Merwin

W.S. Merwin read -- well, spoke and read -- on campus today. I think it was one of the best readings I've ever been to. There was a short interview-type chat with the faculty member who introduced him -- I say "short" but I think it was actually about 40 minutes -- with questions that were open-ended enough to let him go on in whatever direction he wanted. He talked about his anti-war politics, mortality, solitude, poetry, the environment -- you know, little superficial issues. *grin* Then he read for about another 40-45 minutes or so (I think; I was not moved at any point to look at my watch). He read poems in chronological order, from some pretty early stuff up through the body of work covered in Migration, then a good handful of new poems, including a couple of elegies that just took my breath away.

I hadn't heard him read before, and he is a fine reader; he doesn't get in the way of the poems at all, doesn't get all over-dramatic about it, but his reading definitely adds something that the poems don't have on the page. And he reads at just the right speed and tone to allow the words to sink in. I could have listened to him for hours, except it would have filled my brain up way too much, and my heart, and I would have had to implode or something.

Some of what he said before the reading part -- this is going to sound weird and maybe pretentious or something -- but, completely unexpectedly, it set my brain off spinning around with ideas about my book. You know, the one I've been claiming to be working on for the last, oh, five years or so? I suddenly understood a little bit more about my own project, and where I want to go with it (or where it was already going, just tugging at the leash and waiting for me to hurry up and come along), and a glimmer of what might be an entire new section that I'm going to have to write.

And his poems ... you know, I've always been aware of Merwin, obviously, and have read him in bits and pieces, but I've never really immersed myself in his work. I think you come to poets when you're ready for them, and I have a strong, strong feeling that it's time for me to come to Merwin. I think I have a lot to learn from him.

And this is incredibly superficial, but the man does NOT look his age, no how, no way. He was born in 1927 and I would have pegged him as mid-sixties, at most. I'm bad at guessing ages, but really, the man is positively radiant or something. I guess that's what living in Hawaii will do for you, huh?

I don't listen to poetry well. Oftentimes at readings my mind wanders, and I catch a turn of phrase or a tone that I enjoy, and that's good enough. I shouldn't admit this, but it's true. So it's really quite rare for me to find myself riveted to a reading like I was tonight, swimming in the words, literally almost forgetting to breathe now and then, on the verge of tears a couple of times not because the poems were sad so much as that I was just ... moved.

And I'm not really sure just what it was about Merwin, or about his poems, that had this effect on me. All I know is, I'm awfully glad I left work a half-hour early and walked across campus to be there. Because tonight, I remember what poetry can do. And I'm feeling deeply grateful for that.

Thomas Merton Foundation 2007 contest

The Thomas Merton Foundation has announced the judge and complete guidelines for their 2007 "Poetry of the Sacred" contest. Coleman Barks is this year's judge, and you can get the guidelines here (pdf document). Deadline is Dec. 31, top prize is $500, and there is NO ENTRY FEE.

I will say that I am not altogether unbiased about this contest, as my poem "O" got one of the three honorable mention awards in the 2006 contest. It's a really good contest, though; they came through with the results right on schedule, called me on the phone to give me the news, posted the winner & honorable mentions on their website right away, sent my check very quickly, and sent me 4 contributor's copies of the print publication when it was available. It's a very professionally-run contest. And their definition of "poetry of the sacred" is very broad -- definitely not just poems about religion or God or anything like that. (I mean, my poem was about "ooh, lookit the whale, how cool!") You can read all the past winners and honorable mentions on their website. There's some excellent stuff there.

So send them a poem if you've got something that seems to fit! Good luck to one and all. :)

Two weeks to turkey

W.S. Merwin is reading here on campus Monday. Note to self: arrange to take off work early so I can get across campus by 5:00 for the reading. I'm not as familiar with his work as I should be, but I definitely want to go hear him.

Last night I went to a small concert in the local lefty-indie bookstore (the one where my poetry group read a couple months ago), by the singer-songwriter Pamela Means. Saturday night I'll be going to a concert by the singer-songwriter Ferron. I think we have a trend here.

I'm feeling cautiously optimistic about this week's election results, although it concerns me that so many of the Democrats who won are actually quite conservative, especially on social issues. And of course it bothers me that so many anti-gay-marriage amendments passed. Not that I'm likely to get married anytime soon (or ever), and not that the institution of government-sanctioned marriage isn't problematic to begin with, but it still really rankles. But still ... I'm not gonna miss Donald Rumsfeld one little bit, and "Madame Speaker" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

The student newspaper on campus ran a nice article today on the "new" Plath poem. Too bad they didn't actually provide a link to Blackbird or anything, you know, helpful like that.

Word today that Hunter O'Hanian, executive director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, is leaving to take a position with an arts center near Aspen, Colorado. I don't know enough to know whether this is a disaster or no big deal or what, but I do hope they are still on track to get their low-res MFA writing program underway. I'm getting itchy to start sending out applications. (Edited to add a link to the story on FAWC's website.)

Several airlines have some particularly excellent fare sales to Hawaii right now. I've been to Maui twice (2002 and 2004) and I sure hope I get to go again someday, either back to Maui or to one of the other islands. I spotted a fare as low as $406 from Indianapolis to Honolulu on Delta. Sigh! Too bad I don't have $406 to spare.

Two weeks from today is Thanksgiving, already. Can you believe it? Yeah, me neither. Eek! Anyone out there have any exciting plans for the holiday?

Linky bits

Nice article on Marge Piercy (who has just put out a new book of poetry) in this week's Provincetown Banner. I've felt that her last few volumes would have benefited from a heavier editing hand, but Piercy was a huge influence on me once upon a time so I continue to watch what she does with interest. Plus, she's a cat person.

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Sounds like William Styron lived much as I think I would like to, if I didn't have to have a job and stuff. From the New York Times' lengthy obituary:

... it was an unconventional routine he stuck to: sleep until noon; read and think in bed for another hour or so; lunch with Rose around 1:30; run errands, deal with the mail, listen to music, daydream and generally ease into work until 4. Then up to the workroom to write for four hours, perfecting each paragraph until 200 or 300 words are completed; have cocktails and dinner with the family and friends at 8 or 9; and stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and reading and smoking and listening to music.

Honestly? That sounds perfect to me. Except for the smoking part. Doesn't mesh so well with the part where I have to work from 8 to 5 most days, but even if you're never going to get to live that way, I think it's always a good exercise to imagine your ideal life. I can imagine a lot of ideal lives, actually -- none of them perfect. But they all have writing at their center. And none of them involve being a morning person. Funny, that.

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Boutiques and other non-book retailers are now displaying and selling books as lifestyle accessories. I find this about equally funny, frightening, and oddly appealing.

Hell, if putting a margarita-and-sangria-colored cover on my book (er, if I had a book, that is) would get it into the hands of a few people who might not otherwise buy it, and if some of those people would actually read the thing -- I'm all in favor. Perhaps poetry publishers need to get on this trend, hm?

When I started a writing group many years ago, I put up flyers in bookstores, in the library, in laundromats. Which flyer brought me the most calls? Yep, the one from the laundromat. And the people who called me turned out to be good writers, too. Because even good writers do laundry sometimes. And even good readers go shopping in places other than bookstores, so why not sneak in a few books?

What do y'all think? Ignoring for the moment the fact that these venues would be more likely to stock "lowest common denominator" titles (kind of like what Starbucks has started selling, I guess) --if someone bought your book in a gas station or a trendy clothing store, would you feel weird about it?

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I put a worldcat.org search box over on the right-hand side of this here bloggity blog. You can use it to look up books and see if they're available at a library near you. Of course, you can also use it to plug in an author or a title and get bibliographic details: publisher, ISBN, sometimes the table of contents. I don't know how useful it will be for anyone, but what the heck -- I'm a library geek so I oughta act like one.

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Still toying with the idea of going to AWP. If I do, who's gonna buy me a drink? *grin*

Me and Sylvia Plath

I know I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but: One week from today is Election Day. Please, please vote! And if you can, try to learn something about your smaller local races, too -- City Council, County Commissioners, School Board, whatever you've got where you are. It's important to vote for your Senators and Congresscritters, but the local issues are awfully important, too. I especially try to find out something about my local School Board races, because what's going to change the world more than making sure the kids in your town are getting a good education?

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A quick Google News search on "Sylvia Plath" tells me that a lot of newspapers & other sources are picking up the story about the newly-discovered Sylvia Plath poem which is set to appear in Blackbird tomorrow. I am so tickled that my poem "Opening the Hive" will appear in the same issue. Not just because Plath was a big influence on me when I first got serious about poetry (though she was), and not just in the selfish hope that the Plath publicity will draw a few more readers for my poem (who knows if that will happen) -- but also because Plath's poem was discovered in the manuscript collections of the Lilly Library, the rare-books library here at Indiana University, where I work -- yep! -- in the library system. In fact, I worked in the Lilly one summer while I was an undergrad, as a page/shelver. I remember coming across some of the books from Plath's library there, and touching them almost reverently. We also have, in addition to a lot of manuscript materials, a set of paper dolls she made when she was young -- and even a lock of her hair, which is a little creepy but whatever.

And not only THAT, but I wrote "Opening the Hive" after reading Marianne Boruch's essay, "Plath's Bees," which I found in Poets Teaching Poets: Self and the World. I wouldn't go so far as to say my poem responds, exactly, to Plath or to Boruch; it was more a case of "ooh! bees! a beehive is a cool image to use in a poem!" -- but the connection is there, nonetheless.

Too cool.

Edited 11-01-06 to add:
Here's a link to Sylvia Plath.
And here's a link to me.

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Also cool: an email today accepting two of my poems -- both fairly new ones -- for the Fall/Winter 06 issue of Pebble Lake Review. Thanks to Amanda!

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Happy Halloween to all. If the veil between this world and the next is truly thin tonight -- may that be a source of understanding and inspiration, not fear.

And failing that, at least a good hard sugar coma.

Mary Oliver

Went to the Mary Oliver reading in Indianapolis tonight. On the one hand, how great to see such a huge crowd for a poetry reading -- there were hundreds of people there (I am terrible at estimating crowd size, but Clowes Hall seemed about half full, and I think it has a capacity of 3000). And it looked like a lot of them were buying books. On the other hand, how many of those people will attend even one other poetry reading this year, or buy a book of poetry by somebody else?

I don't like it when I start to feel resentful. In my defense, I already hadn't been feeling well, which I'm sure contributed to my little bout of crankiness. A few years ago, I went to a show by the singer-songwriter Melissa Ferrick, in a local bar; there were maybe 50 people there, not a horrible turnout, but not a packed house either. Two nights later Ani DiFranco gave a concert on campus, and Melissa had enough of a gap in her schedule that she was able to stick around, so she got tickets and went to the concert. (I actually ran into her there, and she remembered me from having chatted with me at her own show, and gave me a big grin and a hug -- which made my night.) I kept stealing glances over in Melissa's direction during Ani's show, and she looked sort of down and cranky, and she left early, and I didn't really understand why. Tonight, I think I understood the little "where were all these people two nights ago?" voice that must have been muttering inside her head as she sat in that packed and cheering auditorium watching somebody else get to be the rockstar.

The reading was ... well, I hadn't heard her read before, but I didn't feel particularly surprised by what she read or how she read it. I was a bit surprised by a couple of genuinely funny poems, both from her new book -- she has some poems about her little dog Percy that are just priceless. One of them involves Donald Rumsfeld. Oh, go to the library and look it up for yourself. :) The other thing that surprised me was that the instant she stepped behind the podium, she nearly disappeared. Apparently, um, she's not particularly tall. Whenever she was looking down at her paper, we could pretty much just see her from the nose up. When she looked up, we could see her whole face. It was like watching a poetry reading by Kilroy Was Here. I spent a lot of time listening with my eyes closed, because it was actually kind of distracting!

I asked the friends I'd driven up with whether they wanted to go get in line for autographs, and none of them did. I hadn't been able to decide if I wanted to buy a book and get it signed or not -- I kind of did and kind of didn't -- so when my friends weren't interested, I decided to bag the autograph line and just head home. Then I saw the line. Holy cow, I bet it was going to take her at least 90 minutes to get through that whole thing.

It's funny -- the reading, and the entire atmosphere surrounding it, made me think of so much I love about the poetry world and so much I can't stand about it, all at once. So many people there were loving the reading, were so happy to be there; it was a really nice atmosphere. And while Oliver's never been a lesbian activist or anything, she's never been closeted either (that I'm aware of) -- most or all of her books have been dedicated to her partner, who died last year -- and frankly it gives me a little bit of a warm fuzzy anytime I see someone who's not straight getting that much adoration. (Call it the Martina Navratilova Effect.) And, yes, I do like much of her work. I won't deny that her work is generally more comforting and reaffirming than challenging, and if that means her work fails by a certain set of definitions, well all right then; working from another set of expectations, her work is a rousing success. But the whole poetry-superstar thing makes me so uncomfortable, and I don't think it is good for poetry.

Anyway, my thoughts are muddled, and I am tired. It's raining outside, and Joni Mitchell is singing "My Old Man" on my tv (I love VH-1 Classic). I spent over two hours in a small car with four other people, with at least two different conversations going on at any given moment, and I spent another hour in a very crowded room listening to poetry and being distracted by my own self-indulgent internal mutterings. It's time for me to be quiet for a little while, and then it's time for me to sleep.

Thanks, y'all.

The Indigo Girls concert Monday night was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I was front row, a little to the left (Amy's side of the stage); sometimes the sound is kind of crappy from the very front, but the sound was pretty good this time. There were so many nice moments. The opening band, Three5Human -- which takes its name from the historical fact that not so very long ago, here in the U.S., Black human beings were officially counted as 3/5 of a human being -- was AMAZING. The lead singer, Trina Meade, has the perfect rock'n'roll voice, huge and full of heart (think Janis Joplin meets Tina Turner); the guitarist, Tomi Martin, plays these awesome rip-your-face-off licks and makes it look effortless. Trina joined Amy & Emily onstage for their old old song "Kid Fears" and I got more goosebumps than I've gotten from music in a long time, and during the encore Trina & Tomi joined them for "Tether" -- all I can say is, if you think Indigo Girls are nice little acoustic folkies, you should have been there with those three electric guitars wailing to the heavens.

It made me think that everyone should have work to do that makes them feel that alive.

Afterwards, a small group of us waited around outside to say hello to Amy & Emily and get quick autographs. They are very very good to their fans and nearly always take the time to greet the hard-core hanger-outers at least briefly, even when (like they were this time) they're tired and it's cold. While we were waiting, Carol Isaacs (their keyboard player) came around and offered us all chocolates, really good ones too. (I love her!) The Indigo Girls appreciate their fans, and make a point of saying so, more than any other musicians I can think of at their level of well-knownitude. Every time I see them it's like they are actually surprised, and very pleased, that we all know the words to many of their songs and that we stand and dance along or sit and listen intently. "Wow. Thanks, y'all!" It's so endearing.

It makes me think that none of us do our creative work in a vacuum; that we are all in conversation with whatever audience we imagine, and with our peers and our influences; that being listened to (or read) is an amazing gift; that on a good day it is a very, very lucky thing just to be alive.

Blustery bits

It's cold and blustery outside, wind blowing bright yellow leaves across the still-green lawns. (Well, I assume about the yellow and the green -- the colors were there a couple of hours ago, but now it's dark out.) I have finally given in and turned on the heat. Sigh.

Busy week upcoming -- Indigo Girls concert tomorrow night, Mary Oliver reading Thursday night -- both in the same venue, Clowes Hall on the Butler University campus in Indianapolis, just under two hours from where I live. I haven't seen the Indigo Girls for two years (though I caught Amy Ray's solo show last year) so it will be very good to see them again. Besides the fact that I love their music and admire their political activism, Amy & Emily are two of the nicest human beings you could ever hope to meet -- which makes it all the more fun to support them. The other night in Toronto, they had to leave the stage mid-encore because the venue had a very strict curfew with a huge fine they'd have to pay for breaking it. So what did they do? Why, they got their guitars and they went outside and they played their usual last song, "Galileo," in the street for those fans who had stuck around. Someone even put a video of it up on Google Video (I think that link should work). It's kind of dark, and mostly what you hear is the crowd cheering and singing along, but still, how cool!

I am looking forward to Mary Oliver's reading, too. I know a lot of poets nowadays don't care for her, but I like her well enough, and I've never heard her read before. I glanced through her new book in one of our mega-chain bookstores last week, and there's a lot of God stuff in it, which makes me uneasy; she's always written about religious-ish stuff, of course, but she hasn't in the past said "God" quite so directly quite so often. Oh well. She just lost her partner of many many years not that long ago, and I guess if anything will send a person to religion, that sort of thing probably will.

Eduardo notes that Blackbird will be including a previously-unpublished Sylvia Plath poem in their November issue. The last I'd heard was that they were still negotiating the specifics of the rights, so I'm pleased to know that it's really going to happen. All the more so because my own poem "Opening the Hive" will be in the same issue. (And yes, I think it's extra amusing that my poem uses bee-related imagery, given that Plath wrote a bunch of bee poems herself!)

That's it from here, I guess. Back to the laundry.

Voracity, Veracity

Did you spend hours as a child reading the encyclopedia or the dictionary? Do you love watching documentaries on TV, nature or science or history? Do you get a little thrill from guidebooks and almanacs and all manner of reference materials?

Yeah, I thought so. Me too.

At my poetry group's reading last month, I read a new poem called "Sleeping in Space." It's about an astronaut trying to sleep on the space shuttle as it orbits the planet, and in it I use terms like "orbital sunrise" and "apogee" and "capcom." I've been fascinated by the space program for many years, I admit, going back to the Apollo moon-landing days; but this particular poem came about after having watched about fifteen or twenty hours of NASA TV over the course of several days. A couple of the members of my poetry group expressed some kind of surprise that I knew all these facts about what astronauts do, and asked where I'd learned this stuff. But how, I wonder, can you not? If you're a poet (or, probably, any other kind of writer), I think you owe it to yourself and to your art to be fascinated by the things of this world, to read and watch and listen voraciously, to learn and learn and learn.

They used to say, "write what you know." But I think what's important is to know what you write: to immerse yourself in a world and its language, then write from that place. When I put a po'ouli in my poem "A Field Guide, A Map," I probably spent an hour looking up stuff about that particular species of bird, what it looks like, how it's studied, where it lives (or lived; the poor thing may be extinct by now). Is all that in the poem? No, I really just mention the bird's name. But by learning more about the bird, that name seems now to belong to a real thing, something that I can feel certain belongs in the poem . There's a reason it isn't a dodo or a hummingbird. It has to be a po'ouli.

Some people call this immersion obsession, and say that you have to write about what you are obsessed with. Fair enough. I can be obsessed with something for an hour, write one poem about it, and leave it behind. Or I can learn its language for weeks, months, years. This kind of obsession, or learning, or research (yes, I'm gonna sneak librarians in here in a minute!) is what gives poems a language and a context. A linguistic texture. It's one thing to write about a whale, but quite another to make it a minke whale, to see its baleen and the gleaming white bands around its pectoral fins, to know that the exhalation of a minke whale -- its blow -- is, unlike that of the humpback or the blue whale, practically invisible. Now isn't that way more interesting and resonant than just to say "hey, a whale"?

So if I ever teach a poetry class, here is what I'm going to make them do. I'm going to send them to the reference department of a library, and I'm going to ask them to research some body of knowledge that they aren't already terribly familiar with. I don't care if it's oncology, cloud formations, the history of Barbie dolls, Greek mythology, or auto repair. I'm going to ask them to find twenty vocabulary words that are unique and/or specific to that field, and turn in the list of those words complete with definitions. Not just brief dictionary definitions, but a bit about what the terms mean and a bit about their context within the field of study. They can start with Wikipedia or something, but I want them to find at least an introductory text or guidebook and spend some time with it. They don't have to come away feeling like an expert in the field, but they need to immerse themselves, at least a bit. Then (you see this coming, right?) they're going to write a poem using that vocabulary -- and, of course, mining it for emotional resonance, not just writing a poem about "how to repair a car" or whatever.

This is what poets and librarians have in common. We love facts, names, specificity. We know all kinds of weird, unexpected stuff. Or we should, anyway. My friends who write SF/F and historical fiction don't have a monopoly on doing research! And that's the way I like it. (Of course, I freely admit to being a big old nerd.)

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On a completely unrelated note, This Is Broken had me laughing at my desk today till tears ran down my cheeks. "Please notify the United States Postal Service to notify the United States Postal Service that the recipient has a new address." Hee hoo ha!

Ex-Laureates

Just found out that Robert Pinsky is visiting my campus -- on the same day that Mary Oliver is reading up in Indianapolis. Good grief. His reading is at 4:30 and hers is at 7:30, so if I were driving alone, I might be able to make both -- but because I'm carpooling to Indy with a group of people who like to arrive early, I won't be able to. (It's about an hour and 40 minutes from Bloomington to the Butler campus, where Oliver is reading; we're leaving around 5:00. I think I'm gonna take a book, because I think we're gonna be sitting in the car for half an hour waiting for the doors to open...)

I know for a lot of people the choice between Pinsky versus Oliver is like the choice between having one's fingernails pulled out with a pliers versus, I dunno, something else bad. To which I say, phhbbttt.

The College Arts and Humanities Institute and the Institute for Advanced Study are actually bringing several poets to campus, along with writer Temple Grandin, to speak/read on the topic of "Solitude" -- something rather near and dear to my heart, and probably to the hearts of most poets, I'd wager. W.S. Merwin is reading at 5 pm on November 13, and Louise Glück is reading in March. Here's all the info, in case anyone's interested...

Blood Orange Review

The new issue of Blood Orange Review is now available online, including my poems "A Field Guide, A Map" and "Snow at Midnight" as well as other good stuff. (Or, if you don't like my poems, amend that to "as well as some actual good stuff." *grin*)

It's a nice little journal and they're in the market for new work, hint hint....

Saturday jollies

I've never posted about football on this blog before and I probably never will again, but Indiana beat Iowa 31-28 today, which is the first time they have beaten a team in the top 15 since October of 1987 when they beat Ohio State on the road. (I remember that one well because I was in DC for the big March on Washington for GLBT Rights, and the news spread through the Indiana contingent pretty quickly.) This one was a home game, so it was pretty crazy.

When I heard the final score on the radio, while driving out to Bloomington Hardware, I decided I was afraid to go anywhere near campus for a while. :)

In other happy news, the Valparaiso Poetry Review is taking my poem "Swallowed" for their Spring/Summer 2007 issue. This is a weird and kind of creepy poem that for some reason I have kept submitting despite a bunch of rejections -- I don't know why, but I always thought it would eventually find a home.

I know, it's probably considered tacky to blog about every acceptance I get (at least I keep my mouth shut about the rejections, which of course there are more of). But I wouldn't go to the trouble of sending stuff out if I didn't enjoy it when something gets accepted, and the cats don't give a shit, so y'all get to hear about it. I like reading about other people's acceptances, too. Even if I don't post a congratulatory comment, rest assured I always smile and think, "go you!" I like to be reminded that most of the time, persistence eventually pays.

If anyone is reading this from the general vicinity of Bloomington/Indianapolis, by the way, I have in my possession a couple of extra Mary Oliver tickets (the reading is on the 26th and it's free, but you have to have a ticket) -- our little group accidentally ended up with more than we needed. If anyone wants them, let me know and I can save you the bother of getting your own from Clowes Hall.

A good mail day

In today's mail:

Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home by Rebecca Loudon. The cover art is even more gorgeous than it looked online! Plus, lulu.com sent it from an address on Aviation Parkway in Morrisville, NC. AVIATION PARKWAY. How totally freaking cool is that?

The Transparent Dinner by Christine Hamm. Here's what I said about the book: "There is both stench and beauty here, both grim reportage and fractured fairy tale. The strength of this book is in its relentless refusal to distinguish between the two, exposing the place where horror and magic commingle to create something deeper than a simple truth. These poems tell secrets -- dirty ones, delicious ones, ones you know you could be punished for hearing. Hamm is a thief and a trespasser, and her readers are the richer for it."

Our Bodies, Ourselves: Menopause. Hey, a girl can't read poetry ALL the time!

Poetry 1, Technology 0

My poem "Eight-Bar Solo" is up over at Poetry Southeast. Lots of good stuff there, including poems by Kelli Russell Agodon, Dorianne Laux, Hilda Raz, and plenty more! Check it out, if you're so inclined.

Got to work this morning only to find that the hard drive on my workstation was in the process of completely crapping itself. Fortunately almost everything I have there is saved to the network drive. Still, darned inconvenient (and a handy reminder to all to back up everything you care about!). I'm home on my dinner break now, before heading back for my 6 to 10 pm shift on the reference desk. The evening shifts are generally pretty lively. Since the Information Commons is open 24/7, there are lots of students just getting there by the time I leave at 10. (We have grad students, librarians-in-training, to staff the desk till midnight.)

There is a cloud outside my window that looks just like a giant flying mouse (not the Disney variety). Cool.

P.S. I don't really care for cigars anyway. Shut up, Dr. Freud.

...but no cigar

"...the winner of the 2006 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Contest is Bestiary Charming by Jackie White. The runner-up is Breach by Anne Haines, and Northport by Thomas Allan Johnston receives an honorable mention."

And a hand-written note that says "Very close!!"

In other news, I think I'll stay home tonight because I'm absurdly tired, but tomorrow I'll be whooping it up at the Lotus Festival. Where else can you enjoy Tibetan sand paintings, Hindustani slide guitar, funky Brazilian samba-tronica (I'm not kidding, that's what it says!), stilt walking and mask dancing from Cote d'Ivoire, Klezmer punk-rock, Tuvan throat-singing, and the Balkan Beat Box all in the middle of Midwestern flyover country?

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Po(e)tp(o)urri

I've been particularly enjoying working on the reference desk lately. The desk I've been working on since June is much, much busier than the one in the little branch library where I used to work, so although I'm only on the desk about 8 hours a week, I'm getting a whole heck of a lot more experience.

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This week's installment of Dykes To Watch Out For made me cry, dammit. Mo's had those cats forever, and I knew they were getting really old, but... wah.

If that made you sad, go get some baby panda therapy. Is there anything cuter than a baby panda? I can't think of anything.

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Like several other bloggers, I recently received copies of the textbook I'm now in (thanks to Emily). I am highly amused. Except if I had to answer the study questions, I suspect I'd flunk the class on my own poem.

It's fun being in a book full of mostly dead people though. That's a first for me. It's odd company to be keeping, for sure. Me and Emily Dickinson, we're like this.

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I am probably going to be submitting some of my published pomes to IUScholarWorks, a new digital "institutional repository." This is something a lot of universities are starting to do, generally coordinated by the libraries. It's one way of preserving scholarly & creative works digitally, giving them a permanent "address," and gathering together a bunch of the scholarly & creative output of a university in one easy-to-google location. We don't have a lot of content in ours yet, but if you look at the ones at Kansas and California, you can get a better idea of how this sort of thing works.

There is a "community" here for librarians & library staff, and we're starting out by just including works that have already been published. I double triple checked, and it really is ok with them if I stick a bunch of poems in, as long as they've been published and as long as the rights reverted to me upon publication. Cool. I want to convert them to pdf format first, so I'll get around to doing that shortly. I'll give y'all a link when they're in there.

Not that I have to worry about this anytime soon, if ever, but does anyone know whether book publishers would (hypothetically) have an issue with (hypothetically) publishing a manuscript that included poems already housed in an institutional repository? I'm thinking it wouldn't be a problem, since books always include poems that have been published in journals and anthologies. But if anyone suspects differently, let me know.

(Adding my documents to the repository doesn't involve relinquishing any of my rights -- I made sure of that.)

* * * * * * *

Hanne Blank manages to put into words some of the things that have been bugging me about the Mark Foley story. The whole thing is such a nasty little brew of inappropriate behavior, downright sleaziness, homophobia, and political power games. Lately I've felt like I should wash my eyes out with soap every time I read the news.

* * * * * * *

How in the hell is it October already? I had all these plans. I was going to get all this stuff done. Hmph.

Today's crackpot theory

The success of a reading depends entirely upon managing to wear the right pair of shoes.

Tonight's went pretty well. It would have been nice if there hadn't been a really loud punk band playing in the park across the street for the first half of our reading. But other than that I think it went pretty well.

I like doing readings. Maybe I like it a little too much, considering I don't get to do it very often.

Maybe if I bought new shoes I'd get asked to do more readings. *grin*

The holy silence

Saw an obituary today for a fellow in his seventies named Lucky H. Christmas. He was from Quality, Kentucky.

* * * * * * * * * *

Record Store Cats.

* * * * * * * * * *

What I like best at the reference desk is when somebody asks me a question about something I know absolutely nothing about, and I'm able to lead them to good information. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, but it's not true that librarians know everything. We can, however, darn sure figure out where to look it up.

* * * * * * * * * *

I'm enjoying the new Indigo Girls album. And as it turns out, if it's true that they are using the orchestra pit as part of the stage instead of selling the three rows of seats they can stick in it, I apparently have a front row seat for their concert in Indianapolis next month. I have it on fairly good authority that they are not selling the pit, so I am quite pleased. Front row, bay-bee!

* * * * * * * * * *

Thanks to those who have weighed in on my reading questions. Never fear, I have already practiced my poems and plan to continue doing so throughout the week. (I practice them standing up. It makes a difference.) I don't ever memorize my poems to the point of going completely "off the page" with them, but I am generally looking at the audience instead of down at my paper at least 50% of the time. Unless I'm reading something brand brand new (which I very seldom do, though I do it at the student readings in Provincetown because it's just more fun to read the stuff I'm working on that week) or unless I suddenly get uncomfortable with what I'm reading for whatever reason. (That has happened to me. Midway through I realize: "Oh shit, I said THIS in this poem? Why didn't anybody TELL me? Gah..." and all I can do is just finish reading.)

David Vincenti's comment was a good one. He said:

If I know my audience will be mostly amateurs or non-poets (like when I trot myself out as "the engineer who writes poems"), I do usually introduce myself/my work and script a few transitions.

If I know my audience is likely to contain a non-trivial fraction of deep readers and/or experienced writers - especially, perish the though, people whose work I love - I spend more time inside the works and less between them.

And you know what, I think that's what I do too. I think sometimes inexperienced (for lack of a better word) audiences need a little more hand-holding, which is not necessarily a bad thing. With a more experienced audience, I have more of a sense that I trust them to "get" the poems on their own a little more, that they have certain expectations of a poem and that they know to pay a certain kind of attention to a poem, that they have a context for it. The audience at a Five Women Poets reading tends towards the "friends and relatives" sort of audience. I often like to subvert their expectations of poetry by actually (gasp) being funny and engaging (at least that's what I aim for...), where with a more experienced audience, I don't feel the same kind of compulsion to persuade them to like me; I let myself trust that they are there primarily because they like poetry, for whatever warped and twisted reason, and that changes how I present my work. With an inexperienced audience, I feel like if I can win them over and get them to like me, then I don't have to worry so much about the poems necessarily being entertaining or engaging; if I pull them in with a few words of introductory patter, they're more willing to follow me into a poem that is maybe more "difficult" (ugh, that word) than they'd normally stick with.

If that makes sense at all. And I hope it doesn't come across as being condescending to my "less experienced" audience, because holy moly, does it feel good when someone comes up to you afterwards and says "you know, I never really cared for poetry before, but..."

Also, in all honesty, the first ten or so words that I say after landing at the podium are generally pretty much a lost cause -- I have a breathy moment, I'm not quite there yet. Better that should be introductory bla-bla, instead of losing the first line or two of my first poem. (Especially if there's a microphone. Nothing like launching right into your poem and halfway through it you realize the damn thing's not on.)


Lyle mentioned applause in his comment. Since we have seven readers, what generally happens (and sometimes we actually mention this in our overall intro to the reading -- "hi, thanks for coming, we'll have a ten minute intermission halfway through, you can purchase our CD, bla bla bla") is that people applaud after each reader finishes. That works pretty well. I don't think we've ever had people try to applaud after every poem. That makes my hands hurt just thinking about it.

He also mentioned silence -- and yeah, there is that moment sometimes mid-poem, sometimes right after the last line, when you can hear the audience listening and you know they're right there with you. That is the BEST FEELING IN THE WORLD. An actress friend of mine refers to that as "the holy silence."

And those moments, those silent moments, make all the rest of it worthwhile.

* * * * * * * * * *

Word of the day: anadromous

One entry found for anadromous.

Main Entry: anad·ro·mous
Pronunciation: &-'na-dr&-m&s
Function: adjective
Etymology: Greek anadromos running upward, from anadramein to run upward, from ana- + dramein to run -- more at DROMEDARY
: ascending rivers from the sea for breeding [shad are anadromous] -- compare CATADROMOUS

(thanks to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary)

* * * * * * * * * *

I watched some tennis on TV the other day. As they hit the ball back and forth across the net, back and forth, back and forth, it went: BAP, BAP, BAP.

BAP BAP BAP BAP BAP.

Thud.

And that's all I have to say about that.

* * * * * * * * * *

Favorite headline of the week, from the NOAA Fisheries Service announcements:

Invasive Sea Squirts Persist on Georges Bank

(I do hope that's not what killed Lucky Christmas.)

More reading (over)planning

The set for my 8 minutes' worth of the upcoming Five Women Poets reading has come together almost by accident. The poems I've selected aren't necessarily the best poems I have written in the past year, but as I went through poems (stopwatch at the ready for timing them), these seemed to want to hang together. Hm.

1. [poem by someone else, not completely decided yet]
2. The Total Loss Department (1:07)
   
3. The Aging Sailor Remembers (1:13)
   
4. Sleeping in Space (2:17)
   
5. Arrival (1:48)
   

#3 and #4 are likely to confuse and consternate anyone who believes poems are always autobiographical, since I'm neither a retired ship's captain nor a space shuttle astronaut. Hee.

I wish I had more opportunities to read -- I really enjoy it, though putting together my set always gives me fits a little bit. I suppose I need to plan out my introductory remarks more carefully, so that I don't find myself babbling. But there's a fine line between "avoidance of babbling" and "too stiffly scripted." I always find myself a little put-off when a poet reads their intros word-for-word from the page, as I think the intros are a good opportunity to connect with the audience a little bit, be a little bit human. While there is something to be said for not talking between poems at all, letting the poems speak for themselves, I generally enjoy hearing what the poet has to say, and find that I feel more included somehow when they chat a little bit.

What about you guys? Do you script your introductory remarks? Make notes about what you want to say but ad-lib based on the notes? Ad-lib entirely? Eschew introductory remarks altogether? Do you do anything differently for a "hometown crowd" where you know many of the people in the audience, as opposed to an audience of strangers?

If you do readings, what do you like -- or dislike -- about doing them? Besides, of course, the rockstar treatment, the limo ride to & from the venue, the bottles of champagne delivered to you backstage, the groupies hanging around the stage door after ... What, does that stuff only happen to me??

All the news that (gives me) fits

Ended up not getting to the Gerald Stern reading tonight. I've been feeling a little blah, like I'm coming down with something, and driving over three hours (about an hour and 40 minutes each way) for a 30-40 minute reading just didn't feel like the way I wanted to spend my evening. Instead I sat home and watched a Jean-Michel Cousteau special on PBS about the National Marine Sanctuaries (some gorgeous underwater photography, including coral spawning and humpback whales) and NASA TV. I am such a nerd.

Word from the Indiana Arts Commission that beginning with the 2007-08 grant cycle (for which applications will be due in February), their Individual Artist Grants are being increased from $1000 to $2000. Good news, right? Except that unless they come up with some additional funding (shyeah right), only 40 artists will get grants instead of 80-some (in FY2005 they funded 86 artists out of 199 applications). For myself, I'd rather have a better chance at a $1000 grant -- enough to cover a one-week summer workshop -- than a less-than-stellar shot at more money. Plus, you don't get your funds until something like September, which means that for a summer workshop I'd have to put it on my credit card & pay it off later when I got the grant money; I could have managed to do that with $1000, but more than that will be a stretch, and maybe not do-able. Hello, friendly credit union, can I have a loan?

Oh well. I meant to apply for this fiscal year, but was felled by the Martian Death Flu in January and didn't get the application done. I'll probably try next year anyway. $2000 might let me take two workshops in Provincetown, which would be almost unbearably cool. You know, I don't think I have ever been away from home for two whole weeks in my adult life....

Upcoming (or incoming, as the case may be)

I'm planning to drive up to Indianapolis for several readings in Butler University's Visiting Writers Series:

• Wednesday, Sept. 20: Gerald Stern
• Wednesday, Oct. 18: Gregory Orr
• Thursday, Oct. 26: Mary Oliver

I'll be on the Butler campus three times in eight days, as the Indigo Girls concert at Clowes Hall is on Monday, Oct. 23, right in between the Orr & Oliver readings. (Although if I start feeling a little overbooked, I may end up skipping Orr; it's over an hour and a half drive in each direction, and so far I don't have anyone interested in going with me.) I've snagged a pretty good seat for the Indigo Girls show, 4th row, and their new album comes out this Tuesday so I'll be hearing lots of songs I haven't yet heard in concert, which makes me a happy happy fangirl.

IU's MFA program will be bringing in some readings this year, I'm sure, but they haven't yet updated their calendar to reflect this academic year. They're not exactly spectacular about making sure their readings get publicized outside of the English department, which is a drag sometimes.

And of course, the Five Women Poets reading at Boxcar Books on Saturday the 30th of this month. Can't forget that one. :) (If it weren't for this reading, I might have considered driving down to St. Louis that night, as cartoonist Alison Bechdel of "Dykes To Watch Out For" and Fun Home fame is reading/speaking, and I adore her. She'll be at Left Bank Books, for you St. Louisians.)

(Still contemplating opening my eight-minute segment with a poem by someone else -- thanks to those of you who chimed in on that topic! 8 minutes is such a short set, but I think it might be fun. And our audiences usually have a large percentage of "I never read poetry but I thought I'd come and hear my friends" people, so almost anything I read will serve to introduce people to someone new to them. Which is nice.)

* * * * * * * * * *

Wrote some poems this weekend after not writing a damn thing for about a month. Thank goodness. I have complete first drafts of poems called "Dx" (an abbreviation you medical-types will recognize) and "Waiting to Meet the Rock Star," and have started scratching out notes on one called "Sleeping in Space" (I've been watching a bunch of NASA TV this weekend).

There's never enough time in the weekend, is there?

Reading plans

So I am starting to think about what to read for my poetry group's annual reading, which falls on September 30 this year. Two things I am considering:

1. At our meeting the other night we chose the order in which we would read. We decided that we wanted to end on an "up" note, and someone asked "okay, who's got an uplifting poem that they can end on, and they can go last?" Lots of silence. Several of the members didn't feel like they had anything non-depressing to read. Eek! So I volunteered to go last. Now I have to be sure I end on something relatively uplifting -- oh, the pressure. I've actually never been the last reader in this group, as far as I can recall. Hopefully it won't be one of those readings where we lose half our audience at the intermission.

2. I'm considering doing a cover -- that is, reading a poem by someone else. I haven't chosen a specific one, but I'm toying with the idea in general. Partly, I'm not real crazy about my own work right now. Partly, I want to take the opportunity to promote work I love by someone else, and maybe inspire someone in the audience to go read more by whoever I end up reading, and discover some poetry they will love. I haven't decided for sure yet, though. What do you all think about people reading poems by others instead of only original work? Does it work best to open with the cover (and since of course you're selecting something really good, do you feel like the original work sometimes pales by comparison? because that seems a little risky) -- or do you think it's best to slip the cover in the middle of your set? I only have about 8 minutes to fill, so if I do a cover, it will be only one, for sure.

I have to decide what to wear, too. That's probably more traumatic than deciding what to read. *grin*

This one's for Corn Shake

Corn
Originally uploaded by Macky's hat.

It's a leetle doggie with a corn hat!

One of my heroes

Tonight, in the last match of her professional career, Martina Navratilova (along with Bob Bryan) won the mixed doubles championship at the U.S. Open, demolishing a couple of Czechs in straight sets.

The woman turns fifty years old next month. She's won more championships than I've probably even watched on TV. She is thirty years older than Maria Sharapova, who won the women's singles title tonight. She's a politically outspoken lesbian activist with a smile that lights up the world when things are going well for her. I was fortunate enough to see her play a couple of times in exhibition matches during her brief semi-retirement, and to witness that kind of power and grace from close up is nothing short of spectacular. Her presence just fills the whole stadium.

And here she is, still kicking ass and taking names and bringing home one more big old trophy -- and purely for love of the game. If she can find it in herself to work that hard, surely I can manage to sit down at my desk every day and write. Right?

Go Martina! May you have a long and blissful retirement. And thanks for the inspiration.

Good news is always nice.

Got word last night that Blood Orange Review is taking two of my poems, "A Field Guide, A Map" and "Snow at Midnight." (And thanks to Charlie for his post a while back that tipped me off to this nice little online journal!)

If I'm not mistaken, I now have more poems in the "forthcoming" file than I ever have. That feels good. Publication isn't everything, and it's not the reason I write. But I will admit, uncool as it may be, that I do enjoy it. It is heartening to know that not only did someone like my work, they liked it enough that they want to get other people to read it. To me, that's a heck of a compliment.


A heartfelt "well done" also to fellow blogger Diane K. Martin, whose manuscript made the runner-up cut in the Tupelo Press first-book contest -- frustrating, I know, to feel so close and yet so far, but at least you know you're playing on the right ballfield! And congrats as well to Theresa Sotto, a fantastic poet I met this past summer in Provincetown, whose manuscript made the finalist roster in the same contest.

May we all find the best of readers for the best of our words.

Animalia

Two non-poetry-related notes tonight, both courtesy of the Atlanta Zoo.

• Atlanta has a brand-new baby panda! Their female panda Lun Lun gave birth to a little butterstick-sized critterbaby just before 5 pm today. My aunt, who is a zoo member, got an emailed announcement from them about two hours later and forwarded it to me straightaway. My psychic powers tell me that I will be spending an inordinate amount of time peeking at their Panda-cam over the next several months, if the baby survives and does OK. There's not much of anything cuter than a baby panda! I may also have to make a trip to the ATL to see the little guy in person (in panda?) when they put it on display. Hmmm, it may very well be old enough by the time AWP rolls around. Even more incentive to figure out a way to get there! If I manage to go, I think I will try to plan an extra day to visit the aquarium and the zoo.
  

• Recycle your old cellphone and help with gorilla conservation. They'll take any old cellphone, whether it works or not. Definitely a good cause. If you don't want to take or mail your old cellphone to Atlanta, there are a bunch of other drop-off locations throughout the USA, Canada, and Australia. This is a great idea because (besides the fact that they can use the proceeds from selling usable phones) apparently there is a substance called coltan which is used in the manufacturing of cellphones, the mining of which directly screws up the gorillas' natural habitat. You can read more about it here.
  

to play with venomous beasts

Watching Rock Star: Supernova on TV and reflecting on why I, your basic frumpy middle-aged librarian type, love loud rock & roll so much. I love that intensity, the sense of skating on the edge. Maybe because I've fairly effectively banished that kind of hair-pulling, fist-clenching angst from my own life. And thank goodness for that.

I like that "live or die right here in this moment" intensity in some sports, too. Tennis. I love how psychologically intense a hotly contested tennis match can be. Win or lose, live or die by the half-inch that fuzzy ball falls inside or outside of the painted line. Watching Richard Gasquet late last night, cramping terribly, using everything in his body and his will to somehow rocket the impossible passing shot, saving match point against Lleyton Hewitt (who ended up winning anyway, but nevermind that). Watching Andre Agassi say goodbye, at once completely spent and completely full.

I don't really understand the need to put oneself in physical danger, to play with venomous beasts, et cetera. But I guess sometimes writing poems can put the poet in emotional danger that is just as dire in its own way. I've written poems that have left me feeling wrecked for days. I've written poems that have pissed other people off. I'm sure I'll do both of those again.

Ideally: a balanced, comfortable, sane life, with the need for "live or die in this moment" intensity channeled into poetry. I have no patience with romantic angst or manufactured crisis mode. There's time enough for crisis when it happens despite our best effort. People leave us, people die -- isn't that crisis enough?

What I do like: working at the reference desk. I've always been someone who likes having answers, being a know-it-all. It's actually kind of dangerous to reward someone like me for being a know-it-all. *grin* I love it when I help someone find the information they are looking for, or when I help them understand how something works, or when I help them feel okay about the process of discovery they need to go through to get from here to there. When the interaction ends with them saying "you've been REALLY helpful!" with a note of surprise in their voice, like they're not used to anyone being quite that helpful, like they'd almost forgotten what "good customer service" was like. I love surprising them like that. They get a little bit confused by it sometimes, like there must be a catch to it. I love that.

It doesn't always go that well, of course. It's not like that even once a day. But when it is, it makes it all worthwhile.

I still intend to make that fresh start, spending 90 minutes a day at my desk reading and writing (and maybe I'll count submitting as a part of that -- I haven't decided yet -- what do you guys think? does the submitting process count as part of writing, or is it a separate thing?) but I've decided that, as wiped-out as I've been from work, it's okay if I wait to start until next week. After the US Open is over and there's no more tennis to veg out in front of. I don't have to keep the same semester schedule as the university just because I work there. After all, I'm not going to stop writing for three weeks over Christmas, either. This new job takes more out of me than I'm used to, and it's OK that I need some time to acclimate.

I need to start thinking about (and seriously getting publicity out for) the Five Women Poets reading at the end of the month. I've got a couple of poems I'd like to read then but which need revising first.

* * * * * * * * * *

Steve Irwin to a charging elephant seal: "You're a naughty boy! You can't catch me, I'm a land mammal!"

(I'm not kidding. That was on an episode I'd recorded and just watched tonight, about Antarctica.)

On that note, adieu for now.

Phew...

With the beginning of the fall semester, my job is taking just about all the energy I've got. I'm working on the reference desk almost every day, plus leading some tours and orientation sessions for new students, plus several other major projects. I'm not working any more hours than usual, but I'm working more intensely, putting more of myself into my job than usual right now. I'm loving my job, but I'm not really writing right now, which is frustrating. I'm trying to trust that this is temporary.

Lucky for me the US Open is going on, and I love watching tennis, so at least I have something relatively mindless to rest my brain with in the evenings. (And DirecTV is dishing up five extra channels of US Open programming, which is awesomely cool.) Tonight Martina Navratilova and Nadia Petrova won their first-round doubles match in extremely convincing style, 6-1 6-1. Navratilova will have her fiftieth birthday in October. Right now I am watching Andre Agassi, a mere slip of a child at thirty-six, against the usually-quite-entertaining Marcos Baghdatis. It is Agassi's last tournament before retirement, so it goes without saying that pretty much everyone is cheering for him...

I get to take Labor Day off for the first time in several years. Hopefully at least a little poetry will happen over the long weekend. I'll be wandering through the Fourth Street Festival and maybe some of the art will inspire me. Man, let's hope so. I miss poetry.

Craft and cats

Gina Franco shares some intriguing notes from a craft class with Thomas Sayers Ellis: "A Risk in Every Room."

My list of teachers I think I'd like to work with just gets longer and longer.

On a totally non-poetry-related note, my little bitty kitten Lotus had his annual vet appointment yesterday. He weighs eleven pounds, four ounces now! I guess he's not so little bitty anymore. :) (Which makes sense, since he is a year and a half old now after all.) My vet adored him and threatened to steal him away, but I didn't let her.

Welcome back

It is the week of ubiquitous arrival. The dorms officially open tomorrow, but a lot of students have already arrived early -- for official reasons, like the international students and the football team and the marching band and the Resident Assistants in the dorms, or just because they wanted to pay the early move-in fee and get here already -- and of course the off-campus students have been filtering in all week. All over town there are upperclassmen having reunions with one another, parents looking tired and sad and proud but mostly tired and cranky, townies looking resigned, students looking excited and happy or maybe kind of scared (and some of them also tired and cranky).

I am forty-five. I moved here when I was eighteen, a wide-eyed freshman.

The ones I love are the ones who come here open and fall in love with this place, which means that they let this place change them.

I remember my first semester so vividly. I met new friends almost immediately, which for someone who was always shy and found it difficult to meet people was nothing short of miraculous. But we were all new, all strangers, which made it easier. Plus I lived in the hippie dorm. *grin* I remember an autumn night when some friends and I wandered downtown to a street dance featuring local bands. I was wearing a long skirt and sandals, and the harvest moon was fat and orange and weightless in the trees. I remember finding people who actually liked to talk about poetry. I remember reading Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich and knowing that my life would never be the same.

Nowadays, a lot of the undergrads live in luxury apartments, with giant plasma TVs and expensive cars and the stink of privilege. It's true that I resent them, their unquestioned assumption that they deserve all that, that life should be no other way, how they take material ease and comfort for granted. Not many of them end up being librarians, I suspect. Maybe some of them end up being poets. I kind of doubt it, but who knows.

My undergrad experience -- both in and out of classes -- was all about questioning everything. Who I was, what I wanted from life, what the point of all of it was. It was hard and I cried a lot, but it was the right way to do it, for me. I can't imagine what it's like not to question, just to assume, to demand, to take for granted. I can't imagine believing you have always been right about everything.

This is probably why I don't run the world.

I love being a part of this academic community, though. I love the vibrant energy, the sense of people all around me trying new things, the certainty that -- even if not everyone is here to be a scholar and not everyone wants to question their own beliefs -- a large part of the community around me is devoted to learning, teaching, understanding. Being in the library and knowing that somewhere in that building, now and then, someone pulls a book from a shelf and opens it and knows her life will never be the same. I love being, in some small way, a part of that.

Welcome back, students and learners and dancers and dreamers and yes, even the plasma-TV owners. Welcome back.

Enough is enough

I am tired of the fact that I waste so much of my non-work time. There is no reason on earth why I shouldn't be reading a book of poetry a week, drafting at least one new poem a week, and revising & submitting like crazy. I spend too much time watching TV, screwing around online, and accidentally napping on the couch.

Well, enough is enough. The fall semester starts on Monday around here, and in the name of getting a fresh start myself, I am going to try to be a little bit more disciplined. I've set up a schedule for myself that has me spending less time online, rationing my TV time, and spending 90 minutes every evening at my desk being productive. (I've even outlined what counts as "productive" although it is pretty broad.) This will be in effect every other Monday, as well as Wednesdays and Thursdays; on the other Mondays I work till 10 pm so I have to have a different schedule for that day, and on Tuesdays I work until 6 (instead of 5) so I have to tinker with that schedule a bit too. Fridays I will have an evening off, and for now I'm not going to draw up a weekend schedule.

If that feels okay after a while, I will rearrange things so that I am spending two hours at my desk being productive. By the time I'm applying to MFA programs, I want to feel confident that the 25 hrs/wk they expect you to put in (between residencies) won't be an impossible stretch. When I'm in an MFA program, I figure I will probably spend 3 hours a night Monday through Thursday, plus big chunks of time on Saturday and Sunday, with Friday evenings off -- that should come out to about 25 a week.

Assuming, of course, I get in somewhere. And can come up with the funding to go there if I do. Eep!

Disconnected ramblings

"The sex is better at Yaddo but the work is better at MacDowell." Well then. Guess which one I want to go to! (Thanks to Jilly for the link.)

* * * * *
I got satellite TV yesterday, with a DVR, and have been amusing myself by hitting the "rewind" button while watching something live. Now if I blink and miss something, I won't miss anything. I want that button for my life.

* * * * *
I'm sitting on the couch (sitting the long way with my feet up and my back against the arm) and there's a kitten on his back against my leg, all stretched out as long as he can possibly stretch with his two front feet stretched out over his head towards my feet, and his two back feet nestled by my butt. He is as long as my leg when he stretches out like this. I guess I can't really call him a tiny baby kitten anymore. When I skritch his tummy he stretches out even longer. He's like a slinky. An orange and white slinky that purrs and sheds.

* * * * *
I had thought about trying to take Maurice Manning's W513 class at IU this fall semester (that's the only graduate-level poetry writing class here that's ever open to non-MFA students). But the course description I found online makes it clear that this time around, it's really intended only for the MFA fiction students and is going to focus primarily on "how poetic craft differs from the craft of fiction." When I took the same class with Cathy Bowman a few years ago most of my classmates were MFA fiction students, but it wasn't exclusively for that population. Oh well. It's just as well -- if I can discipline myself sufficiently, I can get a lot of work done in the next few months without having to be in a class.

You'll note that big old if in there. I really gotta work at that one.

* * * * *
I was talking with one of the graduate assistants in the library where I work, and the topic of poetry and MFA programs came up. She mentioned that one of her friends had recently finished her MFA at Vermont College and had just won some contest or other for her first book. The name sounded vaguely familiar to me, like I'd read a press release about the contest, but I couldn't place it, so I asked the GA to send me the details in email. Turns out the friend was the winner of the Sawtooth Prize, which was judged by D.A. Powell. Sometimes the world is very, very small. I actually kind of like it that way. And now I have two reasons to be curious about this book & to buy it when it comes out.

* * * * *
I need to start sending out publicity for the Five Women Poets reading at the end of September. We are in a new venue after having used the same location for quite a few years, so it will be interesting to see whether we draw a slightly different audience at Boxcar Books -- which is a nice little lefty-punkish-indie bookstore with a small but surprisingly good poetry section. Always nice to read in a bookstore, surrounded by words & all their echoes.

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.