down

I've been reading all the fascinating comments on my "epistolary blogging" post with interest. I'm afraid, this week, I just don't have the energy to respond as I'd like to. The whole hurricane/flood thing has me in a bit of a funk, even though I don't really know anyone directly affected by it (other than some online friends/acquaintances). See Rebecca Loudon's post for some pointers re: assistance; while some of her links are Seattle-specific, they should lead you in the right direction regardless of your location. I gave what I could, though it was a pathetically small donation. The situation down there is just unimaginable. And, as always, it's those who had the least to begin with who are hurting the most.

[Edited to add: Here is a list of organizations accepting donations for Hurricane Katrina relief, from FEMA. Also consider the Humane Society's Disaster Relief Fund. ] [Further edited: Network for Good has an even better list of places to donate.]

On a more personal front, my little-old-man cat, 18 years old (and diabetic since January 1996), is pretty sick & spending the night in the hospital. I know he's been on borrowed time for a while now, but I worry about my little guy and the house feels sad without him in it. He has lived with me since he was 4 weeks old, and if he were a person, I'd be sending him off to college this month. :) I know many of you are "cat people" so please send some good thoughts in Mudpuppy's direction. We're not quite sure what is up with him, but he is definitely feeling crappy. Fortunately I have a wonderful vet who cares about him a lot and who I trust very much.

Doesn't help that work is crazy, crazy busy this week (first week of classes) and next week will likely be quite crazy as well. I do have to work Monday, so no three-day weekend of recuperation for me.

So if this blog is kind of quiet for a while, it's just because I am here, drinking a beer and distracting my brain by watching too much tennis. I'll be back to poetry eventually.

Blogs: the new epistolary art?

In an article in this week's New York Times Book Review, David Orr writes about how poets' letters are often extremely interesting, in part because "poets are haunted by the concept of speaker and audience the way novelists are haunted by the idea of time." He goes on to bemoan the apparent death (or death-throes) of the epistolary art, saying:

It's a pity, then, that brilliant letters are about as likely to be written by young poets today as odes to Psyche. This isn't the fault of the poets. The letter has always been an awkwardly balanced genre -- part practical necessity, part literary performance, part cowardly way to break up with your girlfriend -- and advances in technology have made the letter's modern incarnations smaller, faster, flatter and more ephemeral. These qualities enhance the functional side of letter writing at the expense of the casual, cloudlike accumulations of thought that often lead to the most incandescent poetic observations. And let's face it, the modern letter equivalent makes for a lousy read. Consider, for example, a text message version of Keats's famous explanation of ''negative capability'' (as originally set forth in a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, it's a kind of artistic disinterest):

JKEATS1: Iz tryN 2 dev mor neg cap

G&TKEATS: watz dat?

JKEATS1: dats bn N uncertainties -- misteries -- doubts w/o NE irritable reachN aftr fact & reasN : -)

G&TKEATS: kewl

There's nothing wrong with text messages -- they're terrifically useful and often very funny -- but they 8nt Xactly gud 2 look @. Even e-mail messages, which bear some resemblance to letters, are probably too short (not to mention too easily disposable) to maintain the letter's literary position.

So we're likely down to our last few poet correspondents.

(Orr goes on to review the new Selected Letters of James Wright, which sounds like it's worth reading.)

Anyway, that got me started thinking ... I wonder if blogs are, to some extent, taking the place of letters? True, they aren't addressed to a singular "you" so they lack a certain level of intimacy. But they do often have the pecular mix of formality & informality one finds in letters, and to some extent they are often addressed primarily to a known group of readers, even though they're accessible to a much wider audience. Certainly I've read a goodly number of individual posts that were well-written and substantial enough to hold a reader's interest outside the ephemeral confines of the "blogosphere" -- and I can imagine, somewhere down the road, somebody publishing selections from same. At least I think I can imagine that -- though I'm not entirely sure I like the idea. I know that a lot (though not all) of my email correspondence is dashed off hastily and has the "flattened" quality Orr refers to, while blog posts tend to be more ruminative, more detailed, more composed of actual complete sentences.

It's probably too early to say, really; blogging is a relatively new art form (if I may be so bold as to elevate it to that level), and I don't think it's exactly going to replace the centuries-old art of letter writing just yet. But in terms of the literary function of poets' letters, something Orr discusses ("poets often have used letters to arrive at new ways of thinking about poems," he says), blogs just might be primed and ready to jump in.

Thoughts?

Provincetown in autumn...

Just a quick note to point out that the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown has posted their Fall 2005 weekend workshop schedule. There are some nifty-sounding ones, and if I had the money, I'd love to spend a weekend working with Michael Klein, Martha Rhodes, or Mark Wunderlich. Alas, it won't be possible this year -- but I thought I'd pass on the link in case anyone else out there might be interested. I bet P-town is lovely in October and November....

'Cause I'm the boss, that's why

I know I haven't been blogging this week. I haven't been writing either, or reading much, or anything particularly productive. Busy, busy week at work and it has been eating my brain. The fall semester begins on Monday, and I've been taking care of reserve requests for faculty, and covering the reference/circulation desk myself most of the time because most of my student employees have been out of town, and yesterday & today the new students were in for orientation activities, so I've been answering LOTS of questions. And since we no longer have a full-time librarian in my tiny little branch library, it's been up to me to make sure everything keeps running smoothly. I like my job, but I'm glad it doesn't always take this much of my energy. Next week will be crazy, and then things will settle down into a normal routine.

Seeing the new students pouring into town always makes me a bit nostalgic for my undergrad days, and sometimes makes me feel a bit sad that I did my MLS (that's Master of Library Science, though I'm sure y'all can come up with more interesting definitions) on a part-time basis while working full-time. If I won the lottery, I would probably go be a full-time student again, because it was a life I really loved. (The full-time-student-envy completely disappears at the end of the semester when the stress levels inside the library rise to deafening proportions, though, I assure you.)

Working in an academic library is, for me, one way of staying in touch with the parts of "student-ness" that I love. At least I'm in that environment, surrounded by people who are actively engaged in learning. Yeah, academia is a deeply flawed institution -- but I think, perhaps with a bit too much optimism, that its heart is in the right place. And I am an academic at heart, really. It's the environment I'm happiest in. Sometimes I think I should have just sucked up and done the whole "get a doctorate and become a professor" thing -- except that, oddly enough, I do not find myself drawn to teaching. I would enjoy teaching creative writing in some settings, I think; my old writing group used to give workshops on occasion and that was lots of fun, and working with advanced or talented or at least highly motivated students would be fun. But you and I both know that if I'd gotten a doctorate in English, or even an MFA, I probably would have ended up teaching freshman comp and introductory lit -- maybe in a community college -- and that would have made me crazy. There are people who love doing that, and more power to 'em. But it's not for me. And I'm glad I was able to recognize that before I did something bad like go from undergrad directly into grad school, just because it's what everyone (including myself) expected of me.

I do sometimes wish I'd had the bright idea of going to library school a little earlier, instead of farting around in a stupid office job till I was in my mid-thirties. But I'm glad I ended up there eventually. And every now & then I catch myself looking around the library, seeing students tracking down the information they need and collaborating on group projcts and whatnot, and I realize that I have some small part in helping them to get the education they want, and it makes me really (and geekily) happy.

Besides which, just about every librarian & library-school student I've ever met has a total office-supply fetish. And you just can't beat spending your days with people like that. *grin*

The dog-day cicadas are at it again

Late-summer afternoons and evenings are so noisy here in Indiana -- the green of the trees is almost audible and then there are the dog-day cicadas and the crickets, singing their hearts out for someone to love. Or at least for someone to mate with. Do insects love? Unlike humans they are unashamed of their desire -- the sky and trees are filled with it.

Today 48-year-old Martina Navratilova, along with Anna-Lena Groenefeld, won the doubles championship at the Rogers Cup in Toronto. Not only did they win, but in the last three rounds of the tournament they had to defeat the #1, #3, and #4 seeded teams. Pretty damned impressive. I love that Martina still plays at her age, still loves the game, still wins. She is sort of like the Stanley Kunitz of tennis. *grin*

I have been writing what might be a long poem, or maybe not so long once I chop out all the crap. My writing process feels different these days, looser. Every few days I sit down with the notebook and write another page or two of poemy stuff, and although it's been a couple of weeks since I started, I haven't typed any of it up yet. I have in mind a larger structure than I've worked with before -- I think, actually, that I'm envisioning a book manuscript, or a section thereof, even while I'm first-drafting stuff. That's new and different. Manuscripts I've done before (chapbooks or longer) have been more a matter of "go through all the poems and pull stuff out and figure out how to put it together" which makes me think of the artist carving an elephant from stone, taking the stone and chipping away everything that doesn't look like elephant. Except not really. Anyway, I'm envisioning a long-ass poem, fragmented, the fragments and sections interspersed throughout the whole of something longer. It's a little weird to imagine the skeleton of the larger effort before having written the meat and fin and feather of it, but I think it is a useful direction at least for now.

Feeling a bit lonely this weekend but it is a useful loneliness, a productive thing -- something to push against and feel it pushing back. A fruitful resistance.

Michael Cunningham, on Charlie Rose the other night, talking about how everyone's life has stories in it -- I often wonder what mine might be. I try to have faith that they are there & that if I keep chipping away at it everything that isn't elephant will fall away and leave my story standing there, unashamed and evident.

What's even better than getting published?

Go congratulate Trista -- she and her partner are now the mommies of a gorgeous baby girl! I haven't been reading Trista's blog for very long, but she's awfully good at telling stories, so I suspect we'll be hearing some great baby stories very soon. :)

My poetry group met this afternoon -- we usually meet on a weekday evening but sometimes our schedules get nuts and the only time we can find is a Saturday late morning/early afternoon. We were out at D.'s house; she lives out in the boonies of Nashville, IN and you go down this rather steep and somewhat daunting gravel road to get there. Her house is a sweet little log cabin surrounded by trees -- green green green green everywhere! -- and bird feeders, and guarded by a big Rottweiler mix who'd be more likely to lick you to death than actually do anything remotely guard-doggish. I can imagine living out in the woods like that, stocking up on everything in the wintertime because you'd be bound to get snowed in a few times -- sometimes I think it would be lovely to live in a little cabin or cottage and get snowed in a few times a year. If, of course, you could happily light a fire and snuggle in with a blanket and some books and a cat or three and not have to worry about making it into town for work. Sigh. I can picture my ideal life so clearly -- the only problem is I can't figure out where money would come from! Stupid money -- it just gets in the way of everything, doesn't it?

And then, of course, when I imagine living out in the boonies like that, I catch myself remembering that I am middle-aged and getting older, and thinking it would not be terribly wise to live out in the middle of nowhere by myself with no ready access to emergency medical care or anything like that. I do love the idea of looking out every window and seeing nothing but trees and grass and green things, maybe a pond, the occasional deer or fox stopping by for a visit. I am tired of hearing traffic and ambulance sirens and motorcycles.

Yeah, so I just need to win the lottery, right? *grin*

Anyway, we had a productive meeting -- making plans for our annual reading in October and workshopping a pretty good-sized stack o'poems. I am looking forward to the reading; I think most if not all of my poems will be from Provincetown & after. I guess you could say it will be the World Premiere for most of them. Except then people would look at you funny, so you probably wouldn't want to say that.

Thanks, by the way, to everyone who congratulated me on the Calyx acceptance. I'd been working on a pretty long string of rejections, so it was nice to break that streak. It's back to normal today, of course, with another rejection in the mailbox. Oh well. Time to send 'em back out! The only way to get published is to persist. Oh yeah, and writing writing writing, writing as hard and as well and as much as you can. All you can do is write the best poems you can figure out how to write, and keep on sending them out -- the rest is out of your control. That, and not letting either acceptance or rejection go to your head. When you sit down and face the blank page, that page doesn't give a crap who's accepted or rejected you before. It's a fresh challenge every single time. And that's the beauty of it.

Happy to inform

There are a lot of things in this world that feel good. One of them is plucking the white SASE from the mailbox, holding it up to the light before opening it (oh, come on, some of you do that too, I know it), peering through the envelope at the letter inside, dimly making out the words "happy to inform you that" and tearing into the envelope.

(Yes, maybe it's gauche and boring to post the details of one's rejections and acceptances on one's blog. So what. It's not like the non-poety people in my life are interested in hearing about it, and I do like to share happy news with people who might appreciate it.)

So, Calyx will be publishing my poem "Against Metaphor" next year. I don't know which issue yet. But I do like Calyx very much, so I am pleased. And now if you'll excuse me, I have a little self-congratulatory butt-waggling acceptance dance to perform.

Poetry Midwest

Check it out -- my poem "Windows" appears in the new issue of Poetry Midwest, which just went online today. (My poem "Door" was in there a few issues ago. Yes, I write poems about things other than house parts, honest!)

I believe they're still reading submissions for the next issue -- hint, hint, allayouse. :)

Endangered languages

Interesting article in the new IU alumni magazine about endangered languages -- languages currently spoken by so few people they are in danger of dying out -- being pushed aside by the "predator languages" such as English, Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi. Some of the languages discussed in the article are Lakota (Sioux Indians), Efutu (spoken in part of Ghana), and Yiddish.

As anyone who writes probably instinctively understands, a concept for which you have no language effectively doesn't exist for you. When languages are lost, sometimes concepts die off with them, entire ways of thinking and of seeing the world. The classic example, of course, is the Eskimo language that has a whole bunch of different words for snow. How many of us look at snow and just say "snow" when, if we had the words for it, we could see that it was granular crunchy snow, or fluffy soft snow, or snow that comes as a complete surprise? How many of us would recognize all the kinds of love in our lives if we only had the words for them? And all the kinds of hunger, all the kinds of joy?

The article has a sidebar with facts about a few of the world's endangered languages. I thought these two were especially poignant:

Mohawk, one of the more famous North American Indian languages, is polysynthetic. That is to say, every verb must describe the action, the agent, the recipient, and the time of action. For example, the English phrase, "I am currently bringing the sugar to someone," is a single word in Mohawk: "tkhetsikhetenhawihtennihs."

Boro, a language spoken in northeastern India, has some of the world's most descriptive verbs. These include onsra: to love for the last time; gagrom: to search for something below water by trampling; and egthu: to create a pinching sensation in the armpit.


Of course, this is why we write poems -- to describe the things for which normal language is hopelessly inadequate.

What concept or action do you wish your language had one single word to describe?

...Sincerity

Every time I see the word "sincere" I think of Linus trying to find the most sincere pumpkin patch in which to spend the night, in hopes of being visited by his beloved Great Pumpkin.

What is the Great Pumpkin you are waiting for in your sincere pumpkin patch, the one you believe in even when your crabby older sister says you're crazy, the one for whom you'd wait all night shivering among vines? And when the shadow rising over the horizon turns out to be a stupid beagle ... what then?

Now this is nice...

Poking around online, I found a really gorgeous Yusef Komunyakaa poem over on Ploughshares' website -- "Ode to the Guitar."

The plucked strings tremble
& traverse the heart,
back through that other
strong muscle singing blood
& guilt. ...

Go read the rest of it -- it's really lovely.

Landlocked sky

Tonight after rain the sky went sepia, the green grass and green trees reflecting back a blackish shade. Sepia, then wet copper, then deep to blue to black.

I'm quite addicted to pandacams these days. There's a baby at the National Zoo (if that camera is at capacity, try here) and another even younger one in San Diego. Baby pandas are just the cutest little boogers imaginable. Ssssh, don't tell my cats (they think that title is theirs and theirs alone).

Dear World: I am feeling quite determined to apply to low-residency MFA programs in the near future. There is no need to continue testing said determination by making more things fall apart in expensive fashion. There's "making sure I have to jump over hurdles so I appreciate it" and there's ridiculous, and we're closing in on the ridiculous here. Just cut it out now. Thank you very much.

I am reading Rachel Zucker's The Last Clear Narrative. It is giving me some ideas about how to proceed with a couple of long poems I'm working on (one I've already got a version of on paper, and one that so far exists mostly in a framework in my head). One thing I have found over the past few years is that my reading and my writing mature in parallel -- being willing to take risks in reading, digging into poets whose form & language is very different from my own and who maybe even mystify me a bit at first, leads directly into a greater capacity for risk-taking in my own work. And god only knows risk-taking is important. Essential, even. I am only beginning to understand this, after over thirty years of writing. When I took a class with Cathy Bowman a couple of years ago, she had us read very broadly, for which I am still grateful; one of the poets we read, Stephanie Strickland, is someone I probably wouldn't have attempted on my own and that would have been my loss, as I enjoyed her work a great deal. It is also good to spend time reading poets you immediately enjoy and identify with and feel comfortable with, but I think your own writing (or my own, anyway; I shouldn't presume to speak for anyone else) benefits most from the effort to grasp what is not immediately lovable: the different, the strange, the (to use a loaded word here) difficult. (Or, to read poets who foreground clarity in the ways that your own work is difficult. Read stuff that doesn't sound like you, is the point.)

I didn't get that until a couple of years ago, and now that is one thing I always want from teachers -- introduce me to poets I might not otherwise read or know about. Cathy Bowman & D.A. Powell both gave me some of that (Powell was the one who recommended Rachel Zucker) and that has helped my writing at least as much as anything either of them ever said about my own poems. When I think about doing an MFA, about half of what excites me is the thought of having teachers giving me reading suggestions for a couple of years. There's just so much out there that I could spend eight hours a day reading and still miss out on good stuff.

I don't always have the critical vocabulary to put into words what someone else is doing. I couldn't, right now, write a paper about what Rachel Zucker's book tells us about the concept of "narrative." There is value in doing that kind of critical work, of course, but right now what works best for me is just to read the work fairly closely without trying to explain it to myself. Where are the gaps, how does she get from Point A to Point B. "Look at what she's doing here" more than "this is why she's doing this." One of my long poems is about the experience of being a spinster (I love that word) and I know that it is not going to be a Point-A-to-Point-B narrative, and unlike a lot of what I write it's probably not going to have so much of a beginning and a middle and an end. It's not going to make a big old "spinsterhood is powerful" statement, which is what I probably would have written two or three years ago. I'm not sure exactly what it is going to do, but I'll find that out as I go along. (See Charlie's excellent post on "Process and Product" for some thoughts along those lines, by the way. I know a lot of times I feel as though I'm just writing instinctively, but later on when I look back at what I've done I can figure out what I was doing and why -- but I sure couldn't have told you what my plans were before the words were on the page.)

When I got together with my friend S. last week I gave her a couple of my very recent poems, and she was astonished at how much my voice has changed since the last time she read much of my work (probably about three years ago). I am pretty sure I'm still the same person (more or less) and I suspect you can still tell the poems were written by the same person, but yes, there has been a change. For the better, I think... I hope.

As with many things, I suppose time will tell.

Politically incorrect speech

I keep calling my cats "you people." As in, "are you people ready for dinner or what?"

Note to self: Nobody appreciates being referred to as "you people."



I think the germs from my rotten tooth jumped down my throat when their toothsome residence got yanked out from under them, and took up residence. I now have a sore throat and a cold. Summer colds are a drag. What is it about being mildly sick that makes you think you should be able to just quietly read a book or write for a while, but then makes your brain just fuzzy enough that you can't quite concentrate? Hmph.

That's it. That's all I got.

How do you feed it?

Got together with an old friend of mine, S., after work today. She was in my writing group, the one I started, that met weekly from 1985 to 1994 or so (and continued to meet sporadically for several more years after that); and she went to Provincetown for a workshop a couple weeks after I did, so I was eager to compare notes. Unfortunately her experience wasn't as good as mine, though she did get something from it. Summer workshops can be a bit of a crapshoot, especially picking a teacher -- even if a teacher has had rave reviews from other people, it's impossible to know whether this will really be the right teacher for you, will give you what you need. I've been extraordinarily lucky; I've been to ... hmm ... 8 or 9 summer workshops, and two of them have blown me away, sent me home completely fired up and ready to leap off the cliff and go somewhere new/deeper with my writing. And the rest were pretty good.

S.'s experience, which she'd hoped would be just the kick in the pants she needed to vault to the next level with her own work, has made her think long and hard about the next step in feeding her writing. Like me, she's considered low-residency MFA programs, but she's never seemed quite certain that was what she needed to do. (In fairness, I was never certain until the prospect of possibly doing one at FAWC arose -- and yes, I will apply to several other places as well, but I think I'm waiting to send out applications until FAWC gets their program underway and starts taking apps -- depending on how long that takes; I'm not sure what their time frame is.) S. hasn't done as many summer workshops as I have, but she's done some, and as our contrasting experiences suggest, you can't be guaranteed you'll get what you need -- and a week of working with someone, really, just isn't that long. Not when what you need, or part of what you think you need anyway, is a mentor -- someone who will kick you in the pants, push you, challenge you, in ways that a peer just can't. When you workshop with peers, you have the responsibility of challenging them right back -- and, selfish as it is, I just want someone to challenge me; I don't want to have to give back what I get. Just for a while.

Anyway, a mentor is only part of what I think can help my own work, and that was a bit of a tangent anyway. Mainly, I wanted to ask: how do you feed the beast that poetry is? You write; you read; but what else? Is there a point when you permanently step away from the "student" role, or more precisely, should there be such a point? (I have one friend who's been writing for longer than I have, she's been writing seriously for 35-40 years, and she still takes classes and workshops, several of them every year, as well as peer-workshopping with 2 different groups -- and I wonder sometimes whether it would be better for her to spend some time trying to trust her own sense, her own voice. But what's right for her may, of course, be different from what's right for me.) When you start publishing a lot, do editors start to provide the "pushing" that teachers give in the early stages of a career? (O funny word, "career," implying as it does a mappable trajectory and, well, a paycheck...) What else feeds the beast? Travel? Love? Fine wine? Can you bribe the Muse?

It's pretty clear to me that a low-res MFA would give me the biggest shove in the right direction right now, but it's not at all certain that I will be financially able to do that. And hell, who knows if I will even get accepted anywhere. So it can't be the only path I consider.

I figure I've got about a year "window of opportunity" before I fall back into complacency -- so I have some time to mull this over, and hopefully by next spring/summer I'll be able to start working on some applications.

And I am sorry that my friend didn't have the radiant experience that I did in Provincetown -- but talking to her reminded me not to take what I got for granted, reminded me how fortunate I am, reminded me how much work I did to make myself ready to be pushed & to take myself to a place where that was likely to happen.

(Carol -- Katie was in my friend's workshop too! Sometimes I like it when the world gets small.)

Cheerleader + Librarian

Congratulations to Jenni -- she has work in the current issue of Arsenic Lobster, as does my fellow Bloomingtonian Joseph Kerschbaum.

Further Adventures of the Renegade Librarian: I mentioned WorldCat in an earlier post. If any of y'all who have published books are curious to know how many libraries own your book, but don't have ready access to WorldCat, drop me a comment -- be sure I have your name and the title of your book(s) -- and I'll be happy to look 'em up for you. Chapbooks too, so long as they have an ISBN. (You don't have to give me the ISBN for me to look them up -- it's just that non-ISBN-owning chapbooks are not likely to be included.)

Bonus, I'll do it from work and count it as a reference question, since we have to keep track of how many of those we get. *grin* If you want to see the whole list of libraries, those get really long so I won't post them, but I'd be happy to copy/paste it into your email.

Yes, I'm just a happy little bibliographic geek, I am! When Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (the place I'm probably proudest of being published) came out, I checked WorldCat every few days to see how many more libraries had added it. It's in 153 libraries now, a year and a half after publication, which is pretty good.

How it happens

So funny how poems happen in the brain, like little electrical misfirings (but productive ones). Today I was standing in line at the circ desk of the main library, with a pile of poetry books in my arms (I'd gone up to the tenth floor -- where the poetry lives -- with one call number on a piece of paper, but of COURSE I kept plucking books from shelves like ripe fruit that had to be picked RIGHT NOW -- like I need to bring more books into this house, sheesh). I was gazing aimlessly at a book truck stacked high with returned books behind the desk, and my eye landed on one that had the word "DECISION" prominently in the title on the spine. Only, with my middle-aged vision, I thought it said "INCISION" and I thought, yeah! that's a word I should use in a poem someday, with its connotations of precision and of deliberate injury with healing intent. Then I remembered the poem I revised yesterday, the last stanza of which has the image of carving a name into a gravestone, and all of a sudden I realized that the name needed to be incised, not carved. And just coming up with that one little word made me irrationally happy, delighted, buoyant -- so I didn't mind when my stop by the post office to check my P.O. Box yielded only an advertising flyer and a rejection slip.

(I'm actually glad to get the rejection slip, as I've got a LOT of poems out right now, many of which have been out for months and months -- the ones that came back today went out in March, and at least one of them -- I'll have to check -- has been considerably revised since then. So now I can send 'em back out. I swear, it's like I on-purpose picked the places that would be slowest to respond this time around!)

P.S. How on earth did it get to be August already?? Man.

P.S.2. Whoever thought up the horribly annoying new Target commercial -- the one that starts off "I like backpacks and I cannot lie" -- needs to be FIRED. That commercial bugs the crap out of me.

P.S.3. Interlibrary loan rocks my little bitty world. Seriously. If it's in WorldCat, which compiles the holdings of hundreds of libraries and contains over 33 million records, I can probably get it delivered to me within a few days just by clicking on a couple of clicky things. I've gotten my hands on all kinds of obscure little chapbooks and random small-press stuff. It is, as they say, a beautiful thing.

Poet's Market

I had a "30% off any paperback" coupon from Borders, so (silly silly me) I wandered in there today. Lo and behold, the 2006 Poet's Market was on the shelf, so I used the coupon on that. If anyone would like the 2005 edition, I will either trade it for another book if you've got something I might want, or else I will send it for the cost of postage and a padded envelope (not sure how much that would be, maybe 4 bucks or so? it is a fairly large book). For that matter, I still have the 2004 edition, if anyone could use that -- same deal. Both are somewhat dog-eared and lightly annotated. I will also consider trading for recent issues of journals I haven't already read -- esp. if you have the Martin Espada-edited issue of Ploughshares.

I have been reading Lucia Perillo's new book, Luck Is Luck -- wonderful stuff. I took a workshop with her in 2002 at the Indiana U. Writers' Conference and enjoyed it quite a bit.

I keep wanting to make popcorn and then remembering I have a big hole in my mouth where my tooth used to be, and popcorn would probably be a Spectacularly Bad Idea. Fooey. I really love popcorn.

Happy Birthday, Stanley Kunitz

In honor of the 100th birthday of Stanley Kunitz today, NPR's "All Things Considered" had a very nice story, featuring Kunitz reading his poem "The Long Boat." You can listen to the audio on NPR's website (and there's some additional material there as well). According to the story, he is spending the day with friends & family at his home in Provincetown. I hope he has a wonderful birthday. It is a beautiful day in Provincetown, 75 and sunny with a light breeze.

Also see this nifty graphic from the New York Times: "You have to fight for your poems."

And this article from the Boston Globe: "One hundred years of plenitude."

I was fortunate enough to hear Kunitz read at the Fine Arts Work Center in August of 2003, when he was only 98 (only!) -- a reading that was special enough even the New Yorker covered it (towards the end of this long and very interesting article). I was deeply moved by his presence, his spirit, and his commitment that night -- which was also my first experience with FAWC, where I had such an amazing, life-changing week this summer. Kunitz was instrumental in the founding & development of FAWC, so I (like so many others) owe him a debt of gratitude even beyond what we all owe him for his poetry. As if poems like "The Wellfleet Whale" and "The Layers" and "Touch Me" weren't enough.

And when I feel like a late bloomer, at the ripe old age of 44 and haven't published a book yet, I think about how much of his best work happened in his eighties, and I feel hopeful again.

Happy, happy birthday, Stanley Kunitz. The world's a better place for poetry because of you.


And happy birthday, too, to bloggers Rebecca Loudon and Teresa Ballard. Note to mothers anticipating elective C-sections in July: Avoid the 29th unless you want the kid to grow up and write poetry, apparently. And what mama in her right mind would ever wish for that? *grin*

Note To Self

Words to use in a poem:
tropopause
altimeter

On facing fear

When half my tooth crumbled and fell out of my mouth last night, my first thought (well, after the incoherent "what the fu......?" one) was: I wonder when and how this image will show up in a poem?

Most people would think me weird for that. Not that I care. :)

We all have silly things that frighten us, some more than others. Some people are terrified to fly. Others are terrified of snakes, bridges, poverty, the dark. Me, I'm deathly afraid of dentists. I remember once the late great Warren Zevon was interviewed, after he'd been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and he said that he'd always been afraid of doctors and that ended up not working out so well for him. With dentists, it's not even so much the fear of pain (though that's there) as the fact that it freaks me out to have someone all up in my face like that, and having my face pushed around, and having someone's hands all in my mouth.

Happily, the new dentist I went to today has very small hands.

So tonight I have one tooth less, and one bottle of vicodin more, than I did before. And eventually, the experience of forcing myself to stay in that chair will turn up in a poem.

I hope it's a funny one. The world needs more funny dental poems.

For the record: when a tooth falls apart and a big piece falls out of your mouth? It feels just like it does in those dreams where your teeth crumble.

On a happier note, I fired up NASA TV online at work today to watch the shuttle launch. It made me really happy. There was one shot from the camera mounted on the fuel tank, looking back at the earth, where first you could see the coastline of Florida and then later the blue curve of the planet.

Years and years and years ago, the very first book of poetry I fell in love with was The Space Child's Mother Goose. I was a child of the Space Age, through and through.

It all connects up somehow, or would if it weren't for this Vicodin.

Things fall apart, just a little, things crumble when we're not expecting them to. But we dope ourselves up and we carry on. And that's what life is all about.

Dear Muse: Please excuse Anne from getting anything done tonight, as she is doped to the gills following her extraction. Sincerely, [illegible scrawl]

At the risk of unoriginality...

...it's Too. Darn. Hot.

I probably wouldn't even have left the air-conditioned house today had I not had to dash next door and feed the neighbor's parakeets while she was out of town. It was even too hot to get in the car and take myself out for ice cream, and believe me, anything that keeps me from ice cream is extreme.

I did get some writing done today, though -- managed to take some disquieting dreams I've had lately and stuff them into a poem, which feels like a bit of a relief. (If something's going to nag at me like that, I may as well get some use out of it!)

Two fun library-related links for you:

Library Career Romances - From the 40s through the 60s, a popular trend in young adult fiction was the "career romance" in which young women pursued various professional careers and also (it's a shocker, I know) managed to find True Love. This page features library-related career romances, with titles like "Kitsy Babcock, Library Assistant," "Nancy Runs the Bookmobile," and "Books and Beaux." I am quite amused.

Banned Books Bracelets - These bracelets have links that are designed to look like the covers of various frequently-banned books, like Go Ask Alice and Annie on my Mind and Howl. Proceeds go to the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. They come in both adult and kid sizes (featuring adult and kid books respectively). I think I'm going to have to order one of these, especially since I've actually read all the books featured on the adult one. (I know, I'm such a show-off. *grin*)

Stay cool, y'all.

It's not the heat, it's the stupidity.

Feeling less than sharp, less than fully verbal the past couple of days. I think it's partly the weather -- we've had Excessive Heat Warnings from the weather service, dewpoints as high as eighty (they say most people start feeling uncomfortable when the dewpoint hits 65), temperatures into the nineties with typical Hoosier humidity. I keep the a/c running in the house, even though every time it cycles on I can hear the pennies (and quarters, and nice shiny Susan B. Anthony dollars...) draining from my poor bank account. Ice cream, I think, is on today's agenda. And I'm very glad I decided against going up to Indianapolis to watch the RCA Tennis Championships in person -- for one thing Andre Agassi pulled out due to injury and he's the one I most wanted to see -- and for another, sitting outside for several hours sounds entirely less than pleasant today. (I am rooting for Taylor Dent, though; I saw him practicing before a tournament several years ago, and had no idea who he was at the time but was highly impressed by this kid who was whacking the ball just incredibly hard. It's been nice to see him get his act together & start to make something of himself.)

I've managed to be pretty productive the past couple of weekends -- drafting two things-that-might-turn-out-to-be-poems each weekend -- I'm satisfied with my level of productivity anytime I'm writing at least one "keeper" a week, so this is good. Hopefully I can keep it up this weekend despite the weather.

In honor of the weather and because I've little else to say, an old poem:


Harvesting

The summer wears on
becomes overripe and malodorous.
You try not to move too much
but always something calls you,
the phone, a kid selling candy,
the water for your dinner boiling over.
Every action feels like an uprooting,
limp pale tendrils pulled through dust
and clods of dry earth.
You want it to rain.

But what you planted grows relentlessly
despite the weather,
tomatoes swell and split and fall,
zinnias grow too tall for bouquets.
In back, early windfall apples
hit the ground at odd moments,
plock, and you gather them in paper bags
but it's too hot to can or bake pies.
Every night you check
the asparagus, cut the stalks
when they're still tender,
finger high. What you miss
keeps growing, ferny and defiant.
No matter how much you harvest
some escapes you, falls free,
goes to seed.

-A.H. 1987
published in Calapooya Collage, 1988

your laugh for the day

Go read The Dan Brown Code, written and produced by Spatch. Even if you haven't read the best seller in question (as I haven't), this is a rather hysterically funny sendup. (And if you like this, there's much more amusement to be found on his site.)

Oh, and last night's Enormous Burp? That had nothing to do with the Large Fruity Drink, which only made me slightly smilier than usual (though I do admit to being a lightweight when it comes to alcohol-containing concoctions). No, that Enormous Burp was the sound of a cheeseburger attempting to, uh, get itself evicted from paradise. Let's just say the food at that place leaves something to be desired.

Carry on. :)


Oh! Also: there is a lovely article on Stanley Kunitz in this week's Provincetown Banner. What I'd give to be in Provincetown tomorrow night... sigh.

*burp*

It has come to our attention that this blog has had altogether too much thinking and cogitating and generally pointless rumination going on lately. Consequently, the remainder of this post will be devoted to the aftermath of my first (and, one rather hopes, my last) trip to "Cheeseburger In Paradise," which just opened up in the building where Chi-Chi's (late lamented home of half-price after-work margaritas and at least one known case of hepatitis) used to be.

*BURRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP*

Ahhhhhhhhh. Much better.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Love,
The Mgmt.

(The pina colada wasn't bad. Too sweet by half, but nice and fruity, and nice and big. We like nice big fruity things here at Land Mammal, yes indeedy do.)

to chew on...

The moment of change is the only poem. [Adrienne Rich]

The thing that is broken has particular authority over the act of change. [Louise Gluck]

I trust language maybe a little too much. But it seems safer than some other things I've trusted in my life.

I was going to say "it all ties together somehow" but I think the point these days is that it doesn't. Or doesn't have to.

Simultaneously longing for & resisting closure in my work. That's the point of it right now, I think, or the goal.

Headache. Goodnight.

the hiss of interstellar static

Just as the universe of space-time is made up of mostly nothing, vacuum scattered with brief luminous intensities, so being human is made up of mostly distance, unbridgable, which we must somehow forgive.

We can never be quite whole, but we can be quite holy.

What's messing with my head:

For the past, oh, couple of weeks or so (ever since the you-know-what in you-know-where-town that everyone is probably sick of hearing about by now) I've been in the weirdest place, mentally: at the same time as self-confident and as filled with self-doubt as I have ever been in my life.

Which leads to such odd juxtapositions as being head-over-heels in love with my own newest poems, and at the exact same moment wondering whether I have enough talent that I should even dare set pen to paper, much less toy with the idea of going into an mfa program or god forbid trying to get a (sssshhhhhhh) book published someday.

I have no idea what this is about.

(Although it seems to be a place from which I can get some work done, so I shouldn't complain.)

So we should have poetry karaoke, yes?

An odd thing, the last couple of nights: though I've sat down at my desk and scribbled a little bit, spent a little time reading, most of my writing time has turned into "sitting there reading poems aloud to the empty room" time. I've been reading my own poems aloud a bit, the newer ones, and I've been reading a bunch of poems from Cocktails out loud and realizing how much better I get them when I do that (and so appreciating the precision and the ring of them as I read -- he does some nifty stuff with rhyme I almost overlooked on the page), and I've read a few others aloud as well. But this is part of writing practice, yes? I think it is. I think it counts.

I've got to figure out routines that work. I'm not doing so well at sitting down at my desk from 7 till 10 every evening, which is what I'd like to do; I've gotten a late start the last couple evenings but have still made myself sit down and do a little work just to stay in touch with it. Weekday evenings, after a full day of work, just aren't the best time for me to do a lot of actual writing as a general rule, and if I sit down in hopes of feeling really productive and draft-y I usually get disappointed. (And I am SOOOOO not a morning person.) So I think I will try to spend evenings journaling and reading and doing exercises -- writing imitations, trying forms, stuff like that. Fiddling, tuning the instrument. Also reading aloud for a few minutes every evening, because that feels useful and necessary right now. Then, weekends, I will be revved up and ready to do some serious writing.

My poetry group meets tomorrow night, and I've promised that instead of bringing a poem to be workshopped, I'm going to take the time we'd normally spend on one of my poems & tell them all about Provincetown. I'm going to read them a few D.A. Powell poems (I think I'll read them the "dogs do love trash" one even though they will be scandalized *grin*) and then I'm going to pick out a few things from my notes to talk about and then I'm going to read them two of the new poems I wrote, talking about how I drafted & revised them. I'm really pleased with how I handled the revision process on "Fog, Provincetown" and "Hold" & talking about that will give them some of what I learned during the week.

Thinking of my friend S. who is in Provincetown this week, in Martin Espada's workshop. I envy her. When she gets back we're going to get together and compare notes.

Got a really nice second-hand compliment today on my poem in the current Rattle. It's little things like that sometimes that keep you going. I'm happy just to know someone actually reads my crap; to get a compliment from a stranger is, as they say, gravy. I write for myself, yes, for that feeling I had walking down Pearl Street with my arms open whispering yes ... that's why I do it. But to be listened to, to be read, to be heard, to have someone whose work I respect come up to me the morning after a reading and tell me I inhabited my poem as I read it, to know by the response someone else gives me that my words are ringing true -- that's sweet, sweet, sweet. (Reading a poem to someone is like sex: sometimes you know when you're doing it right just by listening to how their breathing changes.)

Marge Piercy was the first poet I really enjoyed reading aloud, and then Plath, of course: "Stasis in darkness..." I still get out Hopkins sometimes for the sheer pleasure of his words on my tongue. I'm not a "performance poet" by any stretch of the imagination, but sometimes I know when I've gotten it right by how it rings in an empty room -- or a room that isn't empty. I know by listening to how the poem's breathing changes. In Powell's workshop we talked about reading your poems in the bathroom for the acoustics. So now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go talk to myself for a while like the crazy woman I know I am.

Hello, Dennis

It started raining several hours ago & is supposed to rain for the rest of the week. Thanks, Hurricane Dennis!

I still feel a bit cut loose from routine, even though I've been back home for over a week. I'm trying to take this as an opportunity to reshape said routine. I would like to spend every evening from 7 to 10 in my study, reading and writing. Tonight I went in there about 7:20 and emerged about 9:40, although I did take a couple of breaks. Not too bad. Finished reading Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. Interesting stuff, and gave me some ideas for working with longer forms.

This summer sometime I want to tackle a major revision of my longish poem "Interstellar Static" (which a few of you have seen). We talked about it in Provincetown and the suggestion that most made the hair rise up on the back of my neck was to write it in a much more fragmented form. I might write fragments from different time periods, or write formally different pieces, or even use different voices entirely. I might make it a bit of a mosaic. Maybe it will be something you have to stand a little distance from in order to see the clear picture.

The thrum at the seabed of my feelings today alternates between excitement and fear. I woke this morning with a sinus headache (again: thanks, Dennis!) and wicked cramps and a rather deep-seated sense of dread, so I stayed home from work. It's easy for me to say "yes, I'm thinking about doing a low-residency MFA and the thought of trying to tackle a two-year program that costs about what I make in one year, when I have no savings and am driving a 14-year-old car that will need to be replaced soon, is scary as heck and makes me want to throw up" but. When I say that I'm excited and scared about what comes next, I think I really mean the poetry.

There is the joy of falling in love with something at the very moment you also realize it is going to be taken away from you. And no I'm not entirely sure what I mean by that.

Although on Friday of the workshop, sitting in the Adams Pharmacy drinking a bottled Frappuccino and watching it rain, watching a dog walk by with his stuffed toy held in his mouth like an Oscar statuette, the sense of "I don't want this to ever, ever end" was almost overwhelming.

It was a fabulous workshop but over and above that there was the fact that I came there needing to be in that space. I knew what I needed to feel and I went to a place where it was possible to feel that.

Walking down Pearl Street in the newly minted dark, after the student reading, I spread my arms wide and laughed. And then I went back to my room and I wrote.

That's the happy ending of it: And then I went back to my room and I wrote.

I know what I need to feel and I need to make my own home into a place where it is possible to feel that.

Tonight's forecast says "Humid with thundery rains."

Nesting Instinct

Like a woman about to go into labor, I suddenly find myself nesting -- clearing space -- I've just cleared an entire (smallish) bookcase and am going to move it to the other side of my tiny study, next to the poetry bookcase which is overflowing -- am generally reorganizing bookcases this week. Target has some 8-shelf cheapo bookcases on sale for $36 and I think I will buy two to replace the nasty block-and-board shelves in my dining room -- these will be taller so will hold more books. I am making space for something and I don't think it's just more books. (Although, speaking of which, it is entirely shameful -- and "shame" is a word I do not use lightly -- how many books I have bought and not yet read. During the several years when I was not writing, I was reading very little -- and have unearthed an entire stash of literary journals from 1995-97 that never got read. I could retire now and never move my ass from my sofa and still not run out of stuff to read before I died.) I am also thinking about doing some serious weeding, selling some books I probably won't read again -- I would give them away or trade them, but if what comes next is what I think it is, I'm going to need cash money.

A fairly productive weekend. Yesterday I drafted two new poems, wrote in my journal for a while, and revised two of my Provincetown poems to the point where I feel they may be finished. (And I'm damn happy with them too.) Today I have been reading Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (a D.A. Powell recommendation) and have written in my journal somewhat productively though I haven't really touched any poetry.

I am making space for something. I am hungry, hungry, hungry for whatever comes next.

Radio Reminder

This coming Sunday (July 10) I'll be reading three of my poems on our local NPR radio station's poetry show, The Poets Weave. You can listen online using either RealPlayer (.ram) or Windows Media Player (.wma) format, but you have to tune in on time because they don't archive it anywhere -- and it's only a five minute program, so if you blink, you'll miss it...

Here's the details:

Sunday, July 10, 2005
11:45-11:50 AM Eastern Standard Time
(that's 12:45-12:50 PM Eastern Daylight/New York time, 11:45 Central Daylight/Chicago time, et cetera.)
To listen online: http://www.indiana.edu/~wfiu/listen.htm

(Of course, if you're within radio-signal distance of Bloomington, Indianapolis, or Kokomo, Indiana, you can pick it up on an actual radio. The URL above lists the various frequencies on which you might find the station, depending on where you are.)

I can never really stand the sound of my own voice on the radio, but I guess most people feel that way. About their own voices, I mean, not about mine. Although maybe people can't stand the sound of my voice, but if so, they've never told me! Actually I had an ex who used to say I had a phone-sex voice. I could never quite hear that myself, but hey, whatever works. :)

From notes I took in class last week

"the more influences you have, the better"

poem arises from act of living -- liminal moment -- not separate from, not expository or at some remove -- writing from the very crisis

Assignment: Find a line in your poems that feels like it has that ring of finality to it -- start from that line & write forward.

"whenever you find yourself playing with lines instead of writing, you're probably in a bad spot"

on line breaks: a real line can't be broken -- has a sense of autonomy, is a miniature poem in itself

"Revise towards strangeness" --Rachel Zucker

"so much of being a poet is like being a mollusk"

stanza = "room" in Italian. Think of poem architecturally -- how you move from one to another -- the feng shui of the poem.

"you never want to introduce anything into a poem that feels like an argument, or a judgement ... the reader will decide against you."

the spider-plant poem (little poems sprout & drop off of it)

punctuation as musical notation -- tension between "stop" mark & continuation of line
colon as aperture
fulcrum -- change in rhythm
systole/diastole

"the title is the priest of the poem -- it stands there & tells you how to behave. I don't believe in titles -- I believe I can step into the poem & talk directly to god."

Creeley: space between lines is a silence in which the heart can break

(after a discussion of the eroticism of doorknobs, bald heads, being caught): "face it, there's something erotic about just being alive ... it's all erotic until you can't do it anymore."

"Poems are written by bodies, they're not written by minds."

Hass: "a good poem contains its opposite"

Sometimes it's good to write more than you need so you have lots of bits and variations from which you pick and choose -- then go thru & maybe highlight the ones you like, the lines that are tonic, have a kind of entity about them -- pull them out & as necessary build bridges between them. "Be willing to honor the plasticity of language."

Try writing a sentence & endlessly subordinate & interrupt & do everything you can to keep from reaching the period.

a poet is a deity with the power of creation -- each created poem is a world -- the poet is then at the beck & call of the world that has been created -- that power & that responsibility to one's own creation -- take care that the worlds are sustainable

compress -- put pressure on -- every part of the poem

"The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully." --Stevens

the poet is a rat who builds his own maze & then has to find his way out

try using altavista babelfish to generate revision (!)

there's a faith in pushing past the edges -- in saying that things go on

recovering

...how we cleave and sunder, cleave and sunder--

Today I was in the throes of post-workshop blues, and missing people I haven't seen in years, and missing people I barely know, and feeling generally disconnected. I went out (by myself) to Third Street Park for Carrie Newcomer's annual free concert in the park -- always fun, with kids and dogs and picnics and hot air balloons drifting overhead and fireflies rising up out of the grass, and good music. I met a six-month-old black Lab pup who made me smell like puppy kisses.

So I was sitting in the park, listening to Carrie play. I looked around at people I know, and people who probably know people I know, and people I'll probably know someday, and people I don't know at all. And all of a sudden I thought, the sweetest connections are the ones you don't necessarily have to call on -- it's enough to know they're there, on the other side of the park or the other side of the planet, listening to the same music, under the same sky. It's enough to know they're there. And my heart filled right back up again.

And then the fireflies started rising up out of the grass, and I waited for a star to come out so I could wish on it, and it did, so I did.

"...wrapped in hope and good intentions, bare to the bone."

I did expect this

Hello, post-workshop blues. I've been expecting you.

Don't get too comfortable. I don't intend for you to stick around long.

Meanwhile, I'll just be over here with my head underneath the covers for a while.

Killer legs!

Thanks to Peter for pointing this out ... do check out a great interview with Eduardo C. Corral, and a chapbook of his work, over at Web del Sol. There's some tough and gorgeous work here. Bravo!

waking up

I took a nap this afternoon (snuggled up with one of the cats -- they are so so happy to have me home) and dreamed I was in a workshop. I don't know who the teacher was, I don't think he was anyone I know, but as the dream began (or as the part of it I remember began) I had just read a poem and the teacher said "Don't you all agree she needs to freshen all of her language?" and everyone was nodding and mm-hmming. I thought, but didn't say out loud, "But people like the language that they know!"

I'm even getting workshopped in my DREAMS now. How funny is that?

I do not remember any dreams that I may have had while in Provincetown. Maybe this is because I didn't sleep that well in my noisy B&B (there was sewer work on the house next door, so the construction vehicles started up every morning around 7:30 and the diggy-thing that shook the entire house started around 8, but that was OK since I wanted to get up no later than that anyway -- plus the parking lot, right outside my front window, was gravel and anytime a person walked through it to get to their car or to the door of the main house it went crunch crunch crunch, and traffic, and on the last night the boys in the room next door were apparently having a *ahem* very good time). Or maybe it's because the creative, associative part of my brain was getting such a workout all day and it was too tired to come up with images for dreams. Really, I'd write/revise for a good couple hours every morning, class for three hours in the afternoon, readings in the evening, and most evenings I did a little writing too. And even when I ate lunch or dinner, if I was eating alone & if I wasn't writing, I was reading poetry. I've never had a workshop that asked quite that much immersion of me. That's probably one reason it was so productive. It was kind of odd not to dream though.

The big catchup

Okay, rather than expecting everyone to scroll back through all my P-town posts to find responses to your comments, I'm just going to put them here in a big pile -- shuffle through them till you find yours. :) If I miss any, pester me here or in email....

Peter, re: It sounds wonderful. Tell DA Powell I *heart* him.
You can thank Carol, who was also in the workshop & noticed your comment, for this:

(He said it was sweet. *grin*)

Lorna Dee, re: Anne, check your email. I sent you some "drafty" type reframings of what I think are two good poems here.
I thanked you in email, but here too! I've already started reworking them (I'm pretty sure I've worked on both at this point), but I'm intrigued by your ideas too, & pleased that my drafts inspired you to play. You know, I've never loved revision, but this week, I couldn't wait to launch into it. It's like a connection finally happened in my brain about it.

Ginger, re: It's made me think about this whole blogging thing, and how I sometimes feel for bloggers the way I do for characters in a good novel.
LOL! Yes, I feel the same way, except that with characters in a novel I think "I wish I really could meet so-and-so" and with bloggers there's always some chance I may actually meet them at some point. (Case in point -- sitting around chatting with fellow workshoppers on the first day and mentioning blogging, only to have Carol say "wait! I know you!" That was startling at first, but turned out to add a neat extra layer to our interaction.) And yes, I did go out on a second whale watch -- Monday after class -- and we saw 3 humongous basking sharks (thirty feet long!) and got a nice close look at a finback whale. I normally see more than that when I go out, but I think it was just Somebody's way of reminding me that I wasn't there to see whales, I was there to write poems!

Sarah, re: it's so funny that you saw John Waters! living in baltimore, we saw him once at a bar in baltimore that he allegedly frequents. a kind of seedy, really dimly lit, always-packed-on-the-weekends, bar with a really fabulous jukebox. kind of a perfect place for him, i think.
Hee! Provincetown is a perfect place for him, too. I didn't see him to say hello or anything, just saw him going by on the street. And, glad you enjoyed reading the posts. It's kind of weird to have people who know me in "real life" reading these posts (though I submit that last week was the reality and the 8-to-5 job is the fictional construction...), but kind of nice too. :)

Rebecca, re: I'm enjoying reading about your conference. I only went to one, (twice) and even that was difficult for me. All I wanted to do was ride around on my bicycle, and, come to think of it, that's pretty much all I did. The poems didn't come until a year later.
I usually figure I've had a really good summer workshop if I get one decent poem out of it -- but always, always what I've learned comes back months or a year later and the poems come then. I'm amazed at how productive I was able to be this week -- and I bet there will be more as everything I learned filters down to deeper levels. This workshop was difficult for me -- in the sense that it stretched me & pushed me on both intellectual & emotional levels -- but it was a good difficulty.

Diane, re: How it takes you out of yourself and brings you back to your core, how it shakes all your dead leaves from your tree.
Yes, yes!!! Although in this case it felt like it didn't take me out of myself so much as bringing me to my best self. And yes, it will stay with me. I won't be that best self every day, but knowing that core is there will probably sustain me.

Emily, re: Anne, I LOVE this, LOVE this. It is making me cry. I think we have the same taste in women. [sad grin]
Awwwww, thanks. So you like the slightly salty ones too, eh? *grin* You know, I like that draft myself, though I think I wrote two this week that were better. But I'm definitely going to work with the Race Point one, and not just because I want to say big ass mola mola. :) Here is one of the things I learned as I wrote that draft, though: when I'm in a truly joyful and peaceful place, when I'm in the middle of falling in love with myself again, that's when I feel safe enough to access the sense of longing that I think peeks its little head out in that poem. I think that's why the week was risky (in a good way) for me -- and I think learning how to handle material that feels risky is one of the things D.A. Powell teaches best, even if he doesn't say it in so many words.

Suzanne, re: This is a keeper. This one you keep and redraft, Anne. I have some suggestions for you, but I'll wait until it has time to dry--it's still wet. I'm so happy this weekend is getting under your skin. :-)
Thanks!! Sure, send along your suggestions -- though I've already done some mucking around with it and suspect a major rewrite is already going to happen. I feel like I learned so much about revision this week & understand the process so much better -- I'm not nearly so afraid of it anymore. In a way that has freed me to write stuff I probably wouldn't have tried to touch otherwise. And yes, the week got under my skin -- waaaaaay down in there! It really was almost a physical sensation. Odd, that. But so good.

Carol, re: I didn't make it to the good-byes, Anne, but I can't bear good-byes, and why should we? It's hello.
Yes, exactly. That whole group bonded so tightly in just a few days -- I do suspect we've all entered each other's lives on a long-term basis, even if it just means each of us has the happiness of knowing the others are alive on this planet somewhere. Okay, that sounded REALLY sappy. Oh so what. :)

Jenni, re: He sounds wonderful. If I ever have the oppertunity, I'll definately take a class with him.
You should! I think you'd enjoy him a great deal. He would certainly have no trouble with your more "risky" material, and he'd probably give you a lot of good poets to read as well. (I swear the man has read everything!)

Jilly, re: glad it was productive and you got to meet my friend Carol. :)
Yes!! Meeting Carol was fabulous. Definitely get her to show you some of the new material she started working on there, too. Burning temples and so on. Amazing stuff.

Eduardo, re: Thanks for posting about your time in P.Town. I think I'm the only queen who hasn't visited the town yet. Sigh.
Oh honey. You must. You would be in hog heaven. (Okay, maybe I spent a bit too much time drinking at the Squealing Pig.) Provincetown isn't what it used to be -- it's way too expensive and too much new construction and too gentrified -- but it is still one of the Great Good Places in the world. And the Fine Arts Work Center does wonderful things. What I love about FAWC -- well, one of the many things to love -- is that, being a part of such a queer community, it is a completely safe and queer-friendly place without having to make a big deal out of it. It just is. I think that's part of why it is such a good place to write -- that level of honesty is pervasive & contagious. I haven't found that atmosphere at other summer workshops; I've never felt unsafe about coming out in other workshops, but at FAWC (and in P-town), it's like "coming out" isn't even an issue. Everyone just is whoever the hell they are -- whether that's a grizzled old Portuguese fisherman or a sparkly drag queen on rollerblades. Hell, it was even okay to be a librarian from Indiana there. :)

Gina, re: hope the transition isn't too jarring.
Yeah. *sigh* Going back to work is going to be hard. I fully expect a big emotional meltdown within the next ten days. In that workshop I felt simultaneously so totally vulnerable and so totally empowered -- and neither of those is necessarily a safe place to be on a day-to-day basis. It was worth it, though.


For everyone else who just posted good wishes and agreement -- thank you -- it felt good to share such a mind-blowingly good experience, and I thank you all for being there so I had someone to share it with. I like the idea of all that amazing energy somehow filtering out into the world! I do feel changed by the week. This happened to me once before with a summer workshop (at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, over ten years ago, with the poet Michael Carey) but this feels even deeper, stronger. I guess I must have really needed it.

Poets you come back to

One of the (many, many, many) things I learned in Provincetown was that I really need to go back to Wallace Stevens. I mean, I've read him -- of course I've read him; I did take poetry classes as an undergrad, after all! -- but I haven't read that much of him since I got my head screwed on (closer to) straight about poetry & about who I am as a poet. I've just ordered his book of essays, The Necessary Angel, and his Collected Poems. Stevens and Stein were the two most-referred-to poets in our workshop, I believe (no, I wasn't keeping track); I don't feel particularly drawn to go back to Stein right at this moment, but I suspect I should spend some real time with Stevens.

Are there poets (or other writers) you read early on in your writing life and then went back to much later? Who were they and what was that experience like? Or are there poets/writers you want to go back to now?

home again, home again...

As the plane descended into Indianapolis I saw all these flashes of light. I thought maybe there was a big fire or accident or something with lots of emergency vehicles, and then I realized it was fireworks -- a couple of larger displays, I think, and a ton of just individual people shooting off fireworks in their yard. It was so cool to see that from the air. Little flashes everywhere, all kinds of colors, bigger and bigger as we descended.

So I'm home, and my checked bag made it too, and the cats are just fine. I have a ton of blog comments, some of which I do want to respond to, but ... not tonight. I'm zonked. If you left me a comment in the last week and want a response and don't get one in the next day or two, please feel free to email me (ahaines at gmail dot com).

Very tired. Good night!

blogging while intoximacated (a little)

okay, I'm not that intoximacated but two beers is definitely enough to loosen me up a bit. whoops. :) Just got back to my b&b after saying goodbyes to my workshop people. I think the only time I've found it quite this hard to say goodbye after a workshop was Michael Carey's workshop at Iowa, whatever summer it was that I did that ... but no ... I think this one was actually harder. This group just really jelled for some reason -- six students and one teacher -- and I'm not just saying this because I gave out my blog address to everyone: every one of them is someone I feel privileged to have gotten to know. Every one of them is just ridiculously talented as a poet, and worked their butts off. Every one of them amazed me at some point with something they wrote or revised this week. And as for D.A. Powell, what can I say ... if you ever have a chance to take a workshop with the man, do it (especially if it's on revision *grin*). I think the best word for him as a teacher is generous. (Though "funny as shit" should work in there somewhere too.) I know that so much of it is happening to stumble across the right teacher in the right setting at the right time, and some of it is the student being open to learning, but above & beyond all that, he's just a fabulous teacher, and f'ing brilliant to boot.

Enough gushing, I suppose. I could go on all night, and I can't because I have to *sigh* pack my stuff so I can *sniffle* leave tomorrow. I may cry as the ferry pulls out of the harbor. I really may. All my feelings are just so heightened right now. It is probably a good thing there was no one of the appropriate gender/persuasion combo in the workshop, because I could have gotten myself in big trouble, letting myself be so heightened & vulnerable and in such a, yes this is the word for it, a loving space.

Oh! Sam Witt zipped out to P-town for the weekend, so he stopped by our last class as a Special Guest and read us the long poem of which we'd seen drafts -- it's really an amazing piece, and it was neat to hear him read it. He's a sweetheart too (he joined us for drinks tonight). Carl Phillips also showed up for tonight's reading, though I didn't get to meet him. Tonight's reading was much, much fun -- Doug Powell & Sonia Sanchez. She is quite an amazing performer/reader, and though she went over the usual allotted time you gotta admit she's earned it at this point in her life; and D. read really well too, with just the right amount of intro, and humor, and moments when the audience was just completely silent -- especially during his Poseidon Adventure poem ("[morning broke on my cabin inverted. tempest in my forehead]") -- god, that poem just wrecks me. His work makes me want to take more risks with my own. A lot of this week was about taking risks. That's the part I didn't expect to get from this, but got (and needed).

We did decide that there should be a poetry-workshop reality show -- somewhere in between American Idol and The Real World -- & it was decided that Jorie Graham would definitely have to be one of the poets. Maybe you had to be there. I know some of you are gonna find your way to this blog and read it, so feel free to chime in. *grin*

Okay, I'm going to start getting all maudlin and "don't want it to be over" and "I love youse guys" and all if I don't shut up and start packing my suitcase. So.

(I must remember to be very, very kind to myself for the next couple of weeks as I go through re-entry. A high as high as this week has been will almost inevitably have a crash to follow.)

Sorry, I know I'm posting a lot!

Race Point Notes 6/29/2005

I kiss the sweet cold salt from my own skin
twenty steps down to the water
twenty steps back
the waves’ crinoline rustle
each one advancing darkens its little moon of sand
how to describe the water’s color:
gray green brown blue white
if I met someone with eyes like that I’d marry her
and she’d wear seafoam lace
against her seafoam face

as I come down to the beach
there is a moment when the waves
are all at once all I hear
like stepping into a room

the ocean greener now as sun brightens through haze
a gull takes off from water, three small plashes
as its feet push off the surface
two whale watch boats at rest
they’ve got something but I don’t see blows
if I can’t see it from here it must be basking sharks
or a big ass mola mola
I just wanted to say big ass mola mola

something dark breaks the surface
then again – a small black – snout?
and a quick black arc
SEAL – whoa nellie – we have seal
a few yards offshore
surfaces three times, slick and soundless
then gone

sky bluer than water
water greener than sky

I just wanted to say big ass mola mola
I just wanted to say if I found a woman like this water I would marry her
as the waves come in
in long rows
and dead things wash ashore


(Anne Haines 6-29-2005 draft)

on a poetry high!

Tonight was the potluck bbq (much fun) and student reading. The student reading was SO AMAZING. There were so many absolutely incredible pieces read -- I was just blown away by the overall quality of everyone's work, much of which was new work from this week. I read a new piece-in-progress, cobbled together from some of the first-drafty stuff I posted here -- as I read it tonight I realized it is much closer to finished than I thought; it felt really good coming out of my mouth, really strong. And a couple of people from other workshops, including one whose poem (and performance) was one of my favorites of the evening, came up to me to tell me how much they liked my reading and to say I read very well. I say that not to boast, but just to share what a good, good evening it has been. (The audience overall was very attentive and receptive and generous.)

All of the writing teachers attended the reading, which was just wonderful -- at the IU conference none of the faculty ever bothers to attend the student readings, at least not that I can recall. And let me tell you it is a lovely experience to read a piece you feel good about with Robin Becker and Olga Broumas in the front row, and Sonia Sanchez, D.A. Powell, and Katherine Vaz in the audience as well. Sonia Sanchez caught up with all the readers afterwards and hugged us all and thanked us, which was so sweet of her -- she just has a wonderful energy. And Doug Powell said he was so proud of all of us. "Did you cry? I cried." Hehehe. He's just a terrific teacher, and has been extremely generous with his time and attention, socializing with his students quite a bit and making us laugh a lot. I could not have picked a better teacher for what I needed to learn at this moment. This has been one of the best workshop experiences I have ever had.

Doug & a bunch of my class (maybe all of them, I don't know) were headed over to the Squealing Pig for a drink, but much as I hate to miss an opportunity to hang out with such neat people, I felt compelled to come back to my room and write -- so that's what I'm about to do right now. But I feel so wonderful about the reading that I had to check in quickly and share this feeling with some folks who might understand just how good a poetry high like this can feel. God, I am just on top of the world right now.

Coming later, maybe: thoughts on why a good workshop is like good (and slightly kinky) sex. *grin*

A small revelation

I come here when I need to fall in love with the world again, and that is the same thing as falling in love with myself again.

Fog and rain and chilly breezes. The words are in me and all around me. Everything's a poem now and I feel very full.

It isn't easy. Nothing about this is easy. But it's the good hard work of being really alive.

Remind me ...

...that no matter how much fun I'm having, I should not stay out this late when I have work to do before class tomorrow; and if I do stay out this late when I have work to do before class tomorrow, I should go to bed go directly to bed do not pass go do not collect two hundred dollars, and not wake up the laptop & start checking email and reading blogs and stuff.

I owe several people email, blog comments, etc. At this point I'm guessing I will nto bother trying to catch up until maybe Satruday when I'm sitting around in Logan Airport.

It's pathetic how little I have to drink in order to legitimately say I am Blogging While Intoxicated.

I'm having a good time though. Poets are very silly people, we are indeed.

fog and harbor breezes

Did I mention I saw John Waters the other day? I'm 99% sure it was him -- he does live here, and I know for sure he was in town for the film festival a couple weeks ago, so it would almost be surprising not to see him.

Readings tonight by Katherine Vaz and Olga Broumas (who is working on a translation into Greek of the Kunitz poem "The Layers," so she read that poem in English and in Greek, and then some new & uncollected work of her own), and a slide talk by the painter Joel Janowitz, whose work I liked a great deal. Then Doug Powell & a couple other poets from the class & I wandered downtown to look at tacky tourist things and buy fudge. Good times.

Tomorrow morning we are supposed to do our morning writing outside, so I plan to get up a bit early and head for the beach. Then tomorrow after class I have my individual instructor conference. Those can be a bit difficult, even -- especially! -- with a good teacher; at best, I usually come away thinking that I have a lot of work to do but that it is work that's worth doing, and at worst I come away thinking that I really cannot write for shit. I'm looking forward to it, but I expect to feel pushed a bit. So afterwards I am going to treat myself to a nice dinner at Napi's. Then Robin Becker reads tomorrow night, which should be good.

Any of you who are reading these little updates and thinking that you'd like to come here for a workshop someday: DO IT. I'm serious. It is so worth it. They get so many amazing teachers here, and the students seem to be of very high caliber -- everyone in my class is a better poet than I am in some way or other, I think, and I don't always feel that about a summer workshop. We have a couple people with MFA's, everyone is well-read and experienced and serious about their work, and all in all it is a group that challenges me to stay at their level. Which is good, it's really good, it's what I need. And this town, what can I say about Provincetown, it's a magical place. There is no other town quite like it. In a perfect world I would stay here for at least a week and a half -- at least a couple days before the workshop & a couple days after it -- to enjoy the town just for itself. Because the workshop is requiring a lot of my time. But it's good. I mean, this morning I wrote four pages of new material. I seldom write that much in one day, much less in the MORNING! And I am getting what I wanted from this, what I needed. It's challenging me artistically and emotionally, and I needed that. There are some hard things about it, but hard in good, growth-producing ways.

I think that Hunter O'Hanian mentioned something at orientation about FAWC working to start a low-residency MFA writing program. I know they're starting a low-res MFA visual art program in connection with, um, UMass I think? I forget who. So maybe he was just talking about that and in my addled brain I heard him say something about a writing MFA. But if they really do start up a low-res program here, I believe I will have to apply. In fact I will think that it is a sign that there was a reason I did not apply to low-res programs before -- I was waiting for this one to come along. To come here twice a year and have my butt kicked for a week ... heaven. And imagine the faculty they'd likely put together! Mark Doty, Robin Becker, Marie Howe, other folks who teach here often.

Okay. I got poems to type up and maybe edit just a bit. And I want to be in bed before midnight -- I'd like to get up at 7, get out of here by 8:30 and on the beach by 9. Earlier if possible.

By the way the bit of poetry-shaped writing I posted earlier is certainly fair game for commentary -- it's EXTREMELY first-draft, and it's about 1/3 of what I wrote this morning. I may read the last section of it at the student reading on Thursday evening, or I may read something I haven't written yet -- we'll see.

We'll see.

snippety snippets

I still think everything I have ever written is crap. But I have this confidence that sometime soon I'll write something that is not crap. This is a pretty good place to be, productivity-wise if not sanity-wise. And I'd rather write lots than be overly sane anyway.

**********

Which well-known poet once briefly worked for the company that made Richard Simmons' infomercials and used to answer the phone when it was Richard Simmons phoning pretending to be his assistant Marcia? No, it wasn't Olga Broumas nor was it Robin Becker.

(I was laughing almost to the point of tears hearing that story though I'm not quite sure why.)

**********

This business of taking some "ring of finality" last lines from a poem and starting off with them is incredibly productive for me. Like, holy cow productive. I also hit a point this morning where I was just writing and writing and not worrying about making "a poem" out of it which is just where I wanted to get this week. I have a bunch of pages and somewhere in there I think is at least a poem.

**********

The doorknob that may or may not turn
The door that may or may not stick
The head hairless and revealed
The chance of being caught
The dark, the light, the dark
The known, the strange, the stranger
The unendurable beginning, the unendurable end
What quickens us & brings us to surrender
The breath from which our bodies come
The eros of just being alive
The door we push at & finally fall through

(class notes: things that are erotic)

**********

"Poems are written by bodies : they're not written by minds."

**********

[draft deleted]

Provincetown picture postcards

blurry Mark Doty


town landing, low tide


basking sharks (approx. 30 ft. long, humongous fish! taken from the upper deck of a 100-foot boat, if that gives you any sense of how big these suckers are)


ship and dock in fog


Pearl Street window

Quick, quick update

(or "quick, quick! Update!")

Had our first full class meeting today, and already I can tell I have many things to learn from Doug Powell. He's a neat teacher, and he seems to have read just about everything there is to read. He also goes off on tangents a lot, which might drive some people crazy but feels very natural to me anyway. Let's see -- we talked about reading one's poems aloud in the bathroom in order to revise (which somehow led to the virtues of irritable bowel syndrome...), and about the use of fart-sounding devices in poetry workshops, and ... oh yeah, other stuff too. Hee. Many more details later, I'm sure.

Fellow blogger Carol Peters is in the workshop with me. So the class is 1/3 bloggers. Oh my.

The rest as a quick list:

• I am pitifully un-well-read. This may or may not be remediable.
  
• Today is one of those days when everything I have ever written is crap.
  
• The above can, however, be a useful feeling if you use it to spur yourself to write something better and prove that you can write non-crap. It may also be a useful state of mind from which to work on revision, so.
  
• One of our assignments so far: find a bang-up ending from one of your poems -- you know, one of those endings where it just feels like an ending, bang pow, the big finish -- and start writing from those lines. This assignment made me immediately very excited, though I haven't started on it yet and now I'm tired.
  
• I have never been this quiet and shy in a workshop before. What gives? Possibly related to points #1 and #2 above. Is there a name for it where you know you're not really out of your depth but you feel as though you are?
  
• I would give a lot to be able to bottle the air here and bring it home with me. Harbor breezes, harbor breezes, harbor breezes. Oh lovely.
• It is only Monday and already I feel as though I'm running out of time.
  

Must write a bit. More later. Maybe not till I get home. (Yeah yeah. You and I both know I'll blog at least a couple more times this week. Addict.)

Mark Doty reading

Quick notes before I dive into the Pile Of Poems we're working on this week -- and also a lovely packet D.A. Powell gave us, which is mostly working drafts of his own poems (along with the final versions) -- handwritten and everything -- how cool is that?

I went out on a whale watch today but (for the first time in maybe a dozen times I've gone out from P-town) did not see even one whale! Still, it was a lovely day to be out on the water for a few hours, the naturalist was extremely adorable, and it was a pleasant afternoon. And they gave us passes for our next trip free, so if I can find time to go out again -- which I will, by hook or by crook (wait, what's Richard Nixon got to do with it?) -- I won't have to pay.

We had our orientation & a brief first class meeting tonight. There are only 6 in my class, so we should each get plenty of time to talk and stuff. Doug Powell seems very cool, chatty, laid-back; he said he's going to write each of us a "prescription" by the end of the week, giving us a list of poets he thinks we should read -- which is exactly what I always ask teachers for, so I will look forward to that. He also wants us to spend at least 2-3 hours every morning before class writing. Eek. :) Hopefully I can write on the beach, 'cause I haven't been to the beach yet. Tomorrow we will schedule our individual meetings with him -- we get an hour, which is way more than I've had at other conferences/workshops.

After our brief class meetings, Mark Doty gave a lovely reading. I enjoy his readings so much. He doesn't over-theatricalize the poems, but his presentation adds a lot, and I always notice lines and phrases (and even whole poems) that never stood out for me on the page. He said that there's a tradition at this particular podium (i.e. FAWC) of reading new work, especially for those who teach or read there year after year, just to prove to everyone you're actually doing something, but this year he decided to buck the trend & do a retrospective. Then he thought about how to narrow down the selection. First he thought he'd read Provincetown poems but he said that reading could go on till 2 am and that didn't help him any. He ended up reading, get this, nothing but poems set on Pearl Street, between the red barn down the road & the harbor. So every poem he read was set within 3 or 4 blocks of where we were sitting. (The Fine Arts Work Center is on Pearl St., as is Doty's house -- and so, incidentally, is the B&B where I'm staying.) It was a lot of fun, and afterwards I pestered him to sign my book (he commented on the fact that I had a bunch of pages marked -- "this is a brand new book and look at all those lovely markers already!"). I took pictures, but decided to be considerate & not use flash, and so they came out pretty blurry. I may post one later on anyway.

Olga Broumas (who's teaching this week) was in the front row & seemed to be especially enjoying the reading. Fun to watch poets watching/listening to a poet. (Robin Becker & Sonia Sanchez are the other poets teaching this week, although Sanchez was delayed by a late train in Boston and wasn't there this evening.) Doty's partner Paul Lisicky was there too, of course, looking pleased and proud. (Lisicky is quite a good writer in his own right -- fiction and memoir -- if you haven't read him, I recommend him. And they're a horrendously cute couple; not really knowing them at all, just seeing them together, they seem extremely well-matched.)

Off to dive into poems and maybe to write a bit.

the weather is here / wish you were beautiful

Greetings from Provincetown! Wifi is up & running in my room, which is less-than-peacefully situated between the hot tub (though SOME of you out there would appreciate the view... ahem) and the door to the office/main house. There's a lovely, faintly salt-scented breeze tonight on Pearl Street. I splurged and bought a bottle of tempranillo wine and a bit of dark chocolate. I am not, however, touching the half-wedge of brie someone left in the refrigerator -- it appears to be the approximate consistency of the erasers we used in grade school. Eek.

Have already bought books, including The Wild Braid (pictures of Stanley Kunitz and his garden, with poems & interviews, in celebration of his 100th birthday-- it seemed appropriate to buy it here). Have already gotten past the initial culture shock (which passes quicker with every visit) of walking down Commercial Street among granola dykes, glittery drag queens, and all genders in between. Every time I come here it feels a little more like coming home. This time I'm here with a purpose, beyond just enjoying the town and the beaches and the whales and the restaurants etc., and that feels very good.

Had hoped to do some proper writing tonight but it's been a very long day, and although I did have a short nap when I got in, I'm going to sleep very soon. Very, very soon. Tomorrow: Beach? Whale watching? Writing? Until activities at the FAWC begin at 6:00, I am free to do exactly as I please. I do think I will try to catch a whale watch, though. I miss my whales and I need to see them! And tomorrow is probably my best chance to spend time at the beach.

Tomorrow evening: reception, orientation, brief first class meeting, and reading by Mark Doty.