Security numbers given only the birthdate and birthplace of someone. Coincidentally enough, the latest "thing" on Facebook is to post the city where you were born in your status field, and a lot of my FB friends have been doing that over the past several days. And that has made me think.

For myself, I tend towards putting quite a bit of information about myself online. My picture and my real name are attached to my Facebook, my Twitter account, and my blog. I'm easily findable via my work address - so much so that I once got fan mail (via USPS) from a guy in prison who'd heard me reading poems on the radio. At the same time, I don't have my street address listed in the phone book (not that anyone uses phone books anymore), and I keep a P.O. box so I can give out a mailing address without disclosing where I live. And certainly not EVERYTHING about my life gets disclosed online - by any means. (Y'all THINK you know me! ;) )

So I don't know. I'm considering unfriending people on Facebook with whom I don't have much if any connection (friends of friends...), and the "what city were you born in" thing just raised red flags for me in particular. But online connections are important to me, personally & professionally, and a certain degree of openness does encourage that kind of connection. I've made some very nice professional connections via Twitter (you wouldn't believe how many librarians are on there, particularly the ones who work with new technologies) and I've made some wonderful poetry-world connections via this very blog (and bought a LOT of books I would never have known about otherwise). I loved meeting up with online friends at AWP last year. And I've very much enjoyed meeting up with online friends at Springsteen shows; there's a very nice little Bruce-fan community online, particularly on Twitter. Some of those connections could have been made without the use of real names, sure. But would they have felt like honest connections?

And I certainly can't do shameless self-promotion without using my actual name. If I want y'all to come to my reading, I have to tell you who I am and where I'm reading!

There's a line, certainly. I tend not to give out my phone number unless I feel a certain degree of comfort. But I can't bring myself to be much more cautious than I already am. The good that's come of being relatively open online has, for me, outweighed any bad.

But I do know people who've posted things online that I've thought were foolish. I once saw a grad student publicly bad-mouthing faculty members in their department via their blog - bad idea. And I've known several people who've posted details of financial difficulties in ways that seemed rather unwise to do in public. (I'm not talking about "damn I can't afford to go to AWP this year" but much more specific things.) And of course, there are lots of people who post details about their health concerns and complaints about their jobs. The Internet is very, very public. Even if you think you're only letting in a few friends - once it's out there, it's out there. That's all a little different from the identity-theft concern, but it's all on a continuum and most of us, even those of us who are very comfortable online, are constantly assessing our own approach and where to draw our own lines.

What do you think? Where do you draw your online-disclosure line?

Springish

2010-03-04T21:32:00.002-05:00

Went to a great reading by Gerald Stern this evening on the IU campus. The room was pretty full, which is a lovely thing - poetry doesn't always get a good audience here, and I'm not sure that readings get promoted adequately beyond the walls of the university, but there were lots of people there, as there should have been. Ross Gay introduced him which once again made me think that Ross Gay is about the best introducer of poets I can think of. Seriously, we've all heard those intros that drone on like a paragraph (or five) out of a dusty anthology, listing award after award and book title after book title, but not giving the audience any sense of what the poet is like. Ross Gay always conveys something about the poet as a person, and always comes across as being really excited about the fact that he's about to hear this reading, and his enthusiasm is always lively & contagious.

Anyway, Stern opened with a brief tribute to Lucille Clifton, of whom he spoke with great admiration (he called her a "national treasure" which sounds about right) and read a short poem of hers before getting out his own work. He read some poems, then some prose, then some more poems, and at times you couldn't really tell (unless you were familiar with the work) where his storytelling stopped and the poem started. Engaging, warm, and with both humor and depth. I was glad to be able to be there.

* * * * *

For a semester that started out with a pretty blank calendar, the upcoming events have been coming up thick and fast - announcements, ticket on-sales. I now have on my calendar:
Gerald Stern - which was tonight
Carrie Newcomer - this weekend
Haiti benefit poetry reading featuring a whole bunch of IU faculty, next week
Yo-Yo Ma, later this month
Martin Sheen lecture, in April
Indigo Girls, also in April
Jeff Beck, in June (super excited about this, as I've recently gotten into him much more than I ever had before, and I've never seen him before)

I'm sure there will be more.

Nice.

* * * * *

This is what I bought with the money Field sent me for a poem:

The journal was handmade by someone named Janette Maher, bound in painted artist's canvas, lovely blank pages. (Etsy is so dangerous!) I liked what Leslie said in a comment on an earlier post, about "tithing to the church of poetry" and using poetry money for something that will feed the poetry. I also decided that I liked the idea of using money that came to me for doing something I love in order to pay someone else for doing something that they love.

The colors remind me of ocean sunsets. Always a pleasant thought.

And I'm slowly edging my way back into poetry after a slight absence. I thought that when poetry came back it would come all in a rush, but it's sort of seeping back slowly. I finally drafted a poem that kinda scares me, which is a good sign. It's always good when your early drafts make you a little bit queasy and uncomfortable. Poetry morning sickness, maybe.

* * * * *

Love, love, love that the sun is already up when I go to work in the morning. Ten days from now when we go back on Daylight Stupid Time it will be dark in the mornings again, but for now, I'm really loving the light. Spring is just around the corner. I can smell it.

Absentee

2010-02-28T21:50:00.002-05:00

A busy week out of town playing caregiver, then two of the busiest work weeks I've had in recent memory; as a result, I'm behind on everything online. Sorry to be such a half-assed blogger lately.

I'd hoped to throw my hat in the ring for an NEA this year, but with the deadline coming up fast, I think that hope is going to become another victim of this hectic month. Oh well. I doubt I had much of a shot at it anyway. Best of luck to all my friends who are applying this time around!

* * * * *

Upcoming poetry events in the Bloomington, IN area:

Gerald Stern, Thursday, March 4, 7:00 pm in the Neal-Marshall Grand Hall on the IU campus

A Benefit Reading for Partners in Health, Haiti Soleil, and the People of Haiti, Tuesday, March 9, 6:30 pm, Rose Firebay, John Waldron Arts Center. Featuring poets Catherine Bowman, Richard Cecil, Debra Kang Dean, Romayne Rubinas Dorsey, Ross Gay, Eugene Gloria, Joseph Heithaus, Maurice Manning, Alyce Miller, Maura Stanton, and Crystal Williams.

* * * * *

Many thanks to blogger Lyle Daggett for his kind review of Breach!

And while I'm in shameless self-promotion mode, my prosepoem "Flyover Country" is up over at BLOOM's website (and will also appear in the print edition to be released at AWP in April). Nice to see this journal making a comeback.

* * * * *

Sending thoughts & prayers out to the people of Chile. If you'd like to make a donation to help them out via cellphone or online, here are some options (via Mashable).

More than flurries

2010-02-05T21:40:00.002-05:00

Here's hoping that any of you who are affected by the current blizzard are in a safe place with plenty of food, good company if you want it, adequate heat & light, and something good to read. It's pretty impressive out there! Here in south-central Indiana, we are just on the far edge of it; we had freezing rain, sleet, regular rain, falling slush, big fat wet snowflakes, and regular snowflakes at diferent times throughout the day. Currently it is snowing like a snowy thing out there and I hear there have been a lot of slide-offs and fender-benders around town.

Indianapolis, a little ways north of me, is expected to get around 8 inches of the stuff overnight. I'm hoping they get the highways cleared quickly, as I need to get up north to deal with a family situation - I'll be spending about a week with my mom while she recuperates from a bit of unexpected surgery.

* * * * *

So, poets & writers, what do you do with the occasional actual check that you receive for a piece of writing? I mean, those of us who don't get paid enough for it to make up a significant percentage of our living wage. Thirty or forty bucks here and there, that kind of thing. It's always nice, even if it doesn't add up to minimum wage when all's said and done; there's something about getting money for a poem that says "this counts for something." (Yes, contributor's copies and nice notes and even acceptance form-letters count for something too, the nice notes perhaps most of all. But, you know, we live in a culture that values cash. So.)

So what do you do with it? Do you:

Sock it away in a special savings account and let it add up?
Purchase a little something special for yourself with it? (I will admit that on the day I got my check from Field, I spotted a handmade journal on Etsy that costs just about the amount of the check... and I'm sorely tempted.)
Turn around and spend it on po-biz stuff, reading fees or postage or supplies? Or sock it away towards a workshop or an AWP trip?
Turn around and spend it on poetry books or journals?
Treat it like any other income and spend it on groceries or rent or whatever?

Just curious what other people do...

The best news

2010-02-03T01:28:00.005-05:00

I've had quite a lot on my plate for the past few days. So this will be brief.

But I just found out some fantastic news! (Thanks to Patty Paine for linking the article on Facebook.) D.A. Powell, brilliant poet and the best teacher I have ever worked with (two summer workshops in Provincetown), has been awarded the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award! (That link goes to general info about the award.)

Here's an article from the L.A. Times announcing it. Big congratulations to him - this prize is well deserved.

And if you haven't seen these yet, he's got two poems online from the February issue of Poetry: "Pupil" and "The Fluffer Talks of Eternity." (Thanks to Eduardo for linking the latter of those two poems on his blog, thus tipping me off to their existence.)

In the midst of a rough week, it's so nice to hear good news.

Songish

2010-01-24T22:50:00.005-05:00

I went to Evil Megachain Coffee Place today, poked at Twitter on my cellphone for a while, then scribbled. Drafted something that feels kinda like song lyrics: it's rhymey and not subtle or complex enough to be a poem, with a song-ish structure. I used to do that all the time, but not so much lately. It's fun.

(Sorry about the evil megachain coffee. It's close to home, usually has a free spot by the windows, and plays decent music. I can usually write there, and that's what counts.)

* * * * *

Apparently there were some football games today. I think I live in the one part of the country that won't generally be cheering for New Orleans. Good thing I don't care enough to take sides.

* * * * *

Ahsahta Press is taking its back catalog digital, via the Boise State University Library's institutional repository, ScholarWorks (the same name IU uses for ours). I suppose there is bound to be a certain amount of controversy over this, but I think it's pretty cool. It's not like they are giving up on print, they're just using the repository to keep books available that otherwise you'd have to order via interlibrary loan, and I like that they've got the library involved - to me that suggests it will be done right. I still love print, carry a book with me at all times despite the fact that any unexpected dull moments can just as easily be filled by poking at Twitter or Facebook or various random websites on my cellphone (and if I'm standing in line at the post office, I'll be honest, it's easier to pull out the phone and hold it in a free hand rather than trying to juggle turning pages in a book while standing there) - but I love the idea of small-press poetry being available in virtual perpetuity. What do y'all think?

* * * * *

The "Hope for Haiti Now" telethon Friday night was very nicely done, with several musicians I'm not usually that crazy about turning in heartfelt performances that won me over. (Justin Timberlake and Mary J. Blige, I'm talkin' to you.) Of course I loved Bruce Springsteen's delicate rendition of "We Shall Overcome," assisted by Seeger Sessions band members Charlie Giordano on accordion, Curt Ramm on trumpet, and Patti Scialfa, Soozie Tyrell, Cindy Mizelle, and Curtis King on vocals. And the new song written especially for the occasion and performed by Jay-Z, Rihanna, Bono, and the Edge - "Stranded (Haiti Mon Amour)" - is actually a pretty good song, unlike a lot of other well-intentioned charity singles ("We Are The World," I'm talkin' to you).

Keep on giving to Haiti if you can. You can donate directly, or you can purchase the audio and/or video of the telethon, or just grab individual songs for a buck apiece, if you're so inclined (link goes to a page that leads to your choice of iTunes or amazon). Here's Bruce to inspire you:

Bruce Springsteen - MTV Shows

Journalish

2010-01-17T23:35:00.002-05:00

A few news tidbits from the literary-journal front:

diode, one of my favorite online journals, has a new issue up. Check out v3n2 here. I've only barely dipped into it so far, but looks like some good stuff!

Bloom, which fell off the face of the earth for about three years, is (knock on wood!) being revived. Look for a new issue at the AWP conference in Denver this April. My prosepoem (yes, prosepoem -- something I hardly ever write!) "Flyover Country" will be in it. I'd about given up, to be honest. But I'm glad things are looking hopeful once again; this was one of my favorite journals until it disappeared.

Last but not least, today I got the speediest acceptance I've ever gotten -- a few minutes short of three hours from the time I hit "send" to the time the acceptance letter showed up in my inbox! I'll have two poems in upcoming issues of the Tipton Poetry Journal: one in the winter 2010 issue this month, and one in the summer issue this coming July. Not only did the acceptance arrive in my inbox that fast, but there were even proofs attached! Sometimes, technology really does make our lives a little easier.

Haiti: Ways to Help

2010-01-14T19:16:00.004-05:00

The images from Haiti are almost impossible to comprehend. So many of the people there had almost nothing to begin with; how on earth can they get through this? I can't imagine what those people are going through right now. Horrible. I don't have words.

A few helpful links, in case you have not yet identified ways you can help:

How to Use Tech to Make a Speedy Donation. Helpful tips from PCWorld.

Charity Navigator offers some suggestions for how to make sure your donations go where you intend them to, and how to select the most effective places to donate.

Doctors Without Borders is where I'm sending the donation that I wish could be so much larger. They do good work, hard work, and as far as I can tell they manage their funds reasonably well. Also I believe they already have a presence in Haiti, which helps.

Oxfam America is another good place to donate.

I will admit that I haven't researched Yéle Haiti as thoroughly as I'd like. It's a smaller organization, and less well-known. But it has been in Haiti for a while, it seems to be reputable, and they make it very easy to give a $5 donation via cellphone simply by texting YELE to 501501. $5 isn't much, but a bunch of tiny donations can add up.

You can also donate $10 to the Red Cross by texting HAITI to 90999. The Red Cross has been criticized for spending too much of its money on administrative costs, and I still hold a bit of a grudge against them for their homophobic policies regarding blood donation. But they know what they're doing when it comes to mobilizing emergency assistance, good people work for them, and they are on the scene.

Someone I know recommends Partners in Health, another grassroots organization that has been in Haiti for a while and has built up relationships there.

And clicking on the logo below will take you to some information provided by the White House.

If you are in a position to help, please do.

Draft dodging

2010-01-13T02:09:00.004-05:00

The temperature hit 32 degrees here after 11 days, I think, of never inching above freezing.

And Monday afternoon (while I was on my dinner break from work before heading back for the evening shift), another dam may have broken. I drafted two poems, or poemish things anyway. I hadn't drafted anything that held my interest since, oh, about September... so it felt like a pretty big relief to come up with something that felt like I might actually want to look at it again at some point.

I'll post it here, but it will disappear in 24 hours or less. (Things blow away when it gets drafty, you know.)

Edit: *poof*

2010-01-13T01:57:00.001-05:00

Test post via SMS.

Bookish

2010-01-06T19:46:00.002-05:00

It's been quite a while since I took a stab at writing a book review. I love talking about books, but for some reason find reviews difficult. In this case, I was writing the review with a very specific audience in mind -- obsessive Springsteen fans -- and that made it easier. So you can go over to Blogness to read my review of Nick Hornby's fun new novel, Juliet, Naked.

And over here, where my audience (inasmuch as I have one...) tends towards the literary sort, I want to post an excerpt from Hornby's book, because he manages to describe a particular frame of mind -- call it long-term writer's block, or something like that, though I don't actually believe in "writer's block" myself -- so vividly. I think some of y'all might recognize it... I know I do. Hopefully, if you do, it's because you used to feel this way and you don't anymore. The protagonist here is Tucker Crowe, a rock singer/songwriter who hasn't written or played any new music in years.

It wasn't as if he was a happy slacker, either. He'd never been able to shrug away the loss of his talent, for want of a better word to describe whatever the hell it was he once had. Sure, he'd got used to the idea that there wouldn't be a new album, or even a new song, anytime soon, but he'd never learned to look on his inability to write as anything other than a temporary state, which meant that he was permanently unsettled, as if he were in an airport lounge waiting for a plane. In the old days, when he flew a lot, he'd never been able to get absorbed in a book until the plane had taken off, so he'd spent the pre-boarding time flicking through magazines and browsing in gift shops, and that's what the last couple of decades had felt like: one long flick through a magazine. If he'd known how long he was going to spend in the airport lounge of his own life, he'd have made different travel arrangements, but instead he'd sat there, sighing and fidgeting and, more often than was ever really acceptable, snapping at his traveling companions.
(from Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby, pg. 159)

2010:2

2010-01-03T21:34:00.002-05:00

S-s-s-so cold this week. It was 1 degree outside when I woke up this morning. One.

* * * * *

Thanks to Leann's post over at Blogness, I just frittered away at least an hour working out my personal Springsteen setlist statistics. I attended 9.4% of the shows on the "Working on a Dream" tour, and I was curious to see which songs I got that were statistically more or less improbable to have gotten. I didn't get the sole performance of anything, but I did get one of two performances for a few, and ... so on. Also, I got 25% of the Girls In Their Summer Clothes this year.

Anne. Put down the spreadsheet and back slooooooowly away.

* * * * *

Here's a little video that I took at the Atlanta Zoo when I was there. The keeper was feeding the meerkats some live crickets, one by one. Apparently this is a great meerkat delicacy.

2010:1

2010-01-02T21:23:00.008-05:00

As I wrap myself in layer upon layer of fleece (it's 9 degrees outside, and my house is drafty) I catch myself doing what everyone seems to do in the last days of one year and the first days of the next. Lots of internal summation, lots of listy thinking. I'll spare y'all. And no, I'm not making resolutions, though I do have goals and hopes for the next few hundred days.

* * * * *

In my last post I mentioned the murder of fiction writer & IU professor Don Belton. It appears that his killer has been caught; the young man's story is that Belton had sexually assaulted him a few days prior, and the alleged killer had gone over to Belton's house to discuss the situation. (Here is the ABC News version.)

Now, I didn't know Don Belton, and I don't know the alleged killer, and so anything I say must be conjecture. I do know what friends of Belton have been saying, and they all say that he is not the sort of person who would have assaulted anyone, and they sound pretty credible to me. And while I believe that self-defense against sexual assault is absolutely justifiable, I don't think that showing up at someone's house several days after they allegedly assaulted you, with a large knife in your belt and a willingness to use it, is really what I have in mind when I think of "self-defense."

I also know that homophobia and racism stink pretty loudly, and there's been a bad aroma around this story for a while. As the "Justice for Don Belton" website points out, "there is a long, established history of suspects invoking a claim of sexual assault and/or a “gay panic” defense to get charges reduced or to win over a jury when the victim was a gay person."

The whole thing makes me fairly queasy, to be honest. As I said I didn't know Don Belton at all, but it sure sounds like the world has lost a talented and much-loved man. And it won't surprise me if homophobia turns out to play a very large role in what happened. It's all very, very sad.

* * * * *

Also sad, the recent suicide of poet Rachel Wetzsteon (who I also did not know). Along with the Christmas-week suicide of Vic Chesnutt, this news spotlights the fact that this time of year can be so very hard for people. If you know someone who's sad or lonely, do the world a favor and reach out to them this month, will you? Sometimes even love doesn't help someone pull through crippling depression -- sometimes there's just too much fear, pain, damage -- but sometimes it's good to try.

This poem of Rachel Wetzsteon's, reprinted in the New York Times, struck me hard:

Sakura Park

The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter
like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on
and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles
a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
But the petals scatter faster,
seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor,
and at least I’ve got by pumping heart
some rules of conduct: refuse to choose
between turning pages and turning heads
though the stubborn dine alone. Get over
“getting over”: dark clouds don’t fade
but drift with ever deeper colors.
Give up on rooted happiness
(the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve
(a poor park but my own) will follow.
There is still a chance the empty gazebo
will draw crowds from the greater world.
And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:
the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.

* * * * *

I continue to contribute to Blogness on the Edge of Town; the last few days have celebrated the "Decade of Bruce" with several of us talking about our favorite album, song, tour, and show of the past ten years (as well as our least favorite song - that one was kind of hard). Other than that, I haven't been writing much lately. Maybe it's just too damn cold. Maybe the days are just too damn short. Or maybe I've just been too damn lazy.

I hope all y'all had a good holiday, whatever "a good holiday" means for you. Mine included a short trip to Atlanta, where I got to see actual giant pandas for the first time in my life. Here's the youngest, Xi Lan:

And some meerkats (they remind me of people I know, though I can't put my finger on who):

And finally this dignified gentleman orangutan. My sister said he looks like Buddha. So he's the Orangubuddhatan:

(More zoo pictures on my Facebook, for those of you who are there.)

Terrible news

2009-12-29T01:07:00.004-05:00

Few details so far, but terrible news today that fiction writer and Indiana U. creative writing faculty member Don Belton was found stabbed to death in his home.

Here's the story from an Indianapolis tv station.

I didn't know him personally, but this kind of crime is not usual here in Bloomington, and to hear that it was a fellow writer...

This following the awful news a few days ago that singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt took his own life. Just very, very sad.

I'll try to check in at more length in the next day or two as I catch up from holiday travels.

Update, early Tuesday morning: The local paper reports that a suspect has been taken into custody.

Solstice stillness

2009-12-20T22:27:00.002-05:00

I can't figure out whether tonight or tomorrow night is the longest night of the year. It comes down to seconds; tonight the sun set at 5:25 and will rise at 8:01, and tomorrow the sun sets at 5:26 and rises at 8:02 Tuesday morning. The actual moment of Winter Solstice happens around midday tomorrow. Tonight feels like Solstice Night, though, with darkness and stillness and just a bit of snow.

And fleecy blankets, and a cat on my feet. That'll enforce a little stillness.

* * * * *

I continue to trace the roots of this stillness. I feel like I haven't got anything to say, but when has that ever stopped me? I think, perhaps, I need to go back to the details. To just being awake, and noticing deeply.

I like Twitter. It's good when you don't have much to say.

And so, I'm going to use the avenue that has felt most hospitable recently. Beginning tomorrow, I'm going to try to notice three things each day. I don't need to force those things into poems; I just need to pay attention to them. Full attention, even if only for the length of time it takes to compose a 140-character description. And I'm going to tweet about them.

We'll see how that goes and whether it wakes me up again.

I bought a new phone a couple of weeks ago, and it has an adorable little slide-out keyboard and a bright shiny touch screen and it has Twitter and Facebook and Gmail and Outlook and a camera and maps and navigation and even a lolcat application.

So if I notice things, I don't even have to be near my computer to record them, to put a few words out into the ether. I just have to grab my little phone, my little portable brain.

Three things a day. I can do that, right?

* * * * *

In other sort of writing-related news, I've signed on as one of the contributors to Blogness on the Edge of Town, which is, yes, a Bruce Springsteen-related blog. Mostly news and tidbits and suchlike. Should be fun, and a nice way to stay connected to a community that's become important to me.

Lucky for me, as soon as I took this on, Bruce did a lovely and newsworthy thing (in case you haven't heard): he posted a statement on his official website in support of marriage equality. You have to scroll down past the cute picture of him at the White House for the Kennedy Center Honors a couple weeks ago, but the statement is still there, and it still gives me the warm fuzzies to read it. He doesn't post political statements very often, so the fact that he felt this one was important enough to comment on makes me really happy.

Why should I (or anyone) care what some wealthy heterosexual rockstar thinks about this, or any, political issue? That's a fair question. And it's an age-old one, really - can someone's art be compassionate, authentic, truthful if the artist is a weasel? Not going to even try to answer that one tonight. I'll just say that it did my little heart good to see someone whose work I have respected for over thirty years demonstrate, not for the first time, that his heart is in the right place. And considering how much of my money has ended up in his pocket, I feel like I have more than an artistic stake in this, heh.

I will say that his statement has not met with 100% support in his own fan community. There are people who listen to his music who disagree pretty strongly with a lot of his politics. So I guess he took a certain risk in posting that statement, though at this point I think most people who'd stop buying his music or going to his shows because of something like that have already stopped long ago.

I'm rambling. It just made me really happy, the night that statement got posted and I stumbled across it. Fangirl that I am, I'll leave it at that.

* * * * *

Watching the news, where they're talking to stranded travelers in the airport. I hope those of you who got blizzarded on this week are digging out without too much drama, and if anyone's traveling, I hope you get where you're going okay.

Hope it all clears up before Thursday, when I am getting on a plane myself. Till then we just have a little snow, and enough cold to make me bundle up trying to stay warm (except when I suddenly have to try and cool off - you middle-aged women know what I mean there) but not so cold as to be dangerous. It's not so bad. Though I confess I wouldn't mind being snowed in for a few days, so long as I had heat and people food and cat food and the Internet and a few books to read. And maybe somebody with a younger, stronger back than mine to shovel me out eventually!

May you have a happy holiday, if you celebrate one of those Decemberish ones. Peace and joy and goodwill and light, and all that.

Yes, light. Here's to its return.

AWOL

2009-11-30T17:17:00.002-05:00

There’s a difference between where I am now, on the one hand, and productive silence (where you’re not writing but your silence is moving you towards new work) on the other. Where I am right now feels necessary and unavoidable, but not necessarily like it’s moving me towards any kind of writing.

On the other hand, who knows?

* * * * *

Shedding skin is an itchy procedure. Snakes get real cranky when they’re halfway there.

* * * * *

So after all the drama about “OMG is this the end,” it looks like Springsteen doesn’t feel like the E Street Band is anywhere near finished. Nice interview with him in Billboard this week, conducted just prior to the show I saw in Nashville. What amazes me is that the guy’s had basically the same job since he was a teenager and he still clearly loves his work. If you could bottle that kind of undying passion & enthusiasm and sell it…

Getting paid squillions of dollars for doing what you love probably doesn’t hurt the enthusiasm, of course.

* * * * *

Music just makes words seem inadequate. With just a few notes, a chord or two, you can convey a feeling as complicated as “triumphant but wistful, without regret” so clearly that everyone listening feels it too. You can convey feelings and images so complicated that there aren’t actual words for them. Add the dimension of performance, and musicians have a whole language that, as a writer, I barely have access to.

The same could be said for visual art as well, of course – there are things you can say with a certain intensity of blue, a certain slant of light – but I don’t have the vocabulary or the framework for that. Music, at least, I can hear with comprehension – even if I can’t produce it myself worth a darn.

I foresee guitar lessons in my future. I took lessons for a few years in high school, but it’s been a long time since I was anywhere near serious about playing – long enough that I think what I want to do is start from the beginning. I know it’s not the same as having an actual teacher, but I think I’m going to invest in lessons via Nils Lofgren’s online guitar school. He’s one of the most amazing guitarists I know, and with any luck the lessons will give me just enough to keep me interested and focused and give me a reason to sit down & practice every so often. I don’t think I stand a chance of ever getting good enough to get paid for playing, but I would like to regain enough chops to do a little songwriting. I used to write songs now & then and always enjoyed it, but was hampered by the inability to create music that could provide a strong enough framework to support complex lyrics, so my song lyrics were always kind of dumb and simple compared to the poems I was writing during the same time period. I’d like to revisit that effort. But to do so will require the acquisition of musical craft.

So that’s going to be my Solstice gift to myself, I think. And yes, I’m going to start at the beginning with the beginner lessons, make myself go from the ground up. Because the hard part of having been serious about playing & then letting it go for years is that my expectations are all out of whack – I pick up the guitar and my hands jus t don’t do what they’re supposed to, & I find myself trying to play things that I just don’t have the technique to do anymore. And because I’ve never stopped listening to music my ear is still good, so I can hear how much I frankly suck. If I start at the beginning and get somewhat disciplined about it, I think I can get my chops back. Might take a couple years.

And maybe, once I start playing again, the creative, articulate part of my brain will wake up and I’ll find my way back to poetry again. I sure hope so.

* * * * *

Still have an essay or two brewing, I think. Watch this space.

No, I haven't...

2009-11-20T13:32:00.004-05:00

... fallen off the Internet. At least not quite.

Just back from a quick trip to Nashville, put about 580 miles on the ol' odometer (well, the rental car's odometer; my beater wasn't quite up to the trip) in two days and saw a terrific concert. I need to go back to Nashville when I can spend more time. Very cool city.

I've been a very, very lucky girl this year. Wednesday night was my 8th Bruce Springsteen concert of the 2009 "Working on a Dream" tour. He and the band play in Baltimore tonight, then Buffalo NY on Sunday night (no, I won't be there for either one, sadly) and then ... that's it for the foreseeable future. The E Street Band is officially on hiatus for at least a year or two. I think most of the band members have every intention of coming back together and touring again, but life takes its hard turns sometimes and there aren't any guarantees. I've certainly enjoyed every moment of the ride I've had; it's been worth every penny, every mile, every aching muscle.

April: Denver
May: St. Paul and Chicago
August: Mansfield, MA x2
September: Chicago again
October: St. Louis
November: Nashville

Add that to the 4 shows I caught on the 2008 "Magic" tour (Indianapolis, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City) and it's actually been a two-year journey.

I have an essay-ish thing brewing about it all. Maybe this weekend I'll get it written. Gratitude is an important part of it, so it's an appropriate Thanksgiving-week thing...

Nearing Winter

2009-11-01T20:59:00.005-05:00

Still not writing, and still experiencing poetry as a foreign language. I miss it, I do. I almost got it back as I was driving back from St. Louis on Monday afternoon - something about the particular combination of alertness and meditativeness that highway driving engenders has often brought me to bits of poetry. But alas, the words just flitted around the edge of my brain, laughed at me, and left.

What can you do?

* * * * *

Thanks for the kind words about my poem's appearance in Field - it's nice to share good news with people who appreciate it for what it is. Of course, the world keeps its balance, and I've had a few rejections this week too. C'est la vie. Book manuscript #1 is still out to one place, which I'm expecting to hear from just any day now; I'm holding off on sending it elsewhere at this point, until I take the time to give it a long hard look & see if it wants a big revision. (I imagine sitting it down, giving it a stern look, and asking it "do you want a big revision?" like a bad mom asking her child if he wants a spanking. Sigh.)

* * * * *

A week ago tonight I was in St. Louis for a Springsteen show. I met up with some friends before the show, and three of us went to get our wristbands together (when you have general admission tickets, you get there a bit early and get numbered wristbands; they draw a random number and the person with that number gets to go in first - so if you want to be together in the GA area you have to show up at the same time for your wristbands). We ended up doing pretty well in the lottery, about 150 back from the number that was drawn, so we ended up about 2 or 3 deep in front of the stage, pretty much right in front of Nils Lofgren's mic stand. (The picture here was taken a couple hours before the show, right after we got into the arena. We actually ended up a little closer to the stage than we are here.) I'd never been up close on that side of the stage before, so as the show progressed it was fun to have eye contact & interaction with the guys on that side, particularly Clarence Clemons & the aforementioned Nils Lofgren - who gave me quite a few great smiles throughout the show. It's no hyperbole to say that Nils is one of the greatest living rock guitarists, and it was very cool to be able to watch him play from so close. From all accounts he's also a very sweet guy, and I have to say his energy onstage is very light, almost constantly in motion but very peaceful at the same time - a lot of fun to watch.

The show itself - what do I say about it that hasn't been said? It wasn't an epic, awesome, one-for-the-ages show like the St. Louis show last year. But not every show can be that, by definition. People who weren't there say that the setlist was boring, and it's true that there weren't a lot of surprises or rarities (though the fan who brought the gorgeous sign requesting that Bruce play piano got us a wonderful, uncommon solo piano performance of "For You" which showed that Bruce's voice, even this late in a long tour, is holding up remarkably well). But everything that was played, including the Born to Run album straight through, was played with a lot of heart, a lot of presence, a lot of commitment. "Backstreets" was mesmerizing and heartbreaking, sounding more and more like all the band's history and love has been poured into it; when Bruce sang "we swore we'd live forever" I'm pretty sure Clarence Clemons was looking at the little "altar" he has set up onstage, which houses pictures of several departed friends including the late E Street organ/accordion player, Danny Federici (Clarence writes about the altar in his new book, Big Man). So that was a touching moment. And after delivering the final, intense, wordless wails at the end of "Jungleland," as the spotlight slipped off of him, Bruce bent nearly double at the microphone, breathing heavily, seemingly exhausted by the force of throwing every cell in his body into that vocal. Theatrics? Sure. But also, the physical commitment he puts into his performance is unmistakable.

(Incidentally, the Bruce-as-blur photo here was taken with my crappy little cellphone camera. I didn't bother taking many, because they hardly ever come out worth anything, but this one struck me as kinda cool.)

I find that, as an alleged writer, I am envious of musicians for the physicality of their art. I get a little taste of what that's like when I do poetry readings, which I experience as a very physical thing (it matters what boots you wear, how you stand, how you breathe when you're reading, even if you're just standing there at a podium in front of twenty people). And it's a lovely feeling, a means of settling into your own body as home. But it's not just the performance aspect that I envy, though there is that. It's the way you make music, if you're doing it right, with your whole body. You can kinda do that with poetry, but you can also forget to do it, very easily. If you hold your breath while you're writing a poem, you still get a poem (maybe not a great one, but). If you hold your breath while you're singing, you get ... silence, y'know? You don't have the option of remaining disconnected from your physical self. And I envy that.

I also envy the communal aspect of making music. Being in a band. You can collaborate in poetry, but it's not the same thing. Watching the E Street Band from so close, it's wonderful to see how they communicate. A nod of the head, a wave of a hand, can change the whole course of a song. (And when Bruce decided to do the "Detroit Medley," which starts with "Devil with a Blue Dress On," he told the guys closest to him & they ran to spread the word to the rest of the band - and I noticed Nils making little devil horns on his own head with his fingers instead of verbally telling everybody what the song was, a game of rock & roll charades. I got a kick out of that.)

In my next life, I'm gonna get over myself about 20 years earlier, so that when I'm in high school I won't be too shy to talk to other people who love music, and can start a band. Yeah. That's what.

Most of my friends at the St. Louis show were headed to Kansas City for the show the next night. Not me - I wasn't able to swing both shows, so I left STL on Monday morning. Before leaving town I took a tiny detour to Left Bank Books. I was instantly greeted at the door by a six month old tabby kitten named Olive, who followed me around the store and pounced on anything that even thought about moving and was generally crazy as a loon, which is what a six month old kitten is supposed to be. I picked up a few books as well as a magnet that says "If you don't grow up by middle age, you don't have to" (quote attributed to James Gurney). Seemed very appropriate for the moment.

When I got home I got a call from one of my friends at the Kansas City show. They'd done the lottery for the general admission folks & had everyone in line, when all of a sudden they announced the show was cancelled due to a death in Bruce's family. Needless to say everyone there was fairly stunned. This is not a band that cancels shows if they can possibly help it. Turns out it was Bruce's cousin who died, who had worked as the assistant tour manager for the band for the past ten years. He was in his mid-thirties, so one assumes the death was entirely unexpected and certainly very sad. Just goes to show you - you never know when a show will be your last. Or as the great Warren Zevon once said, not long before his own death: "Enjoy every sandwich."

I have one E Street show remaining - Nashville, in less than three weeks. After that it's going to be a long winter.

Fuel in Field

2009-10-24T18:46:00.003-04:00

One more snippet from the Department of Shameless Self-Promotion (or is that the Shameless Department of Self-Promotion?): My poem "The Fuel" appears in the brand-new issue of FIELD, hot off the press -- I got my contributor's copies today. Check out the table of contents; I'm tickled to be in some pretty darn good company!

* * * * *

Went to a very good concert the other night: Alejandro Escovedo and Los Lonely Boys. Escovedo is a terrific songwriter and impossible to pigeonhole; he's got punk, rock, alt-country, and various other influences in his sound. His set was intense and heartfelt, accompanied by a second guitarist and a terrific violinist (who grew up, as it turns out, here in Bloomington). Los Lonely Boys, doing an all-acoustic set, sounded about like I expected them to -- great harmonies, smokin' guitar work. My friend and I commented to one another that it was so obvious the band members are brothers; the way they interacted onstage, you can just imagine what it would be like to sit at the family dinner table with them (probably kicking each other under the table and flinging mashed potatoes) or to go on a road trip with them (eek).

The opening band, Hacienda, was relatively unmemorable -- four guys with two guitars, percussion, Hammond organ, and vocals. Sort of a Tex-Mex thing, I guess. I would rather have had their 30-40 minutes divided between Alejandro Escovedo and Los Lonely Boys; Escovedo's set in particular felt way too short. I really need to see him do a headlining set someday.

* * * * *

Off to St. Louis tomorrow for what promises to be yet another fantastic Springsteen/E Street Band show. Yeah, I do expect it to be fantastic; would I drive 228 miles each way if I didn't? Here's a great clip from the last Springsteen show ever at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a few nights ago. This is their cover of "Higher & Higher" and it kind of explains why I go so far to see these guys. How can you not want to be in the same room as this much joy? Check out the huge grin on Bruce's face. This is a cheesy thing to say, I guess, but in this video it's like he is a man possessed by radiance. I've heard from more than one person who was at this show & it sounds like this song was a truly transcendent moment.

Words fail me

2009-10-19T16:45:00.001-04:00

After almost a year and a half of pretty intense productivity, it doesn’t surprise me that I’m not writing at all lately. I don’t really believe in “writer’s block” but at the same time it seems pretty normal to have periods when the writing just doesn’t happen. That’s happened before and it will happen again, and especially given that I’m in the very last stages of completing a big project, doesn’t freak me out at all.

What does freak me out, somewhat, is the fact that I don’t seem to be able to read poetry right now. I get to a page with a poem on it and my eyes just blip right over it, almost as if it’s in a language I don’t read. It is the damnedest thing, and I don’t remember it ever happening before. Maybe for a day or a few days, but not as an ongoing thing like this.

Maybe this is my reflexive way of ensuring that I don’t go back to my new manuscript until I’ve gotten some serious distance from it and can be somewhat objective. Maybe I’m spending too much time on Facebook and Twitter and just don’t have the attention span (or the depth of focus) necessary for poetry. Maybe zombies ate my brain. I have no clue.

Has this ever happened to anyone else?

* * * * *

Also, there’s one thing that is annoying me right now about aforementioned Facebook and Twitter, and that is how the real-time nature of it gives me all kinds of reasons for envy (a feeling I do not like having). It is easy to become painfully aware of other people who have time in the middle of the day to write a poem, go for a walk, curl up with a book, send out manuscripts, take a nap – while I’m sitting in my cubicle or working with students at the reference desk. I like my job. I like it quite a bit. But man, I don’t really need to be reminded of how nice it would be to have more time for writing, and of how much better a writer I think I’d be if I had more time to give to it.

Assuming, of course, I would actually write if I had time. Which, right now, who knows.

* * * * *

On a happier note, this weekend I am off to St. Louis for one more Springsteen/E Street Band show. This will be my next to last show of this tour, which is to say, my next to last E Street Band show for the foreseeable future. After November the band is going on hiatus for at least a year and a half, possibly/probably longer, and there's no guarantee of another tour. At the very least, it seems unlikely that, two or three years down the road, these guys will be doing the three-hour-plus, full-throttle rock shows they've been doing. Not impossible, but ... unlikely.

I’m certainly going to savor every moment of what's left, every bit of thunder.

Still shameless

2009-10-01T22:39:00.002-04:00

The new issue of Coal Hill Review is up, including poems by Chana Bloch, Maureen Seaton & Neil de la Flor, yours truly, and others. My contribution is "Blue Afternoon: The Middle Distance" which is about being a middle-aged, bifocals-wearing person. Hey, you take your material where you can get it, eh?

Shameless self-promotion

2009-09-29T20:57:00.002-04:00

My poem "Swallowed" (originally published in 2007) is this week's "Poem of the Week" over at the Valparaiso Poetry Review blog. This poem was always a little different for me, maybe even an odd duck, though reading back through it now I see a slight similarity to the tone of my current project, which also features fictional characters. Though that similarity may be all in my head...

* * * * *

Five Women Poets, one of the groups I'm a member of, has its annual reading on Saturday evening, October 10. If you're near the Bloomington IN area, you are most cordially invited: 7 pm at Rachael's Café on Third St. The group consists of Patricia C. Coleman, Deborah Pender Hutchison, Antonia Matthew, Helen May, Carol Paiva, Anya Peterson Royce, and myself (yes, that's seven members of Five Women Poets; we're poets, not mathematicians!) and Bonnie Maurer will be our special guest poet. Drop me a note if you need directions or further details. I have no idea what I'm reading (or, more importantly, what I'm wearing) but it should be fun.

Fragmented

2009-09-27T19:35:00.001-04:00

There are some things I don't know how to do without talking about them.

There are some things I do that I don't know how to talk about.

And there are other things I do that I know neither how to do nor how to talk about.

* * * * *

Rolling Stone: You've talked about the E Street Band being so close now, but you quit the band back in the Eighties, and Bruce later broke the group up for 10 years. How do those two decisions look to you now?

Little Steven Van Zandt: There is no doubt that those two things were mistakes. I tell everybody, if you've got a band that works, it's a miracle. It's never going to be perfect, but if it works on some level, hold on to it with both hands and don't ever let it go. Bands should never break up. I had this conversation with Bruce. One of the reasons why we got back together is I really feel a moral obligation. You ask people to fall in love with you. To need you. To want you. To buy your records and come see you. You have an emotional contract with people. To break up is to violate that contract. That relationship has now been restored, and we are feeling it more than ever.

[from the October 1, 2009 issue]

* * * * *

Something about the trajectory of morning rain, a runner all in gray on the sidewalk.

* * * * *

Things get stuck inside your head sometimes in a way that makes you sad but not sorry.

* * * * *

In the end it all comes down to love & thunder
and the things you are willing to lose:
love & thunder, love & thunder, love & thunder.

Past the autumnal equinox

2009-09-25T00:42:00.005-04:00

I miss poetry. Sometimes you have to take separate vacations even when you love each other, though. I just hope poetry and I can reconcile in time for us to whip some stuff into shape before some upcoming deadlines.

Speaking of which, I picked up a rejection slip at my PO box on my way out of town to go to my mom's and then to Chicago, last week. It had, as they say, "ink" -- the editor had particularly liked one section of a longish poem, which is one of my favorite poems from the new/current/ongoing project. So that was nice. Maybe I'm on the right track.

* * * * *

Last night I saw Lucinda Williams perform in a smallish club here in town. The place was packed and enthusiastic. I was about four deep in front of the stage, a nice spot. I hadn't seen her before, though I've been a fan of her music ever since Sweet Old World came out years ago; in honor of the 30th anniversary of the release of her first album, she's doing a chronological setlist on this tour, playing several songs from each album starting with the first and going through her current release. It was really cool to hear how her music has evolved over the years, from the rootsy acoustic folk/blues she started with to the rock-your-face-off sound she has now. Her backing band, Buick 6, opened with a very good instrumental set which definitely set the tone for the rock-your-face-off portion of the evening.

Sometimes, what you really need is just some LOUD. And loud felt really good to me last night.

This show was just a few days after Lucinda married her manager onstage at her Minneapolis show (a ceremony which included her father, Miller Williams, reading a poem) and she seemed to be in a fantastic mood. She also seemed to enjoy the high energy of the crowd and the rock vibe of the club (maybe she just needed some loud, too). If you're fond of good songwriting and bands with a lot of electric guitar, check out this tour if it comes near you. Good stuff.

* * * * *

Dave over at Wings for Wheels has a particularly nice appreciation of Bruce Springsteen in honor of his 60th birthday (Bruce's, not Dave's); if you liked my post about the show in Chicago, his seems to come from a similar impulse. Yesterday's "Happy Brucemas" brought a plethora of articles, posts, tributes, lists, and other appreciations -- far too many to list here; if you really haven't had enough Bruce-related reading in your life lately, check out the links over at the Backstreets news page (scroll down just a bit for the birthday tributes) and the big honkin' linkfest at Blogness on the Edge of Town.

* * * * *

The trees are starting to turn -- I notice it a little more every day. Summer's definitely over. I always feel like I write more, and better, during transitional seasons. Sure hope that turns out to be the case this time around. I miss poetry.

The screen door slams...

2009-09-23T01:22:00.005-04:00

I realize now that by waiting a couple days to post this, I risk its being lost in the flood of “happy 60th birthday to Bruce” blog posts and tweets and web pages and discussion board posts and lord only knows what all. Because, yes, Mr. Springsteen is sixty years old today. (And still jumping up on pianos and racing around onstage strapped into an electric guitar, natch.)

But this post, while it’s about Sunday night’s Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band concert in Chicago, is not really about Bruce Springsteen.

It’s about something bigger. Yeah, as big a megastar as Springsteen is (and he’s a pretty big megastar), there’s something bigger. And that’s the music.

So, the big deal about the Chicago show was that Bruce and the band were going to perform the Born to Run album in its entirety, beginning to end, at this show. (Along with a couple hours of other songs, of course.) He’d done this once before, at a benefit show in Red Bank NJ, at which he also performed Darkness on the Edge of Town straight through. There have been various rumors about why he decided to do it again: request from a VIP or a friend, filming for a DVD, a last hurrah towards the end of what could end up being the last E Street Band tour. (Nobody connected with the band has said anything about it being the last tour, but they have announced a hiatus of at least a year and a half, and after the loss of organ & accordion player Danny Federici almost a year and a half ago & given various health issues for other band members, I think they are all keenly aware that there are no guarantees.)

I didn’t manage to get a general admission ticket for this show, which is my usual preference. Sometimes you end up standing behind a couple of tall broad guys and when you’re 5 foot 1 like me you end up standing on your toes craning your neck wondering if the band is really up there somewhere, and sometimes you end up smack in front looking a guitarist in the eye and sharing a grin. I’ve had both experiences, and for the chance of the latter, I’ll put up with the former sometimes. But because I had a seat and didn’t have to worry about standing in line or holding my place, I was able to nab the opportunity to help pass out flyers before the show, promoting the forthcoming memoir by iconic sax player Clarence Clemons. (No, I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it will be pretty damn entertaining.) I didn’t get to meet Clarence or anything like that, but I got to meet his manager & her assistant, and I got a t-shirt, and I got to feel like I was helping out a little bit. And quite a few people were visibly excited at the prospect of the book, so that was cool.

After passing out a few hundred flyers, it was almost time for the show to start, so I found my seat. It was in the fifth row, not very high up off the floor but pretty far back, and I resigned myself to not feeling the connection with the band that I often feel when I’m up close (a highly addictive sensation, that).

Eventually the lights went down and the crowd made that tremendous WHOOSH like a jet airliner taking off (I love that moment so much) and under cover of darkness the band took the stage. I’d heard that they intended to kick off the show with the Born to Run sequence, so it was a bit startling when the crackling, bluesy guitar riff of “Seeds” filled the arena, Nils Lofgren whirling and dancing in the spotlight. Startling… but wonderful. Turns out that’s just an awesome song to kick off the show with. After a few moments Bruce stepped up and the crowd cheered louder, and after the first few vocal lines Max Weinberg’s drum kicks in with an almighty THUMP and we’re off and running.

The first handful of songs were reeled off at a breakneck pace, the band barely stopping for a breath or to acknowledge the thunderous applause between songs. As always the occasional crescendo of shrieks reminded me so much of a roller coaster, the biggest one of all – and we shriek at these concerts for the same reason we do on roller coasters, for the sheer speed and exhilaration and joyous risk of it all, and the wind in our ears. Finally it was time for the album, which Bruce introduced briefly by explaining that when they started recording it they’d put out two albums that had tanked and this was basically their last chance. Everything was riding on this album, for him. Everything. And you could kind of tell that he felt like a lot was riding on it again tonight.

And those familiar, beloved opening chords of “Thunder Road” filled the arena, and before the first verse was over the entire audience was singing along… as always, it felt like home. Or like church.

The songs followed one on another, without any introductions or chatting in between. Not a lot of “hamming it up for the audience” either. Just… the music. The work. The songs unfolded just as they did when I first listened to that album, back in high school, back when we always listened to albums beginning to end. Movements of a symphony. Parts of a greater whole. Even “Born to Run” itself, the ultimate anthem, was rescued from its role as a bit of a “victory lap” song; the house lights only halfway up instead of fully lit, the song not wrapping up the main set or blazing out as an encore, even the biggest song of all became just one part of the larger work. Oh yes, we all sang along like we always do, we pumped our fists and waved our hands in the air and screamed. But it was different… somehow, this song I’d heard so many times live and hundreds, maybe thousands, of times on vinyl & magnetic tape & shiny silver disk & invisible bytes – this song that I know as well as I know the sound of my own blood rushing in my ears – somehow, this song regained a little bit of mystery. Amazing.

I won’t talk about every single song (though there’s not a weak song on the album and there wasn’t a weak moment in the performance of them Sunday night), but “Backstreets” deserves mention. Talk about a song that’s accrued layers of history and meaning. When I first heard it, it was just a romantic song about losing someone. But over the years it’s become so much more. In Indianapolis last year, Danny Federici rejoined the band for a few songs after having been gone for a few months while undergoing treatment for melanoma. He was a little weak, but clearly radiant with joy at being back on stage; as it turned out, that was his last public performance. I don’t know if he or the rest of the band suspected that would turn out to be the case, but I do know that “Backstreets” hit me so hard that night. “We swore we’d live forever,” Bruce wailed, “on the backstreets we’d take it together.” A few weeks later, the day after Danny’s funeral, the band played in Tampa. I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard the show described, and I’ve heard the bootleg; they opened with “Backstreets,” a single spotlight illuminating Danny’s vacant spot on stage, Roy Bittan’s piano suffused with loneliness, a hard emptiness where the organ was supposed to fill up the song, Bruce’s voice cracking with palpable grief. I’ve never heard the song quite the same since. Anyway, Sunday night’s performance of it in Chicago was exquisite, and somehow managed to roll together all the layers and all the years and all the different ways I’ve heard the song; Bruce added a small vocal bridge of “All the way to the end… just you and me… all the way to the end…” and some high, wordless moans the likes of which I’ve never heard. Stunning. Just stunning.

But the highlight of the album mini-set was, without question, “Meeting Across the River” into “Jungleland.” “Meeting,” rarely played in concert, featured Curt Ramm recreating the lonely, searching trumpet solo from the album and the wonderful Richard Davis on upright bass. It’s an atmospheric, jazz-inflected, melancholy song unlike any other in the Springsteen catalog, and thinking of it in the context of the history & significance of the album the desperation in Bruce’s voice on the recording became not just a great singer inhabiting a character, but a sign of how badly he wanted this album to be … exactly what it turned out to be. “We gotta stay cool tonight, Eddie, ‘cause man, we got ourselves out on that line. And if we blow this one, they ain’t gonna be looking for just me this time.” Like the guy in the song, Bruce knew this was his last chance. And the way he sang it Sunday, you’d think he still felt that way sometimes.

And then Soozie Tyrell's violin introduced “Jungleland” and I may not have breathed for the entire ten minutes or so of that song. I’ve always liked the song, and it’s always great to get it in concert, but this was probably the best I’ve ever heard it. Everyone in the band was completely focused, completely immersed in the music. Garry Tallent's bass playing, always exquisite, was especially solid. Little Steven Van Zandt's guitar solo was absolutely on fire. Everyone seemed completely and utterly present.

Let me tell you, there are some big personalities in the E Street Band: Bruce, Little Steven, Clarence “Big Man” Clemons, the Mighty Max Weinberg. But Sunday night, while they performed Born to Run, the personalities took a complete back seat to the music. I’ve never seen them so … in service to the music. And that sense peaked with “Jungleland.” During Clarence’s sax solo, always a breathtaking highlight when he nails it, Bruce climbed up on the piano – not to take the spotlight, but to raise his fist in the air with the beat of the solo, conducting the band, conducting the music. And I mean “conducting” in the sense that a lightning rod conducts. So it was appropriate for him to get up on that piano and become the highest point on the stage, channeling the fierce energy of the music from … wherever it comes from … and spreading it across the stage & out into the darkness of that packed arena.

The entire album was performed flawlessly, with devotion and focus and passion. Really, I thought it would be cool to see all the songs in order, but it turned into something a lot bigger than that. It was pretty fucking amazing.

The rest of the show was almost a letdown after that, I have to admit. It got a lot looser right away, and it was a fun show, well-played, lots of energy – but it was like the first bite of any food after the most exquisite chocolate mousse you’ve ever put your tongue to: just not quite the same level of incredibleness. Although I will say that “Badlands,” which closed out the main set, took on a life and a ferocious joy that I haven’t felt from it in years. Might have been the best “Badlands” I’ve seen since 1978, and I’ve seen a lot of “Badlands.” House lights up, crowd singing along at the top of its lungs, just an absolute celebration: “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive!”

I’ve said that with the E Street Band, I don’t always get the show I want, but I nearly always get the show I need. And that was so true on Sunday. I’m a very spoiled girl; I’ve been close enough to the stage to get eye contact with band members on several occasions, and that’s always special. But Sunday wasn’t about the band members, wasn’t about charisma and personality and stardom. It was about the music, plain and simple, and sitting (well, standing – who could stay seated at a show like this??) where I was, that far from the stage, I let go of wanting “connection” and just focused on the music – and that’s what I needed.

Love and thunder, baby… love and thunder.

On the way home, I didn’t listen to bootlegs as I’ve mostly been doing lately. I listened to studio albums: Born to Run (twice through), Darkness on the Edge of Town, The River. I found myself thinking about all the years and all the miles those albums have accompanied me through. When Darkness came out I had just started playing guitar. I was what, 16 years old. I honestly thought I might try to make it as a musician, though I knew it was the longest of long shots. Why did I veer from that course? I don’t know. Partly because I thought my greater talents lay elsewhere (though I’m not sure where, and if I do indeed have greater talents, I wonder if I’ve made sufficient use of them to justify walking away from something I loved as much as I loved being serious about playing that guitar). Partly because I was realistic. Partly because my courage flat-out failed me.

My dad, see, was a musician when I was a little kid, a bass player. He put himself through grad school by playing. We didn’t have tons of money, but there was always music in the house. When I was ten years old he got a job teaching college, and we moved away from his musical community. He pretty much stopped playing. I’ve always wondered whether the grief he must have felt about walking away from the musician’s life contributed to the health problems that eventually killed him. And it’s funny, isn’t it, that I myself turned away from the possibility of trying to live that life – though I never got as far as getting good enough to make money. I am my father’s daughter, I guess. And driving home from Chicago the other day I thought about all that, and I listened to Springsteen’s song “Independence Day” which is about a son leaving home and making some kind of peace with a painful father/son relationship:
So say goodbye it's Independence Day
Papa now I know the things you wanted that you could not say
But won't you just say goodbye it's Independence Day
I swear I never meant to take those things away

And that last line just hit me so hard. Because on some level my dad walked away from music in order to do something more stable, something with a regular paycheck, something that allowed him to feel like he was a good husband, a good father, a good provider. And in some small way I guess I’ve always felt a little guilty, a little responsible. And if the grief he must have felt over the choice he made was part of what killed him, then in some small way maybe I’m responsible for that.

But don’t we all kill our parents, somehow, on some level? Metaphorically speaking, of course. I think there’s a Shakespeare play or three about that one.

Anyway, I always justify the money I spend running around to these concerts by saying “it’s cheaper than therapy” – so there you go. Figuring out just what it is I need to learn to forgive myself for? That probably would have taken me thousands of dollars worth of therapy right there. “You’ve got to learn to live with what you can’t rise above,” as Bruce sang in “Tunnel of Love.”

Anyway, I started writing poetry back then, when I was 15 and listening to “Born to Run” – as well as lots of other music. It was music that ignited that impulse in me. So maybe what I owe myself, and what I owe to that larger thing that is the music, is just to recommit myself to my writing. To give it all I’ve got. It may not be my last chance – hell, it’s poetry, there’s not much riding on it in the first place. But I need to give it that level of commitment.

Tonight I’ll be on that hill with everything I’ve got…
I’ll be there on time and I’ll pay the cost
For wanting things that can only be found
In the darkness on the edge of town.

Till then, tramps like us…

-AH September 22-23, 2009

I wanna be where the bands are

2009-09-15T23:42:00.007-04:00

Work has been pretty nuts lately. On Monday, the only times not blocked-out on my calendar were 8:00-9:00, 3:00-3:30, and 4:30-5:00. Today wasn't much calmer. Yikes!

Every day at lunchtime I try to escape from the stress and listen to a little music, which helps tremendously. It's pretty funny to think that for several years there I didn't even listen to music every day... it's like I forgot, for a while, how much music can feed me. If I ever forget that again, somebody smack me, ok?

photo from backstreets.com

Speaking of which, just a few more days until I run off to join the E Street Circus yet again. Just one night this time, in Chicago; and it's going to be a slightly different show than any I've seen before, as they are going to perform the entire "Born to Run" album (along with other stuff of course).

I was initially pretty bummed because I did not manage to snag a general admission (floor) ticket for this one, and my reserved seat is not (by my standards) all that great -- it's way at the far end of the arena. Oh, I'm such a spoiled girl. But then an opportunity arose which I would not have been able to take advantage of if I'd been in GA, because I would've been standing in line before the show and not available: I will be helping to pass out promotional flyers advertising E Street sax player Clarence Clemons' forthcoming book, Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales. I know it's just a couple hours of passing out flyers, but I'm pretty thrilled to be able to help out even in this small way, to be a tiny little part of things. I was already excited about the book (I heard from someone who got a galley and he said it's pretty entertaining), so it will be fun to try and share a little of my excitement with a bunch of happy concert-goers.

And hey, what could possibly be more "up my alley" than promoting a book at a Springsteen show? Jeez, throw a cat or two in there and you pretty much have my entire life covered! :)

So, uh... not much poetry lately, I'm afraid. I do have a reading coming up with one of my writing groups -- October 10 is the annual reading by Five Women Poets, at Rachael's Cafe here in Bloomington IN. Hopefully I can drag myself back into "poetry brain" between now and then...

These boots were made for blogging

2009-09-09T22:43:00.003-04:00

I bought these from Zappos. They arrived on my front porch literally 18 hours after I clicked the purchase button, and they are ridiculously comfortable. I'm not a girly-girl about too many things, but I do get excited about new shoes! Seriously, I didn't know cowgirl boots were this comfortable, or I would've gotten some years ago. They are actually a little darker than they appear in this picture, but that's ok. They make 'em in black and bright red, too; I'd probably buy both of those if I were rich and stuff. (As it is, this is the most I have ever spent on a pair of shoes, and I won't be getting more anytime soon! Definitely a splurge, but I expect to be wearing 'em for years.)

I walked around in them for a good couple hours over the weekend at the Fourth Street Festival, a fabulous little arts & crafts fair here in town; and today I wore them to work to give them the all-day test. Put them on at 7:45 and didn't take them off until around 6 pm, and I kind of didn't want to take them off at all, they were that comfortable. The next and final test will be whether I can dance in them for three hours at a concert; that test takes place in Chicago on September 20.

Definitely a girly-girl when it comes to new shoes. They have to be comfortable shoes, though.

* * * * *

Delighted to see that my favorite rockstar has up and gotten himself named as one of the Kennedy Center honorees for this year! Bruce Springsteen will be recognized along with Robert DeNiro, Mel Brooks, Dave Brubeck, and opera singer Grace Bumbry. Kind of odd that there's only one woman on the list, but the pairing of Springsteen and DeNiro is pretty fortuitous, I think. Should be fun to watch the telecast when it airs in late December.

* * * * *

Have found it difficult to maintain "poetry brain" lately. I need to spend some uninterrupted time this weekend reading poetry; that should help it to kick back in. I kinda wish I'd had a three-day weekend to relax and read and write, but classes were in session on Labor Day and so I worked (in fact I was on the reference desk from 6-9 that evening). That's ok because I can take the holiday time later on, but a little stretch of unscheduled time would sure do wonders for my writing right now. Oh well. I'm trying to stay on top of the submissions, too, and fire off a packet or two every week just to keep stuff out there. I don't know if you've noticed, but you don't get published much if you don't send stuff out. :)

Getting the US Open wrapped up will help too. I get so distracted when there's tennis on.

* * * * *

Speaking of splurges and distractions, how about those Beatles remasters? Between the great piece on All Things Considered and the comprehensive review on Popdose, I'm sold. Just trying to decide whether I want to try and save up to buy the whole box set (I like the neatness and the self-containedness of box sets) or whether I want to run out and buy Abbey Road (my favorite) right away and acquire the rest one at a time over the next few months. I was a little too young to really "get" the Beatles before they broke up (I was born in '61), but I was a huge huge Beatles fan in my teens and early twenties. Pretty amazing to think of all the ways in which they've been influential, both culturally and musically. And commercially, for that matter.

* * * * *

Ellen on Idol? Really? Weird.

quick'n'drafty

2009-09-07T23:57:00.004-04:00

If you are even a casual Springsteen fan, and you have access to the NFL Network, do not miss the hour-long "Working on a Dream: Super Bowl Journal" documentary they are airing about eleventy-nine times over the next few days. Some hilarious moments, like Bruce sitting in the trailer supposedly putting together the setlist for his halftime show: "Hmmm.... then I'll read the Communist Manifesto, into 'Badlands'...." And a very nice glimpse into what goes through the mind of a truly consummate performer, how he prepares himself, what it's like to be on that stage. "On stage your exhilaration is in direct proportion to the void you're dancing over" -- which reminds me, in a slant-rhyme sort of way, of an old Jeanette Winterson line (from Written on the Body): "What you risk reveals what you value."

I don't believe I have ever intentionally watched the NFL Network before, but this was great stuff.

* * * * *

A drafty drafty draft:

[gone. poof.]

In season

2009-08-31T20:36:00.002-04:00

I have only two batches of poems currently out, and the reading period for lots of journals begins September 1st (which, though I swear the calendar has got to be pulling my leg, is tomorrow). So... you know what that means: time for this girl to get her act together and get some poems sent out. Though I probably won't take the time to do it until this coming weekend.

I always overthink the submission process -- reading over guidelines, analyzing sample poems from various journals trying to decide if they're anything like any of mine, fiddling with the index cards I still use to keep track of where my poems are and where they've been, making and remaking submission packets. So I thought I'd ask you guys how you go about it.

How much do you pay attention to your submission packets as a group -- as a mini-manuscript, as it were? Do you try to send out poems that play off of one another, poems that exhibit a wide stylistic range, a grab bag to give the editors different things to choose from, poems that belong together? What about if you're working on a thematic manuscript or group of poems -- do you send poems from that group out together, and if so, do you point out that fact in your cover letter?
Do you pay attention to the order of your poems? I always think I'm putting the strongest poem first in my packets, but looking over my submissions spreadsheet, it looks like the last poem gets picked just about as often as the first. Which probably says as much about the fact that I am not a good judge of my own poems as anything.
Do you like to send out a bunch of packets all at once & then sit back for a while, or do you maybe send out one or two at a time & then a little while later send out one or two more?
When they come back, do you send out the same group of poems all together to the next journal, or do you go back and make new selections?
Finally, I'm always open to recommendations for new places to submit! I like online journals and print journals, both -- I love the feeling of holding a print journal in my hands & seeing my work literally "in print" but I also love being able to send out a URL because it's so much easier to share the poems that way. There are lots of good journals in both formats and I try to keep a bit of a balance in my submissions pattern. So if you've got a journal you really like, or especially if you think of one that my work might be a good fit for, I am all (virtual) ears.

That long held breath before beginning

2009-08-30T20:31:00.005-04:00

The evening feels tinged with sadness in an unexpected way, as the day's clouds clear away just in time for the last of the light. I'm acutely aware of everything I didn't get done this weekend. I've been low-energy, knocked low by a cold that I probably caught either in the pit at the Springsteen show or else on the plane there or back. (In which case it was worth it...)

Classes at the university where I work start tomorrow. It's always hectic, with thousands of students pouring onto campus: long lines at restaurants, parking lots filled to bursting, Target not someplace you want to even think about setting foot in for a while. But at the same time I always love it. Thousands of people, every one of them feeling like they get to have a bit of a new beginning. It's pretty sweet in a hectic, crowded, obnoxious way.

This month marks thirty years since I first moved to Bloomington as a starry-eyed eighteen-year-old freshman. I fell in love with the place right away, sensed that I could become a lot of different people here. I took classes in which people took me seriously as a thinker, as a writer; I learned to take myself seriously as well (maybe a bit too seriously). Funny to think that I have been here so long, stayed here to ride out so many changes. Funny to think of what's stayed the same.

* * * * *

A little pile of rejections over this past week. Clearing the decks, I suppose, for a big submission push in September. At least, if I know what's good for me.

Also got proofs for my poem that's forthcoming in the fall issue of Field. Nice to be reminded of the little successes in the midst of aforementioned rejection pile.

* * * * *

A draftish thing from yesterday, which will (as per usual) disappear after a day or so:

[poof]

Night 2 & onward: Don't you lose heart

2009-08-26T22:47:00.003-04:00

I don't have it in me to write an extensive review of the second Springsteen/E Street show in Mansfield. Not because it wasn't any good -- it was fan-freakin-tastic. Not because I don't want to boast about how close I got to the stage (one person between me & the stage, more or less in front of Steve Van Zandt, a great vantage point from which to appreciate all the little interactions that go on among the band members). But in many ways, that second show struck me in a non-verbal, purely physical place. Maybe because it was about a million degrees and a kazillion percent humidity in the pit and I sweated more that night than I think I ever have since back in the days of karate practice in a non-air-conditioned dojo. Maybe because it's hard for me to accept how much being at a show like that is home for me, and the brutal fact of it is that I don't get to have that experience more than a few times a year, and sometimes when I'm not actively nestled in the heart of E Street Nation I feel a little bit exiled.

I console myself with music. Right now I'm listening to the bootleg of that second night, when they took a request for a song called "Janey Don't You Lose Heart" -- an older song that I have only recently fallen quite in love with, and had not at all expected to hear performed. In a way it's a slighter song, not one of the big classics, not one of the epics. It isn't "Thunder Road" or "The Rising" or even "Prove It All Night." But it's a sweet song, and it was played with great affection.

That's part of what I love about how the band is performing these days -- the sheer fondness for the songs which is so clearly evident. I've seen & read a couple of interviews with Bruce where he talks about how it's like you're in a car with all the people you have been over the years, the crazy 20-year-old, the 30-year-old who just wants to crash the car into a wall, and so on, and you just hope the guy who's driving is one of the reasonable ones. (Completely paraphrasing there; he said it much better than that.) These days, it's clearly the pushing-sixty Bruce who's driving, taking great care, using all his years of experience to navigate the hairpin curves. But what I love about the guy and his art is that he has never kicked any of those other people out of the car. He is still solidly in touch with the youthful wildness that inspired "Born to Run," the rage that inspired songs like "Murder Incorporated," the sorrow of "Point Blank" or "The River," the complicated emotions of "Independence Day." When he plays those songs it's not with irony or nostalgia; it's with a real inhabiting of the original emotion that inspired the song, but also with a sense of affection and compassion for the version of himself that wrote the song. If that makes any sense at all.

And watching that, watching what happens on that stage as he re-inhabits those songs with compassion & affection but without losing the hard-earned 60-year-old self that can drive that car safely home -- I begin to understand something that I haven't quite put words to, yet. As Springsteen sings in "Tunnel of Love," "you've got to learn to live with what you can't rise above" -- and there's something in all this music about learning to live with yourself, with your own sorrows, your own regrets, and yes, your own sheer cussed goofiness.

So much more that I'd like to write about these shows, at some point -- in particular about watching the band members interact with one another, how a raised eyebrow or a tilt of the head can speak volumes among people who've been working & playing together for well over thirty years now, the sheer physicality of who they are with one another. And some of the music itself, too, of course: the second night saw Nils Lofgren taking a "Prove It All Night" solo that verged on the physically impossible (hitting a whole run of scorching harmonics with the guitar up over your head? Come on, Nils, that's just SICK!) and an absolutely spine-tingling "The River," among many other musical highlights.

But I'll leave you with two videos. There are a lot more out there, but these are a couple of my favorites. First up, "Thunder Road" from the second night. Because this is one of my very favorite songs, and because I think the guy who shot this video was about ten feet to my left -- yeah, I was THAT close to the stage.

And finally, just because this is so goofy and so fun, this is what happens when a fan submits a song request via blow-up doll. While Bruce & the E Street Band can make my knees weak and make me weep with deadly serious songs like "Point Blank," they also know how to play in every sense of the word. And you gotta love Stevie plopping that wig on top of Bruce's head while he's playing and singing and can't do a thing about it. :)

Concert review: a steamy night in Mansfield, Mass.

2009-08-23T12:37:00.000-04:00

So uh... I went to this concert last night.

:D :D :D :D :D

I had a reserved seat last night (I'm in general admission for tonight's show). I usually prefer GA, but my seat was absolutely terrific, I chatted with some very nice people in the seats around me before the show, I could see almost everyone on stage almost the whole time, and I'm pretty sure I got at least one actual moment of eye contact with Steve Van Zandt (don't dare go so far as to speculate that he recognized me from Chicago, but he did look right at me when the lights were up and nodded happily... who knows if he was actually looking at ME but I'll take it).

Where to begin? The show kicked off with "Jackson Cage," a not-often-played song from The River that I was actually thinking about the other day & wondering if I would ever hear, and went from that right into "She's the One" which was just the most perfect segue. Other highlights were "Point Blank," a song I was totally obsessed with when The River first came out (I used to sit in my dorm room and listen to it over & over, picking up the needle at the end of the song & dropping it back at the beginning of the track), and on which Garry Tallent's bass playing was nothing short of stunning and exquisite; "Burning Love" (yep, the Elvis song); a particularly heartfelt and almost wrenching "Backstreets"; "Trapped" (a Jimmy Cliff song, which Bruce has been covering on occasion for some years now and it is always fantastic); a rip-roaring "Detroit Medley" launched by a request in the form of an actual blow-up doll wearing devil horns and a blue dress (for "Devil with a Blue Dress," part of the medley) -- Bruce and Stevie had some fun with the doll before the song, and while they were playing, Stevie took the red-haired wig from the doll and plopped it on top of Bruce's head -- too too silly, and ridiculous fun; "Born in the USA," which doesn't get played much anymore; and a raucous, barn-burnin' "Twist & Shout" to close. They played about 2 hours and 50 minutes, I think.

Not the best E Street show I've ever seen, but a damn fine one, probably in my top five. As hot and sweaty as it was (before "Rosalita" Bruce hollered, instead of his usual "is there anybody alive out there" -- "is it hot enough for ya??" several times), Bruce had that "I do not want to leave this stage!" look on his face. I've seen it a couple times before. He is always whole-heartedly committed to his performance, but some nights he is just so totally fucking ON it's unbelievable. He seemed thoroughly happy, completely present, sometimes somber and serious, sometimes silly and playful, as the song and the moment required.

Oh, and Jay Weinberg (son of Max, the usual drummer) came out & drummed for the encore, which was fun as hell. He's not the master that his father is, but then, he has about 40 years less experience! For his age he is pretty terrific, and a HELL of a lot of fun to watch, very passionate and animated and clearly loves doing it.

As does everyone on that stage, really. Just such radiant joy shining on every face up there. I know it is their job to make it look like they are having a good time -- they are professional entertainers, after all -- but you can not fake that much joy. You just, you just can't. At this point in all of our lives, we know that every show is a blessing and a gift. Everyone in the band is keenly aware of that, especially after Danny Federici's death last year. They don't take it for granted, and neither do a lot of us in the audience. There is no other band on the planet today that speaks so eloquently about survival, and appreciating what you've got, and the kind of joy you can find only when you've made it through some hard times. And that's why I fucking love those guys and that music so, so much... and that's why I fly halfway across the country just to see them again. Because what they're telling me these days is something I want to remember. It's something I'll hold on to for the rest of my life. And for that, I thank them.

And tonight, I get to do it again. I am so very lucky. So very, very lucky.

Counting the obsessions, one by one

2009-08-18T22:22:00.003-04:00

I've been thinking about the concept of obsession and what it has to do with poetry (and lo & behold, Diane Lockward had a nice post the other day about one of her own long-term obsessions).

I go through phases with my obsessions. On the one hand, sometimes it looks like I get really really serious about things and then I lose interest in them. As a kid and early teen I was obsessed with horses, like many girls that age, and had a bunch of model horses -- all of whom had names, life stories, in some cases genealogy. I was a serious, dedicated practitioner of karate for a number of years in my late teens through mid-twenties or so; I ate, breathed, and slept the Kyokushin Way. Since 2000 or so I've been fascinated by whales, and have gone great distances (Maui!) for the primary purpose of seeing them. And currently, of course, I'm chasing Bruce Springsteen around the country just as much as my limited finances will allow.

So what of this? Am I just a flake who can't stick with anything for more than a decade or so? I don't think so. I think I mine my obsessions, and now that I've got 30 years of serious writing under my belt, I'm learning how to do so more productively. My first book ms. (the one that's currently visiting various editors' desks and trying to make big "me! pick me!" puppydog eyes) has a ton (whale joke haha) of whale poems in it, as well as poems strongly influenced by what I learned from whale-watching -- connections between humans & animals, gorgeous distances, thinking globally, etc. And of course my second ms., the one I'm so (whether justifiably or not, time will tell) in love with right now, is heavily influenced by Springsteen & my running around chasing those perfect concert moments. It's actually perfect that his tour will most likely be ending after November and the band will most likely take a hiatus for a little while at that point (not that he's said anything of the sort for certain, but cobbling together various hints & comments, that is what looks most likely); once I finish with this manuscript, I think it's possible that I won't be quite as compelled to go quite so far out of my way to see the E Streeters. There's been something I've needed from the experience of being obsessed, and I've just about got most of what I needed, I think.

But as I read through the new manuscript, I am beginning to realize something. It's not the whales or the rockstars that are my obsession, really. There's a deeper vein, things I've been writing about for thirty (gah!) years now. Light, the various qualities of light; darkness, how it can be both threat & comfort. Distances. Regret. Breath. Music in general.

But hey, what poet isn't obsessed with most of those? So, hmm.

I do write a hell of a lot about light, though. Some people remember the smell of places they've been in; I remember the quality of light. Provincetown, the unbelievable clarity. The shifting cloud-sun-cloud-sun afternoon light through the windows of my early childhood. Stagelight, how the technicians use a spotlight to carve the performers out of the darkness.

Anyway.

* * * * *

I really love this poem from today's Poetry Daily -- like, "suck in your breath and hold it for a minute while your heart breaks a little" love it:

Ocean

Goodbye again. Say there is a little song in my head

and because of it I can't sleep or change my mind
about the future. Now the song runs all the way down

to the beach where I sit as if the sky

were my room now. No one, not even you,
can hear me singing. Not even me.

As if the music rose from the mouth of the ocean.

No mouth. Like rain before it reaches us.
Like wind twirling dresses on the clothesline.

Who has no one has the history of the ocean.

Lord, give me two more days. So that
the last moments may be with someone.

--Jason Shinder

Countdown to the circus

2009-08-17T22:59:00.002-04:00

I'm back online, thankfully - and working to catch up on everything.

* * * * *

Friday morning at butt o'clock I get on a plane for Boston. Saturday night and Sunday night I will be in the good company of my beloved E Street Band and a few thousand of their friends. It's the farthest I have traveled just for a concert (or two), and maybe it's not entirely rational to be doing this. But it feels right, these little pilgrimages to join the circus for a night or two. (I'm headed for Chicago in September, St. Louis in October, and Nashville in November -- and maybe, just maybe, Cleveland as well.)

And as this tour moves towards its inevitable end, so does work on my new manuscript. Tonight I had a flash of insight that I think will help me tie everything together a little bit more: a little clearer understanding of what I'm really writing about, behind all the spotlights and guitars and the trappings of character & plot, and why I'm really writing it. I feel like I'm on the verge of articulating something that will be the key, something that will bring this thing to closure.

I've been working on this puppy since the spring of last year, and part of me doesn't want it to be finished. It's been one of my favorite writing experiences ever. I console myself with the thought that I'll probably have to spend another year revising the thing before it's ready for prime time. :)

* * * * *

Cross your fingers, if you would, that Hurricane Bill takes a hard right turn and gives the East Coast a miss. There are a few powerful figures I would love to meet this coming weekend, but Bill ain't one of 'em.

* * * * *

By the way, if anyone has any great ideas for possible reading opportunities in Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, or Cleveland, drop me an email and I'll give you the dates that I will be in those cities. I'd happily extend my Bruce-related visit by a day for the chance to do a reading. I should have more copies of my chapbook available by then (if you're waiting on one now, I hope to have 'em and get 'em sent out before I hit the road this week) and although I doubt I could sell enough to finance an extra night of hotel room, I'd love the opportunity to read and get a few copies out there.

* * * * *

None baby but the brave, no one baby but the brave...

Land of disconnection

2009-08-07T20:20:00.002-04:00

My DSL at home has seemingly crapped out entirely, and now I can't even get a usable dialup connection. Given my work schedule which is packed with meetings and reference desk shifts, it looks like Wednesday morning is the first time a technician can come out and take a look at things. I'll try to do some more troubleshooting between now and then -- goodness knows I should be able to figure it out if it is anything at all on my end; I'm a good troubleshooter usually, and it's something I do routinely as part of my job so I have that particular brand of "methodical" down.

So, because I am an addict, I'm actually spending money to sit at [horrible corporate coffee place] and drink a [actually-not-half-bad corporate smoothie] and use their wi-fi. (The smoothie is the part that costs money.) I'll get through what I can before the annoyance of being in a room with other human beings, listening to music I did not select (Einstein here seems to have forgotten her earbuds), gets to me and I go running back to my cave -- er, my own house. I am so far behind on email, Facebook comments, etc. it's not even funny.

* * * * *

So, Book Manuscript #2 has gone out to two of its first readers. The first one got back to me with very helpful comments the other day, and the second one gave me a call today to check in after a first read-through. So far, I'm getting pretty positive reactions, which makes me breathe a big sigh of relief. I'm getting some good suggestions too, and feeling pretty good about the next phase of this work. I envision a couple more small revision passes through the ms. and maybe one major-ish shuffle; I'd still like to get it down to a little shorter length than its current page count, but I feel like I'm on the right track.

I am a total process junkie. (As befits the stereotype of us feminists, actually. Heh.) I'm fascinated by my own writing, revision, & manuscripting processes. I'm fascinated by yours. I'm fascinated by anyone's creative process, really, if they write or talk about it with any kind of insight. (Yet another reason why I like Bruce Springsteen; in some of his interviews he's revealed a tendency towards a bit of process-junkie-ness himself, and he seems to be quite thoughtful about his own creative process -- maybe not something you'd expect from a rockstar, but there you go.)

Being aware of my own process sometimes helps me write things I wouldn't otherwise have known to catch. It's like I can see the poem coming from a greater distance, and because I catch it early instead of waiting until it's clobbering me upside the head, I'm able to be looser with it, catch language that is somehow closer to the untranslatable whatever that poetry is. It's more unmediated, somehow. Both more and less controlled. (If that makes any sense at all. Maybe what I mean is ... more aware, and less controlled.) And that affords me possibilities I would not otherwise have.

That's for individual poems. This business of a manuscript? A book? That's still new to me, even though this is the second one I've put together. (Third one, if you count the totally sucky one I put together and sent to like one or two places sometime around 1992.) The process this time around feels completely different than it did with the Firstborn, but I don't know how much of that is because I learned a few things the first time around & how much is because this project is a completely different beast from that first one. But I can't help thinking that what I've learned about the process of writing probably applies, on some level, to any writing -- whether a poem, or a book, or whatever.

I'm fascinated by process. There are few things I enjoy more than sitting down with a writer (or a musician, or any kind of creative artist really) and sharing notes. Everything from "so do you listen to music while you work?" to "how do you know when something is finished?" to "how do you let yourself be influenced without crossing the line into being derivative?" Not that those conversations generally get that interview-question-ish, but it's the sort of ground I love to cover.

I'm planning (tentatively) a trip to Cleveland this fall, in part to spend some time at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. They have a big-ass Springsteen exhibit up right now, and it includes a lot of his notebooks. Yes, notebooks, as in the notebooks in which he worked on the first drafts of some of his songs. Since I doubt I'll ever get a chance to buy the guy a corporate smoothie (actually mister wealthy rockstar should really buy, now shouldn't he?) and pick his brain about his writing process, I'm hoping to gain some insight from peering at his scribblings, his doodles and deletia.

I'm sure that for some people, examining your own creative process is about as interesting as examining your own boogers. Some people are more intuitive and instinctive than I am, I think. I do overanalyze sometimes. But that's kind of like telling really bad jokes: it's OK, so long as you know you're doing it.

* * * * *

Bla, bla, bla.

* * * * *

Tomorrow I need to spend some time coming up with a thirty-minute set for my reading at the Writers' Center in Indy on Sunday. 7:00 pm, northside of Indianapolis - stop by if you're in the area! Drop me an email if you want driving directions. There will be an open mic following my set. I promise to stick around for the open mic - I hate it when featured readers bail on the open mic, though I understand why people do (open mics can be so... how to put this kindly... excruciating, sometimes). I'll be reading poems from Breach, but I'll be reading new work from both book manuscripts, too. I'm looking forward to it. Should be fun.

Sunday draft

2009-08-02T16:56:00.005-04:00

Jumping on while I have connectivity for a minute. This is a drafty draft from earlier this afternoon -- it will go "poof" in a day or so.

*poof*

Flaky DSL and Evening with the Muse

2009-07-29T23:17:00.004-04:00

Still wrestling with a DSL connection that intermittently flakes out without warning. Bear with me, please, as I try to catch up as best I can. I love computers, but I hate them, you know?

* * * * *
Meanwhile, a reading announcement: I'll be the featured reader at the Writers' Center of Indiana (in Indianapolis) in their "Evening with the Muse" series, coming up on Sunday, August 9 at 7 pm. The reading is free, and will be followed by an open mic and light refreshments. If you're in the neighborhood, please do stop by!

Technical difficulties

2009-07-23T22:14:00.003-04:00

We interrupt your regularly scheduled Land Mammal for this bulletin: My DSL is misbehaving and I can't make it work. I'm doing my bestest to drag the laptop out to Starbucks/Soma/Panera/the library and use wi-fi every so often, but for the next few days I'm afraid responses to email, facebook, blog comments, etc. will be slow at best.

I hope to be back up to speed soon -- got a technician scheduled to come out on Tuesday.

I hate computers. Phbt.

I live by the river

2009-07-20T22:51:00.003-04:00

Just because I've been watching this over & over this evening and sharing it everywhere else, I'll share it with y'all too. Here is Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band about 3 weeks ago, with their opening number at the Hard Rock Calling festival in London. Yes, they're covering the Clash, and doing an extremely creditable job of it too. If this doesn't put a big grin on your face, you have no rock & roll in your soul. LOVE. THIS. Love this so much.

On self-confidence and suckage

2009-07-19T23:13:00.002-04:00

So I spent a good chunk of time this weekend poking and prodding at my new manuscript. Just about every time I read through it I pull out a poem or two; slowly but surely it's coming down to fighting weight. On the last pass through it this afternoon I pulled out 3 pages and put in one new one. I made slight revisions to a whole bunch of poems, and finally rewrote a last line that had been driving me crazy (thank you, Carl Phillips, for teaching me how to see into the architecture of a poem & hear the underlying rhyme and meter even when there isn't any).

And then I emailed the first two (of three) people who've agreed to read the thing, and asked them if they're ready for it. Which is a big step, in a way. These poems are all pretty new, by inclusion-in-manuscript standards; the very oldest of them date back to April of last year. I usually sit on poems for several months at the very least before sending them out anywhere, and most of my two- to three-year-old poems still feel brand spanking new to me. So although I've done a lot of intensive work on this manuscript & on the poems in it, I don't feel like I have that much perspective on it yet. In other words... I can't guarantee with 100% certainty that the thing doesn't basically suck.

Now, I don't think it probably sucks. I am certain that it's imperfect; I'm open to the possibility that it may be deeply flawed. The thing I know for certain is: it's too new for me to have perspective on it. I'm a little in love with the thing, and like any shiny new love, I'm probably blind to both its true virtue and its true failings.

So what I posted on Facebook was, "Yikes! What if it completely sucks?" Which is really shorthand for all of the above. And of course, a couple of friends immediately rushed in to assure me that it couldn't suck, etc. And my reaction to this reassurance was interesting to me. (Why, yes, I'm a Gemini; I react to something with one part of my brain even as I'm observing my own reaction with another. What, doesn't everybody do that?) Because what I thought was, hey, it might suck -- and if it does, so what? I'll just write something else. And I like thinking that way. I like it a lot.

See, early on in my writing life, I had to fight the "OMG what if I write something and it sucks?" paralysis, just like everyone does. And like most people do, I fought it by consciously bolstering my own confidence. I told myself that no, what I was writing didn't suck, that I had the right to write what I was writing, that my voice deserved to be heard. And that was pretty difficult at first. That took me some years, actually, but I finally got there, finally got around to believing that maybe I do have some degree of talent as a writer, that maybe some of my poems are not too shabby. Getting published helped. Getting positive feedback from peers and from teachers helped. Mostly, just doing a whole lot of reading and a whole lot of writing helped.

But now, you know what? Sometimes I write a draft and it's a dead end, it isn't going anywhere, it basically ... sucks. That shouldn't shock anybody. There isn't a poet alive, and probably no dead ones either, who can claim that every word that falls out of them is priceless or whatever. There may be some who believe that of themselves, but they're wrong. *grin* And if I write something and it sucks? So what. I've developed enough confidence over the years to believe that I can leave the sucky draft behind and write something else. Hell, even Roger Federer makes unforced errors in every match, and he just shrugs them off and moves on to the next point. If he let every error get to him, he'd probably just fall apart and never win another match.

Natalie Goldberg (I think -- or was it Anne Lamott?) has written about embracing your own willingness to write "shitty first drafts," and William Stafford wrote about "lowering your standards" as the key to writing prolifically. And you know what? They're right. Not only that, but if you fail, sometimes it's because you are taking risks that ultimately move your work forward. That doesn't mean the failed drafts are any good; they probably suck. Suckage doesn't mean they aren't useful to your process. Write them without censoring yourself; realize they suck; learn from them; move on. That's one way to get better at this writing stuff. It's probably not the only way, but it's the way that works for me.

It seems to me there are two ways to defeat the internal censor -- you know, the one that stops you from writing. One is to hear that little voice that says "this sucks" and to out-shout it with a confident and hearty "Does not! Does not! Does not!" The other is to hear the "this sucks" voice and to quietly say back, "So?" and keep on writing. I think maybe it takes some time and experience to develop this second method, to find the confidence to allow the "this sucks" voice its truth and yet at the same time to disempower it. Maybe this is advanced poetry jiu-jitsu, or something. Or maybe it's just advanced denial. Whatever; it works for me, right now.

And maybe this manuscript does suck. It probably doesn't, but if it does, so what? I'll either fix it, or write another. I've learned a lot from writing it. I've worked hard, and I've had fun. And no matter what, there will be more poems where these came from. To me, that's what it means to be self-confident as a writer: to be okay with failing now and then, knowing that there's more. Because there's always more.

And once you know that, the possibilities are endless.

Low high; hi!

2009-07-18T21:54:00.005-04:00

It's been cool and cloudy today and, honestly, really lovely. I don't think the temperature even hit 70 degrees all day. In Indianapolis, the record "low high temperature" was set over 100 years ago at 75, and they probably broke that record today. I know climate change is probably to blame for this, but I confess I've been enjoying it immensely.

I've returned safe & sound from the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago (attendance, including registrants and exhibitors, totaled 28,941 - this conference could eat AWP for lunch and still be hungry!). While an unfortunate amount of my time was eaten up on the shuttle buses between my hotel and McCormick Place, I attended some interesting sessions, met a few people, saw some cool stuff in the exhibits, and picked up some great freebies - notably the free frothy coffee drinks from ProQuest (I hit that line three or four times) and a free copy of Rachel Zucker's forthcoming book, Museum of Accidents (out from Wave in, I think, October). I got to hear Zucker read, which was great fun, and chatted with her for a minute at her book-signing; I also got to hear Jane Hirshfield (but didn't go to her book-signing because it conflicted with Rachel Zucker's reading - I already have Hirshfield's newest book anyway) and Sherman Alexie (didn't go to his signing either, as the line was about 980300198 people long - librarians love them some Sherman Alexie! - but did snag a copy of the bound excerpt from his forthcoming book that they were handing out). Other very popular book-signers included Judy Blume (who I gawked at for a minute) and Neil Gaiman.

Besides that, and besides getting together with Sara for a bite and some drinks & good conversation on Friday evening (yay!), the conference pretty much took me entirely out of poetry-brain for a full week. I'd taken my new manuscript with me, knowing I'd have the option of at least one or two quiet evenings in my hotel room and thinking I'd take advantage of the marauding-cat-free space to spread out pages all over the floor & juggle them a bit, but I found I didn't even have the -- what, ability? willingness? mental sharpness? -- to read poems, much less write them or fiddle with them.

It was a relatively interesting conference, & gave me some good food for thought especially regarding some of the technology trends that are going to affect how libraries serve their users (I really, really want to play with Google Wave now), & helped me get a little clearer understanding of how what I do on a day-to-day basis fits into the larger world of library work. So, that's good. All in all, I have to say AWP is way more fun. But ALA was worth my time. And I had an incredible view from my hotel room; I stayed at the Holiday Inn Mart Plaza, up on the 19th floor of the Merchandise Mart, & to the west I had a clear view all the way to the broad sweep of the horizon, directly below/before me was the Chicago River, and to the east & north I could see much of the Chicago skyline, including the John Hancock bldg., with glimpses of Lake Michigan in between skyscrapers. Evenings were spectacular, watching the big fat orange sun sinking below the horizon & watching all the lights slowly twinkling on. The daytime view was gray and kinda bleak (I'm not a fan of cities; give me a view with grass & trees any day) but at night it was spectacular & dazzling; I kept my curtains open all night just to look out at it all.

Next up - two Springsteen shows in Mansfield, MA in August, and a Rosanne Cash show (for which I have front row seats!) in September at Notre Dame. And I'm plotting: we just got 25 new Springsteen tourdates, so I'm trying to figure out how many (& which ones) I can afford to go to. St. Louis is almost for sure, and I'm considering Chicago & Cleveland as well. Sorely tempted by Nashville, which was a fantastic show & venue last year, but the date is horribly inconvenient for me; also by Kansas City, which is the night after St. Louis so it would be a lovely "double shot" but the drive back is long. And I only have so much money - not that much, especially now that we've received the official word that the university isn't giving out any raises this year (not cost-of-living, not merit, not anything - no, it's not a surprise; yes, I'm glad that I have a job at all, and one I generally like, to boot - but it does look like I'm going to be driving the '91 Corolla for at least another year).

Sure, I'm crazy for chasing a rock band around the country like this when I don't exactly have the kind of disposable income to justify such a thing. But every show I go to, I come away feeling energized, rejuvenated, glad to be alive. I come away feeling at least ten, maybe twenty years younger. I come away with all kinds of energy for my own creative work. I come away in love with rock & roll again and with the world. And that's worth every penny & every mile.

Checking in quick

2009-07-07T00:57:00.003-04:00

Hope everyone in the U.S. had a good Fourth of July holiday. It rained here allllllll day on the Fourth. I think I started growing moss.

Just wanted to post a quick check-in as I won't be around much for the next week or so. I'll be headed to Chicago for the big American Library Assn. annual conference, a humongous event which takes over the McCormick Place convention center as well as several of the big downtown hotels. While I'll be doing library-ish stuff most of the time, I do hope to steal away for an hour or so each day to catch some of the readings that will be going on. Not the plethora (I've always thought "plethora" sounded like some kind of a prehistoric fish...) of readings you get at AWP, but still, there are some good ones including Jane Hirshfield, Rachel Zucker, Janice Harrington, and Sherman Alexie.

I've touched bases with at least a couple of Chicagoans, but if you're going to be at ALA or in the area, drop me a note! My conference schedule is looking relatively nuts, which is par for the course, but I'm hoping to escape the ALA-mania for at least one evening. I don't think it will be quite as much of a social whirl as AWP, but hopefully it will be fun.

Speaking of AWP, I didn't get the grant that I applied for, so chances are I won't be going to Denver next year. Oh well. I'm still looking around for funding possibilities, so maybe something will turn up -- but as great a time as I had in Chicago, I can't do another one on my own nickel. Maybe in 2011 (D.C.) though more likely not until 2012 (Chicago again) -- heck, by then I may have finally finished reading all the books I picked up this year, huh? :)

Steamy River

2009-07-02T22:10:00.003-04:00

A few days ago I mentioned a video of "The River" from Glastonbury in which Bruce Springsteen literally has steam rising up off of him. Here it is, at least for now (the BBC's been taking these down as they find them, but this one's been up for a little while so maybe it'll stay). I've never seen anything quite like this. It starts getting steamy (literally!) just before the two-minute mark.

* * * * *
For those watching Wimbledon -- I'm so glad I have tomorrow as a holiday, because the Match of the Andys (Andies?) -- Roddick vs. Murray -- should be awfully entertaining. And I'm sure Roger Federer, who's bound to have a much easier time dismissing his semi-final opponent (Tommy Hass), would love to see them spend five long sets demolishing one another.

* * * * *

Separated At Birth?

Sugarland musician Kristian Bush...

Poet/editor Tim Green...

Tim? You got a cowboy hat hiding around there somewhere? Because it's kind of uncanny. ;)

* * * * *

Happy Fourth, y'all. Be careful if you're playing with fire this weekend.

New kids & cheap books

2009-06-29T20:13:00.002-04:00

Quick notes:

Look who's blogging now! A couple of my favorite poets have recently joined the (I know this isn't a word) blogosphere: D.A. Powell and Patricia Fargnoli. Drop by and welcome them.
The University of Pittsburgh Press is having a humongous Summer Poetry Sale until August 1. Lots of great stuff for half price. Because you can never have too many books, right? (sigh)

I know. I know.

2009-06-29T00:02:00.003-04:00

Seems like every post I make starts off with an apology. I'm going to stop doing that & just accept that these days I don't seem to have much to blog about, or much inclination. I'm still reading most of you at least occasionally. Not quite ready to declare myself on an official hiatus, not just yet.

Today I spent, no joke, about ten hours tampering with manuscripts -- both the Firstborn and the New Kid. I rejiggered the Firstborn somewhat: pulled out a good handful of poems and shook up the sections, which now number 4 instead of 5. The New Kid is still taking up more space than it oughta, but it's down below 100 pages now at least, which is a pretty nifty feat considering the very first draft clocked in at just over 140. (I know! Crazy. This thing is gonna have more viable outtakes than Springsteen's The River album.)

I'm still working on tightening up the New Kid. But, I'd be very happy to get suggestions for presses that might consider a strongly thematic poetry manuscript of almost 100 pages.

The two mss. are so different it's unreal. I definitely feel that they are both "my voice," whatever that means, and they certainly have some overarching themes/obsessions in common (I'm almost afraid to run either of them through a tag-cloud machine because I'm scared to see how big the word "light" would be), but there are very, very few -- if any -- poems that could conceivably be swapped from one into the other. #1 is your typical first book, where I'd written poems one by one over several years & have played puzzle pieces with them, fitting them together to see how they interact with one another. It does have an emotional/thematic arc, or a couple of them, and I do think it hangs together as a ms. But #2 clearly has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and almost all of the poems in it were written knowing that they were going to be part of an extended story. In fact some of the poems in #2 may not even make a lot of sense outside the context of the collection.

It was interesting today, going back to the Firstborn after having spent so much of my time & energy on the New Kid recently; despite their differences I'd definitely gained a few insights that helped me tighten up the Firstborn. So, that's good.

What is the New Kid about? Well, I've got snippets from various places incorporated throughout the thing, and this one sums up a good bit of it:

"On stage your exhilaration is in direct proportion to the void you're dancing over."
--Bruce Springsteen, Super Bowl Journal (February 2009)

Anyone else out there have the experience of working on two different collections simultaneously? I never thought I'd find myself in this position, for sure. It's interesting.

I do have two readers lined up for the New Kid, and one for the revised Firstborn. I don't know whether or not I want to go out looking for more, but if anyone's dying to cast an evaluative eye on one of 'em, feel free to backchannel me.

I've had a few other things eating my brain over the past few weeks, besides poetry. I've vacillated about whether or not I wanted to mention anything about this in such a public place, and I may come back later & edit this post -- but, my mom has just started radiation treatments for a wee dab of breast cancer. All the doctors are extremely optimistic, and there's every reason to believe that after a little radiation she'll be able to put this thing completely behind her. But it has, understandably I think, thrown me for a bit of a loop. So there's that to contend with. Among other things.

Well, this has certainly been a self-involved post. I was going to leave you with a really cool video to make up for that a bit, but it's been taken down from YouTube "due to a copyright claim by British Broadcasting Corporation." Dang. It was Springsteen singing "The River" at the Glastonbury festival in the UK a couple days ago; a decent performance of one of his best songs, but what was really cool about it was that steam was visibly rising off of his body. He sweats a lot when he's onstage, and apparently it was chilly & damp at Glastonbury (chilly & damp in that part of the world? nooooo!) which caused the striking visual effect. I mean, I've seen racehorses steaming after a workout, but never rockstars. It's an image I would love to steal for my rock-related manuscript, but nobody would believe it! You'll just have to take my word for it, I guess. It was just a cool, cool video, with the steam and the humongous crowd and the giant flags & banners everywhere. Maybe they'll release it on DVD or something. One can only hope. I'd buy it.

Peeking out from under

2009-06-16T23:20:00.005-04:00

Sorry I haven't been around. I'm way behind on email as well, so if I owe you one, please be patient & accept my apologies... I've had a lot going on, to be honest, some of which won't see the light of this blog, some of which will.

What I've been doing

Well, partly, I've now got a working draft of my second (!) book manuscript. (The firstborn is out there in the world, visiting editors and trying to make nice. Imagine it like some ever so slightly questionable hippie hitchhiking and couch-surfing, hoping somebody will ask it to just move in...) I was actually up until ahem-ahem-A.M. one night last week pulling together the initial draft, from which I've since pulled out a bunch of poems and added a couple of new ones. This one has been a very different experience from my first ms., in that this has consciously been A Project almost from the beginning, just over a year ago. I won't say that makes it better or worse than the firstborn, just different. I'm at the dangerous stage right now of being a little bit in love with the thing. I need to get over that before I start giving it to readers (got the first one lined up).

Now that this ms. has gone from being a disorganized pile of poems to being A Thing, I may be in a better position to go back to the firstborn and revisit it; I haven't looked closely at it for a few months. They're very different projects, but maybe I've learned a few things. I actually want to write at more length about the differences between the two, though maybe talking too much about a manuscript before it gets accepted anywhere might jinx it.

Readings

The Indiana University Writers' Conference is going on this week. As always, the evening readings by conference faculty are open to the public. I can't make most of them this week due to work & other commitments, but I did get to see Aracelis Girmay and Manuel Munoz the other night. I heard Aracelis Girmay last year at the Indiana Review "funk reading" and really liked her work, so I was glad to see her again; she read a lot of new work that was just phenomenal. (Seriously, there was a poem involving a green dress which alone was worth the price of admission -- well, the reading was free, but if there'd been an admission price, this poem would've been worth it. It got spontaneous mid-reading applause, too, which is always nice.) I enjoyed Manuel Munoz as well; fiction readings often leave me a bit cold, especially when the writer races through paragraphs & pages like they were being paid by the word & need to get in as many as possible in their allotted time, but he read at just the right pace & had a great reading voice. I'll have to check out his work.

Road Trip

I seem to have planned a quick trip out East in late August (yes, there are concert tickets involved). I haven't yet booked a flight, so I'll throw this out there: if anyone knows of a possible reading venue in or near Boston, MA or Providence, RI on August 20 or 21, drop me a note. If I could sell a few chapbooks, it'd be worth my while to extend the trip by a day or so.

You Know You're Really Truly Middle-Aged...

... when you find yourself reading an article about one of your favorite rockstars, not in High Times or Rolling Stone, but in Arthritis Today.

Seriously.

Drafty...

Here's one of the newest poems from Manuscript #2 (aka The Project That Pretty Much Ate My Brain This Year). The protagonist has been on the road and is well on the way to becoming a successful touring musician, but there turns out to be a price...

(I'll take this down in a day or two)

[gone again, gone again]

Ah, memories...

2009-06-06T23:45:00.001-04:00

Springsteen 5-12-09 429
Originally uploaded by imgoingdown_2

Spent some time poking around Flickr tonight and was rewarded by finding one more great shot from the Springsteen show in Chicago last month. You may need to click on the photo to enlarge it. Look just to the left of Bruce, a little lower than his butt (ahem). I'm the chick in the tie-dye t-shirt, singing along for all she's worth.

Damn, that was a great night.

Poem of the week & salsa!

2009-06-01T21:51:00.002-04:00

My first writers' group (the one that I started back in, um, 1985 or 1986 -- we meet sporadically and casually these days, but we still have a powerful bond with one another) met yesterday afternoon. We sat around on Barb's back deck in the sunshine, which was lovely. Anyway, we generally bring some kind of munchies to share, and I was in a chips-and-salsa mood so that's what I brought. Except I randomly decided to bring a kind of salsa I'd never tried before: peach-mango! Boy oh boy, is that ever some good stuff. It has that spicy-sweet thing going on that I just love. Very summery and refreshing. I brought home what was left & just finished it off as an after-work snack (I had the late shift on the reference desk tonight so didn't get home until after 9). Yum.

Then I randomly stumbled across a poem I know I'd read before, but not recently. You know how sometimes a poem you've read before will haul off and wallop you upside the head like a whole new revelation? Yeah. That. This is the one that did it to me this time:

The Truth the Dead Know

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

-Anne Sexton

That third stanza! Holy crap. And the fourth one too. I'm generally allergic to drama and excessive intensity in my actual life (not counting whatever happens in the context of a rock show), but boy howdy do I love it in poems.

* * * * *

As I was typing that my computer made its little "you have a new message! go look at it instead of having any kind of actual attention span!" chime. I could tell from the first few words (gmail displays the subject line and the first few words of the message before you open it) that it was a rejection note -- when they're accepting something they usually use your name instead of the generic "Dear Poet" -- but was pleased to note a P.S. mentioning they'd liked one of the poems, which was my own favorite of the batch anyway. I think that's the first time I've ever gotten "ink" on an emailed rejection note; I've gotten emailed rejections that I suspected were the "encouraging" version of the form rejection, but I've never been sure about those. Too bad they didn't actually take any of the poems, but encouragement is encouraging and so I am duly encouraged.

Poem of the week

2009-05-30T22:05:00.004-04:00

Just finished reading Ali Liebegott's novel-in-verse The Beautifully Worthless. It gave me lots of ideas about how to structure the project, book, whatever it is that I'm working on currently -- one of my characters has started writing letters, which may or may not show up in the manuscript interspersed with actual poems. (They may also just be background information for me to use myself. Don't know yet. I'm leaning towards including them, though.)

Liebegott's book struck me as a bit uneven, but overall pretty interesting and handled the balance between lyric & narrative pretty well. Here's a bit from it:

Once, I found myself beneath a woman,
her legs straddled my lap, her face bent down
to my turned-up mouth, my turned-up mouth
that was turned like flames following the curve
of gasoline thrown by the arsonist.
I wanted exactly what happened that night
for this woman, to undo the buttons of my shirt
exactly as she did,
it was as if the shirt were my skin,

for months after, I was haunted by buttons
opening and falling like the light plunk of a penny
into a wishing well, there's no way I loved her,
and I know she's never thought about those buttons
and how they felt, like something sacred,
like she was God and I was the dying child coming home.

-Ali Liebegott, from The Beautifully Worthless

Just wondering...

2009-05-29T22:45:00.003-04:00

So it's been almost a year since I started sending my first book ms. around, which means that some of the same deadlines are coming around again. The ms. has been tweaked here and there since I started submitting it, but hasn't been significantly restructured -- it's still essentially the same book, though hopefully the tweaks have made it a little stronger.

So... obviously nobody's accepted it yet. Do any of y'all ever send essentially the same ms. to a publisher/reading period/contest for a second time? I know most of them use different judges every year, but if you don't get past the initial readers to become a finalist it doesn't really matter who the judge is anyway. I'm inclined not to resend it to anyplace that rejected it without comment, but haven't decided about the places that at least gave me a nice word or two. My instinct is not to resend it even there until it's been significantly restructured, but... what do you guys think? Seriously looking for advice here.

Thanks!

Monkey see...

2009-05-28T23:39:00.004-04:00

So this is my first attempt at making a video, using the bitty camera on my bitty new netbook. Not sure how crazy I am about it, and the video quality leaves something to be desired, but I'll put it up at least for now. This is a "rainy morning in Provincetown" poem -- I wrote the first draft sitting in the Adams Pharmacy looking out at cranky wet tourists walking by, then moved over to the Provincetown Public Library and worked on it for a while, then went back over to the Fine Arts Work Center and typed it up & printed it out & took it in to my workshop that afternoon. It was a good day.

Enjoy!

Tweet!

2009-05-27T22:48:00.002-04:00

The new issue of OCHO, featuring poets who Twitter, is up! Collin Kelley & Didi Menendez did a great (and fast!) job putting this together. There's a wide range of voices and you're sure to find something you like in this one, whatever your taste. (Maybe you'll even like mine, a kinda weird thing called "Verge" -- you tell me what it's about 'cause I'm still not sure.)

Also, in just over an hour, I will be forty-eight years old. That's a big number.

Drafty in here

2009-05-26T21:31:00.004-04:00

Of course I am disappointed, though not exactly surprised, by today's California Supreme Court ruling. I do believe there is momentum in the right direction... baby steps, baby steps. Have faith and keep fighting.

Meanwhile, just to assert that my little join-the-circus road trips really do spawn something other than long rambling blog posts, here's a rough draft from today. I'll take it down in a day or so. It's definitely rough, but so much fun to recall a moment and turn around & put myself in the other person's shoes. Er, boots.

[gone again]

Road notes from the E Street Nation: Part 2 - The Beat, The Beat, The Beat

2009-05-24T20:46:00.003-04:00

No, I haven't run away and joined the circus (or a rock & roll band... same difference). Still here.

I have been restless and impatient ever since returning home from my oh-so-short road trip a couple weeks ago, feeling centered only when listening to music, bashing away at my guitar, or writing. I feel like something's come unplugged.

Rock concerts -- at least the ones I go to and love -- give the audience full permission to express and enjoy a couple of things that are, intentionally or not, less than abundant in my life: unbridled romanticism (from"the screen door slams, Mary's dress sways / Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays..." all the way to "big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams / meet me in a land of hope and dreams") and unfiltered sexuality (cue up any throbbing bass line, any drumbeat shuddering through the air and into each and every body in the room, any scorching guitar solo). Hell, just immersing yourself in -- giving yourself over to -- music that's being created by other human beings to the extent that your body moves, almost involuntarily, with what those other humans' hands are doing... that's almost frighteningly sexual in and of itself. Rock music isn't sexual because of its lyrics, but because of its pure, immersive physicality, and the expectation of surrender. So... yeah.

Strong stuff for a middle-aged hermit. No wonder I'm ready to run off and join the circus, huh?

You know, if I had my life to live over again, the one big thing I would do differently is: I would push myself harder with my own music, make myself learn to sing even if it's emotionally challenging (which it is, for me, for some reason -- more than physically or technically challenging -- singing in front of people feels like standing there naked), not put down the guitar just because I'm busy doing other things. Because as much as my fangirlcelebritystalking ways are exactly that -- at the heart of it, it is much more that I long to be a part of the larger thing that is the music itself. I would much, much rather be someone's lyricist or even background singer (yeah right) than their groupie. Much as I get all fangirly about the musicians I love, I don't give much of a shit about celebrity itself -- if you put me in a room with, say, Tom Hanks or some other megasuperstar and a minor-league musician I happen to love, it'd be the musician I'd get all tongue-tied talking to. Because they are the emissaries of the Music, corny as that sounds.

(Which is how it happens that a middle-aged doofy poet gets all swoony over being given a little plastic guitar pick by a middle-aged doofy rockstar. Trust me, I know how silly this all is, but it's truly in service to something larger. And knowing that, my friends, is part of what makes it different now -- and deeper -- than what it was like seeing this same band thirty years ago, when it was just wild and fun. All the deeper stuff was there then, but I didn't know it yet, at least not with the brain part of my brain.)

At my age (forty-eight in a few short days!) I'm obviously not about to run away and join the circus. I know it, you know it, my colleagues at work know it, my cats know it most of all. I'm too fond of having health insurance and of sleeping in my own bed at night. Certainly "Chasing Angels," the manuscript I'm working on these days, is in part my stab at living vicariously through my characters, imagining the good and the bad of being a full-time touring musician. If I can get the thing written and (cross fingers) published, it will certainly serve in part as a very public love letter to the music and the people who create it.

It's all my dad's fault, really. He was a musician and I grew up in a house full of music -- my dad's band occasionally practiced in our living room (when they couldn't use the drummer's basement for whatever reason) and music was just a part of the air I breathed. And then when I was 12 years old he got his doctorate, got a faculty position, packed us up and moved us to Indiana, and never made an effort to find himself a musicians' community or people to play with, and he pretty much gave up playing. Which is just tremendously heartbreaking to me, even now. He always loved music and listened to it, but he was never a part of it in the same way again.

What would it be like to reach middle age without having given up on your greatest, craziest dreams?

Getting a little taste of that, even from a distance, is another reason I love Springsteen/E Street Band concerts. In part it's what they're selling us -- the dream, the romantic sense of belief. I know that. It's a circus, it's a show; they're performers, playing their parts. But also, there's something there that's much too real to be just an act, just entertainment. You watch Bruce on that stage with every cell in his body committed to what he's doing (living the dream he's been working on since he was a kid, really) and as you sing along and raise your arms in the air and become a part of it, you can't help but believe the message on some level. "Dreams will not be thwarted / Faith will be rewarded."

Late in the show on a Saturday night (Milwaukee, 2008)...
Bruce: "Don't you [people in the audience] gotta be in church tomorrow?"
Steve [Van Zandt, guitarist]: "We're in church."
Bruce: "What?"
Steve: "We're in church now."

Religious experience? Sure, maybe. I really don't care what you call it. All I know is, when I go to these concerts, I become a part of something much, much larger than myself. Call it Music, call it God, call it twenty thousand people getting sweaty together in a very large room. Call it a little corner of joy and hope and letting your whole body be alive. Call it whatever you want... all I know is, I want more.

Interlude: Radio Nowhere

2009-05-22T01:13:00.003-04:00

Still scratching my head trying to put some words together about some of what the recent Springsteen shows meant to me. Maybe it won't happen. Maybe it will.

Meanwhile, here's part of Radio Nowhere (from a couple of weeks before "my" shows) so you can see I wasn't kidding about Mister Holy Crap Jay Weinberg. Not that a little YouTube video can capture half of what it's like when you feel that bass drum in your chest and legs... but maybe you'll get a little of the idea. (I love how he's singing along, too! He's just SO into it, it's unreal.)

Road Notes from the E Street Nation: Part 1 - The Thunder

2009-05-19T01:12:00.009-04:00

So last week I spent a few days with my mom in northern Indiana, then drove to Chicago, flew to St. Paul, flew back to Chicago, and drove back home. All for the love of rock & roll. It wasn’t quite as epic as last summer’s road trip, but it sure did have its moments.

One thing I was looking forward to was the new kid on the drums. Max Weinberg, who’s been the E Street Band drummer since the mid-seventies, has a “day job” as bandleader for the Conan O’Brien show – and with Conan taking over Leno’s timeslot, Max won’t be able to miss the first few weeks. It was revealed a few months ago that Max’s 18 year old son, Jay Weinberg, would be sitting in for at least some of the European shows that Max won’t be able to make – and Jay’s been warming up by playing at least portions of most of the recent U.S. shows (though he didn’t make an appearance at the Denver show I went to). Now, Jay’s usual gig is with a metal band, and did I mention that he’s 18? Just… yeah. I have to admit that my first reaction was “An 18-year-old metalhead? Has Bruce Springsteen lost his freakin’ mind??” But I’d been hearing good reports from the shows Jay had played so far, and I was dying of curiosity to see for myself.

The St. Paul show opened with “Badlands” and Jay was on the riser – and holy crap, people! The kid’s impressive! “Radio Nowhere” is his real showpiece – long black hair flying, bringing the thunder like nobody’s business. I immediately became a convert. True, he doesn’t have the precision, the consistency, or the depth of repertoire that his father has. Nor can he read Bruce’s mind quite the way his father can after so many years. But let me tell you, the kid makes up for it with his passion, enthusiasm, power, and joy. He is SO much fun to watch. At about the halfway point of the show Max took over, and the changeover was just incredibly sweet – both Bruce and Max visibly busting with pride, giving Jay hugs and high-fives, the audience ROARING as Jay took a bow. (And for the rest of the show Max played, if anything, even harder & better than usual, & his "usual" is damned amazing -- a little challenge from the younger generation never hurts, I guess!)

[photo from backstreets.com]
Understand: the E Street Nation is very, very protective of its little band. We’re incredibly lucky in that most of the guys in the band are the same ones many of us fell in love with thirty-plus years ago; and we don’t much care for change, or for new faces. So to see the audience embracing the “new kid” was sweet indeed. Does it help that he’s “family”? Sure. I wouldn’t deny that. There are lots of competent, even brilliant, drummers (my hometown guy Kenny Aronoff comes to mind) who could have stepped in to get the job done. But they would have just been hired hands. So the blood connection does make a difference. That said, Jay had to win us over on his own – it wasn’t a gimme. And he did so with gusto.

A little known fact about the younger Mr. Weinberg: “Jay” is actually his middle name. The whole show I found myself calling him by his full name, which is HOLY CRAP JAY WEINBERG. I heard more than a couple of other folks using his real first name as well. Seriously!

Anyway, so St. Paul was a pretty good show. But Chicago’s what I really want to talk about. See, I had general admission tickets both nights. The way they work GA is this: you show up at the venue between 2 and 5:00 on the day of the show with your ticket in hand, and you get a wristband. The wristband has a number on it. Around 5:00 they start getting people lined up in numerical order. Once people are sort of lined up they let you know how many wristbands have been given out (around 1200 in St. Paul and a little less than that in Chicago), and they let you know how many they will be allowing into the “pit,” which is the partitioned-off section right in front of the stage. (600 in St. Paul, 550 in Chicago – it varies by venue.) They draw a “random” number, and the person whose wristband matches that number gets to be first in line. It generally works more or less okay, and keeps people from sitting in line in front of the venue all night like in the bad old days.

ANYWAY. In St. Paul, I didn’t get into the pit, and in fact I had a good couple hundred people ahead of me going into the main GA area, so I had quite a few people in front of me – at 5 foot 1 this is an issue! – but honestly I still enjoyed it more than I would have from a seat. The energy is higher on the floor, and those of us who like to stand up and dance and shout and sing the whole show don’t have somebody behind them begging them to please sit down. But still… you want that magic number, you want to be close. In Chicago, my wristband was #782. I stood in line, surrounded by strangers, my heart pounding as they drew……… #747. I was in!! Not only that, but I was WAY in… I knew at that point that I’d either be in the very front or at most I’d have maybe one person between me and the stage. Oh, the glee! Oh, the anticipation! Oh, the people high-fiving and texting their friends! 20,000 people in the United Center and we’re going to be in front of all of ‘em!

We were ushered into the arena a good couple hours before the show, so most of us used the time to sit on the floor and relax while we could. Some people brought in food and enjoyed their dinner. Lots of chatting, reminiscing about shows past, getting to know your neighbors. I always meet really great folks at these shows, and St. Paul & Chicago were no exception. A few times I stood up to stretch and just gazed at the stage… right… THERE… within touching distance. The stage is like an altar to me, a sacred thing, set with the implements of magic: guitars, microphones, Soozie Tyrell’s violins, Roy Bittan’s white piano. There’s a comfort in seeing water and setlists set out for the band members a few minutes before showtime, in the ritual of the last-minute soundcheck. I’ve never been a performing musician, but looking at that stage just feels like home to me. It’s funny.

And then that magic, magic moment when the lights go down. The crowd erupts and under cover of darkness, one by one, the musicians slip onto the stage. And the lights blaze up and the band crashes into “Badlands” and I’m out of my mind with giddy delight. It’s funny, being six feet from the musicians – the show is BIG: grand gestures, full voices, everything devoted to pushing the songs’ energy all the way up into the rafters. Being so close to that is like chatting with someone who’s in full stage makeup – it’s TOO vivid, too big, too MUCH almost. It takes a little getting used to. (Oh, but I can get used to it… oh boy can I ever.)

It’s a different show, being close enough to actually interact with the band a little. Close enough to get hit with a flying drop of sweat (Bruce sweats like a horse and he plays that guitar pretty hard… it’s actually fairly unsanitary up front *grin*). I was, in an uncharacteristically brilliant move, wearing my favorite tie-dye “Little Steven’s Underground Garage” t-shirt, and as luck would have it, I was planted squarely in front of Little Steven himself. It was a fun moment when he noticed the shirt and gave me a big smile. (And then at the end of the show, he came over in my direction and handed me a guitar pick – someone else was reaching for it and he was very careful to make sure it got into MY grubby little hands. Swoon!)

I actually find, when I’m up close, that I only end up watching Bruce about half the time – even though he’s pretty much the greatest and most charismatic performer in the history of rock & roll. I just love watching all the other band members as they rally round to support his vision – the little interactions between them, the scrambling when Bruce changes up the setlist on the fly, the dedication and love that every one of them puts into the music. It’s a remarkable band, made up of (from everything I have heard from people who know or have met them) remarkable people. Yes, it is Bruce’s vision and commitment (and NOBODY, nowhere, conveys pure commitment in their performance like Bruce Springsteen does) that’s out front leading the way, but the E Street Band is a magnificent machine: the sheer virtuosity of Nils Lofgren and Roy Bittan; the mighty thunder of Max Weinberg; the heart and soul and rock&roll conviction of Little Steven; the reliable foundation of Garry Tallent’s criminally underrated bass playing; the "biggest man you've ever seen," mountain of love, Clarence Clemons… it’s like a bumblebee, this band: with that many strong-minded individuals on stage, it should be physically impossible for it to fly -- but fly it does. Oh baby… fly it does.

[photo taken with my crappy cellphone camera. that's Bruce up there standing on the piano.]

Next up: Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll (except not so much with the drugs part).

For the moment

2009-05-18T00:53:00.005-04:00

Still working on my thoughts about the St. Paul and Chicago Springsteen concerts. I know, too much buildup, the post will never measure up! Ah well. To tide you over, here's a little drafty draft from today. This is from my "Chasing Angels" series and it's in the voice of the longtime, loyal fan who's just spent a little time following the band she loves from town to town. Gee... where would I have gotten THAT idea, hmmm? ;)

[gone]

diode

2009-05-15T22:47:00.003-04:00

I'm working on a proper post about my two-night stand in the E Street Nation... and actually right now I am listening to an, er, audience-sourced recording of the Chicago show, reliving one of my favorite nights of my life. These concerts mean so much more to me than just the music. Still working on finding the words.

Meanwhile, if you want some words, you can go check out the new issue of diode! I am very pleased to have three poems in it. Haven't had the time yet to read the rest of the issue closely, but it looks like some hot stuff overall. It's a consistently interesting journal. Hope y'all enjoy it...

spring vacation in the E Street Nation

2009-05-14T01:50:00.003-04:00

I will definitely make a better post in the near future. But for now, I leave you with this picture that someone sitting in a section behind the stage snapped at the Chicago Springsteen show. (You probably have to click on the picture to see the whole thing. And yes, it's taken from behind the stage; Bruce and Steve were interacting with the drummer so that's why they have their backs turned to most of the audience.)

Look in the very front row, towards the left... short woman wearing a tie-dye t-shirt that's kinda blue at the top... c'est moi.

I'm not kidding. At the Chicago show, I was in the very, very, very front. To say that I was deliriously happy would be an understatement.

(The shirt I was wearing, incidentally, was my Little Steven's Underground Garage shirt. And Little Steven did indeed notice and appreciate that fact. He smiled at me a bunch of times and at the end he came over and put a guitar pick into my happy little hands. Niiiiiiice.) (Yes, he was also Silvio on the Sopranos, for those who follow tv more closely than they follow music. But he belonged to the E Street Band first, darnit!)

Anyway, it was a bit of a whirlwind trip, and I'm long overdue for sleep, so I will post more tomorrow or so. And I'm sure I owe some emails, Twitter/Facebook stuff, etc. and I haven't read any blogs in days. I'll catch up eventually, right?

Good intentions

2009-05-07T00:34:00.002-04:00

I know, I've been a very poor blogger lately. I'd say it was just that I don't seem to have much of anything very interesting to say, but when has that ever stopped me (or anyone on the internet for that matter)?

I'm going to try to be better. Really. (Hi Eduardo.)

At the moment, I have a monster to-do list staring me in the face; I'm headed out of town on Friday and it's crazy how much I have to do before then. And a good part of this evening was a lost cause thanks to a combination of sheer slothfulness and a headache (my sinuses apparently do not approve of the weather tonight).

My crazy-productive writing spurt seems to have tapered off, which might be a good thing actually. After I finish running around the Midwest for a few days, I hope to take some time and sit down with a bunch of the poems I've drafted over the past few months and pound on them a bit and revise the things. And I want to see how close I am to having a draft of the full "Chasing Angels" manuscript. The other day I sat down and asked my three main characters (the singer, the guitarist, and the devoted fan) a question -- yes, I'm doing that fictiony thing of writing up character studies, just for my own benefit, to understand them better. I may end up mining these sketches for poem bits, or I may not, but I think I'm going to do more of them. The question I asked them this time was: What scares you? The funny thing is, I know good and well what scares all three of them, and as I wrote their answers, none of them were completely honest. Typical. ;) Next question I want to ask them is: What would you risk for someone or something that you love? Something tells me they won't give me the whole truth about that one, either.

The other writing project on my plate is, of course, the first book manuscript -- the one I banged together on my retreat in June of last year and have been sending around to various presses and contests. Twenty-nine presses and contests so far, to be exact. I've decided that it goes out to one more, just to make it an even thirty, in the next month or so -- and then I may pull back a bit on this one. If nobody names it as at least a finalist, out of thirty attempts, I think that's a sign that I should do a pretty extensive revision. I skimmed through it (and tweaked it here & there, of course) as I was getting it ready to go out to the last little handful of places, and funny enough, I still pretty much like it and believe in the thing. But I may well be able to make it better. Maybe I can manage to go away somewhere for a long weekend this summer and dive back into it then.

So, one more publisher or contest. I'm open to recommendations! :)

Spring fever

2009-04-27T23:24:00.004-04:00

First off, run over and congratulate Diane K. Martin, who has some terrific and long-awaited great news!

I've been busy, and not blogging. Poetry stuff, music stuff, wishing there were more hours in every day stuff.

Got a grant application submitted which, if I get it, will send me to AWP next year. Fingers crossed. And if nothing else, putting the application together was a worthwhile experience -- a chance to step back and look at the trajectory of my work and what I've been doing with it. I hadn't updated my artistic resume in a while and it was nice to realize that I really did have some things to add to it. Speaking of which, I promised my manuscript I would send it out to two more places (maybe three) this month and then if it doesn't get picked as at least a finalist, we're talking major revision. Er, "this month" means I don't have a lot of time left, doesn't it? Guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow evening.

Getting so much happiness & energy from music lately. I've decided that in addition to the Bruce Springsteen show in Chicago next month, I'm also going to see him in St. Paul the night before. I will be in St. Paul for less than 24 hours, which seems a little crazy, but I felt my face bust into a giant grin when I got my ticket in today's mail, when I opened up the envelope and carefully extracted that precious little piece of paper. And that told me I made the right choice when I decided to go. If I could be even half as present with my work as Springsteen is with his, half as committed, I'd get a whole lot more work done. I almost think of him as one of my writing teachers. Weird, huh?

This past Friday night I went to Indianapolis to see some of my other musical heroes, the Indigo Girls. I hadn't seen them in a few years, and that's a few years too long. It was a general-admission, standing-room show in a room the size of a large high school gym, and I was incredibly fortunate & ended up standing front and center. I mean, I was so close that I was even able to get some (semi-surreptitious) halfway decent pictures with my cruddy little no-megapixel cellphone camera. I went by myself, but unexpectedly met up with someone I knew a bit from online, and had a great time hanging with her and the friends she'd come with. And, you know, I really need to remember how much music feeds my spirit. Especially when I go to a show where I'm standing, putting my arms in the air, singing along -- not hunched over in a seat protecting my heart. There's a communal experience that happens at some shows -- Springsteen, Indigos -- almost a tribal thing. There's nothing else like it, and it feeds me deeply.

Finally, I squoze out two lines of a villanelle the other day. If I actually finish it and make a proper villanelle, you can be assured that hell has frozen over, which probably means all the swine flu viruses will be frozen to death. In which case I had better get cracking.

Small pond

2009-04-18T22:32:00.002-04:00

This week two different people, neither of whom I knew, recognized me because of poetry stuff. One had seen me at the annual Five Women Poets readings (she knows someone else in the group and comes to our readings often). The other was a cashier in a shop who took my debit card, recognized my name, and remembered hearing me on the radio.

Does that ever stop feeling weird?

In other news, it's full-on spring and everything is busting into blossom. I love this time of year. Bloomington has a ridiculous number of flowering trees and we're just at that stage where the earliest ones are starting to lose their bloom, petals drifting through the air like clouds of snow. The redbuds are intense in their pink/magenta/fuchsia/undefinable color, bright as a neon sign. DC may have its cherry trees but we have our Bradford pears, flowering plums, redbuds, dogwoods, magnolias, tulip trees, forsythia, and a bunch of other stuff I don't know the names of. It's really fairly spectacular.

A few days ago (actually, on the plane back from Denver, right after we skidded down onto the Indianapolis tarmac) I finished reading Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. It got a lot of hype when it came out a few years ago, and I resisted reading it for that reason, but people, the hype is justified. This is one of those books that fucks you up while you're reading it (and that's a good thing). It pulls you into a world and a language that makes your heart hurt but that you never want to leave. I'd give a lot to be able to write like that.

Finally, sending out good thoughts to the terrific poet, blogger, and all-around good guy Brent Goodman. In case you hadn't heard, he had a heart attack a few days ago and is hanging out in the cardiac ward for a little while. And what's really amazing is he's still writing and posting a poem every day. Now that's heart.

Scott Russell Sanders chat

2009-04-14T23:49:00.002-04:00

A quick note: Our local newspaper is doing an online chat with the wonderful writer Scott Russell Sanders tomorrow, April 15, at 11:00 am Eastern time. You will be able to access it without a subscription, and you can submit questions in advance if you want. Go here for the scoop:

http://www.heraldtimesonline.com/livediscussion/discuss.php

Chasing angels in Colorado

2009-04-13T00:18:00.005-04:00

Back from a quick trip out west. I hope to blog more about the Springsteen show later; as his shows often do, this one not only rocked my face off but also brought me to new understandings about a few things. I take away equal parts exhilaration and thoughtfulness from his shows. It's pretty amazing. Anyway, we didn't get a great spot on the floor, so I was on my tiptoes craning my neck most of the night and still couldn't see all of the stage (and depending on which way the guys in front of me happened to shift, sometimes I couldn't see any of the stage; I'm 5 foot 1, for the record, so it doesn't take much of a tall person to block my view) -- and even so, I preferred it to sitting in seats; the sound was better, and the crowd around me was way more excited and energetic. There was a young woman behind me who, by the encores, was so radiantly happy that the smile on her face could have powered a small city. The difference between standing on the floor in general admission versus being in seats is the difference between watching the musicians perform versus participating in the performance. Being in GA, you really do feel like you're more a part of things, more connected with the performers and the music. It's a great thing.

It was a high-energy show, with a fantastic crowd; people were on their feet cheering, fist-pumping, arm-waving, singing along from the floor all the way up to the rafters (and there were plenty of folks up in the rafters; it was a sold-out show and even the nosebleed seats in Denver's Pepsi Center were full). It amazes me, every time I see him, how Bruce puts everything he's got into every show; even after thirty-five years, he still sings "Born to Run" like he means every word with all his heart.

As I type this I'm listening to an audience recording of the very first Springsteen show I attended (9/9/1978, Notre Dame, Indiana) and while the energy was very different then in ways I'd like to spend some time putting words to, the shows he does now are every bit as joyous and every bit as enjoyable. I remember that '78 show as well as I remember anything from that far back. I was seventeen: what did I know? Well... I knew more when I left that show than I did when I walked into the arena, that much is for sure.

While I was out there I also had the chance to meet the newest member of my extended family -- my sister's stepson's son, who is three weeks old and as my sister says, he is stinkin' cute.

Tomorrow: back to regular old reality again. I hope to get back on track with writing and stuff by next weekend.

Thanks to all who sent nice comments on my recent Field acceptance, by the way -- or thought nice things and didn't get around to posting them. I first submitted to them in 1989, so it certainly feels like one of those "persistence pays" situations. The contract showed up in my mail while I was gone, so I can now tell you that "The Fuel" will be in the Fall 2009 issue.

And I would be remiss if I didn't mention the amazonfail fiasco currently playing itself out. Others have summarized it much better than I'd be able to, so read these two posts and follow the links therein if you want to know more:
Emily Lloyd (Poesy Galore)
Timothy Green
Both of these bloggers give some good information, but come at it from somewhat different angles and give different examples. There is tons more out there about it -- in blogs, on Facebook, on Twitter. I'll leave you with a link to a petition which I have signed and certainly endorse; I don't know if online petitions are ever taken all that seriously, but it's a quick way to do something.