Difficult material: Some things take time

Oddly, I have now written two poems about my father's death in the past couple of months -- one while I was in Provincetown, and one last night. He died in January 1994; I've written about it since then, of course, but almost nothing that felt like a real poem. (As opposed to, you know, just scribbling or working stuff out for myself or therapy whatever.)

I won't go so far as to say that now my dad's death is just "material" like anything else; of course it's still something that cuts closer to my own heart than, say, a poem about a squirrel running around the yard. But I feel like I'm working with it a bit more, shall we say, impersonally now -- and that feels like a good thing, a useful thing.

The one I wrote in Provincetown came from an exercise in which we were to write about emotional pain using the language of physical pain. I wrote about grief & about the time I had a corneal abrasion, which was pretty much the most exquisitely painful thing I've ever experienced (I'd rather break a bone or go through major surgery again). You can't keep your eye open because the light hurts too much. You can't keep your eye closed because the eyelid pressing on the scratched cornea hurts too much. It's this inescapable thing, kind of like the early days of grief. I wrote the poem feeling rather detached about it and actually fairly cheerful, whereas another poem about how difficult it can be to go into stores and try on clothes when you're a fat chick made me feel like throwing up as I was writing it. Go figure.

One reason I held back from writing about my father's death was because, well, you know. "Death of a parent" is on everybody's list of the "oh god not another one of those PLEASE don't send me any more of those" topics . It's really hard to write anything about it that hasn't been said a billion times before. And yet, if part of the work of poetry is to help us (both reader & writer) grapple with the difficult, to understand what it is to be human, grief & loss is inextricably part of that. It might be the biggest part of that. Not to write about it feels dishonest, incomplete. The trick, I guess, is figuring out how to tackle this material so that it's not just catharsis for the poet but also gives the reader a reason to bother with it. There I go again, stating the obvious. But I'm not sure how to be any more specific about it than that.

I don't know that I've managed to be successful with either of my "dead dad poems" (hi LKD) -- I make no claims for them at this point. But I think, I hope, that with these poems I'm starting to move beyond personal catharsis and beyond "oh here let me bestow upon you this wisdom I have gleaned from my own pain" and into the real territory of poetry ... whatever the hell that is.

It only took twelve years to reach this point with this particular material. Sheesh.

What is your own "difficult material"? Is there something you hesitate to tackle in your work, even though it feels important to you? Is there something you're waiting to write about? What are you waiting for? I'd like to know.

The dog-day cicadas at the top of their lungs

Slept late today. Very late. Unconscionably late. So late I am too embarrassed to say how late. And when I will happily admit to sleeping till noon on many weekends without embarrassment, that will give you some idea just how late.

Oy.

Still feeling very quiet. Summer is winding down and the fall semester begins in just two weeks (and a day). Hard to believe. I do love fall, and back-to-school sales (which make me crave notebooks and pens and bookshelves and new shoes), and despite how chaotic this town gets when thousands of students arrive, I do love it when they all come back.

Had a note from the folks at Blackbird today -- there is potentially going to be something very interesting in their November issue (besides my poem). More on this as it develops -- fingers crossed.

Outside it's almost dark, and there's a small brown rabbit in the driveway. There are at least a couple of these little guys living in my yard. Most mornings I see one or both of them when I get in the car to go to work and I always say hello. Hi, bunny. Hi little white tail. They never say hello back at me though. In fact, usually they run.

I am in a funny in-between place, but I'm not sure what I am in between. Perhaps I just need to drink more coffee.

And if I want to write, I need to make myself sit down and write. Because you can't write if you don't write. You know?

Quiet lately, and an Alice Friman poem

I haven't had much to say lately, here or anywhere. I'm not sure why, but I'm just going to ride it out and trust that the words will return.

Meanwhile, here's a poem by someone else.

Northwest Flight #1173

     We guessed your silent passage
       by the phosphorescence in your wake.
           At dawn we found you stranded on the rocks.
                    --Stanley Kunitz

We sit on the tarmac in Indianapolis.
Four hours, five, punctuated by coffee
and too small cakes on miniature trays.
The rain taps at the rows of little windows --
the only recognition from the outside world
that we are there -- while we,
like the ark on drizzling Ararat,
wait for the levels to go down: the generators
to work. I read poetry and think of whales.
A beached body, its grunts and squeaks,
small tracks like the flashing instrument panel
that measures the dying of a great interior.

I remember last August when I saw one
trailing phosphorescence off Provincetown:
the long languorous arc of the body dipping
in and out like a needle hemming the seas,
while circling birds above the blowhole
announced the repeated baptism of tonnage,
the metamorphosis of breath to rainbow.

Transferred to another plane, rocking at last
on the runway, all windsocks go, the great wings
spread out over their humming eggs of energy,
we lift, shuddering through fog, to where the sun
pumps above our small geometric lives, and I
wonder as we climb, buoyant in our blindness,
if we too want -- like a silver needle freed
of thread -- entrance into insubstantial air.

--Alice Friman, from Inverted Fire (BkMk Press, 1997)

As far as the eye can see

On the way back from Race Point, June 2005
(click to enlarge)

Just quick notes

I want to do this so badly I can taste it. (It tastes like salt.) Perhaps I can apply for an Individual Artist Grant from the state Arts Commission, which would cover it, and then go in say late September or early October of next year. If they'd have me. That seems like a long time from now.

The other day I made a list of places I want to go and things I want to do, and I even left off a bunch of them. I either need a heck of a lot more vacation time and a heck of a lot more money, or a fairy godmother.

* * * * *

Here is a nice article from the Cape Cod Times about the Stanley Kunitz memorial reading at the Fine Arts Work Center this past weekend.

* * * * *

This is cool as hell: The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form. They are only up to the A's and B's, and you too can contribute if you want to.

* * * * *

My kitten is eating a cardboard box. I really don't know why.

* * * * *

I'm very tired.

AWP advice?

Seeking advice from AWP veterans! I have realized that I actually do have a reason to attend other than "wanna hang out and meet some bloggers and see what it's like" ... it would be a really great thing for me to be able to chat with representatives of some of the low-res MFA programs I'm considering applying to. And Atlanta isn't too bad a drive from here, just about 500 miles -- if my ancient little car holds out (oh, cross your fingers) I could easily do it in a day.

But I can't afford it. But! My aunt lives in ATL, probably about a 30-minute drive from downtown. And if she's in town that week, I'm sure I could crash with her. So here's my conference-newbie question: how much would I miss out on if I had to leave at a reasonable hour every evening to get back to my aunt's -- say, no later than 8 or 9 pm? (It would be so rude of me to come stomping in at midnight; she goes to bed early.) Not having to pay for a hotel room would make it decidedly more affordable, although I still might not be able to swing it (heck, even just parking is expensive)... but the prospect of being able to meet some of the low-res program folks and make a more intelligent decision is awfully darned appealing.

* * * * *

This blasted heat and humidity is sapping every ounce of energy I've got. I know it's hotter in other places, but in the middle of the day we generally have about 65% humidity here -- going up to 90% at night. When you do this to lobsters, they turn bright red. When you do this to land mammals like yours truly, we tend to go home from work at night and fall asleep on the couch and just crash there. I am behind on everything.

More, I hope, later.

Plug, plug, plug

I have been one poor correspondent & owe several of you email. I promise to catch up this weekend!

* * * * *

A couple of quick plugs:

Inch is looking for "tiny poems and tiny fiction." Sounds intriguing! See this post from Little Fury for details.

My good friend and poet-colleague Shana Ritter recently made an appearance on The Poets Weave, the poetry show on our local NPR station. They're now archiving and podcasting this stuff, so you can take a listen if you'd like; she has some nice work. You can nab it from iTunes by searching on "WFIU" or you can go directly to the radio station's website, where it is archived in RealAudio format. (iTunes will have a new episode up in a few days, so if you want to hear Shana, you'd best nab it soon.)

* * * * *

Got my contributor's copies of the Merton Seasonal, the quarterly journal of the Thomas Merton Foundation, featuring my little whale poem which was awarded honorable mention in their Poetry of the Sacred Contest. They sent me five copies, which is really cool. All in all they run a very good contest: they phoned me to give me the good news, which made it more exciting; the contest results were announced when they said they would be instead of weeks or months later like some contests; the check arrived like a week after they notified me about it; they posted the poems on their website quickly; and the winner & honorable mentions are very nicely showcased in the print journal. And all that from a contest with no entry fee! Check out some of their past winners to get a sense of their generous definition of "the sacred," check out the contest guidelines, and if you have a poem that might fit, I highly encourage you to enter this year's contest. All in all, it's been one of my favorite publishing-type experiences. It's so cool to find a non-poetry organization that recognizes and honors the value of poetry & poets.

So I guess that was really another plug, wasn't it. :)

Relaxation and focus

Thinking about Provincetown and my workshop experiences there -- what strikes me above all else is that I've never experienced, anywhere else, that balance of utter relaxation & "on-vacation-ness" and focused, intense, hard work. Not at any of the other summer workshops I've attended, not when I take a couple days off work to stay home and write, not anywhere. That's where the magic is for me, I think; and I even experienced a bit of it when I visited Provincetown just for vacationing, before I started taking workshops there. The atmosphere of the town is so ... I don't quite know how to describe it. So NOT "nine to five," business as usual. Partly it's because so much of the town is dedicated to tourism, to reminding people that they're on vacation. Partly it's the landscape of the place, the expanse of water, the desolate dunes, the Province Lands that feel like another planet, the smell of salt water, the clarity of light. It all works together.

So when we all gather at FAWC for a workshop, we're on vacation, most if not all of us; enjoying the fact that while we're there we don't have to clean the house, pay the bills, go to work, make the dentist appointment. And yet the focus is so damn intense. I don't know about anyone else, but I spend at least as much time writing, reading, preparing for class as I do actually in class. More, usually. Not to mention how conversations over dinner, drinks, even slipped in around the edges of the karaoke (heh) keep circling back to poetry. It's pervasive. Everything starts looking, feeling, smelling like a poem.

Tonight I remembered one of the most important lessons I learned in martial arts, lo these many years ago -- yes, I was a very serious student of karate for about six years or so, in my twenties. The first most important lesson is to remember to breathe (I gotta admit that one applies to poetry very nicely too). The second important lesson is to relax every muscle that is not absolutely necessary for whatever technique you are doing. You don't want to be a floppy jellyfish on the dojo floor, that will get your ass kicked. But you also don't want to clench every muscle, not until that sudden, singular moment of contact with your sparring partner. Try it for a moment. DON'T HIT ANYBODY. :) But make a fist, and throw a punch in the air. Try it with every muscle in your body clenched and tightened just as tight as it will go. It's like pushing that fist through something viscous, isn't it? Now relax everything, just hold as much tension in your body as is absolutely essential to maintain your form, and try to throw that punch again -- then at the moment when your fist would make contact, tighten everything (even your ass muscles -- especially your ass muscles!) and let out a sharp exhale. I bet your fist whips out there a whole lot faster.

I think poetry is like that, too. If you can relax everything else, relax and let go of the bill-paying mind and the going-to-work mind and the "oh my god everything I write is crap" mind, the words flow a lot faster and more freely. All your energy becomes focused on that one moment of contact, the impact of your words upon the page. When you waste less of your energy on unnecessary tension, whether physical or psychological, there's that much more energy to focus on whatever it is you want to focus on.

And remembering to breathe? Still not a bad idea. *grin*


NOTA BENE: The Management is not responsible for any bad "wax on, wax off" jokes that may hereafter ensue. Also not responsible for lost items. Thank you. --Land Mammal Mgmt.

this connection...

I'm reading Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs. Goodness. Why on earth have I waited so long? This is wonderful stuff, and gives me all kinds of new ideas about what is possible in poems.

* * * * *

The situation in the Middle East (and elsewhere) leaves me frightened and speechless. I don't know what else to do, so I just go on living and writing and loving the world as best I can.

I don't know what else to do.

It's hot. Let's read a poem.

It's too hot to think straight. Not that I generally do anyway.

* * * * * * * * * *

There are so many poems out there. Do I really have anything to say that hasn't been said, and better, 85 bajillion times?

Does anyone?

* * * * * * * * * *

Here's a poem:



Daring Love

I am daring love to be anything else,
to be on its best behavior wicked, to be heartache
in its prime. Love, nod yes, the noggin
of a great disease. Make chain gangs by design,
love; be phantom brawling the nursery, be darkness.

Love, a cooing shadow when a stranger
takes me into his car. Love is my spiced breath,
love cuts teeth. Love unwinds iambic vines
down unrhymed alleyways, jeweled yet innocent weeds
casually blooming the balled tongues of children.
Love dedicates itself, all ruby-sucked thumbs,
to the stewing cradle at the foot of a stranger's
gut. Tell me truth, love: why want his mouth
that toils like a bad taste after the mint
of the moon?

Just leave husk and gristle. I dare you--

be the reason my mother hated to be touched.
Thirty years with a man who refused homecomings
and proms, married without mentioning love. My mother.
Every night she bleached the coaldust out of his clothes,
tasted in his mouth the coalmine, the scuttle, the coal.
You are that smoked winter, love, admit it. You waltzed
his black lung, her wallflower cancer. The ICU nurse
said my mother loved me. Love, are you an empty stare
as the heart, your celebrated domain,
latches its last door?

I am daring love to be anything else,
to be heathen in a red room, to be God's love
for Job, to be kicked dog. Grind your spotlight
on the daughterliest sons. Leave a little despair,
love, be what the least of us can claim.

--A. Loudermilk
from Strange Valentine

Card catalog poetry

Courtesy of Choriamb: Check out the Card Catalog Poetry Project! Very cool, especially for us librarian-poetry-nerds -- and most especially for us librarian-poetry-nerds who are old enough to remember using the actual card catalog back in pre-computer days. *grin*

That's just the way we like it

Every now and then I catch myself expecting the writing of poems to get easier as I get (supposedly) (well, one would hope) better at it -- or at least more experienced.

It doesn't, does it? Not ever.

Well damn.

* * * * *

P.S. So nobody knows what's up with Bloom, huh?

That was quick...

Got an email this evening from Poetry Southeast, accepting one of the poems I just emailed to them late Sunday night. That's what I call a quick turnaround! The poem, "Eight-Bar Solo," is a tribute to the late great jazz bassist Ray Brown, and to my dad (who was also a bass-picker).

Poetry Southeast is still reading for their fall issue until August 1, in case you -- yes, you -- may have some work to send them. It's a nice little online journal, with an emphasis on Southern writing (but they take work from us Yankees too).

Bright ideas

Toying with the idea of taking a week off in February or March, heading out to Provincetown, finding a cheap off-season cottage or apartment or at least a room with kitchen privileges, and giving myself a little writing retreat -- perhaps to start working on MFA application essays and suchlike, perhaps to futz with a chapbook manuscript, perhaps just to read and write like crazy. I have never been there earlier than early June or later than mid-September, and I want to see it when it's bleak and everything is closed. I imagine the moors glinting with frost and the ocean stretching out forever in more shades of gray than I knew existed.

Toying with a lot of ideas, actually.

(Don't you love how I just tossed out that phrase, "MFA application essays," like the whole process of coming to this decision hasn't caused me several years of more-or-less angst? Lordy. After all this dithering and grumbling, I sure as hell hope I actually get accepted somewhere. I'm going to feel fairly ridiculous if I don't.)

* * * * * * * * * *

The people across the street are sitting out in their yard and playing their hippie drums. This makes the kitten nervous for some reason.

* * * * * * * * * *

I had a smallish epiphany while sitting at my desk in Provincetown, and jotted down a title. Said title seems to fit most of the poems that I'm particularly fond of but have not ever seemed to quite fit into the chapbook ms. currently making the rounds. Also, as soon as I thought of the title, I thought of several other poem ideas that fit with that title. Perhaps I am working on my second manuscript now. I wouldn't know. Some of what I'm writing feels different to me, though. I can't quite put my finger on how.

Also, memorization is going better than I expected, and is more fun than I expected. "Stasis in darkness..."

* * * * * * * * * *

I promised several people that I would blog about the exercises D.A. Powell gave us in Provincetown. I still intend to do that, and I'm working on it. I need to dig out my folder o'papers from that week so I can report on exactly what poems we read to go along with the exercises, since I didn't include complete citations in my notes (but do have them on the handouts). They were good exercises. Of course, the one that was supposed to be easy was the one that caused me the most anxiety -- which figures, doesn't it?

Yeah. It figures.

Whither?

Anyone know what's up with Bloom? Their website seems to have disappeared, or moved and left no forwarding address...

Willing

After reading Alison Bechdel's absolutely terrific graphic-novel/memoir Fun Home, I am thinking a lot about the ways in which writers take risks. Bechdel takes just about every risk in the book (as it were) with Fun Home, and is being pretty thoroughly rewarded in sales & critical acclaim. (Which, for those of us who have been following her work for many years via the fabulous comic Dykes To Watch Out For, is both gratifying and a bit surreal.)

I want to ask my poems what risks they take, what risks they are willing to take. I want them to risk their wordy little lives for me.

In return, I need to lay it all on the line for them. I need to be willing.

I know I'm doing the work I need to be doing when every now and then I scare the crap out of myself or kind of feel like throwing up. (Thinking about applying to MFA programs makes me kind of feel like throwing up, too. Y'all should consider buying stock in anti-emetics.)

I haven't really been writing since getting back to Indiana. Break's over now, I think. The Muse is coming and I better look busy.

Gratitude

This evening, local singer-songwriter Carrie Newcomer gave her annual free concert in the park. I would love Carrie's music even if she weren't a local girl, but having her as part of my extended community (we have friends in common, we go to the same vet clinic, etc.) makes her shows even more special. As usual, she performed a nice mix of old and new songs (quite a few that she hasn't yet put on an album -- do we still call them albums? ok, us old farts do--) and as always I was impressed with the consistency of her songwriting. She's a singer-songwriter who isn't afraid to be a writer; her most recent album, Regulars & Refugees, is a collection of character portraits, many of which, one senses, could have turned into short stories just as easily as songs. She has a gift for choosing the telling detail, for writing songs concerned with matters of the spirit but firmly grounded in the recognizable, touchable, seeable world. Her summer park concerts are always a festival of kids dancing in front of the stage, birds wheeling overhead, dogs happily wagging for attention from every passerby, picnic dinners, and listeners from every part of this community's spectrum -- every year I have a moment of looking around at the crowd and falling in love with my little midwestern town all over again.

Doesn't hurt when the weather's perfect, either.

When I come home from a great week like the one I had last week, it's easy to get cranky, to feel sorry for myself because I'll never be able to afford to live in Provincetown, never (short of winning the lottery) be able to just write full-time for more than a short time every year. But you know what, I have a good life. I have a job I like most of the time, doing work that on some level really does matter. I live in a town filled with grass and trees and bunnies and birds, with lots of music and lots & lots of good people. I have good friends. I don't make much money, but I make enough to get away for a workshop now and then and to buy a few books here and there. I live in a little house with the two cutest cats in the world (ok, I'm biased), who are both healthy and who both seem to adore me. My writing isn't where I want it to be, but I am motivated to work hard at it, and the hard work is what matters.

And on top of it all, I didn't see one single mosquito this evening. (I think they all migrated to Provincetown.)

It's not a glamorous, exciting, or well-to-do life. Sometimes it's just barely comfortable. But it's a good life. It is. And nights like tonight, I find myself just breathing deep, breathing it all in, filling my whole body with gratitude.

A new project

Inspired by one of the students in my workshop last week who made himself write a poem without ever writing any of it down (the assignment was to create some difficulty for ourselves in writing the poem, some constraint -- suggestions included writing one word on each page, writing blindfolded, or writing with the non-dominant hand -- I made myself physically move to a new location to draft each line, which was vaguely interesting) and by a certain inebriated recitation-fest in the Stanley Kunitz Common Room in the wee hours of the morning, I have decided that I need to memorize some damn poems. I've got lines, stanzas even, in my head -- and about 2/3 of a few Shakespeare soliloquies -- but no whole poems that I can dredge up, inebriated or no.

To that end, my goal is to memorize one poem a month for the next year. I'll write them down in a notebook at the beginning of the month, carry them around with me all month, and hopefully have them by heart before month's end. I know a month is a long time, and maybe this doesn't sound all that ambitious, but it feels like a challenge to me -- I've never been good at memorization (which is the only reason I'm not a world-famous actress, right?).

First up (for July, since June is almost gone) will be Plath's "Ariel" because I already have bits of it and because I just love how her language feels in my mouth. "Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances..."

If any of y'all have suggestions for others I should consider memorizing, I'm all ears!

Home again, home again...

Uneventful trip home. Of course, after several days of rain, Provincetown put on its bright sunny face to say goodbye this morning. I think it may have been laughing at me a little bit, too.

I miss good seafood everywhere, the sound of the foghorn, the way the air smells, the new & not-so-new friends I spent time with, the near-perfect balance between solitary writing time and socializing, waking early & happy and making coffee and sitting down at my little desk beneath the window overlooking the green courtyard and writing, rainbow flags all over the place, conversations that veer from poetry to silly shit and back again within moments, the making and remaking of connections.

I will not miss the giant-ass mosquitoes. Also, it's nice to be with my cats again. (The moment I stepped in the door, Lotus started up with the Super Extra Mega Noisy Purr. A couple minutes later, he got one of his toy mousies and ran to me with it & dropped it at my feet. Awwwwww! Bear was glad to see me too -- he is smiling & smiling.)

* * * * *

I think I put my finger on why I've been feeling more dissatisfied with my work this week than I did after a similar week last year. Last year, I ended the week feeling all kinds of good things about my work, feeling like I'd made good strong progress. This year, I kind of feel like it's all crap. But you know what, I looked at some notes to myself I jotted on one of my exercise poems from the week, and I think I'm a lot better now at seeing what needs to be done -- at stepping back from my own poems & seeing where they fail, where they need to be pushed. So I'm kind of focused on the failure part, but in a way that should ultimately be productive. I am frustrated with my work mainly because my standards got higher. I don't think I did make quite the breakthroughs I made last year, but it probably isn't quite all crap, either.

I have a lot of work to do. And, you know, that's an okay place to be right now.

* * * * *

"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday, far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." --Rilke

* * * * *

In the National Shitorgetoffthepo(e)t Derby, "put up" defeats "shut up" by a nose.

Good night, Provincetown

Sometimes, I love this town the way you love someone who's going to break your heart.

What I learned this trip: don't bother coming in out of the rain.

So long, P-town poets

Workshop ended yesterday. As always, a bit sad to see it end. More than a bit. I always meet such good people at these things, and we always make staying-in-touch promises which 90% of the time are not even remotely going to be kept. (Not because anyone's a bad person or wouldn't like to stay in touch -- it's just that people go back to their normal lives, get busy, etc.)

(If any of you guys googled me and found this -- hi! welcome! leave a comment or drop me an email ... I miss ya already!)

It is funny how my relationship with Provincetown has changed now that I'm coming here for workshops and not just as a tourist. I feel like I have a community here. All week I saw people I knew, everywhere. I felt like a part of something. Now that I've moved over to a B&B for my last two nights and most of last week's workshoppers have gone home, it feels like a different town, and I don't like it as much.

The good news is that I spoke with both Dorothy (education coordinator and one of the nicest people on the planet) and Hunter (director of the Fine Arts Work Center) and they are definitely working on getting a low-residency MFA writing program off the ground. They will be partnering with another institution, as they have for their visual arts MFA -- most likely either Bennington or Sarah Lawrence. And it should get going within the next two years.

Yes, I'm applying. How can I not?

(I will apply to other places too, of course. One should never put all one's eggs in one basket, even if it's a very nice basket. Which reminds me, I want to go to Cafe Heaven in the morning for an omelet...)

The other good news is that I was offered a letter of recommendation which should carry a fair amount of weight. That makes me happy.

So sometime in the next few days I'll blog about the workshop itself and share the exercises that we were given. They were good ones. I don't always do well with exercises. Although I'm not crazy about everything I came up with for these, I think they were all productive and useful for me, and I will probably try several of them again.

* * * * *

Today was my all day whale watch. Other than the fact that the weather sucked about as much as it could suck without actually having the trip cancelled (rain, fog, rain, cold, and rain), it was fun. We traveled up north to Jeffreys Ledge, off the coast of Maine, and got some good close looks at a number of whales -- humpbacks, finbacks, and minke whales.

And now I'm tired and increasingly non-verbal, so I think I will just fart around online for a while (I am behind on EVERYthing) and fall asleep early.

hi.

They should not let poets go out drinking. Especially not when there is bad (oh, bad, VERY bad) drag karaoke to be found.

That's as much gossip as yer gonna get. It's 3:22 am and I am going to sleep.

:)

p.s. I love Provincetown.

A quiet evening

Staying in tonight, although two groups of poets invited me to join them going out. I've been extraordinarily social this week, and felt the need for a quiet night. Also I want to start revising a poem of mine that was workshopped yesterday -- the critique I received made me realize that a) the damn thing needs more work than I thought it did & is much farther from being finished than I'd hoped it was, and b) it probably has more potential -- if I can revise it well -- than I thought it did. So, I guess that's a good situation.

One thing that's happened this year that didn't happen last year is that I've been socializing not only with people from Powell's workshop but with a number of Carl Phillips' students as well, which has been lovely. This has come about largely, I think, because I already knew two folks in Phillips' class (who were in Powell's class with me last summer) and so by way of "hey, this is so-and-so from my class, we're going out, wanna join us?" the two classes have been intermingling a bit. Several of us are planning to do our best to get the majority of both classes (and both teachers, we hope!) to go out together after the student reading tomorrow night.

I have been enjoying the social aspects of it all this week, getting to know some really neat new people and getting to know better some of the people I met last summer. I've been to other summer workshops/conferences, and have returned to a couple of them more than once, but I've never felt as welcomed as I have felt here. It's nice.

That said, I wrote a poem for today's assignment that made me feel very uncomfortable, that dealt with material that was unaccountably difficult for me. It's good for me to be pushed outside my comfort zone, but I've had a bit of a lingering sense of unease ever since a) writing the damn thing this morning and b) reading it out loud in class. I do believe that most of the time if you write a poem & it makes you feel like throwing up, you're probably tackling something that you need to tackle. And so I'm glad that I wrote this piece (I'm not actually sure it is a poem yet, maybe more like notes for a poem) but it has left me feeling odd all day.

So I'll write a bit tonight, and sleep relatively early, and get up in the lovely morning and write some more. And tomorrow night is the student reading, which was such a fabulous experience for me last year -- so that's something to look forward to & then some.

Seriously, people -- if you've ever even remotely considered taking a summer workshop out here (or teaching one, for those of you with books and teaching experience and what-not!) -- it is just a wonderful, wonderful place, staffed and visited by wonderful people. If I don't end up in an MFA program by next year, I will find a way to come back here ... somehow. It would make me very happy to spend a week here every single summer for quite a long time. (Or more than a week, but let'$ be reali$tic.)

What We Do For Fun In Provincetown

Sunday night: out drinking with poets
Monday night: in my room drinking with poets
Tuesday night: out drinking with poets

Do you sense a trend here? (I may give myself this evening off from that. Or not.)

D.A. Powell gave his reading last night -- all new work, written in the past six months or so. It quite knocked my socks off, or would have had I been wearing socks. Also: titles! Look out for some of them in a couple upcoming issues of Poetry. I am biased (as we are almost always biased for -- or against, sometimes -- our teachers) but it is just terrific stuff.

I've written three poems so far this week: two for class assignments and one for the hell of it. Quite happy with both my assignment poems -- not that they don't need lots of work, but they are workable drafts, I think. The one for the hell of it is about a squirrel I spotted and I wrote it just because I wanted to put the phrase "gnawed nuts" in a poem.

Ah, Provincetown.

P.S. The "shit or get off the po(e)t" odds are currently running approximately 80-20 in favor of the poet. And against said poet's bank account. Just sayin'.

Rainy morning in Provincetown

Life is good and I am a very lucky girl this week. I am laughing hard, writing hard, and waking early without the alarm (you gotta realize I can normally sleep till noon without even trying).

Carl Phillips read last night and he was great. I bought his newest book and had him sign it -- he seems like a sweet guy. My friends who are taking his workshop seem to be having a good time. Though I have to say I don't regret for a moment deciding to take D.A. Powell's workshop myself, even though I studied with him last year. He is an amazing teacher. (I would love to just crawl around inside his brain for like ten minutes someday.) His reading is tonight and he has promised to read a lot of new stuff -- something to look forward to with great eagerness, for sure.

I've written two poems so far this week -- both of them by 9 a.m. This is NOT NORMAL. But I'll take it.

There are mosquitoes here as big as my head. Everywhere you go, you see their slapped, squashed bodies.

Waking up in Provincetown

1. I love this place, possibly more than is reasonable or prudent.

2. Oh, and guess which well-known poet I ran into on the ferry over here from Boston.

3. I was unable to get a wireless signal in my lovely room last night, so y'all should count your blessings that you were spared a considerably inebriated version of the "I love this place" post. Heh heh.

4. Uh, I think that's it for now. I'm happy. And if I'm saying that without reservation or qualification at 7:10 AM on a Monday morning, well, that's something.

One more day...

...of work, and then I'll be officially on vacation for a week plus two days. I'm sure everyone I work with will be glad for the respite from my daily "it's almost my vacation!" babble. :)

I may or may not blog very much while I'm there. Last summer I posted something almost every day, and that felt like the right thing to do at the time. This year, we'll see how it goes. If you don't hear from me, assume I am writing my butt off and drinking beer (or whatever) with poets. Not necessarily in that order. *grin*

I'm writing a poem about this horrible story that's been on the local news for the past couple weeks. There was a traffic accident in which several people were killed; due to an identity mixup, one young blonde woman was mistaken for another young blonde woman in the same vehicle, and one set of parents buried what they thought was their daughter's body while another set of parents kept vigil over a comatose girl -- until she woke up and they figured out what had happened. For some reason the story really got to me when I first heard about it. The poem is from the point of view of the young woman who survived. I feel kind of weird about appropriating someone else's story, when they are real people with real names (which I do not use in the poem) and everyone involved would probably have a very different take on things than what I write in the poem. But, art is art, I guess. What do you think?

IU Writers' Conference readings

"Drinking the water is the hardest part. My hand shakes and you can see my inner chihuahua."
--Mark Wunderlich, between poems, bottle of water in hand.

Other readers tonight: Jon Tribble and Dana Johnson (whose book of short stories, Break Any Woman Down, is pretty terrific). All three readers were quite good.

Poetry podcasts & Kunitz memorial

Two things:

**My local NPR radio station, WFIU, is now offering some of its locally-produced programs via podcast -- including "The Poets Weave," a weekly five-minute poetry show. The host, Jenny Kander, sometimes features local poets reading their own work (I've been on a couple of times), and sometimes she reads (in her cool-sounding South African accent) published poems by a particular poet or on a particular theme -- food poems, winter poems, etc. You can listen to or download any of the shows from 2006 so far by visiting this link, or you can subscribe via iTunes (from the podcast section just search for WFIU and you'll find it).

**The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown has announced their plans for a Stanley Kunitz memorial this summer, to coincide with what would have been his 101st birthday. It sounds like it's going to be quite the event:

The Memorial Service will begin at 11:00am in the Stanley Kunitz Common Room at the Fine Arts Work Center, 24 Pearl Street, Provincetown, MA, on Saturday, July 29, 2006. Speaking at the service will be the poets John Skoyles and Cleopatra Mathis, who knew Stanley and his work for many years. In addition, one member of the Kunitz family is expected to speak.

Immediately following, every poem in Kunitz's The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz (W.W. Norton, 2000) will be read aloud by anyone in attendance at the service who wishes to read. The reading will begin with the first poem in the book and will continue until the entire book is read aloud. It is estimated that the reading will take more than 10 hours, giving approximately 200 people the opportunity to read one of Kunitz's poems.

[more details]

...singing in the dead of night

Email from Blackbird today accepting my poem "Opening the Hive." It will appear in November. Hooray!

There's a funny story about this one, which I almost hesitate to tell here for fear it will make a fine journal look less than "on top of things." But it's so amusing, really. I'd originally submitted this poem (and a few others) to Blackbird way back in November 2004. After a slightly-more-than-reasonable time (okay, almost a year) had elapsed with no word, I dropped them an inquiry; they looked for my poems but had to conclude they'd fallen into a black hole, and invited me to resubmit. A few months later I did just that, though I didn't send the same poems over again, I sent new ones. They rejected that batch, and I'd sort of written them off when out of the blue I got today's email. Meanwhile, of course, the poems from the original batch -- including "Opening the Hive" -- got sent out elsewhere. Fortunately for me, the "elsewhere" in this case is a journal which explicitly welcomes simultaneous submissions, so a quick note in their direction withdrawing the poem should take care of things without any awkwardness.

In Blackbird's defense I will say that the editor with whom I've corresponded has been nothing but courteous, helpful, and apologetic about the black hole thing, and responded immediately when I inquired; and I really like the journal, so this is a happy ending.

Choices, Cherries, Notes to Myself

Choices, Choices, Choices: Time to think about selecting the three poems I want to make eleven copies of & bring to my Provincetown workshop. I have a strong sense of what I want from this workshop, so instead of picking out the poems that need the most work, I want to bring poems that feel like they contain the road signs to where I'm going. Or want to be going. Or should oughta be going. I don't want to waste the week dinking around repairing lines and stanzas -- I want to nudge my process at a deeper level. (That sounds kind of dirty, doesn't it?)

I will probably bring really new work. April and newer. Although I'll also print out a bunch of other poems too, just in case I get ideas about what to do with them.

* * * * *
Bad Poet No Donut: I think I'm skipping the first night of IU Writers' Conference readings. One of my cat sitters is stopping by tomorrow evening so I can show her the routine & where everything is, and I need to clean house enough that she can find the cats at least; I desperately need to do some laundry; I need to do bills; and if I'm going to send the chapbook ms. out to one more contest before I leave (& since it's a June 30 deadline and I don't get back until the evening of the 26th, it's before I leave or never) I really need to dink around with that tonight too. Tonight's reading is Susan Gubar & Scott Sanders, both writers I admire greatly, but I just have so much to do.

Plus I don't really feel like putting pants on and leaving the house.

* * * * *
Rain: The green here is so green this year. I've been told it is a good year for fruit, as we've had lots of rain and missed our usual late freeze. I was at a friend's house Friday evening and picked several cherries from her cherry tree. I never had cherries straight off the tree before. They were sour and delicious, like the taste of a broken heart that's so healed-over it's almost fun to poke at it now and then.

* * * * *
Reminder to self: shit or get off the po(e)t.

* * * * *
Choices, Choices, Choices Part 2: Also need to pick out books to take along. Books to read on the plane and in the airport and on the ferry, two or three books of poetry to dig into throughout the week in case I need some inspiration, and maybe something light to wind down with before I fall asleep at night. Reminder to self: you always end up buying books there because you're a sucker for sweet little independent bookstores, so don't take as many as you think you need.

Also putting some new music on my ipod and planning a Provincetown playlist. When I first vacationed there in 2001, I woke up the first morning to brilliant sun and that clear, intense Cape light; turned on the clock radio and Shawn Colvin's song "Whole New You" filled the room. That's been my Provincetown song ever since.

You have the right to get down on your knees
you have the right to make yourself believe
you don't know my name
but I don't care
you can do it
cuz you have the right

To shake the loneliness and shine the light
take all your tears save 'em for a rainy night
go and wish on every star that's fallen
shake your head and wonder when it's all too good to be true
like a whole new you

* * * * *
One week! One week.

Forty years ago...

On June 8, 1966 a massive tornado (F5 on the Fujita scale, with winds estimated over 250 mph) hit Topeka, Kansas. It killed 16 people & injured several hundred, destroyed 800 houses and damaged about 3000 more. Total cost of the destruction was about $100 million in 1966 dollars. That's a lot.

Even the National Weather Service pays tribute to this famous tornado. And this year the PBS station of Washburn University, whose campus was almost completely destroyed that evening, put together a TV special with an informative companion website.

It hit my house -- didn't flatten it, but caused considerable damage. I was five. This is why I'm not crazy about stormy weather even now.

Rough draft, very rough, which won't stay here for long:

[gone]

A countdown and a poem

3: days this week I have left work at the end of the day in a pretty good mood (I'm still picking up a few loose ends from my old job, but for the most part it's behind me; several major parts of my new job have not yet fallen onto my plate; therefore, I've had time every day to do long-neglected stuff like clean out email files, clean out paper files, catch up on work-related listserv mail, and other stuff that makes me feel both more organized and far more relaxed -- I am probably as "caught up" as I've been in the past three years, and as "caught up"as I am likely to be anytime in the foreseeable future, and it feels really nice.)

2: new poems I drafted a couple of evenings ago after not having written anything for about a month (Also, this filled up the composition book I started using on the first day of my workshop last summer in Provincetown, so I get to start a brand-new poetry notebook just two weeks before this summer's workshop, which just feels like some kind of providence.)

1: rejection slip in today's mail (oh well.)


Found this here and loved it:

Explaining Relativity to the Cat

Imagine, if you will, three mice.
Contrary to what you have heard,
they are not blind
but are in a spaceship
traveling near the speed of light.
This makes them unavailable
for your supper, yes.

So these mice, traveling near
the speed of light, appear
quite fat, though there is
no cheese aboard. This is
simply a distortion of mass,
because the mass of a mouse
is nothing more than a bundle
of light, and vice versa. I see
how this might imply mice
are in the light fixtures,
undoubtedly a problem, so
let me try again.
If two people attempted
to feed you simultaneously,
no doubt a good situation,
but you were on a train
traveling near the speed
of light, the food would
appear unappetizing, falling
to the plate in slow motion,
an extended glob of protein
that never smelled good,
if you ask me, train or no.
The affinity of the food
for the plate, what we call
gravity, is really just
a stretch in the fabric
of a space-time continuum,
what happens when you
have sat in a seat too long,
perhaps on this very train.

Oh kitty, I know how you hate
to travel and the journey must
have made you tired. Come now,
lick your coat one more time
and let us make haste
from this strange city
of light and fantastic dream.

---Jennifer Gresham, from Diary of a Cell

Equal time

Honey Bear found out I posted a picture of Lotus on this blog and he demands equal time. Never let it be said I don't adore both of my fuzzybutts equally.

Readings, we got readings

Indiana U. Writers' Conference reading schedule (Sunday through Thursday of next week, June 11-15): http://www.indiana.edu/~writecon/schedule.html (scroll down past the workshops and classes)

And the Fine Arts Work Center has finally posted at least some of their summer readings/events: http://www.fawc.org/events/index.shtm

If you're within driving/ferry distance of Provincetown, check this schedule -- there's a lot of good stuff! And yes, of course I will sign up for the student reading on the 22nd. Me? Pass up a chance to get up in front of people and force them to listen to me for a minute or two? Hell no. *grin*

The Stanley Kunitz memorial will be on July 29 (a Saturday) at 11 am, with a broadsides exhibition & reading the following evening. I bet that will be a Big Event. If I win the lottery between now & then, I'm buying a plane ticket...

Quiet

Today I was supposed to go to a monthly journaling discussion group, which I usually enjoy a great deal, and I'd intended to go to a late-afternoon concert in the park featuring several local women musicians. I skipped out on both, though -- after the last couple of weeks, I desperately need this weekend just to get myself together and prepare for the heavy-duty, high-energy writing push that I intend to experience in Provincetown. So I have spent the day watching tennis, snuggling up with the cats (who have both been ridiculously affectionate -- even more so than usual, and they are both lovey cats -- today), and napping. There is no nap more restorative than one taken in the sunshine, with a sacked-out cat draped across one's chest, purring in one's face. Unless, of course, one is allergic to cats, in which case I guess it wouldn't be terribly restorative at all. Thank goodness I'm not. Cats are such creatures of comfort, and their sense of comfort is contagious.

I have not even touched my paper journal since closing down "my" branch library, having a birthday, spending the long weekend at my mom's, and starting my new job. Sometimes when I haven't written about stuff, I don't quite know how I feel about it. Now that I seem to be finished napping, I think writing is next on my agenda. Once I've written a bit I think I will feel less scattershot. Sure hope so anyway.

Provincetown plans are coming together. I had a brief panic when I found that most of the B&B's there are requiring a three-night minimum stay on June weekends these days, and I'd planned to stay at FAWC through Friday night, then move to a B&B Saturday and Sunday after my workshop ends -- I'm going on an all day whale watch that Saturday, which should be great fun. As it turns out, someone I've known online for a number of years (and her husband) will be driving from Boston to Provincetown to join me on the whale watch, so we've jointly reserved a room -- they'll take Friday night, then I can drop my bags there Saturday morning before the whale watch and I'll take the room Saturday and Sunday nights. It should work out beautifully, and I'm also pretty excited to meet this person in "real life" for the first time. Plus, after a week of eating/breathing/sleeping poetry, it will be good to spend a day out on the ocean doing something entirely non-literary. And then the next day, Sunday, I plan on going to the beach and just being a lazy bum all day.

All I have to do now is reserve my spot on the Boston-to-Provincetown ferry, and my spot in the airport parking lot. Two weeks from tomorrow I will drive my car to the airport, take the shuttle bus from the parking lot to the airport proper, fly to one city, change planes and fly to another city, take the bus to the water transportation, take the water taxi to the ferry dock, take the ferry across the bay, and then most likely (since I will have an unreasonable number of bags, what with my laptop and the fact that I have to bring my own sheets and towels) take a taxi to the Fine Arts Work Center. That's a lot of transportation. And I look forward to being transported.

I can't wait to feel the ocean breathing in my ear.

Tired.

The last couple of weeks have been entirely exhausting, as I've gotten the branch library I used to coordinate closed down and have moved into my new position (currently in temporary desk space until someone else vacates her space mid-summer). I will like my new job, I think; one of my next tasks is actually to come up with my own job title, which amuses me greatly. I will be doing lots of instructional writing and creating documentation, among other things, and working a couple shifts a week on a busy reference desk serving primarily undergraduates, and some other stuff as well -- it started out feeling like a real hodgepodge, but I'm starting to see how it all really fits together and all belongs in the same job description. It's an evolving thing, for sure.

And exhausting. Every night this week I've crashed out on the couch for a lengthy evening nap. I haven't written a poem in at least three weeks now. Which is bad timing, as it will be best for me to go to Provincetown (just over two weeks away!) with fresh writing in hand and in an energetic writing mode. I am hoping to recuperate this weekend, do some reading which will hopefully spark a new draft or two. If all else fails, I do have a pile of poems from April that still need work -- and I may well take one or two of those along (we're supposed to bring 3 poems to workshop with enough copies for everyone), but I also want to be in the midst of productivity when I arrive, because then I will be ready to start working hard the moment I get there instead of taking a day or two to get into the swing of it.

So this weekend's agenda is a reunion with the Muse. Anyone who's ever been in a long-distance relationship knows how lovely reunion sex can be; hopefully reunion poetry will be as good. :)

We shall see.

Meanwhile, it's raining.

Insert cliche here

Today I am forty-five years old. Which is halfway to ninety, a number I do not even remotely expect to see. I am acutely aware that I don't have all the time in the world.

This year is "shit or get off the pot year." (I just typed "shit or get off the poet" which may be painfully apropos.)

Driving up to my mom's this afternoon, I counted fifteen turkey vultures before I gave up and stopped counting. They were everywhere, soaring over woods and fields and roadkill, soaking up the hot sun on their broad black fingery wings.

13 weird things about me

This one's going around and it looks kind of fun. It was supposed to be "13 things for a Thursday" but it's Friday. Deal. ;)

1. Although I have been told I sound taller online, I am only 5 foot 1. (And a half.)

2. I studied karate (U.S. Kyokushin style) for about seven years in my twenties, got as far as second degree brown belt, and was at one point the senior assistant instructor in my dojo.

3. When I was a small child I often slept with my head underneath my pillow. This was because I was certain that burglars would break into the house someday, and if my head was underneath my pillow they would not know I was awake and they would thus not have to kill me.

4. My first job other than babysitting was working in a zoo. I worked in the concession stand and I was also a "Volunteer Zoo Guide" in the petting area, where I frequently had to explain to small children that the little brown things on the ground behind the goats were not raisins and should not be eaten.

5. I am 25% Bolivian.

6. I once set my hair on fire at a poetry reading during the intermission by casually leaning against a table on which there were burning candles.

7. The movie "Whale Rider" makes me cry even though I have seen it at least 6 or 8 times.

8. I didn't learn to drive until I was 29 years old.

9. I saw the ocean for the first time when I was 20 years old.

10. I fall in love with places much more easily than with people.

11. Lately I have been calling my long-haired cat "Mister Fluffypants." He does not actually wear pants, at least not when I'm looking.

12. I studied Latin for a year in high school. The only sentence I can come up with now in that language is "Rana est in urna." (The frog is in the water jar.)

13. I love all the trappings of academia, from libraries to fresh notebooks for a new semester to the pomp and circumstance of graduation and honors ceremonies. I joke that I'm sometimes tempted to pursue a doctorate solely so I can get hooded, but there's a little grain of truth in that.

14. (Ooh! Special extra bonus fact!) In elementary school I played the violin until I broke my arm and couldn't practice for months and got behind everyone else. To this day I'd likely trade all my other talents, such as they are, for music. Especially if it meant a fabulous singing voice.

IU Writers' Conference

The Indiana University Writers' Conference is coming up in about three weeks, right here in lovely Bloomington. I am not attending the conference this year, though I've had some good experiences there in the past -- nothing that's felt as pivotal as last year's workshop in P-town, but I've had excellent teachers like Carolyn Kizer, Cleopatra Mathis, and Lucia Perillo.

Anyway, the evening reading series is free and open to the public, so I will probably attend most or maybe all of those. Here's the schedule for anyone who might be within driving distance and interested in catching some good readings. Looks like they have a new location this year, in the Chemistry Building (next to Ballantine Hall, if you're familiar with the IU campus) -- not sure why they aren't using the normal location in the Union building this year -- that's odd.

Like last year, the IUWC takes place right before I go to Provincetown. June will be poetry overload month for me, for sure. And hooray for that.

Carl Phillips

Really nice, lengthy article on Carl Phillips from the Riverfront Times -- thanks to Jilly Dybka over at Poetry Hut Blog for this one. (If you don't visit the Poetry Hut, I recommend it; Jilly does a great job of collecting interesting poetry-related articles from all over the place.)

Phillips will be teaching at the Fine Arts Work Center the week I'm there, so I will at least get to hear him read, and I hope to get a chance to chat with him a bit. I know two people who'll be in his workshop, so with any luck I'll get to hear a lot about how it goes. I haven't picked up his newest book yet; I'll probably buy it out there.

What I like about reading his work is the idea that it's okay to write these long, convoluted, syntactically complicated sentences in a poem -- something I've tried to steer myself away from, as I have a tendency to get long and convoluted (or at least overly parenthetical) myself; maybe it's time to try giving myself free rein and see where it goes. Maybe I will try to write a two-page poem that is all one sentence, just to see what happens. Muahaha (evil laughter).

* * * * *

I bought myself an adorable little portable USB hard drive today. 80GB of storage, which is four times the size of my laptop's hard drive. Now I just need to stay in the habit of backing stuff up religiously. If you store your writing on computer (or your photos, or music, or whatever) please, please back it up somewhere. You won't ever regret it.

(I also have one of those cute little USB flash drives, about the size of a pack of gum, which holds every poem I have ever written. This just boggles my little middle-aged mind. It's a wonderful feeling, though, when I'm packing the cats down to the basement for a tornado warning, to know that all I have to do is stick that puppy in my pocket and no matter what blows through, I will still have all my words. I used to worry what would happen if I had to evacuate and didn't have time to pack up the half-dozen fat three-ring binders that held typed copies of all my poems, or what if my house burned down when I wasn't home, etc. It is also nice to be able to take everything with me when I travel. You young people who take technology more for granted probably find yourselves amused by how mind-boggled I am by this stuff. But I started writing back when electric typewriters were relatively new technology. So being able to keep some 1300+ poems on a doohickey the size of a pack of gum... I think I have to go lie down now.)

* * * * *

Today, I hate horse racing. Prayers for Barbaro.

And the Lammy goes to...

The Lambda Literary Awards for GLBT literature were announced the other night. Poetry winners were:

Gay Men's Poetry
Crush by Richard Siken (Yale)

Lesbian Poetry
Directed by Desire: Collected Poems by June Jordan (Copper Canyon)

If anyone wants to see the complete list of winners (doesn't look like it's up on their website yet), let me know and I can email it to you...

* * * * *

Chaotic work day. My branch library closes for good one week from today. They are already starting to dismantle bookshelves and haul away filing cabinets, etc. Next week will be pretty crazy. Then I turn forty-five. Then it's almost time to go to Provincetown.

Every ten years I seem to hit a "reassess my life" point. It happened at twenty-five, at thirty-five, and guess what. The next few months should be interesting.

* * * * *

"Interesting" can mean a lot of different things.

I guess we'll find out.

Like the commercial says...

...when you're #2, you try harder.

Had a lovely voicemail from the Fine Arts Work Center today to let me know I was selected as the first runner-up for the Agha Shahid Ali scholarship. (Remember when I was asking about artistic resumes a while back? That's what it was for -- they needed that, and a brief statement, and of course a manuscript.) Apparently it was pretty tough competition, with some 60 applicants for the one scholarship. Too bad they don't have more to give out, but it does feel good to know that in some way I am at least playing on the right field, that at least the judges didn't read my manuscript and say "*snerk* yeah right. Next?" This feels like an affirmation -- a welcoming. I'm pleased.

And yes, scholarship or no, I'm still going -- even if I have to fund it the good old-fashioned American way. That's why God invented credit cards, right? *grin*

* * * * *

Also: Today's poem on Verse Daily caused me to make unseemly noises. Who is Alison Apothecker and where can I find some more of her work? WOW.

I really need to get around to subscribing to Crab Orchard Review (where this poem first appeared).

Finale

Anyone else catch the shout-out to Jimmy Santiago Baca on last night's West Wing series finale?

Man, I'm gonna miss that show.

Kunitz reading at FAWC, August 2003

Sad news...

Stanley Kunitz, 1905-2006

I never actually met him, but was fortunate enough to hear him read in August of 2003, at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, in the room named for him. Being there was a true gift. So many of us owe so much to him.

How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?

__________

Links:

obituary from the Cape Cod Times

notice on the official Provincetown government website

obituary from CNN.com

the New York Times

the Boston Globe

statement from the Fine Arts Work Center

Poetry Foundation (includes links to other sources)

Full

Few things can make me feel as deeply peaceful as a good meal in a quiet place. I just got back from a late brunch at the Runcible Spoon, where I've been going for years and years (probably the first time I went there was in 1980 or so). I had their Weekend Special, which consists of: two eggs cooked however you want them (I had mine over medium); two pieces of toast with jam or appple butter; bacon or sausage or home fries or maybe there was one other choice (they were out of home fries, but I always get the bacon because their bacon is, for some reason, always perfect); and two pieces of French toast or one pancake (the pancake I had today was maybe the most humongous pancake I have ever had at the Spoon -- not only was it bigger than Julie Dill's head, it was the size of a large dinner plate and a full half-inch thick) with butter and maple syrup. And lots of good coffee. All for under ten bucks.

(Since some of the keys on my elderly laptop are a bit recalcitrant, I almost told you that my pancake came with male syrup. That would have been a different sort of meal entirely.)

For some reason the Spoon is the perfect place to be on a rainy afternoon. There are plants in the windows and fish in the bathtub, and instead of feeling gloomy it feels cozy. Plus I had one of the better, long-time waitrons, as opposed to the one I had last weekend who dropped my jam (I'd asked for apple butter, but whatever) and never brought me a new one, and had to be prompted for silverware. I wrote in my journal for a while before my food arrived, and then while I ate I started reading an interesting history of Provincetown. (I bought it last summer at Now Voyager bookstore in P-town, but am just now getting around to reading it.)

Although I visited Provincetown once in the summer of... hm, 1982 or 1983, I guess (for a women's martial arts camp), I didn't fall in love with the town until I spent a week there, alone, in June 2001. It was a wonderful, relaxing, energizing week which I credit for helping to bring me back to a place where I could write again after several years of not writing much at all. I know that in many ways it is past its heyday. People like me -- lower-middle-class folks, people who can't spend much money on things like vacations -- can barely afford to spend a week there, and it's no longer the kind of town where a starvingartist* can find refuge in a cottage or a dune shack just being an artist/writer, not without working a couple of jobs to pay the bills or being sponsored in some way. And the Portuguese fishing families that settled the town many decades ago? They can barely afford to live there anymore either, and many of them have given up and left. While it is still a town that welcomes the artist, the odd character, the queer in whatever sense of the word you choose, it's also a town that has gentrified itself almost beyond recognition in some ways. I'll never, unless I win the lottery (and a pretty substantial one at that), be able to afford a house there, not even a little three-room apartment.

And yet that town still reeks of magic for me. Partly it's the ocean and the air and the light -- things no amount of gentrification can eradicate. Partly it's the sense of literary and artistic tradition that pervades the place. Partly it's the joyous queerness of it all -- you gotta love a town where the sight of drag queens on rollerblades gliding down the middle of the main street is an everyday occurrence. It's a place that values independence, and is home to very few chain establishments -- there's a Ben & Jerry's, and a small Subway, and as far as I know that's about it. It's a small town, with big white church steeples and the sense of being reasonably safe walking back to your room at midnight after spending a few hours drinking beers at the Squealing Pig or eating a slice of pizza at Spiritus or window shopping or listening to music or just hanging out watching the nightly parade.

It's a place where, for so many reasons, I feel safe letting my inside be my outside. I get that sometimes in Bloomington, because it's home here, but it's different. And yes, the fact that I don't live in Provincetown -- that I can go there and be whoever I am and then walk away from it -- probably helps. It's like writing a poem every day: wonderful for short periods of time, but I probably couldn't live that way forever. (Although I do often feel that, if not for the money and the having to work for a living part, I would be very happy to live in Provincetown. If I ever win that big-ass lottery, I'll find out. At the very least, I do hope to spend some time there in the winter, before too long -- or at least the fall or spring; well outside of tourist season anyway.)

So that's today: loving my town, eating a good meal in a restaurant I've frequented for twenty-five years or so, watching it rain, dreaming of another town I also love. I think I fall in love with places more than I do with people.

Also: Lotus kitten would like to announce that his Loudest Purr can be heard well into the next county. I guess he likes it here. :)

__________
* In Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, Harriet's father is always saying "starvingartist" or "starvingwriter." She writes in her notebook, "Are rich people ever going to grow up to be writers or are writers all like Mr. Rocque with no money? My father is always saying starvingartist or starvingwriter. Maybe I better reduce."

They're playing torch songs on the radio

Do poems have to be about something important in order to be important poems?

I mean, no, I know they don't (red wheelbarrow? come on). And I've read (and written) so many poems that desperately want to be important, but fall on their faces from trying too hard.

But what makes a poem an "important poem"? What?

Discuss.

All aboard...

The new issue of Boxcar Poetry Review is up, including my poem "Sugar Hits the Highway." This poem is one of a series I'm writing about a character named Sugar; in this one, she's apparently driving north on US 31, somewhere north of Peru, Indiana. :)

This journal may have given me a new submission-to-publication record; I emailed the poems to them on March 31, got the acceptance on April 20, and the issue is up today. Pretty impressive!

* * * * *

Also: Terrific Carl Phillips poem over on Poetry Daily today. Check it out.

April showers brought May pollen. Achoo!

Gorgeous weather yesterday. Gorgeous weather today. Supposed to be gorgeous weather tomorrow. Just about 70 degrees, sunny, some of those puffy clouds that look like alligator heads and buffaloes and sailing ships.

Yesterday: the Kentucky Derby. I usually watch it, though I no longer follow horse racing closely -- I used to, in my teenage-horse-crazy days. (I actually got to meet Secretariat once, and stroke his huge glossy shoulder.) Now I'm more aware of the class issues nobody on the screen is talking about, less caught up in the pure animal beauty of those shiny Thoroughbreds; now it's kind of like watching a rich-people party I know I'll never, ever be invited to. I catch myself deeply resenting rich people sometimes, when I realize the money they spend on one hat to wear to the Derby could pay for -- but never mind. The horses, the horses are still beautiful and muscular and fast.

Today: going to a party to celebrate a friend's daughter's graduation from college. It seems like it wasn't that long ago that it was me graduating from college, and now it's the children of friends. But it was that long ago: over twenty years now. Yikes! I've known this particular young woman since she was about two years old, so it's really cool to see her growing up and getting on with her life.

Tomorrow: I'm taking a vacation day. My branch library is closed for the oh-so-brief break between spring semester and the first day of summer session (spring finals ended Friday and summer classes begin on Tuesday). The rest of May is going to be nuts, since my branch closes for good on May 26th and there is much to do between now and then, so I decided to take a vacation day just to breathe first. I have a long list of chores that should be done, but what I really want to do is just read and write all day. Hopefully I can find some happy medium: get the oil changed, drop off stuff at Goodwill, do a bit of house cleaning, then indulge myself with words.

* * * * *

If you haven't seen Charlie's good news yet, go congratulate him! I like it when good poems (and these are very good poems) get recognition.

* * * * *

A thought-provoking short essay from Adrienne Rich in the Virginia Quarterly Review, about poetry and politics. I need to read it again, and more closely, but this:

I need to reach beyond my interior decoration, biography. Art is a way of melting out through one’s own skin. “What, who is this about?” is not the essential question. A poem is not about; it is out of and to. Passionate language in movement. The deep structure is always musical, and physical—as breath, as pulse.

That bit makes me say yes, yes, yes.

* * * * *

Outside my window right now, up in the sky, a cloud that looks like a fat fish. Next to it, a cloud that looks like a fish skeleton.

And next to that, the sky's unbelievable blue.

My voice is very small

Sent off a chapbook manuscript today. I keep revising it and changing it and sending it here and there. Hey, everyone needs a hobby.

Watched "ER" tonight, which was set in Darfur. I know it's just TV. I know.

I am very lucky. Almost unconscionably so.

And so are you.

"The Poet of Provincetown"

Nice article in this week's Provincetown Banner about poet Harry Kemp, aka "The Poet of Provincetown." Apparently he was quite the character. At one point Upton Sinclair said he was the next Walt Whitman -- and today hardly anyone outside Provincetown remembers him.

I'm sure there is a lesson there about poetic fame'n'fortune, but at the moment I am too sleepy to extract it, so I'll just leave it at that.

It's one of those nights...

Rain on the wind, quiet in the house. Thinking of people who aren't here.



[yes, there was a poem here... now it's gone. They do that.]

Friday night in the big city

Tonight's monthly reading at the Runcible Spoon was good in a reassuring sort of way. Lately, when I pick up the local paper, I've felt like I wasn't in the right town -- there was a shooting in a park not far from me, and a couple of other gun-related incidents right smack downtown; plus that awful plane crash -- shootings and plane crashes just are not the Bloomington I know. But tonight was a very Bloomington night, and for that I am grateful.

Most of the readers/performers tonight are people I've known, one one level or another, for ages and ages. Dennis Sipe I don't know well at all, just from seeing him around at poetry stuff, but he's been around for quite a while. Shana Ritter is someone I met very soon after she first moved into town -- was it 1985 or 1986? -- she joined my writing group right after she arrived, and I've always loved her poetry. Tonight she read an old poem that we must have critiqued three or four times in that group, sometime in the eighties, and it was neat to hear it again. David Christman, who played several songs on the ukulele (yes, I said ukulele), lived in the same dorm I did when we were undergrads -- of course it was the hippie/artsy dorm, the Collins Living-Learning Center, and though he and I were never close friends we had lots of friends in common. Roger Mitchell was the other reader; I took a class from him as an undergrad & then some years later I sat in on his section of "Teaching Creative Writing" which was mostly full of first-year MFA students. You know, I don't think I appreciated any of my teachers nearly enough when I was an undergrad -- I guess people who are 19, 20 years old never really appreciate what they are learning, do they? You know everything when you're 19 and teachers just get in the way, those pesky assignments just take you away from writing the Great Art you are of course hell-bent upon committing.

Ugh. Thank goodness we all grow out of being 19, huh? And those of you who teach 19-year-olds, take heart -- some of us really do get around to appreciating our teachers eventually. I look back at my undergrad classes now, particularly with Roger Mitchell and Maura Stanton, and jeez, I was lucky to get to work with teachers like them. Those workshops were so much more important to me than I understood at the time, just for the sense of being around people who took poetry seriously -- and on occasion even took my poetry seriously.

Anyway, Roger read from two of his books (The Word for Everything and Delicate Bait), as well as work from his forthcoming book Half Mask and some other new work. He read the title poem from Delicate Bait, which I have to say is one of my very favorites of his. It's linked there. Go read it. Like many of his poems it's discursive, takes the long way round, uses a lot of commas and not-quite-parenthetical phrases, and then when you're not quite expecting it you get walloped upside the head. (I also have to admit that I love the poem partly because, although I don't know precisely where it is set, it could easily take place in my very favorite restaurant in the world on Maui, so it brings back a lovely memory of Mama's Fish House. Which has nothing to do with the poem, except that it evokes that particular atmosphere. And now I'm hungry for some macadamia-encrusted ahi, dammit.)

I signed up for the open mic and read two poems; was going to cut it to one because I felt like things were getting a little long, but what with all this napowrimo-ing I feel like I've got more new poems than I know what to do with, and I really wanted to read them both just for the sake of hearing them out loud in a room full of people, because that helps me revise. And we were allowed three minutes, and they were both short poems, so I read them both. The first one went over okay, I think; I could hear the places where it worked and some places where it lost energy a bit, but overall I think people heard it and got something from it. The second one was a funny poem, and people laughed where I wanted them to laugh, so you can't ask for more than that, huh? I think I will read that one again on Sunday at the BWWC benefit thingie.

(As a side note: I am really enjoying reading lately. I have to watch out lest I become one of those annoying spotlight hogs. It's funny though; I'm a fairly shy person, but give me a stage and a handful of poems, and I turn into a veritable Miss Piggy of a ham. It does feel good to enjoy it, though, and to feel comfortable instead of all stage-frighty and nervous like I used to be.)

Hung out and chatted with folks for a while afterwards, and you know what, it's getting a little weird with the "oh yeah, I read your blog" stuff. Hee. It's one thing when people I've never met read my blog, but when actual people I actually know are reading this thing -- it's a bit weird somehow. Makes me feel a bit self-conscious. Fellow bloggers, does that kind of thing ever feel weird to you? How do you handle it? Hey, I'm a poet; I'm not used to people actually reading what I write unless I hand it to them and say here. *grin* It's not a bad weird, it's just ... weird.

Anyway, then I gave my friend Tonia a ride home and came home myself, and have been sitting here listening to the cars out on the speedway -- apparently tonight is opening night. The speedway is a couple miles south of me, but I can always hear the cars. It's a small-town summer kind of sound, makes me think of getting ice cream at DQ and the way your skin feels at night when you've been out in the sun all day, so even though it's an obnoxious gas-guzzling noise, I kind of like it.

And now if you'll excuse me, I have a poem to write. Three more poems and I'll have made it for the whole month. Damned if I'm gonna slack off now.

Dailiness, part 2

...to use poetry, not as a special set of glasses which you put on for doing close work, but as a way of seeing every day.

Blogging and dailiness

Like many of us around these parts, I occasionally stop and wonder whether blogging contributes to my "real" writing or detracts from it. (Well, most of you probably don't wonder whether blogging contributes to MY writing... you know what I mean.) And the truth is, although I don't spend that much time actually blogging -- I don't post every day or anything like that -- I do spend time reading all y'all's blogs, time which could probably be spent reading poems or actually writing or something.

But I've decided that, for now anyway, it works out to my benefit. When I first started this blog, I told myself that this was my writing blog. I may talk about other stuff in here, but I try to keep thoughts of writing/poetry at the center of it -- I try to think of myself as a writer, as a poet, here. And believe me, when you work 40 hours a week doing something else and come home to a messy house and cats who need attention and a tv that promises wonderful things will happen if you just park your butt on the couch and watch long enough, it's easy to forget to think of yourself as a writer. (As I've said before, nobody's going to come running after me begging for poems if I don't write.) So I come here and I read about other people's writing and I think about writing, think of myself as a writer, every day. It really does help to remind me that poetry is at the center of my life. And it works (sometimes to the detriment of other things in my life, not that there are that many other things in my life). Sometimes poetry feels like the only thing that really matters. And when I'm in that frame of mind, I'm bound to get more writing done than if I fail to think about poetry at all for a day or more. It's always there, tugging at my sleeve.

And hell... if it weren't for the fact that I would feel obligated to come over here and tattle on myself if I gave up, I don't know that I would actually have made it this far with the NaPoWriMo thing. I've written far more lousy poems than good ones this month, but I knew that would be the case, and I've written some that I hope aren't lousy which I don't think I would have written had I not been making the effort to write something every day.

I read an interview with David Lehman (where did I see it? it's really true, the short-term memory is the first thing to go...) in which the interviewer asked him whether he still writes a poem every day. His answer was essentially "yes, but I miss a lot of days." It occurred to me when I read it that "I write every day although I miss a lot of days" is a very different mindset than "I don't write every day." I think if the default setting on your write-o-meter is "daily," you're a heck of a lot more likely to get more work done than if you sort of wait around till you feel like writing, or till you find the time, or whatever. Even if you don't actually write every day. (And I think it's important not to beat up on yourself if you don't. Okay, you didn't write today ... tomorrow's a new day.) And after this poem-a-day month is over, that's where I want to be: I write every day, except for some days when I don't.

So that's what this blog (and many of the blogs I read) does for me: it's like the little squeaky voice of poetry, hanging right behind me, poking me in the butt, tugging on my sleeve, saying "pssst. I'm everywhere. I'm every day. Don't forget me."

Density

Carol Peters posted a terrific poem by Laurie Sheck today. I've been reading it over and over, trying to tease apart all the ways in which it wallops me upside the head, trying to figure out how she manages to get the poem to hold as much as it does without it becoming so dense and heavy it just plummets like the proverbial lead balloon.

A poem is like the air. Really, it'll make sense in a minute. The atmosphere can hold only so much moisture before it releases the accumulated water in rain, or fog; how much it can hold depends in part on the temperature (think about how much more humid it is in the summer than in the winter, at least in this part of the world). Similarly, how a poem is constructed -- its temperature, its movement, etc. -- influences how much it can carry: how much imagery, how much information, how much feeling, how much strangeness. Poems fail sometimes, or at least mine do sometimes, because the poet fails to construct a strong enough scaffolding to carry all that they're trying to stuff into the poem -- or, conversely, because they construct the poem in such a way that it can carry a great deal and then fail to give the poem enough to carry.

Sheck wants to say a great deal in this poem: "the dark like a god // and our small bodies like errors / the god wants to take back again"? Daaamn. And there are so many lines in this poem with that level of weight, of freightedness. And yet it doesn't feel crowded, crammed-together. The poem is at its optimum humidity, carrying just as much as it is constructed to comfortably carry. Part of that, I think, is the underlying iambic meter. It's certainly not a regular meter by any stretch of the imagination, but it's there as an undercurrent, and it gives the reader something to hold on to.

I think the use of questions creates a certain space in the poem, too, a space that keeps the intensity of the imagery from dragging it down too much. I love it when poets ask questions in poems. Love it. I certainly like it better than when they try to give me lofty answers (something I catch myself trying to do too often, ugh).

And of course, there is specificity of image, the intensely visual and aural ("The drawers of the cash registers clack open again and again / like solved equations" or "how he rubs his palms into his eyes // then slides his bony shoulders and thin face toward the light / of the narrow doorway"). This kind of imagery gives the poem a solid structure on which the poet can hang all kinds of more abstract stuff.

I'm finding that I crave density and weight in poems, that it's something I aspire to and (in my opinion) rarely achieve. I either don't push the poem to do enough, or I try to stick too much stuff in there and it falls apart. I want to spend more time with poems like Sheck's and try to figure out how they do what they do. I think this poem is doing a lot that I haven't put my finger on yet.

And now for something completely different... :)

This poem is definitely not dense, at least not in the sense I've been talking about. It will go away in a day or so. I think I may read it at Sunday's benefit reading, though. Just for grins.


[the poem went *poof*! for my next trick, I'll pull a rabbit out of ... ok, no, I won't. ]

I think this is mostly about community.

A lot going on locally this weekend. It is Little 500 weekend -- every college town has its major party-weekend event, and this is IU's. (If you've seen the movie "Breaking Away," you know something about it -- or at least about the race itself, which sometimes seems like just an excuse for a lot of partying.) So campus and downtown are relatively crazy. In one of those unholy juxtapositions that always seems to happen, last night a small plane carrying five IU students, all graduate students in the music school, crashed in dense fog near the airport killing all aboard. (One of them worked part-time as an announcer on the local NPR station, so I knew his name and his voice pretty well.) All of the students were highly talented, promising young musicians and composers pursuing advanced degrees at one of the best music schools in the country -- a music school that is a vibrant and relatively close-knit community. It's terribly sad.

Tonight there was a poetry reading at the local Barnes & Noble, celebrating Nat-Po-Month, and the "Celebrating Seventy" anthology that came out a couple years ago (and of which many copies are still sitting around waiting to be sold), and the ending of the daily poetry show Jenny Kander had on our community radio station, WFHB. There were 17 poets on the slate, and we each read our two poems from the anthology; the reading went a bit over an hour, which felt about right. It was a nice mix of voices, many of whom don't have any particular ambition towards being widely published or anything like that but are just regular people who read a poem now and then, write a poem now and then -- people who would probably define themselves as parents, teachers, whatever long before they'd define themselves as poets, and it felt really good to listen to those voices especially. There were plenty of good poems read, but what struck me almost more than the poems themselves was the sense, however momentary, of community & collegiality. A nice evening.

A week from tonight at the monthly Runcible Spoon reading series, my friend Shana Ritter (a fine poet who was in my first writers' group; I've known her since 1985 or '86) will be reading, as will my former teacher Roger Mitchell. (Hey! He has a blog -- I had no idea. Jeez, everybody's doing it, huh?) Should be a good one. I may pull something out for the open-mic part at the end, even though I just read at the Spoon last month, mainly because I would enjoy sharing a new poem (or maybe two short ones) with both Shana & Roger, both of whom have been important parts of my writing life.

To end on a happy note: got word yesterday that Boxcar Poetry Review will be taking two of my poems, "Sugar Hits the Highway" and "Deuce." I have been writing a series of poems about a character named Sugar, and these are the first from that series to be accepted. So, yay.