Making the commitment

Thanks to those who commented on my previous post -- you have helped me to focus my thoughts on this.

It's not just about publication. In fact I think it's only about 1% about publication. Do I want to have a book published? Hell yeah. I want to see my book on the library shelf, I want my very own ISBN, I want a beat-up copy of the thing that I carry around to readings and read from. Sure. I love books more than anything, and having one with my name on it would be a huge kick.

But what's much, much more important to me is the process of it. Writing the poems, rewriting them, putting them together and listening to how they talk to one another, looking through the individual poems and hopefully seeing past them to some larger vision. It's that larger vision I am after, and have so far found myself shying away from.

I have felt myself, many times in the past, come close to a place of risked commitment with my writing. I have allowed myself to steer clear of difficult material and difficult form. I have dropped a poem before it's sufficiently revised, too lazy to do the work of pushing on it as hard as it needs to be pushed on. It is no coincidence that my several-year writing hiatus began shortly after I started getting some publications in particularly nice journals and a few finalist nods in chapbook contests, no coincidence that I went (within about six months) from seriously contemplating selling my house and moving to wherever I could get accepted in a good MFA program to spending my evenings farting around online or watching tv.

The truth is, if I spend my evenings farting around online or watching tv, nobody's going to care. I'm not suffering under the delusion that if I don't publish a book I will somehow have deprived the world of the opportunity to appreciate my great and powerful vision. *snork*

Just as two people can have a perfectly wonderful and committed and fulfilling relationship without ever getting married, so can a poet devote herself to writing, and write (yes) great and powerful poetry, without ever publishing a lick of it or giving a shit about publishing. But me, I want to make that public statement. I want to say, yes, here is what I am, what I do. Here it is, world, it's not just mine, it's yours. And so far I've gotten cold feet every time I've come near that point. I've left off revising the poem because it got too hard. I've shied away from writing the difficult poem, instead choosing to whine into my journal or take a nap or, yes, blog. I've written individual poems, but have not made myself step back and take the long view of them, made myself ask what my larger vision is -- and for me, putting together a book will, I think, be one way to make myself do that. I've been at this for over twenty-five years and I feel like I'm still just farting around with it, and it's about time I took it to another level.

I should say here that this is just me, my own process, where I want to go. Just because I want to make that public statement of commitment doesn't mean I don't respect those who "don't need a piece of paper from the City Hall, keeping us tied and true" (thanks, Joni Mitchell) -- I admire and even envy those who do write purely for themselves, who will push their work as hard as it needs to be pushed and take the difficult risks without caring whether the poems ever go out into the world. But for me, imagining my work in that more public format, envisioning a book, helps me to write towards a vision that's beyond my little self -- because I find it all too easy to get bogged down in my own little self, and I want to write towards something larger. I want to say to the world, this isn't just mine, this is yours, this is a part of the Big Something. Boy, that sounds self-aggrandizing and high-falutin', and I don't mean it that way. Sigh.

I don't know if this babble will make sense to anyone but me, and I've already screwed up the post and blown away half of it once so maybe it would have made more sense if I hadn't done that. (Grr!) It's just that I've been thinking about why I write, and it's not just for the fun of pushing words around; it's something that feels larger than a hobby or an amusement or even a craft. Letting it be that large feels like a risk (and certainly the risk of sounding like a self-important hoohah is a big part of that). The risk is to push my work beyond the place where I am personally comfortable and let it be about the poetry, not about me. The risk is to try making a book out of it, something that can go out into the world all by itself without me. The risk is to look at a whole bunch of my work from the past several years and ask myself what the point of it is. What I have to trust in order to do this is that there is a point to it -- and that's difficult. But I've been at this for twenty-five years, and it's about time I stepped back and looked at my body of work instead of just looking at one poem at a time, and asked about the larger vision. Because I doubt I have another twenty-five years, and if I'm going to take this stuff to the next level, I think it's about time for me to start looking at it differently -- and I think that thinking in terms of a book rather than thinking in terms of poems will help me to do that.

(I've read interviews with poets who've published their first book late in life, and they usually have a reason for it -- circumstances, illness, child-raising, or just plain didn't even start writing until later. Me, I've been writing since I was a little kid, have been serious about it since I was an undergrad, 25+ years. I have no excuse. I just haven't tried. I've been lazy, is what it boils down to. )

So, all of that may or may not make sense. But I did want to clarify that it's not just about wanting to have a book out, wanting to see my name in lights (ha!) or whatever. It's about wanting to see beyond my little self, making the self subservient to Poetry (and I don't mean the journal of the same name). I don't just want to express my little self. I want to be in service to something larger. And for me, that begins with trying to understand what I do as a body of work. And so far, that's a risk I've mostly let myself get away without taking.

Boy, am I full of hot air tonight. *grin*

Bits & pieces

Bill Maher, on the Internet: " 'It's like a library,' my friends told me. Yeah, a really rude library. Have you ever been in a library where someone comes running up to you screaming, 'YOU WANT VIAGRA?' "

* * * * *

Still keeping up with napowrimo. Of the 18 poems I've drafted so far, my guess at the moment is that maybe 5 or 6 are worth revising and working with. Not too shabby, for someone who normally considers one poem a week to be a pretty steady pace.
The titles:
Stumble
Unsaid
Harbinger
Monologue
Intercepting the Supercell
Why I Wait Till Late
The Last Storm
[untitled: "Again, I find myself dreaming"]
Daylight Saving
Things You Should Not Write About
Making Sense of Entropy
Migration
Storm Haiku
Sugar Takes Shelter
Shelter
Easter
Lint
Sugar Ignores the Morning Paper

* * * * *

The process of closing my branch library continues. May 26th will be our last day of operation as a library; after that it is turned over to the academic department, which will operate it as an information commons type space. There are an overwhelming number of details to contend with throughout this process. The good news is that as I transition into my new position over the summer, I will be working a few hours per week on the reference desk in the Information Commons/Undergraduate Library Services. It's a fairly busy ref desk, and I've never provided reference services to undergrads (other than the occasional one who wanders into my branch library) so it will be a bit intimidating at first, but I am assured (and I do believe) that the "deer in headlights" feeling goes away after the first couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to it, actually. When I first started library school I was quite certain I had no interest in doing reference work. Then I took the introductory reference class and absolutely loved it. Go figure. Also, I really like all the librarians & staff I will be working with over in the IC/UGLS; they're all very friendly and knowledgeable and for the most part they seem to enjoy their jobs. I'm looking forward to learning a lot from them.

* * * * *

Next month I turn forty-five. No two ways about it: I am middle-aged. Turning forty was good; I made my first solo trip to Provincetown when I had just turned forty, and it was a happy, relaxing, exhilarating week. I ate some fabulous meals, spent significant chunks of time just relaxing on the beach, saw my first humpback whales, and wrote a couple of my first tentative poems after a long hiatus. Forty-five feels, from here, like it might be a bit challenging. Lots of transition. Job transitions, and the sense that I need to decide what role this poetry thing really is going to play in my life from here on out. Am I going to make the effort of putting together a book manuscript and trying to get it out there? (Which presupposes, of course, deciding that I think my work is good enough.) Am I going to finally do what I've been yapping about for years and apply to low-residency MFA programs? Am I just going to keep plodding away writing my little poems and sending them off to journals now and then? How can I make sure I push myself hard enough with this stuff -- and how do I know whether it's worth the effort? If I stopped, nobody would call me up begging me to start writing again -- it didn't happen when I stopped before, and it wouldn't happen if I stopped now. The momentum has to come from me; I'm the only one who really gives a shit whether I write or not. I've been at this, in my interrupted way, for over twenty-five years now. It is very likely that I don't have another twenty-five years left to work on it. So I had better either get busy, or make peace with the fact that I didn't.

* * * * *

Fear the Poet!

Fear the Poet update

Apparently, ever since I blogged the link to the "Fear the Poet" t-shirt (I posted it both here and on livejournal), they have sold more shirts than they normally sell in a month, and they're back-ordered! The bookstore manager tracked down the sudden flurry of activity to me and called me to find out how in the heck I heard about them, and to let me know they were placing double their usual order to restock. Okay, it's a small bookstore that doesn't normally do that much business -- the "more than we normally sell in a month" magic number was actually only six -- but still, I am highly amused.

He said "the only top ten list Whittier College ever makes is 'top ten silliest mascots'" (yes, their athletic teams are actually the Whittier Poets) and "Fear the Poet" seemed to make a better slogan than "run away from the crazy person." Hee. He seemed quite pleased with the extra business. I originally got the link from a friend who just got hired for a faculty position at Whittier; I think she gets credit for doing some fundraising before she even arrives on campus!

Anyway, if you ordered a shirt and it's back-ordered, rest assured they truly are ordering more.

NaPoWriMo, day 14: Tornado Alley

Batting 1000 so far on NaPoDoMoHoHoHo, though I've stretched the boundaries of "poem a day" to mean "before I go to bed at night" rather than "by midnight" -- and yesterday's poem was a pathetic three-liner, sort of a lousy faux-haiku.
It's been a terribly stormy spring. I went to bed last night having watched the first few hours' reporting of the tornadoes in Iowa City, was awakened at 4 am by the kitten tugging at my hair because he was frightened by the storm that was blowing in just then. Tonight there are bad storms just north and west of Indianapolis, hail reported up to softball size, tornadoes, et cetera. It all rather gives me flashbacks of the F5 tornado (wind speeds of 261-318 mph) on June 8, 1966 that damaged our house in Topeka, Kansas when I was five years old -- this June it will have been forty years ago. I'm watching the continuous severe-weather coverage on the Indianapolis tv stations right now, just amazed by the radar & other technology -- in 1966 we had only a few minutes' warning and considered ourselves pretty lucky to get that.

Anyway, this weather has certainly found itself reflected in my napowrimo efforts. Last week I wrote a little narrative thingie about a storm chaser; last night I wrote a (bad) radar haiku; and tonight a recurrent character named Sugar has popped into a poem to tell me about some storms she's seen. (Someday I may have a whole chapbook worth of Sugar poems. Maybe. It would be nice.)


[poem fall down go boom. you know the drill.]

Scared yet?

Yeah, I totally ordered myself one of these today. You can get 'em from the Whittier College bookstore.

Blah blah blah, but at least it's spring

For the first time in over thirty years, Indiana is observing Daylight Saving Time. I haven't had to make this time-zone transition since I was what, ten years old? Before digital clocks existed, that's how long ago it was. And it is weird. Suddenly it's darker in the mornings, which feels like a rip-off after gritting my teeth and plowing through the long winter and enjoying the relief of "finally the sun is up when the alarm goes off" -- that's been taken away all of a sudden and it's just plain disconcerting. And in the evenings, I keep thinking it's earlier than it is and then I look at the clock and feel rushed. I don't understand the light, all of a sudden. It's speaking a different language.

* * * * *

I've hit the wall with this poem-a-day thing. I keep putting it off till the end of the evening then dashing something off resentfully. I feel bored with the sound of my own voice. I know that's part of it, part of the exercise, hitting that point where you think you're through and continuing to push and getting to a place you might never have reached otherwise. It feels like stink right now, though. What I need to do is to remember that this is a practice, not a chore. A practice. Like the practice of meditation, or medicine, or kindness. It's something one does day to day, moment by moment, act by act, but always with the long haul & the big picture in one's mind.

* * * * *

It's fully spring, Bradford pears starting to bloom in earnest, daffodils everywhere, grass and trees green enough that you finally know you're not imagining it. Work is fairly nuts right now as we prepare to close down the branch library I've been coordinating for the past three years (we're closing at the end of May -- yes, I will still have a job, guaranteed; I'll even get to do some writing in the new job, instructional stuff, which is pretty cool). I'm taking lots of solace in the explosion of energy that is a Bloomington spring.

(And the explosion of pollen. Achoo!)

* * * * *

Two readings coming up. One will be an omnibus extravaganza type of thing, partly to celebrate National Poetry Month (about which I am feeling grumpy at the moment, see above), partly to honor a daily radio show on our local community radio station which will be leaving the air at the end of the month (er, the show is leaving the air; the station's gonna be around), partly to promote a local anthology that hasn't been selling as well as it should and maybe sell off some of the copies that are still sitting around. So I'll be reading two poems (the two that were included in said anthology, Celebrating Seventy). Barnes & Noble here in Bloomington, 7:30 pm on Friday the 21st.

The other will be a benefit reading/concert for the Bloomington Women's Writing Center. I haven't been involved with this organization so far, but have been watching from a distance and appreciating what they're doing. I think this is also about a two-poem deal. Sunday, April 30th from 5 to 8 pm at the Players Pub here in Bloomington, ten bucks in advance (purchase at the BWWC website) or $15 at the door.

* * * * *

Watching American Idol. Jenni, I blame you!

Anyone need a NYC sublet?

Storms here today; not as bad as they've had in Tennessee, but we did have some two-inch-diameter hail this afternoon, which is the largest hail I've seen in many years. It's something else to see these smooth chunks of ice, the size of golf balls or small chicken eggs, just plummeting out of the sky.

Passing this along at the request of a friend (& fellow poet) -- if you need, or know anyone who might need, a summer sublet in NYC, his contact info is below. I know nothing about NYC to know whether this is a decent neighborhood or an okay price, so I'm just passing on what I've got. If you know anyone who can help him out, that would be great! Michael's been picking up some sweet acceptances lately, so there may be some good poetic karma to be found in his apartment. :)

Hi,

Just wanted to spread the word in case anyone's looking:
I'll be subletting my studio apartment this summer and traveling.

It's located at 15th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.
That's Gram. Park/East Village, just a street from Union Square.
So it's a pleasant neighborhood on a quiet street beside a park.
And it is centrally located to all transportation (subways and buses).

I have a queen-sized bed and a full-sized futon,
a flat screen tv/dvd/vcr,
ac, small kitchen with fridge, oven and microwave
and bathroom has shower/tub.

Also, building has laundry room and elevator.
The apt is on the top floor (sixth) so there's no noise overhead.

It's available JULY, AUGUST, SEPTEMBER
and most (if not all) of June too.

I'm asking 1500 (ish) a month, which covers rent and bills.

Please forward to anyone interested.

Thanks.

Michael
(917) 817-7171
mikemont17@hotmail.com

today's napowrimo

This one -- like most of 'em this week -- is not necessarily a keeper, but I'm posting it just to show I'm still hanging in there. There may be phrases in here I can cannibalize, but really, the point is just to get something on the page. I sort of cheated here and wrote about my own procrastination, since I fell asleep on the couch all evening (thus missing the Indiana Review reading that featured Diana Marie Delgado, darn it) and didn't get diddly done till almost midnight.

Again, this will disappear shortly.



and, poof, gone. Like the last one, if you missed it & want to see it, backchannel & I'll send it on.

NaPoWriMo update

So, five days, five poems. One is probably a keeper, and four pretty much suck (but at least a couple of them have words or phrases I may be able to cannibalize for something else later). I suspect it's no coincidence that the probable keeper was written when I was relaxed and comfortable, on a weekend day, having consumed sufficient caffeine and spent a half-hour or so reading poetry -- and a couple of the sucky ones have been "oh crap, I'd better write a poem before I go to bed, damn it" poems. Go figure, huh?

How's everyone else doing?

Beyond that: When you've written a first draft, do you generally have a strong sense of whether or not it's a keeper? I always think I know immediately, and then I'll go through a pile of drafts that are six months or a year old and suddenly some of them look promising enough to work on. "Gee, when the heck did I write that? That's not bad."

And of course, sometimes I get all excited about a first draft, and then I either can't figure out how to revise it to completion, or realize I was just infatuated with the thrill of having written something new but it actually sucks after all. I think writing a new draft every day may help me get away from that, since having written something new won't actually be a big deal.

So what about it: do you know? And if so, when? (I'd ask "how" as well, but I suspect that's kind of like "how do you know the milk is bad" ... you just smell it and you know.)

More linky goodness

Michael Montlack, who I met in D.A. Powell's workshop last summer, has a good short story in the new issue of Blithe House Quarterly.

I really like it when people I know get published. :)

Also, I found out that the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies and the Portuguese Princess Whale Watch have an all day whale-watching trip planned for the day after my workshop in June! They plan to go all the way out to Jeffreys Ledge and/or the Great South Channel in hopes of seeing some North Atlantic right whales, an extremely endangered species (about 300 individuals remaining). I have been wishing for a way to see a right whale or two someday -- seriously, I love watching humpbacks and finbacks and minke whales, but if I saw a right whale I would be pee-my-pants excited. So I am scheming about schedules and money in hopes of making this happen. A week of poetry, then a full day out on the water peering into the distance for any sign of flukes? Sounds like heaven.

"You knew I was a poet when you hired me."

Extremely funny, but too big to post on the blog, cartoon here.

Seriously, go look. I'm still giggling.

napowrimo #1

This won't stay up for long.


---and the poem goes *poof* like a tripped-over shadow. (if you missed it and wanna see it, backchannel me...)

po on rye

So there's a growing NaPoWriMo movement afoot (for example, here and also here) -- the plan being to write a poem every day throughout the month of April, aka National Poetry Month. (NaPoWriMo being a takeoff on NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month.) A lot of people plan to post their daily poems on their blogs. I won't be doing that, but I do have every intention of writing a poem every day for the next thirty days.

Note that they don't have to be good poems, or long poems, or finished poems. *grin* I usually write about four poems a month, and maybe two of them are keepers; figure my percentage will be lower if I write a poem every day, but surely I'll end up with more than two that are worth working on some more. Too, I think it's good to remind oneself, now and then, that you are in control of your own writing -- not some "Muse" that you have to wait around for.

If you want to write, write. That's the main thing.

And by the way, if you don't care to write poems but want to take part, reading a poem every day would also be a fine way to celebrate.

Happy Poetry Month, all!

Something to watch

The brother of one of my livejournal friends got shipped off to Iraq (again, even though he was not supposed to get deployed again). She's taken the "make your own Chevy Tahoe commercial" website and created a pretty powerful, subversive political statement with it, as a tribute to him. Highly recommended. Go check it out.

Jane Hirshfield

I went up to Butler University in Indianapolis yesterday evening, along with three other members of my poetry group, to hear Jane Hirshfield read. I actually (and this is a bit embarrassing to admit) wasn't very familiar with her work when I first heard about the reading, but since my friends were going I figured what the heck, I'd go along. I checked out Given Sugar, Given Salt from the public library, and was very impressed -- I love how she doesn't shy away from large and/or abstract issues, but always arrives there via the concrete and specific. Though I guess you could say that about any number of poets. She also, in this book, wrestles with some things that feel very specific to middle age -- something I'm wrestling with now in my own work (and my own life).

I, a woman forty-five, beginning to gray at the temples,
putting pages of ruined paper
into a basket, pulling them out again.
[from "Waking This Morning Dreamless After Long Sleep"]

Last night she read exclusively from After, her new book. I enjoyed her reading very much; she spent more time chatting and providing background than many poets do, but I didn't feel she overexplained the poems, and I got a better sense of how she works -- something I always enjoy. I also got the impression that she would be a good teacher, just from how she talked about the poems and about her own writing process. I think my favorite poem was the one she opened with, "Theology," which had dogs in it. (It wasn't just because of the dogs that I liked it.)

After the reading she took a few questions, which she answered graciously. One question was about how to arrange a book of poems, which certainly seems to be a topic that's out there in the poetic zeitgeist these days, on listservs & around the blogosphere. She didn't really say anything I hadn't heard before about this, but it's obviously something she has struggled with and spent a lot of time thinking about.

Although it was a splurge since it's only out in hardcover, I bought a copy of After, and had her sign it like a big ol' fangirl. Hey, if you can't splurge on a hardcover right in front of the poet, when can you, y'know?

I also chatted for a few minutes with a young poet who's in her final semester of the low-res program at New England College, and has absolutely loved it. Contagious enthusiasm. I have got to find a way to make a low-res program happen -- to come up with the money, and the time/energy.

Catching up

I know, there hasn't been much to see here lately. Sorry about that! I haven't fallen off the face of the earth or anything, I promise.

I've got a poem in the new issue of The Cortland Review. It's got a really cool photo on the front page of the issue.

The fourth-Friday-of-the-month poetry reading at the Runcible Spoon a couple nights ago was very nice. Five Women Poets, the group I'm in, were the featured readers (those of us who were in town anyway; Anya couldn't make it), along with a storyteller from the Bloomington Storytellers' Guild. Usually Patricia tries to have a musician or something to provide a little break from all the poetry, so this time it was a storyteller. Anyway, I opened by reading Gayle Brandeis' "Pear" because I think it is such a kick-ass poem that I really wanted to share it; I think I said her name three or four times to make sure people knew it wasn't my poem, heh. Then I read two car-crash poems, two jazz poems, and a Provincetown poem. The car-crash poems and one of the jazz poems were very very new, but they seemed to go over well, especially "So What" (one of the jazz ones). The person in charge of the new Bloomington Women's Writing Center caught up with me afterwards and asked if I would read a couple poems in their benefit concert next month, which was neat. It takes like three people to make the Spoon feel crowded, and there were maybe twenty people there, so it was a nice full house. And I had a lovely glass of pinot grigio. Maybe that's why I enjoyed the evening so particularly much. ;)

I enjoy readings. I'm not the best reader out there, certainly not the most dynamic performer, not (my five-foot-one pudgy middle-aged self) the sort of reader who commands the attention of everyone in the room the moment she stands up. But over the years I think I've learned how to more or less do the poems justice, and I don't get at all nervous about reading anymore, which is kind of weird considering I am relatively shy (yes, really) and not at all fond of public speaking. On Friday, after the featured readers, there was (as always) an open mic. There weren't too many participants this time -- three, I think -- and one of them reminded me so much of me when I was first starting out reading my stuff, when I was 19 years old or so. Actually if I'm not mistaken the first time I read was at an open-mic at the Cornucopia, a natural-foods restaurant in South Bend, when I was in high school, back in the late seventies. I don't remember much about it, which is probably a very good thing for my ego. *grin*

Good mail this week: got my copy of Susan B.A. Somers-Willett's Roam. I know Susan a bit from online, though I haven't met her, and am just tickled to death (now there's a middle-aged midwestern phrase for you!) to see her having some good success. Also, the cover is really cool. I look forward to spending some time with this book. And, I hope that reading a book by someone I kind of know will prod me in the direction of working on my own stinkin' book manuscript. I turn forty-five in a couple of months; maybe "get the stinkin' book manuscript together and start sending it out" should be my birthday resolution. I don't know if it will be any good, but at 45, I have to recognize that I don't have forever to do this if I'm gonna do it.

I thought I might have something more interesting to blog about, but I now have a Very Large Cat draped across my lap making it difficult to type on the laptop, plus he's purring so loud I can't hear myself think -- so I'll come back later if I think of anything.

artistic resume?

I'm applying for a thingie that requires an "artistic resume." Anyone have advice about how to structure one of these? Should I just throw together sections for publications, awards, readings, education/workshops, and other activities? Should publications go in chronological order, or alpha by journal title, or what? I have no clue here.

Thanks to anyone who can make a suggestion. :)

Nota bene

Here's an interesting note: I went back into my submission files today and did the math. "O" was rejected ten times before getting that honorable mention in the Thomas Merton Foundation contest. (Of those ten, I think I had one or maybe two encouraging notes that didn't single out any particular poem from the submission packet, and there was one that specifically said they enjoyed this poem.) Ten rejections isn't all that many as those things go, but it's enough to notice.

The moral of the story, of course, is that if you've written a poem you believe in and you want it to be published, persistence pays. Sometimes, anyway.

Of course, first you have to write poems you believe in. That's the hard part. I wish I did it more often, that's for sure.

This coming Friday evening, Five Women Poets -- the poetry group of which I am a member -- will be featured at the Runcible Spoon Reading Series. Should be fun. At our meeting the other night we decided we can each have about ten minutes, so I need to figure out what to read. I'm thinking two car-crash poems, two jazz poems, and one or two others -- but I'm not sure yet. I love reading at the Spoon because I've spent SO much time there over the years that it feels very comfortable and homey to me. (In fact, I was just there today for brunch!)

I've been reading Jane Hirshfield's Given Sugar, Given Salt today and loving it. I've probably read scattered poems of hers here and there, but hadn't read any of her books, and am now kicking myself for waiting so long. She's reading at Butler University in Indianapolis the week after next and I am planning to go.

The weather is still chilly, but after drenching rains and quite a bit of flooding last week the grass is green and there are crocuses, a few daffodils, and the beginnings of forsythia. Robins are hopping around. The days are longer. I think we've just about survived another winter.


EDIT: As soon as I said that, I may have to retract it -- the weather forecast I just saw calls for heavy snow and single-digit temperatures early in the week. YEOW.

Happy news!

I don't normally blog from work, but I can't resist sharing this happy news. I just got a phone call from someone at the Thomas Merton Foundation in Louisville, telling me that my poem "O" was awarded honorable mention in their Poetry of the Sacred contest! The judge was Sena Jeter Naslund, whose book Ahab's Wife I just adored -- so to think that she liked my poem makes my little heart all tingly.

Apparently the poem will be posted on their website eventually, so when it is, I'll link to it. It's a poem I've always been particularly (maybe unreasonably) fond of, so I kind of feel like one of my favorite children just brought home straight A's on her report card. *grin* Sort of makes up for all those other poems that were ordered to report to the principal's office...


EDIT: They've already posted the winners on their website!
Here's the winning poem, and here are the honorable mentions.

Wow, the other poems are really good! "Pear" (one of the other honorable mentions) just made my toes curl up a bit.

Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.

Have you ever argued with one of your own poems? By writing another poem that contradicts the first? I tried it once, and I think I may make myself do it again as an exercise.

The first poem is one I wrote back in 1990, and for quite a while it was my favorite poem that I'd ever written. (Probably because it got me the nicest acceptance letter I've ever gotten -- not just "we want your poem" but a few words about why the editor liked it, which just tickled me to pieces.) The second poem was written 12 years later, begun while listening to a panel discussion on poetry at the public library, written in a fit of annoyance with myself because I felt like I was working too hard to make everything in my poems Oh So Deep And Meaningful -- a fault, if it is a fault, which "Let X Equal..." is certainly guilty of.

Note that I still like "Let X Equal..." even though I argued with it. (I contain multitudes, bla bla.) Actually I think it served as a better exercise to argue with a poem I didn't particularly disagree with. Can I feel equally committed to both sides of my own argument? Well, I am a Gemini, so I suppose that may be one of my talents. *grin* I've never presented these two poems side-by-side, not in a reading or anything, so it will be interesting for me to look at them together. I won't say which one I think is the better poem, though I do have an opinion about that, oddly enough. (I also think they are both crap, but I am having an "everything I have ever written is crap" night so I know better than to put too much stock in that.)

* * * * *

Let X Equal...

Let the woman wake
from sleep, as she does each morning
of her life. Let her arm
reach out, drowsy, and brush
the bedroom curtains aside,
let her watch for five whole minutes
the cat washing herself
on the front lawn, the bird
pecking madly at damp earth,
the neighbor clutching the front of her robe
as she steps out the door
and stoops for her morning paper.

Let the sunlight be quiet
and warm across the lawn. Let the grass
be succulent and green.
Let the day unfold like a perfect
equation, every moment growing
toward some simple answer,
some singular integer.
Let the woman stand for the thesis,
the given, all the formulas that build
a body of knowledge. Let her waking
be the question, and the window
equal some visible understanding, the work
she is asked to show. Let the neighbor
and the curtains be variables, the light
and the lawn be the sum
of each other, the pure reciprocity of morning.
Let the woman's hand, opening
curtains, and the woman, rising,
be a new theorem, solid and given,
the beginning of an elegant
and irrefutable proof.

[1990; first published in Northwest Review, vol. 30 no. 3]

* * * * *

Against Metaphor

Today, let the cat
be just a cat, crouching
in the kitchen where he hears
a scrabbling mouse. Let this glass
of clear cold water
be simple refreshment,
the morning sun be the rising
that happens every ordinary
day. My face is just my face,
my feet are in my shoes
which are on this wooden floor
in my house which is just a place
where I can live. Sometimes a life
is just a life, and at night
as I fall into my prosaic dreams
let me learn to be grateful
for having lived the day
as it actually was, one place
at one time,
simple witness.

[2002; first published in Calyx, vol. 23 no. 1]

Apropos of nothing...

...today marked the twenty-year anniversary of my full-time employment at Major Midwestern University. (Yes, twenty years. I was a mere child of almost a quarter-century when I first started.) My boss took me out to lunch, and when we got back, there was a whole surprise party with cake and flowers and cards and everything! I couldn't believe it. Most of my student workers (the ones who hadn't already left on spring break) were there, and some of the faculty & staff from the department my branch library serves stopped by, and some librarians & staff from other departments -- I was amazed at how many people stopped by. The only official recognition one gets from the university is a little pin, so I certainly was not expecting Festivities. It was especially nice because in a couple of months the branch library I've been coordinating for the past 3 years will be closing (being transformed into a technology commons sort of space for the students in the department) and I'll be moving to a new position within the Libraries, so it was just kind of appropriate to have Festivities and a Big To-Do right about now. Then after work I went out to the Irish Lion with a couple of friends, and I stuffed myself to the gills on Blarney Puffballs (delicious little deep-fried balls of potato/cheese/onion, served with sour cream for dipping), fish & chips, and Bass -- enough decadent fried-ness there that I am probably now assured of not surviving for another twenty-year anniversary. Soooo good.

I do not normally like being the center of attention (but since there was cake, I was happy) -- don't normally do much to celebrate my birthdays or anything. But it felt nice to have Festivities today. I felt appreciated, and that's a pretty cool thing to feel at one's place of employment. I still say it would be awfully nice if it were possible to make a living writing poetry, but since it's not, I'm glad that I work in a place where people are mostly pretty nice to me, doing something (library stuff) that feels like a reasonably good and useful thing to do in the world.

I hope you AWPeople are having a good time down there in Austin. Post more! I want pictures and gossip. I want to know who flirted shamelessly with who. I want to know who drank too much and started dancing on the tables. I want ... oh, okay, no, I really don't want that kind of a report. (Feel free to backchannel with all such info, though. Muahaha!)

Watson, come here.

From Garrison Keillor's Writers' Almanac today:

It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell received patent No. 174,465 for the telephone. He filed for his patent on the same day as a Chicago electrician named Elisha Gray filed for a patent on basically the same device. Bell only beat Gray by two hours. Bell offered to sell his patent to Western Union for $100,000, but Western Union turned him down.

In honor of this event, an old poem of mine:

The Message

"Mr. Watson, come here. I want you."
--first words spoken via telephone

Alexander Bell, working fiercely in the lab,
spilled acid on himself that day.
There was something about invention
and necessity, and his words crackled out
into another room, thin and urgent,
carried through air into a moment
when everything changed.

Why then do we always wait
until that last panicked moment
to shout out what we need? We build
the devices, thin glowing wires,
lay the paths to carry signals
from lips to distant ear,
set up elaborate inventions

of intention, plot the ways to speak
our need, then let the creation sit
while we fiddle with one toggle or the next
never testing it by giving voice -- but
finally the burning
becomes too much to bear, impulsively
we grab the wires and cross the distance

with what we know, once said,
is true. Desire crackles out
into another room. Come here.
I want you.

published in New Zoo Poetry Review, 1998
and in A Linen Weave of Bloomington Poets, ed. by Jenny Kander (Lexington, KY: Wind, 2002)

Three good things

1.
Thanks to Ginger for linking to this fabulous essay (or I guess it's actually meant to be a talk) by Rachel Zucker:
Confessionalography: A GNAT (Grossly Non-Academic Talk) on "I" in Poetry
I just read through it quickly, but definitely want to go back and chew on it a little more. I find myself, as is proper for someone in middle age I think, wanting to escape the confines of personal history in my poems, but at the same time I find myself drawn harder and harder to the pull of personal truths. Paradox? Sure. But that's what poetry is all about, Charlie Brown. (As a side note, we talked about truth vs. fact in the journaling discussion group I attended yesterday. I said that there were three things -- stating the facts, telling the truth, and making sense -- and that none of those things were necessarily related to or dependent upon one another. Well, I don't think I said it quite that succinctly, but you know.)

2.
Because the Other Driver's insurance company came through with flying colors, I have no reason at this point to think I won't be able to make it out to FAWC this summer. I truly can't afford it, but I just feel I have to do it, so (in my mind at least) I'm now committed to it. Gonna try and apply for some scholarships, which would make it immensely more do-able. But if you can't commit to doing the impossible and/or seriously impractical now and then -- well, again, that's what poetry is all about. Hey, being able to pay the bills is overrated anyway.

3.
Charlie has a new love in his life and she's adorable. *grin* Go see!

Lammy Finalists, etc.

1. Not quite a cover girl

Got my printed catalog for the Fine Arts Work Center's summer program today. There I am, on the inside front cover, right next to Hunter O'Hanian's signature. Je suis arrivée. Or, uh, something. Anyway, I'm sure they will send you a catalog if you write to them and ask for one, and then you too can gigglesnort at me in my oh-so-touristy aloha shirt trying to look all writerly in that comfy Adirondack chair in the FAWC courtyard. (I was scribbling in my journal and waiting for the caffeine to kick in, is what I was doing.)

2. Lambda Literary Award Finalists

The list of 2005 Lammy finalists came out today. (For those who may be out of this particular loop, they're awards for GLBT literature, in a bunch of different categories, awarded by the Lambda Literary Foundation. The awards ceremony is in May.)

Finalists in poetry:

Gay Men's Poetry
School of the Arts by Mark Doty (HarperCollins)
For Dust Thou Art by Timothy Liu (Southern Illinois)
Sugar by Martin Pousson (Suspect Thoughts)
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale)
Blue on Blue Ground by Aaron Smith (Pittsburgh)

Lesbian Poetry
Where the Apple Falls by Samiya Bashir (redbone press)
Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon)
Life Mask by Jackie Kay (Bloodaxe Books)
New and Selected Poems, Volume II by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press)
Eye of Water by Amber Flora Thomas (Pittsburgh)

There are a few people here I don't know. Never heard of Martin Pousson; anyone know him? Samiya Bashir's name sounds familiar, but I can't think where I might have heard of her; same for Jackie Kay. I'm not familiar with Amber Flora Thomas, but looking her up on amazon.com I see that she won the Cave Canem prize in 2004, and has blurbs from no less than Yusef Komunyakaa, Carl Phillips, and Molly Peacock. Her book also has a really gorgeous cover. Looks worth checking out.

If anyone hasn't seen the full list of nominees in all categories and wants it, either comment with your email, or backchannel me, and I'll be happy to forward it along.

Boruch & McGrath reading

Marianne Boruch and Campbell McGrath read tonight to a packed house. (Really. They drew like four times as many people as the J.D. McClatchy reading on Sunday. To be fair, the publicity for Sunday's reading got screwed up and half of it said it was on Saturday, so people may have gotten confused.) I spotted several members of IU's MFA program faculty (Cathy Bowman, Maura Stanton, Richard Cecil, probably others) as well as several people I knew -- it was defintely the Poetry Place To Be tonight.

And it was a good reading. Boruch led off with a poem from her recent Selected, but then read all new work, which was quite good. McGrath read a sheaf of new poems, then several from Pax Atomica (including "Rock and Roll" and "The Human Heart," two of my favorites in the book), then a few from a manuscript he's currently working on -- one of which, "Ode to Bureaucracy" I think it was called, had me struggling not to keel over laughing. What I love about McGrath's poetry is that he's simultaneously one of the funniest & one of the angriest (I'm not kidding, read some of the rants in Florida Poems if you don't believe me) poets around today. --Maybe "angriest" isn't the right word, maybe I just mean "ranty-est" but man, he does a mean-ass rant when he gets going. I envy that.

Happily, Boxcar Books had a table outside the room selling a few books afterwards, so I bought my own copy of Pax Atomica & can now return the public library's copy to them; I also bought Marianne Boruch's book of essays, In the Blue Pharmacy (which I also have out from the public library). I thought about going back in to get them signed, but the room was mobbed with people most of whom were swarming towards one or the other of the readers, and decided not to fight the crowds. I'm not an autograph fiend, though I do really enjoy having books signed by people I know somewhat (fellow bloggers, I'm lookin' at you) and by summer-workshop teachers. I enjoy getting books signed by people I don't know sometimes, too, but it's not a big enough deal for me to make like a salmon and swim upstream through the throngs or whatever.

(I did once stand in a very long line at a bookstore to get Alice Walker's autograph in a book. But that was Alice Walker and she's pretty much a rockstar.)

Also, I got new shoes today and they have purple insoles and I love them.

Also, I'm jealous of all you people going to AWP. I am not very good at schmoozing in crowds, but if I found a couple of people I could mostly hang out with so that I wasn't constantly wandering around trying to break into conversations, I think it would be a blast going to readings and buying (way too many, I'm sure) books and meeting up with various bloggers for a drink or five. Maybe next year.

Also also, I have marshmallow peeps. Peeps!

Pax Atomica

Just read Campbell McGrath's 2004 collection, Pax Atomica. Holy crap, that was a fun read -- not usually one's first reaction to a book of poetry, eh? I read his Florida Poems a couple of years ago and appreciated it, but I wasn't right there with it, because I've never set foot in the state of Florida. But Pax Atomica is all about growing up in a world of seventies rock, where you love Springsteen and Led Zeppelin and you don't let on that you kinda like Ted Nugent, where you watch Tom Snyder and the late late show before the TV station plays the National Anthem and goes off the air, where the world is full of the tacky crazy things that people make and yet "We build the human heart / and lock it in its chest / and hope that what we have made can save us." And in the end, even though everyone knows John Lennon is dead, there's still a kind of salvation we can find while listening to Guns'n'Roses and grieving for our own personal dead. I recognize so much in these poems and I felt myself nodding my head and (metaphorically speaking) slapping my steering wheel & singing along.

I got this one out of the library, but it's going on the "buy me" list -- and now I am really looking forward to his reading Thursday night.

Resurrection of the Trusty Steed

Got my car back Friday. Finally! At the risk of overstating it a bit, it feels like being back in my own body again. Not quite "good as new" but I think the body shop did a decent job. Celebrated with a couple of new CDs: Rosanne Cash's Black Cadillac (brilliant, powerful songwriting) and K.T. Tunstall's Eye to the Telescope (quite nice).

J.D. McClatchy (who looks just like his photograph, except that he wears glasses to read) gave a reading on campus today. I hadn't heard him read before; he was quite good. He was here in the first place -- and has been in town for a couple of weeks or so -- because IU's Jacobs School of Music was hosting the premiere of the Our Town opera, for which Ned Rorem wrote the music and McClatchy wrote the libretto. He opened the reading by speaking for a minute about the differences between writing poetry & writing libretti; when you write a libretto you are aiming for simplicity and clarity, whereas "Poetry, on the other hand, is meant to complicate things, not simplify things."

This is interesting to me because, yes, complexity does seem to be one of the criteria for poetry; but at the same time poetry requires an economy of language, and poetic language provides a certain directness, a language that hews more closely to actual sense-experience -- it's like a more faithful translation of the untranslatable, if that makes any sense at all. So really, poetry simplifies by complicating -- or complicates by simplifying, depending on which end of the telescope you choose to look through. Poetry doesn't (or shouldn't, anyway) use complexity for the purpose of sheer obfuscation; it complicates in order to make the familiar strange, to make the reader see it new and in that novelty to see it more clearly illumined. Complexity in the name, not of confusion, but of the kind of clarity you can only get when you've got to give it your full attention and work for it a bit.

I think of Adrienne Rich's poem "Planetarium," a poem which has been a touchstone for me for many years. It ends like this:

I have been standing all my life in the
direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslateable language in the universe
I am a galactic cloud so deep     so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me     And has

taken     I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images     for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.

I have always thought that "the most accurately transmitted most / untranslateable language in the universe" was as close to a definition of poetry as I was ever going to see.

Anyway, McClatchy's reading obviously made me think, which is always a good thing. :) He read several poems from Hazmat along with some others, including "My Mammogram" (which for some reason struck me today as parallelling Mark Doty's "Heaven for Paul" closely in some ways -- I'll have to go back & give the two a side-by-side reading, but the way they juxtapose the comic, the frightening, & the profound in a narrative context seems similar). Oh, and during the brief Q&A afterwards someone asked about his writing process; he said that he tries to carry poems around in his head as long as possible because once you write them down you fall in love with them, & then he works on them for a fairly long time. I envy poets who can carry poems around in their heads like that; I find that if I don't jot down at least something, I lose track of it. I mean, I'll sometimes chew on a few lines inside my head for an hour or two, but that's about it. Perhaps the remembery part of my brain is broken. Or dented, at least.


EDIT: Here's a brief write-up of McClatchy's reading from the Indiana Daily Student.

Upcoming events

Sunday afternoon on campus, J.D. McClatchy will be reading. He's in town for the world premiere of the Our Town opera, for which he wrote the libretto & Ned Rorem (who's here as well) wrote the music. Yep, Our Town as in Thornton Wilder. I probably won't make it to the opera, but do plan to get to the poetry reading. I have to admit I haven't read that much of McClatchy's work, but have liked what I've read.

Thursday evening of next week is a hot double bill at the John Waldron Arts Center downtown: Marianne Boruch and Campbell McGrath. Both are poets I read for the first time when I took a class with Cathy Bowman a couple years ago; McGrath's Florida Poems was one of the books read & discussed by the whole class, and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Next month (March 24, to be exact) Five Women Poets, my poetry group, will be reading at the Runcible Spoon in celebration of Women's History Month. No idea yet what I'll be reading, but readings at the Spoon are always fun. It's a local coffeehouse/restaurant that's been around since the late seventies, which qualifies it as a Bloomington institution; it's known for excellent coffee, less-than-lightning-fast service, and the fish living in the bathtub in its bathroom. The bathroom was actually featured on the Travel Channel once, some show about the "ten coolest bathrooms in America" or something. The owner and chef, Matt O'Neill, is a poet and very supportive of Bloomington's poetry community. Plus, they have the best brunch in town -- wonderful omelets and perfect bacon.

I am supposed to be getting my car back tomorrow -- yes, more than three weeks after the accident. It's been fun driving the rental (a brand-new 2006 PT Cruiser, not the car I'd pick out to buy for myself, but always fun to drive something shiny and new) but it will be good to be back in my own little Corolla again.

Tonight is all about the skating -- Olympic ladies' finals. I've been assiduously avoiding spoilers all day. Not sure whether I'm cheering for Sasha Cohen or Irina Slutskaya; I just hope both of them (and heck, everyone else too) skate their best. I love watching ice skating. Someday I'm sure it will turn up in a poem.

What I do on my summer vacation

So I'm reading through the current issue of Poets & Writers, and noticing that there are approximately six bajillion ads for various summer programs -- conferences, workshops, pretty much any variation on that theme you can imagine. Conferences where you go and listen to other people talk and schmooze with agents and editors. Workshops at universities and in resort towns. Summer programs where you take what you've already written and go to get it critiqued, and summer programs where you go and write a whole bunch of new stuff. Places where you have to apply to get in and places that will let anybody in so long as they shell out the money. And I'm looking at all these ads and I'm thinking, man, what a racket.

Now, I love summer workshops. I've been to the Indiana U. Writers' Conference, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, the Split Rock Arts Program in Minnesota, and the Fine Arts Work Center summer program in Provincetown -- and I've had a great time at all of them. I've worked with some terrific teachers: Carolyn Kizer, Lucia Perillo, Michael Carey, Kate Green, Cleopatra Mathis, D.A. Powell, and others. I get a little something different out of each workshop I attend, too. When I took a workshop with Carolyn Kizer at the IU conference, back in 1981 (I think) when I was twenty, just being taken seriously as a poet and having my work discussed was a trip and a half -- not to mention the readings every evening; it was the first time I'd been immersed in poetry for a week like that, and it felt amazing. I remember that Kizer used one of the poems from my manuscript as a jumping-off point for a discussion of whether political poetry could be good poetry or whether the politics inherently compromised the art -- because that was a topic I cared about pretty intensely, I was thrilled that my little poem sparked off the discussion.

But you know, there is this stereotype of the middle-aged, usually female, usually crappy poet who attends these summer workshops & conferences, collecting t-shirts and names of famous poets she has worked with along the way. And it kind of scares me to think I might be That Person. God knows nobody at these summer programs is going to disillusion someone by telling them they're a crappy poet; they want to encourage you , keep you coming back and paying money. These programs are huge cash cows in many cases, I'm sure. (Then again, why tell someone they're a crappy poet if writing poetry makes them happy, makes their life better? Just don't encourage them to send out their work for publication, spare the poor editors, but writing crappy poetry is not the worst hobby a person could have.)

Now, I don't (usually) think I am That Person. I take my work seriously (too seriously, sometimes). I read a lot of poetry, which often seems to be how you can distinguish a middle-aged-lady-crappy-poet from a "Real" (oh, there' s a dangerous word) poet. I get published here and there, which I take to be a possible sign of non-craptastic-ness. But still, as I shell out my hard-earned cash for workshops and prepare to make my middle-aged way across the country yet again, I wonder about these things sometimes.


Anyway, that's neither here nor there, nor is it the post I started out intending to make. I've been thinking about my various summer-workshop experiences, and about what makes a good summer workshop, and how that's different from what makes a good, say, MFA workshop. (Not that I've been in an MFA workshop, but I've been in plenty of undergrad workshops, and a grad-level workshop that was full of MFA fiction students, etc.) Part of it is, of course, the immersion factor. There's a big difference for me in attending the IU conference, where I come home for dinner most days and come home at night and my regular life sort of intrudes a bit, versus going out of town -- but even attending the IU conference is a bit of an immersive experience. When it's good, it's intense; when it's not as good, it's just exhausting. I have had the experience of being so fully immersed in poetry that every slant of light, every blast of the foghorn on the Long Point lighthouse, every walk up that one steep hill in Iowa City makes my skin feel like it's about to burst with poems. Images start falling into lines inside my head without me even consciously manipulating them. It's an amazing feeling. I don't know if I could bear to live that way 24/7 for more than a few days at a time, but for those few days, it's pretty incredible.

The workshop itself, I think, has to be different for a short one-week experience than for a semester-long class or a multiple-year program. You've got a bunch of people who have probably never met one another before and very possibly will never see each other again after the week is over; creating an atmosphere of intimacy and trust has got to be the first order of business. Depending on the workshop, you may have a pretty wide range of experience levels; you may have people with MFA's sitting at the same table with people who've never been in a workshop before. That can make things rocky, or it can create all kinds of interesting tensions and energies. At its best, I think a summer workshop can be like a great one-night stand (not that I'm an expert there!) -- you go immediately to this intense level of intimacy, and you sort of have less to lose by exposing yourself because you have the safety of walking away when it's over. Or the illusion of safety, anyway.

I think the summer workshops that work best are the ones that are structured around a particular aspect of writing, or a particular theme, or have some sort of focus besides just "okay, we're gonna workshop everybody's poems for a week." Which doesn't mean you're not going to explore other topics or aspects (D.A. Powell's workshop last summer was ostensibly focused on revision, but goodness knows we talked about a lot of other things besides), and which doesn't mean a non-thematic workshop won't sort of organically develop its own flavor and focus as themes and topics arise from the poems and the poets in the room. (The way Lucia Perillo continually returned to the idea of mystery, for example.)

And as a student coming into a summer workshop, I think they work best when you think ahead of time about what you want to get out of the workshop, focus your energy somehow. You can't cover everything you need or want to learn about poetry in one short week, but maybe you can come away with three ideas about how to approach revision, or with information about several new places to submit your work, or having made a decision about whether you want to try applying to MFA programs, or with a notion about how to go about structuring a chapbook manuscript, or with ideas about how to discipline yourself to write every day. Or you can just go and try to be as emotionally & artistically open as possible and try to keep yourself in that open, intimate frame of mind for as much of the week as you can stand it.

I'm going to think more about what makes a good summer workshop -- I haven't yet talked about what makes someone a good summer-workshop teacher, which is another issue entirely, or about the stuff that happens in these programs other than actual workshops -- and maybe blog about this some more in the next couple of days. But I'd be interested to hear thoughts on summer workshops & conferences in general, from people who have attended them & people who have taught at them -- and maybe from people who don't want to attend them, too; I'm certainly open to the "these programs just want to take your money" point of view, even if it's in my best interest to disagree vehemently. *grin* So: thoughts?

Luck

Major props to Lucia Perillo, who just won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award ($100,000). I may have mentioned before that I took a workshop with her at the Indiana U. Writers' Conference a few years back -- in 2002, I think -- and enjoyed her a great deal. She kept talking about mystery, and wanting poems to have some mystery in them; I think this was exactly what I needed to hear at the time. Certainly it's one way to start looking at a poem, whether someone else's that you're trying to understand or your own that you're trying to revise: where is the mystery in this poem? how does the poem embrace or try to escape its own mystery?

Anyway, I'm tickled that she has won this award. Her new(ish) book, Luck is Luck, is worth a read (as are her others).

EDITED TO ADD: Here is David Kirby's review of Luck is Luck, from the New York Times.

Locally, all I can say is that it's damned cold. I know you people in Minnesota and environs have it colder, but I stayed in my warm bed (heated mattress pad, flannel sheets, down comforter, another comforter, and two warm cats) as long as I could stand it this morning, and it was still only 10 degrees outside when I got up. Now (almost 9 pm) it's back down to 10 again, though with lots of bright sunshine it wasn't too ungodly awful this afternoon at around 16 degrees. I ran around town a bit doing some retail therapy today (FOUR new pairs of socks!); had brunch at the Runcible Spoon, where I spent some time writing in my journal outlining a manuscript I want to put together -- taking a long-ass poem I'm having trouble working with as a cohesive whole and breaking it into fragments, which will be interpolated with other related and semi-unrelated poems. Could be interesting, I think.

But now I'm in for the evening, in my house which although cold and drafty is at least warmer than it is outside. I've got a heated throw blanket and a down throw blanket over me here on the couch, along with a very large fluffy cat on my lap who pretty much serves as a throw blanket all by himself, and a hat on my head (yes, inside the house -- it's cold in here, and my heating bills have been painful this winter so I'm not turning that thing up past 58). I've got the Olympics on TV, and a couple of books & journals close at hand, in addition to this laptop. I've been reading Floyd Skloot's memoir, In the Shadow of Memory, which includes some interesting meditations on personal/family history, brain injury (he suffered a viral infection of the brain that left him quite neurologically disabled), the nature of memory, the nature of self, and the way all of that influences language. It's quite a fascinating book. I'm not terribly familiar with his poetry, but after reading this book I think I will find some of that and read it.

Stay warm, y'all.

Summer in Iowa

The Iowa Summer Writing Festival has posted its schedule of workshops for this summer. I've been there three times, if I recall correctly; once I did a week-long workshop, once I did a weekend followed by a week, and once I drove out there just for a quick weekend workshop. Had a great time every time, working with fabulous teachers like Meredith Stricker, Michael Carey, and Kathleen Peirce. Michael Carey was a particularly terrific teacher; the workshop I had with him included students at all levels, from real beginners to published poets, and he managed to pull us all together so that we were all challenged & all learning from one another. He's not a particularly well-known poet, but he is a good teacher & a very sweet guy.

I haven't been to ISWF since the early nineties, and I won't be going this year, since (unless something happens to screw it up financially) I'm going to Provincetown and can't afford to do two. But if you're looking for a nice workshop and don't object to spending a week in Iowa City, I highly recommend this program. (And hey, Iowa City is nice. Plus they have Prairie Lights, which is one of the nicer bookstores I've spent time in, and as I recall the used bookstores are quite good too.)

Here's a poem:

Amen

for Kelly

See the day lilies at the edge
of our field, how we walk through them
every spring and talk of the things
we will do when our lives allow
and the children are blooming.

And the field itself,
no matter how we abuse it,
it loves us and feeds us
and asks us to return.

Every year we bend our backs
over the crop, over the weeds,
over the tenderly buzzing insects.
It hurts so much and is never enough.

See how often we cry
over nothing, over each other,
our children, our small wants
and needs; how hungry we stay
and how long is eternity.

See how your limbs and mine
find each other, again
and again, that same door
always opening, how sweetly
we sing the older we get.

Soon we will
have lived with each other
longer than we have lived
with ourselves and more easily.

There is a lesson in this
and love. Consider it.

---Michael Carey
from Honest Effort (Duluth, MN: Holy Cow! Press, 1991)

All dressed up and nowhere to go

Took the afternoon off work and spent a few hours at my desk revising a chapbook ms. until it felt reasonably good to me. Now I'm suddenly finding that most chapbook contests either had deadlines back in December or don't close until at least May or so.

Anyone know of any good chapbook contests (other than Tupelo Press) with a deadline between now and, say, April? I'm sure I will hate this ms. again in a few weeks, so I should shoot it out to as many places as I can while I can still stand it. ;)

Hah!

On my lunch break today I came up with a first draft of the "Total Loss Department" poem. My thanks to Pamela for suggesting that it "screamed out for a villanelle" -- I didn't write a villanelle, but inspired by the thought of a villanelle's repetition, I did repeat the phrase "Total Loss Department" in every stanza, which I like having done. So now that's two car-crash poems. Hey, if it happens, you may as well get some use out of it, right?

A friend from my first writing group (which petered out and stopped meeting a few years ago, but went strong for some ten years back in the day) and I have started exchanging email critiques. I've always loved her work; for years in our group we read each other almost every week, so it will be interesting to get a sense of where each of us has gone over the past several years that we haven't really been reading each other.

Marianne Boruch & Campbell McGrath are doing a reading here on March 2nd. That should be worth getting to.

Calyx

Got my contributor's copy of Calyx today -- as usual the cover art is gorgeous, and though I haven't sat down to read it carefully yet, a quick skim found several poems that caught my eye. And in the "can't throw a rock without hitting a blogger" department, our own Jeannine Hall Gailey is in this issue as well, with a Denise Duhamel review.

(Please don't take me literally. I do not advocate throwing rocks at bloggers, or at anyone else. Thankyouverymuch and we now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.)

It's been a long time since I got a contributor's copy of something in the mail -- now I feel like the drought has ended. A nice feeling, for sure.

In honor of this publication, and because I've been enjoying the poems-by-others posted by several bloggers lately including C. Dale and Carol, here's a poem from a book published by Calyx Press -- Femme's Dictionary, by Carol Guess. I knew Carol when she was here in Bloomington working on her MFA; she got the degree in poetry, but then published two novels and a memoir before getting around to publishing a collection of poetry. She is quite a remarkable writer, whose work I have always admired and enjoyed; the book explores issues of language, identity, gender, love, loss, queerness, amnesia, sex -- all that good stuff. Well worth tracking down.



Femme's Dictionary

She says she wore a dress that first Saturday,
but I say, Skirt, skirt,
insistence darkening my lips
as if the difference
between cloth or a zipper at her waist
might've held us together longer.

I like to call things by their names.
I like to make my words match,
as much as possible,
the thoughts I'm holding onto.
Not love, but a stranger's hand
in my jacket pocket. Not aquamarine,
but the color of blood
between a woman's thighs.

She was different from me.
She enjoyed lying,
the way a hand touching the surface of the water
enjoys the water: its frail and fleeting clasp.
What is it makes impermanence so sensuous?

She liked to watch
me leave, needing the sound of a door
to remind her of where my lips had lingered.
Not bedroom but vestibule,
nine letters to describe the space
she cleared for me. Not quite a room.

---Carol Guess, from Femme's Dictionary (Corvallis, Oregon: Calyx Books, 2004)


[Edit 2/9/06: Sorry about the broken links and the missing graphic -- apparently Calyx chose this moment to revamp their entire website! I'll fix the links when they restore the content to their site...]

Small update

Not to turn this blog into all-wrecked-car-all-the-time or body-shop-play-by-play or anything, but after talking to the Total Loss Department at the insurance company (could there be a more depressing office name? "Nice to meet you, where do you work?" "I'm in the Total Loss Department.") and having them call the body shop guy while I waited on hold, it turns out that much to my surprise the car can be repaired. I'm sure this takes its trade-in value down to nil, but now I'll be able to drive it for another year or two and take the time to properly research the whole car buying thing. (Hey, I've been driving the same car since 1991 -- there's a lot to learn about since then.)

I feel tremendously relieved.

I also feel the need to use "Total Loss Department" in a poem. Hmmmm. :)

Six more weeks of winter

Apparently Mister Groundhog saw his shadow.

I'm seeing a lot of shadows lately, too, and find myself wishing I could duck down into my burrow to hibernate for six weeks.

My supervisor at work says that bad luck comes in threes, so now that I've made it through the Martian Death Flu, the car wreck, and a wee electrical problem that had me summoning the fire truck to my house at 4:00 AM (less than 24 hours after the accident, no less), I should be due for some better luck. Let's hope, eh?

The car, incidentally, is most likely totaled -- though I have yet to hear back from the other driver's insurance company with a monetary figure. I, on the other hand, remain physically unscathed -- didn't even wake up stiff and sore the next morning (as everybody, including the officer on the scene, warned me that I might). So I do feel lucky there, though not as lucky as someone who didn't have an accident. I did manage to write the obligatory "car crash aftermath" poem the day after. Considering I hadn't written much of anything since about November, I'm relatively pleased with it. Thanks are due to Charlie Jensen, whose chapbook arrived in the mail the day after the crash, with just the right balance of familiarity & strangeness in the language to spark some language of my own.

Reading is such an integral part of the writing process, for me. I write best when I'm reading lots of poetry. When I am consciously reading in order to write, I don't read as closely as I might if I were going to, say, write an analytical paper about the work, but neither do I skim. I pay a sort of mid-level attention to the poems as I read them, letting the language wash over me, holding the poems in my mouth a bit to taste them but not trying to identify the individual ingredients. Some poets (or perhaps some poetries) have a stronger tendency to spark my own work, too -- and it's not always the poetry I like the best, or that I understand the best; there has to be some level of strangeness to it, a certain level of distance between me and the language that I'm reading. There also has to be a certain familiarity, something I can latch on to; I don't necessarily have to "like" the work (whatever that means) to be inspired by it, but something has to provoke a reaction in me, sustain my interest, beyond just the language. There does have to be a there there.

I don't know whether I would say the work I read in this fashion "influences" me, as I'm not consciously trying to imitate it and I doubt that anyone reading my work would imagine it was written after reading -- oh, I'm not going to name names here. But some work makes the words bounce around and rearrange themselves inside my head until I make a poem of my own, and some (even poetry I like a lot) doesn't. And I don't always know ahead of time which way it's going to go.

(Oddly enough, I can almost always get myself writing -- not always well, but writing anyhow -- by going to the university library and reading through three or four MFA theses. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe something about the relative rawness and youth of the work makes it easier for me to quibble with, and the quibbling turns into my own poetry -- though what I write is almost never in direct response to what I've read. But I'm not gonna argue with what works.)

How does your reading influence your writing? Are there certain poets you go back and read when you feel the need for inspiration? Do you consciously write in response to other poets/poems? Conversely, do you need to avoid some poets because they influence you too strongly? (When I was an undergrad, I read way too much Marge Piercy, and it showed. *grin*) Do you read differently when you read for inspiration, for analysis, or for enjoyment?

P.S. You should certainly get hold of a copy of Charlie's chapbook. I did say that the poetry that inspires me isn't always the poetry I like, but his is a big old "yes" to both. Strong stuff, these poems. I may say something more specific after I spend more time with them.

How to start the week off with a bang

I wanted to say "it was the loudest sound I ever heard." But really, I was in a tornado once, and that must have been much louder. Not that I remember it.

But the sound of the front end of a Ford Explorer running a stop sign and whacking into the back end of a Toyota Corolla driven by a middle-aged poet-blogger-kittymom is, well, it's loud. Sure as heck woke me up on my way to work this morning.

I'm fine, absolutely fine (with the disclaimer that of course I may wake up stiff and sore and end up filing a medical claim or whatever, but for now, I feel just fine). My poor little blue '91 Corolla is, well, not so fine. Not fine at all. Fortunately the stop-sign-runner had insurance, and I've already spoken with them.

We shall see what happens, though I'm very afraid this will end up meaning I need to go car shopping, an unplanned expense which would severely jeopardize my P-town trip in June. But I can cancel that as late as sometime in May and still get my deposit back, so I am trying to hold off on that particular panic for now.

On the bright side, I'd never been in an accident before, so I guess now I have a new (if maybe a bit trite) image I can use in poems. :-P

(The good news is that she didn't hit me two or three feet farther forward, because that would have bashed in the driver's side door instead, which of course is in very close proximity to the driver herself, namely me. And I don't really like to get that close to the front end of a large, rapidly moving vehicle if I can help it.)

FAWC!

The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown has finally posted their workshop schedule & descriptions for this summer. Go check it out. There are some amazing workshops coming up.

I have already, as I've mentioned, signed up for D.A. Powell's workshop on "Writing the Body." Here's the description:

Writing poetry is a physical act, located within the lungs, skin, heart and eyes of the poet. Words, when they’re working best, transmit the breath, rhythm and sensory experience of being in the world. In this workshop, we’ll explore the physicality of writing the poem, paying particular attention to issues of the body. How do wellness and disease change the patterns of a poem? How does language give shape to erotic desire? What are the parallels between giving birth and creating the poem? These are but a few of the questions that will guide us through the physical labor of writing. Participants should bring 11 copies of 3 draft poems, as well as their writing notebooks.

Now doesn't that sound entertaining? If I had unlimited time and money (or at least a little less limited), I would also take Thomas Sayers Ellis' "A Risk In Every Room":

A workshop for students interested in writing off-subject, forcing visual and sound connections, and creating surprising narrative and non-narrative progression(s) all within free and fixed stanza forms in their work.

Or possibly Major Jackson's "Doorways":

Entrances into and exits out of works of art are as varied as they are essential. Every artist must tackle the questions "Where do I begin?" and "How shall I end?" In this workshop, we will examine poems (and possibly other art forms) by celebrated as well as emergent American poets to discover how poems find their way into and out of their lyric and narrative worlds. Our observations will focus on strategies and how such openings & closings, arrivals & departures establish tone, movement, and emotional engagement. We will spend a good portion of our time critiquing each other’s poems with our eyes peeled close to our own entryways. Students should come to class with eleven copies of three poems-in-progress.

Here's Martha Rhodes on "Revising and Generating New Work":

In this workshop, we'll examine the choices you’ve made for your poems in terms of imagery, vocabulary, line breaks, and overall structure. We’ll note how these choices, these CRAFT decisions, impact your work and how you can move forward with your poems and also generate new work from the poems you've brought in to discuss. To help us with the discussion of your own poems, we'll look at other poets' work at the beginning of each session to see how their choices brought about layered, multi-dimensional poems of psychological complication. Handouts will be provided, along with several optional overnight "assignments," and, if time permits, opportunity for in-class writing. This is a good workshop for those who really want to work on revision, and generate new work during the week.

And finally, Tom Sleigh's two-day weekend workshop, which is just setting off all kinds of sparks in my head -- if I could possibly swing an August weekend in addition to my week in June I would so sign up for this one:

What is and isn't your material? What kind of poem will you allow yourself to write and what kinds of language does that give you access to? Frost’s notion that a poem is a kind of chain reaction—you start with an emotion, the emotion finds a thought, and the thought finds a word—is one way of thinking about it, but we’ll also talk about less linear ways of organizing that may help you push the limits of your material and your language. This is a workshop for poets who want to go beyond the boundaries of what they can already do. Please bring two of your own poems for us to discuss, though we can also talk about some of the new work you produce during the weekend.

"What is and isn't your material? What kind of poem will you allow yourself to write and what kinds of language does that give you access to?" Oh man ... these are exactly questions I need to be asking of myself and my work right now. Actually, just reading that workshop description may set off some fruitful work for me. I'm going to spend some time thinking about this one.

If you are at all considering a summer workshop this year, I wholeheartedly recommend FAWC. Anyone who was reading my blog last summer knows what an amazing time I had there in June/July. The only drawback is that it is not cheap ... but the folks at FAWC really know how to throw a party. I mean, a workshop. :) I can almost taste the salty harbor fog now...

* * * * *

In other news, the deadline for the Indiana Arts Commission's Individual Artist Grant applications is fast approaching. Because it's a "must be on our desk" deadline rather than a postmark deadline, I would have to have my application in the mail tomorrow. At this point, I think it is just not happening. Thanks to having been so debilitated by my recent bout with the Martian Death Flu (I'm still coughing a bit), I just couldn't gather enough energy to get to it.

And yes, maybe I am using the Martian Death Flu as an excuse for my own laziness, or fear of failure, or fear of success, or whatever. But as I think about it, I'm not entirely sure the online mentorship thing is exactly what I need right now. I feel like I know what I need to do in order to improve my writing; I'm staring down what I am relatively sure is the right path, even though I'm not quite on it. I just need to muster the discipline and tenacity I'll need to get from here to there, and that's not going to come from any mentor, or workshop, or MFA program -- it can only come from within myself. The upshot is that I just have to decide (every day, for the rest of my life) whether I want it badly enough to do what I have to do to get there. Like a tennis player who's up a set, down a break, and beginning to cramp, the question I have to face now is how much does it matter to me, really.

And I think the answer is that it matters quite a lot, though I couldn't tell you why. But I can say that and say that and say that, and if I don't sit down at my desk and face the blank or half-ass-drafted page, it doesn't matter what I say, now does it?

So if you'll excuse me, I have a pen to pick up.

like Christmas

Just extricated from the two boxes that appeared on my doorstep yesterday:
The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, Emma Donoghue (short stories) (paper)
Aftershocks, Jess Wells (fiction) (paper)
Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, Marvin Bell (paper)
Bending Home: Selected & New Poems 1967-1998, Susan Griffin (paper)
Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960-2000, Carolyn Kizer (paper)
Rock Harbor, Carl Phillips (cloth)
Digressons on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara: A Memoir, Joe LeSueur (cloth)
The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions, Rick Moody (cloth)
The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed, Jane Cooper (cloth)
Rare and Commonplace Flowers: The Story of Elizabeth Bishop and Lota de Macedos Soares, Carmen L. Oliveira (cloth)
In the Next Galaxy, Ruth Stone (cloth)

...All brand new, mint condition, for less than fifty bucks including shipping. I *heart* Daedalus Books. I have mixed feelings about remainders as a general rule -- as someone who would like to have a book published someday I find it all a bit depressing, but -- cheap books! (Hint: to find the poetry section, you need to select the Books tab, then go to Literature, where you'll find Poetry as a subcategory.)

For his part, the kitten is having a blast playing with the boxes and packing paper.

I may as well start writing my own obituary now, as at this point I think it's probably inevitable that I will end up crushed by an avalanche of books.

by way of an "I'm still alive" post

Boy, am I behind on email.

* * * * *

Awaiting my attention: the Born to Run 30th anniversary box set, the Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, the new issue of Diner, et cetera. Oh yeah, and some blank pages that would be most pleased to have poems plopped onto them. Sigh.

* * * * *

Funky web searches that have led to my blog recently:

"43-year-old spinster" (I beg your pardon, I'm forty-FOUR!)
land mammal close to whale (not lately, but maybe in June when I hit P-town...)
perpetually single unhappy (from the Dept. of Health and Human Services, which makes this incredibly funny for some reason)
roger federer shoes kansas (well, I assume he probably wears shoes no matter what state he's in...)
silly poems drafty houses (hey, that just about sums up my life)
fact or fiction frozen unhappy cat (well, cat, if you'd stop sitting in front of the drafty windows, you might not be frozen and unhappy!)
stinky chair equilibrium chair (huh?)
posture is important for musicians (I won't argue that one)
beluga whales bubble rings (hey, someone else went to the Georgia Aquarium!)
logistically what does it mean in grants writing (logistically, you probably want to make more sense than that if you are writing a grant...)
ariel view of sharks (gee, I don't know if Ms. Plath ever hung out with sharks or not)
what are starfish feel like when there in land (huh???)
buttermilk pig fart poem (HUH?????)

* * * * *

Substance soon, I swear.

Pits and bieces

It was, of course, inevitable that at some point I would receive a postage-due notice and have to stand in line at the post office counter in order to pay my two cents and retrieve my rejection slip. I'm just amused by the fact that it happened on Friday the 13th. All was not lost, however, as I bought some new 39-cent stamps while I was at it, and they have a WONDERFUL new set of stamps that are animal illustrations from children's books. These are the best stamps ever. Even when I get rejection slips I will smile because they will have Wilbur or Curious George on them. I just hope the Very Hungry Caterpillar doesn't eat all my manuscripts.

* * * * *

My little baby kitten weighs NINE pounds now. I guess I only think of him as a little bitty kitten still because I always see him next to the Wooly Mammoth Bear, who has actually lost a little over a pound and is now down to 17 pounds 13 ounces. (At least a pound of that is fluff.)

* * * * *

Why does this make me think of C. Dale?

(Found at http://towleroad.typepad.com/towleroad/2006/01/love_is_a_force.html)

* * * * *

Back (in an actual-factual-substantial-post type fashion) soon. Cough, cough.