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Posting for a poet friend in NYC. I don't know from NYC housing, where the rents have a lot more numbers in them than they do here in Indiana, but I'm guessing this is a good deal...


NYC SUBLET AVAILABLE:
from Dec 15 to April 1 (give or take a week)
(Available for whole winter or segments)

My studio is on East 15th Street (Manhattan)
between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.
That's East Village/Gram. Park.
The building is on a quiet street next to a park
and not too far from Union Square
so great for transportation.

Queen-sized bed and full-sized futon.
ac, tv/dvd/vcr (no cable
but I have wireless internet access),
microwave, stereo, the basics.
Apt is on 6th (top) floor--so it's quiet.
Elevator and laundry room.

1550 per month.
Cheaper and cozier than a hotel.
Photos available.

Please pass on my info if you know someone:

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

Simic on PBS

Tonight on the Jim Lehrer NewsHour (on your friendly neighborhood PBS station -- check your local listings)...

*AN AMERICAN POET

September 26, 2007

As a part of our ongoing series of poet profiles, tonight we feature Poet Laureate Charles Simic.

Simic was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia during World War II where his earliest years saw occupation, civil war, and the beginnings of a Stalinist regime in his homeland. Although he is the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States, he did not speak English until he was 15-years-old. Simic has published over 60 books in the United States and abroad, including numerous volumes of his own poetry, essays, and memoirs. He won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems.

Charles Simic will be answering your questions on his work and the future of poetry in an Online Insider Forum. To participate go to www.pbs.org/newshour/insider/.


EDITOR'S NOTE: Segments highlighted on NewsHour Poetry Series Alert are scheduled to air but subject to change.

The local (that's local, not lo-cal!) report

Best recent google search leading to my blog: "i'm sick of self indulgent bipolar people"

* * * * *

I see that IU's MFA program has updated their website … but they haven't put redirects on the old site yet, so I've been continuing to check the old site, not knowing the new one was up! Oof. Web designers, take heed. The new site is a big improvement, though! Very attractive. So kudos to them for that.

Looks like A.E. Stallings is reading here in October, which is lovely. And Ross Gay has joined the faculty this year -– hooray! I haven 't read that much of his work, but I look forward to doing so, and maybe hearing him read sometime soon. He seems to be a good fit for the program. He's a Cave Canem fellow; that program seems to do such amazing work in supporting and encouraging young African-American poets and so many terrific voices have come through those ranks. I'm glad it exists. It would be nice to see something equally vital and exciting and productive for GLBT poets, wouldn't it?

They've taken Kevin Young off the list; he was officially "on leave" for a while, but for some reason I was under the impression that he wasn't coming back, which apparently is the case.

It is odd, being a poet affiliated with a university that has a strong MFA program, but not being connected with said MFA program. I've been known to rant at length about the fact that it's hard for someone outside the department to find out about the readings they sponsor; I've attended the occasional MFA student reading (and they're usually pretty good) and try to make it to as many of the visiting-writer readings as possible, when I find out about them in time. When I've had a chance to get to know some of the MFA students I've consistently been impressed with their energy and talent.

I really think the "MFA versus non-MFA" divide is a fallacy that hurts us all. I know non-MFA poets who look down their noses at MFA folks, and MFA poets who don't quite trust the credentials of non-MFA types; it goes both ways. The fact is, MFA programs are great for some people, not so good for others. It's certainly not the only way to learn how to write. And I do think they sometimes do poets a disservice by leading them to believe they'll be able to get a cushy teaching job once they have that degree in hand; there are far more MFA grads than there are teaching jobs, of course. But for the right poet at the right time in her/his life, I think an MFA program can be an incredible learning experience. And while for various reasons I do not think that IU's program would be right for me, I think that for some students, it's a tremendous program and I really respect and value what they do. And truly, I think that non-MFA poets and MFA-type folks have a lot to learn from one another, if we can all just get over being a bit defensive about our choice to MFA or not to MFA.

This has been your "can't we all just get along" moment for today.

Mail call! Last chance!

If you'd like to receive a postcard in the mail to let you know when my chapbook, Breach, is available for pre-ordering, please drop your mailing address in my email (ahaines at gmail dot com). I need to get these addresses no later than Thursday (and actually I am already That Person who is asking her publisher for an extension, sigh), so hop to it...

If you'd like an email (instead of or in addition to a postcard), give me your email address.

Of course, I'll post here when pre-orders are open, because I'm a spammer like that. *grin*

Okay, that's enough shameless self-promotion for one day!

Pluggity plug plug

I'm so far behind, I think I just met myself coming back the other way.

* * * * *

Upcoming! Five Women Poets' 33rd annual reading. Featuring original work by poets Joyce B. Adams, Patricia C. Coleman, Anne Haines (who dat?), Deborah Pender Hutchison, Antonia Matthew, Leah Helen May, and Anya Peterson Royce. Friday night, October 12th, 7:00 pm at Boxcar Books & Community Center in beautiful downtown Bloomington, Indiana. Free, but make a donation if you can.

* * * * *

Also plugging: Joyce Adams, one of the members of aforementioned Five Women Poets, has a chapbook coming out from Finishing Line Press: "What is Brought to Light." You can order it at their website; if you're interested & have trouble finding it on there, let me know. I wrote a wee blurb for this, so it has my seal of approval....

* * * * *

This coming weekend, again in beautiful downtown Bloomington: the Lotus Festival! Good times, good times...

Help Wanted

I have no clue whether this pays enough to live on, but I just spotted this in the local paper and thought I'd pass it on ...

The Writers' Center of Indiana (WCI), the state's only comprehensive literary arts organization, seeks an Executive Director to be responsible for overall management, organizational growth, and fund development of the WCI. The ideal candidate should have experience in small nonprofit administration and fundraising, as well as a passion for the literary arts. Send resume/salary requirements to mail@indianawriters.org.

Poem of the week

I often dislike dream poems. There are lots of reasons for this. Sometimes they can be too easy: Ooh, here's some weird images! They don't have to make any sense; they're from a dream! Sometimes they're too personal, too encoded, meaningful only to the person who wrote the poem or dreamed the dream, or maybe to someone who knows that person well. Sometimes they're just too self-consciously symbolic, like a poem your high school English teacher would ask you to analyze, picking out every image to determine once and for all What It Really Means.

That said, I like this dream poem by Michael Collier. Looking at it again, what really makes the poem for me is the word vernix. It's such a completely unexpected word, such an unusual word to begin with and not one most of us use on a daily basis, and it seems to catapult the poem to a whole new level as soon as it shows up. Such a mammalian, human word, given to birds in a dream -- it's startling.

Interesting how much weight one word can carry in a poem.


Birds Appearing in a Dream

One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,
another a tail of color-coded wires.
One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,
another a flicker with a wounded head.

All flew like leaves fluttering to escape,
bright, circulating in burning air,
and all returned when the air cleared.
One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,

deep in the ground, miles from water.
Everything is real and everything isn't.
Some had names and some didn't.
Named and nameless shapes of birds,

at night my hand can touch your feathers
and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,
you who have made bright things from shadows,
you who have crossed the distance to root in me.

--Michael Collier
from Dark Wild Realm (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)

Fiddly little edits

Today I printed out a huge stack of poems -- pretty much everything workable I've drafted in the last two years -- and went to Soma, a funky local coffeehouse largely frequented by grad students. I sat there with said stack of poems and a double cappuccino and a pen, and started editing. I wanted to do some real revising, re-entering the poems and making major structural changes, but mostly what I made were fiddly little edits. Still, it felt good; sometimes when I haven't revised in a while I have to sit there making fiddly little edits for a while just to get into the space of making alterations, and eventually I find myself doing the more drastic work.

I also found myself liking a lot of poems I'd half forgotten writing. I rolled my eyes at a bunch of them, of course, but I had lots of "hey, that's not half bad" moments. Which was nice. If I have half an ounce of sense, which I'm not sure I do, I'll take advantage of feeling this way & get some stuff sent out tomorrow.

Also realized I have a lot of, for lack of a better phrase, terribly romantic poems. Not love poems necessarily (and in fact most of them are not love poems per se), just poems that are ... I don't know. Non-cynical, I guess. And I'm really not a hopeless romantic (shut up, you -- I'm not) so I'm not sure where those come from. Funny. I'm beginning to think the me who writes poems believes different things about the world than the me who lives the rest of my life.

Does that make the poems (or me) dishonest? I don't think so. It's just sort of an interesting conclusion to come to.

Maybe poems are like pillow talk: you mean it at the time, but let's hope nobody holds you to it later on. Which is kind of an interesting angle to the persona-poem versus first-person discussion percolating around various corners of the blogosphere (Kelli's place, in particular).

Well, here's a for-example. I'll take it down in a day or so. This one sort of (kinda) falls into the love-poem category, so it's a bit of an exception, but it's the kind of thing I'm thinking of.


[gone]

The season is turning

Just in the past few days, the oppressive heat and humidity of an Indiana summer has shifted into the cool weather and sometimes amazingly blue skies of fall. Big sigh of relief, here. Many trees are starting to lose their leaves early due to the intense drought, so already I look outside and see little brown leaves spiraling downward. I dislike the winter that it leads up to, but I really do love fall.

Today I'm taking the day off. I was to the point of actually losing my sense of humor on occasion -- which, if you know me, you know doesn't happen very often (hello, class clown here). Stress both at work & outside of work had just built up to an unpleasant point. I'd thought I would make today a highly productive day, get some chapbook-related stuff done that needs to be done asap, send out some poems, clean house, et cetera ... but instead all I've done so far today has been to take a shower and then a long nap with a large sleepy cat snuggled up in my arms. (I couldn't HELP it. The cat made me take that nap.) Tomorrow, I'll get up at a reasonable hour and go out for brunch with Too Much Coffee and get a lot of work done. Swear it.

* * * * *

This past Sunday evening I drove up to Indianapolis for a reading by Roger Mitchell at the Writers' Center. I'd never been to the Writers' Center before, oddly enough; thanks to Mapquest I was able to find it with no problem. It was a little over a ninety-minute drive each way, which is why I haven't been there, I guess. I do want to go back for the occasional event, though I'm sure I'd be more inclined to do stuff like that if I had a car I trusted a little more.

Anyway, the reading was quite good, and I'm pleased to find out that Roger Mitchell has a big new & selected coming out from Ausable Press in the not-too-distant future. I went alone and didn't know too many people there, though there were a number of familiar faces and, as I found out when I chatted with people, several familiar names -- Shari Wagner, for example, whose work I came across when I went to the Indiana Arts Commission literature panel last spring (they had the grant applications in a big binder for anyone in the audience to peruse, and the poetry she included with her grant application was quite wonderful; and yes, she did get a grant). I also reconnected with someone I knew waaaaaay back in my undergrad years; she was a year or two ahead of me at IU, and we had at least one creative writing class and maybe another class or two together, and ran in similar circles. I'd known she was teaching up at IUPUI (that's the Indianapolis campus of IU), so was not too surprised to see her there.

I signed up for the open mic, of course, and was dismayed to see that there was a LONG list of signer-uppers by the time the reading started. We were asked to keep it to one minute, and to my surprise, pretty much everyone did their best to comply. (You know how an open mic can be ... someone thinks their four-page epic comes in at one minute, plus they ramble on and on with an extended intro.) And overall, there were some pretty good poems read. Definitely a higher-quality open mic than some I've been to.

They seem to have a nice little community going on up there at the Writers' Center. I don't know how often I'll be able to take part in it, due to distance -- but it's nice to know it's there. And they have a nice little facility, too! There's a small sort of arts complex there, which the Writers' Center is a part of; it's near the Indianapolis community of Broadripple, which is sort of the "funky shops, clubs with live music, art galleries, and interesting restaurants" neighborhood in Indy.

* * * * *

So, no, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth. I'm still behind on everything -- but am starting to feel a tiny bit more sane. Hooray for the occasional mental health day, especially when it involves napping with cats. And hooray for the season starting to turn, finally.

Shiny

Things may be quiet around here for a few days. I just got a shiny new laptop (it's very shiny!) and for a little while, most of my computer time will probably be spent transferring files from the old falling-apart one to the shiny new one, and getting used to the quirks of Vista Ultimate (which is also very shiny) and Office 2007.

The new laptop's name is Harriet2 (the old one is named Harriet). Bonus points to anyone who knows why I named it that. Hint: a laptop is also called a notebook. :)

It's nice not to have to stick the K key back on (with that tacky blue poster stuff... yes, I meant it when I said it was falling apart) every few minutes, and to have a hard drive that is not 95% full, and not to have the CD drawer pop open for no reason at random moments. Shiny!

Brief notes

That's brief as in short. I'm not talking about underwear here.

* * * * *

Interesting . . . this year, the Lambda Literary Awards are putting all the poetry nominations in one big poetry category rather than dividing them between lesbian & gay poetry. I wonder if they just don't get enough nominations in poetry to sustain two categories? Fiction is still divided, although they now call it "women's" and "men's" (to be more inclusive of various orientations).

* * * * *

Way to go, Jerry Lewis! As if the telethon weren't icky enough already for its whole "tragic-but-brave" attitude towards people with disabilities. Ew. Glad I was watching tennis instead.

Poem of the week and other stuff

It's been crazy this week. First week of classes. It took all the energy I had just to come home from work, collapse onto the couch, and watch way too much tennis on TV. (Go, James Blake!)

But this weekend should be nice. The weather has finally broken, after far too much heat and humidity for far too long. And this weekend is the Fourth Street Festival of Arts & Crafts, which for me means looking at a lot of gorgeous art I wish I could afford, making goo-goo eyes at lots of dogs, and most likely running into any number of people I know. This is the festival's 31st year; it will be my 29th year in a row of attending. (Wow, I'm old.)

* * * * *

I just picked up Laurel Blossom's Wednesday: New and Selected Poems via interlibrary loan. (This copy came from the Virginia Intermont College library, and it's signed!) There are a couple of poems in here that I stumbled across years ago -- I was an undergrad, or maybe (could it have been this long ago?) in high school; they must have been published in Poetry, as that was one of the very few literary journals I was aware of back then (because the public library carried it). In fact, I'm pretty sure that is where I remember finding them. Anyway, something about these two poems just grabbed me so hard at the time, I remember reading them aloud to myself and loving the way the language felt in my mouth. If I stumbled across these poems for the first time now, as a considerably older woman with considerably wider reading behind her, would they grab me quite as fiercely? Maybe not. I have no way of knowing. But I'm so grateful for the way they became a part of my younger vocabulary, and for what they taught me at the time.

Here's one of them.


Doomed

The road sign reads Kansas, another example
of language imitating life. The land's so flat
the wind acts as if it would like to blow you to hell, but
you're modern, this is it: a wheat field

is a wheat field
is a wheat field till you wish. Be careful.
This is that dead stretch they warned you
to cross at night. They were right. If you're driving
straight through to the Coast, you're both crazy
by this time, you are not quite the strangers you
may have been when you left.
Neither of you has ever been this far west.

Your companion pops No-Doz, flips the radio dial
every few minutes to make sure he is
where he thinks he is, no fool
like the deejays spinning blind in their booths.
Every station repeats the same news.
You swear you can smell the sea
and he loves it, no question
California, the two of you, the future

you've heard a hundred times before. It's a hit
and it shines on the other side of this landscape
like the light from the setting sun or a star, traveling
at the same speed you are.

--Laurel Blossom
from Wednesday: New and Selected Poems (Roseville, MI: Ridgeway Press, 2004)

Believe it or not

It's a 4 1/2 foot fossilized walrus penis. (What did you think it was?) If you'd had 8000 dollars, you could have bought it. Instead, it will be in the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum.

Here's another story about it, with more details but no picture.

I really want one of you guys to use the word baculum in a poem. Isn't that a great word?

* * * * *

Last night I dreamed that I was talking to C. Dale (who I have never met in real life) and he asked me who my favorite bloggers were. My response: "Me, of course!" I think this is perhaps a sign that I am spending way too much time online.

Then we continued the conversation but neither of us would name any names. Come on, C. Dale! You can give me better gossip than that in my dreams!

*grin*

* * * * *

Also present is Mark Doty’s incredibly rare 1981 manuscript The Empire of Summer, a book that Doty has since disowned and stricken from his official resume. The book appears in only eighteen libraries worldwide.

One of those libraries happens to be the one I work in. Hee, hee. And I am a huge Mark Doty fan, but after reading the book, I can understand why he wouldn't care to lay claim to it. But isn't it kind of reassuring to know that one's favorite poets didn't, oh, spring from the forehead of the Muse or whatever -- that there was a time when they hadn't yet figured out what to say or how to say it?

All the same, the fact that people are apparently willing to pay a great deal of money for this book makes me want to burn the high-school literary journals with my crappy teenage poems in them, just in case. Oof. Not to mention being grateful that the crappy book manuscript I was sending out about fifteen years ago never got published. Apparently, sometimes one can be grateful for rejection. Ha!

Good, Blurb, Peeve, Ephemeral

Good: A good day today, with good food at the Runcible Spoon, somewhat cooler weather after three triple-digit days in a row, sufficient caffeine, cats, and lots of poetry.

* * * * *

Blurb: If anyone out there -- anyone of the published-book persuasion, I guess -- would be interested in blurbing my chapbook, drop me an email & I can send you the manuscript to read. I have a couple blurbs lined up, I think, but another wouldn't hurt.

* * * * *

Peeve, pet variety: People using "poetry" as a synonym for "beauty." E.g., "When James Blake hits a killer forehand it's pure poetry." Yes, when a poem is good you have the feeling that not one word should be changed, everything is exactly where it needs to be, et cetera. But good poetry can also be disturbing, jarring, ugly even. Some poetry is beautiful but if you always come to poetry with the expectation of beauty, you're eventually bound to be thwarted. It's like "nature" -- nature is orchids and butterflies and pristine beaches, but it's also droughts and earthquakes and cat-5 hurricanes, and critters that kill & eat one another in sometimes unpleasant ways.

Don't even get me started on people expecting "nature poetry" to be all pretty and domesticated. Nature and poetry can both be terrifying. Ought to be, sometimes, really.

* * * * *

Ephemeral: As usual, this draft (hot off the press, scribbled while sitting in the public library this morning) will disappear in a day or so.


[...and, gone!]

Something to look forward to

Coming in October:











Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006
by Adrienne Rich

Rich has been a touchstone poet for me pretty much ever since I've been even halfway serious about poetry. I often name her "Twenty-One Love Poems" as something I'd take with me to the proverbial desert island, though I'm sure it's cheating to choose a whole sequence when someone asks me to choose one poem. I don't necessarily adore all of her work, but I think she is still doing important and vital work after all these years; what I've admired about her forever is how her poetry has evolved, both in form and content -- she's a poet who has not been afraid to change & to question herself, and that seems so crucial.

Definitely a book I will be buying.

If you're in the neighborhood...

For those who may be within decent driving distance of Indianapolis, Roger Mitchell (a terrific poet & former teacher of mine) will be reading at the Writers' Center on Sunday evening, September 9. Complete details are posted on the Writers' Center website.

I plan on going; I'm hoping I can work out a carpool with someone because my (16-year-old rustbucket of a) car is misbehaving a bit and I'm not entirely sure I trust it 90 minutes from home and late at night, but I'll be there regardless. See you there?

More sad news

Just heard that the wonderful writer & activist Grace Paley has died. Here's a good obit from the Washington Post. She will certainly be missed....

This won't last (but then, what does?)

Here's a draft of a thing I'm currently working on. As usual when I post drafty drafts, I'll leave this up for 24 hours or so, maybe less.

[a poem-eating monster went through here and chomped up the poem! she went thataway.]

Thought for the day

If you put napalm in a poem, you'd damn well better mean it.

Outlaw poems

On the issue of whether writers should take the feelings of their loved ones into consideration when they wrote, William Faulkner counseled ruthlessness, saying that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was worth any number of old ladies. This trade-off -- family harmony versus heartfelt expression, once I invented for myself a glitzier heart -- worried me a great deal when I was young. Indeed, when my mother read my first book, after she'd spread the news of its imminent arrival, she remarked dryly/angrily/wistfully/shamefully: "I wish you'd told me what it was going to be like."

Question: What was it like? Answer: Full of much bad writing. I had too much investment in the autobiographical myth, which I thought was necessary because I lacked the inventiveness not to write about actual life, and I thought that actual life required a grand myth to be interesting -- what could be interesting about a pasty-skinned girl from the suburbs? I hadn't gotten wise to Emily Dickinson yet, a poet who derived her outlaw spark from the sly rebellion of her strange punctuation. To put the brigand into the poem itself, not the autobiography, this is the harder trick.

--Lucia Perillo, from "Bonnie Without Clyde" in I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness and Nature (Trinity University Press, 2007)

"To put the brigand into the poem itself." I'm gonna engrave that somewhere. Perfect. I don't think this means you have to be crazy experimental or whatever; taking risks with the poems themselves can mean a lot of things. I think part of figuring out what kind of poet you are is figuring out what kind of risks your poems want to take -- what kind of outlaws they want to be.

(This Lucia Perillo book is excellent, by the way. I highly recommend it.)

End of the summer

The moon is a pale crescent in a pale sky. Cicadas going crazy in the trees. In this college town it's the last weekend of true summer; classes begin a week from this coming Monday, which means the dorms open this coming Wednesday, which means the whole town is about to change.

Work's been busy, busy; I'm a member of the team that is responsible for the library's website, and we just put up an entirely new site as of yesterday evening. So of course there are lots of problem reports, some ruffled feathers to be soothed, some powerpoint presentations to be made for new student orientation introducing people to the site. I've done a lot of running back and forth (well, emailing back and forth, mostly) between librarians/staff and programmers, doing what can feel at times like translation -- distilling a reported problem into the details the programmers need to diagnose it, then taking what I find out from them & coming back with an explanation in relatively less technical terms. It's fun, actually, but today I was juggling about as fast as I can juggle.

The weekend will be for catching up with neglected things -- poetry, laundry, sleep. And I'll watch more tennis than is really good for me. (Note to self: this has to be the last year you allow yourself to get this distracted by the height of tennis season. Seriously.)

* * * * *

"What I really want to talk about is my attempt to sell my book of poems, an art form I've been practicing for long enough now that I can't really speak of humiliation memories but rather . . . what? Humiliation loci? Nodules? What I mean is that humiliation turns into an ongoing, inhabited state because writing itself is of this nature. It's the flagrant narcissism that's so humiliating -- writers think their creations are worthy enough to be circulated and admired; they secretly harbor the pride of new parents who are annoying in their ertainty that, out of all the universe forged by procreation, their own child rises above the rabble. Then print serves to cast one's vanity in cement."

--Lucia Perillo, from "Fear of the Market" in I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature

Sad

Very sad news about Liam Rector.


The Remarkable Objectivity of Your Old Friends

We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.
We called other friends—the ones
Your mother hadn't called—and told them
What you had decided, and some said
What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we'd just have to live
With that, that your life had been one
Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,
Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we'd have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.

from American Prodigal
Liam Rector, 1949-2007

Me-me-me and pandas, & more on titles

Why do all of Eduardo's "me-me-me-and-did-I-mention-me" poets have first names starting with A, hmmm? Well. I'm gonna change this blog starting right now. No more me. Instead, I'm gonna talk about Eduardo! Quick, somebody give me some good gossip about him. Otherwise I'ma make some up. And I bet the real stuff is juicier. ;)

* * * * *

There's a new baby panda at the San Diego Zoo! It will be two weeks old on Friday. Needless to say, I'm spending way too much time at the pandacam lately. Pandas are about the size of a stick of butter when they're born, and they don't develop the distinctive black-and-white markings until they're a week old or so. The new little guy's markings are clearer every day, and it's becoming quite the fat, squirmy little cublet. Now that Mei Lan in Atlanta is almost a year old, it's nice to have a new bitty little one to watch. (Mei Lan is still cute though!)

* * * * *

Thanks to all who commented on the recent post about titles. I think it's a fascinating topic. I've occasionally pulled a book off the shelf at the library or bookstore just because of the title, so I guess titles can be important. (Although I can think of terrific books with stinky titles, and so-so books with fabulous titles...) I suppose they're a bit easier when your manuscript has a well-defined theme or story arc to it, though if you have more of a collection of diverse individual poems, the title can be one way of pulling it together.

Mildly amusing: I have two poems called "Breach" but neither one of them is included in the chapbook of the same name. One "Breach" was published a while back, but feels too dated to include in a manuscript now (it's a 9/11 poem, ugh) and the other wasn't written when I submitted the manuscript. I could try to stick it in now, I suppose, but I kind of like the idea of letting it lurk around unseen like a ghost poem. Similarly, the Indigo Girls had an album a few years back called "Come On Now Social," which is a line from a song that didn't make it onto the album at all -- though it eventually showed up on one of Amy Ray's solo albums. The newer "Breach" poem may make it into the book manuscript ... time will tell.

* * * * *

Oops, I was supposed to be talking about Eduardo! Dang. Next time.

Poem of the Week

Here's Major Jackson, from his first book, Leaving Saturn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002). What fascinates me about this poem is how the ending blatantly risks the purely sentimental and, in my opinion anyway, gets away with it. As someone whose natural tendency is towards the sentimental, I'm fascinated by this, by how Jackson structures the poem's trajectory in such a way as to make this happen. I think it has something to do with how he opens with the descriptive, takes you inside a room so that you believe you're there, and then moves from the narrator's observer-perspective into imagining what it would be like to be Mr. Pate, and thus into a space where the narrator isn't even there -- the poem begins as a first-person personal narrative of sorts, but ends as almost a persona poem. And so the ending works, I think, partly because it comes rom the barber's perspective, but also because that perspective is reached through the narrator's -- compassion, I want to say; nowhere does the narrator tromp right into the barber's point of view like he has every right to be there, but instead he eases into it by first describing the barber's world in concrete, observable detail, then building an understanding of the barber's internal landscape based on the knowable, the observable, the recorded events of his life. And so when the poem says "someone has to cherish these tiny little heads" they are specific tiny little heads, and the someone is a specific someone we've gotten to know a little bit, and I think that's at least partly why the tenderness of that line works without falling over into the morass of excess sentimentality.

So -- concrete detail, and specificity, and sneaking up on one's subject methodically, as a way to risk sentimentality and get away with it. Or something like that anyway.

Also (I just noticed this) -- look how long that last sentence is! The poem is full of long sentences, actually, except for the statement "He forgot / everything & would never be the same." The poem hinges on those lines, takes a turn right there into its ultimate direction. And after those lines, the whole rest of the poem -- almost the second half of the poem -- is all one long sentence, starting with "I remember" and slowly working its way into Mr. Pate's experience. And after the short sentence that says Pate "forgot / everything" -- that long final sentence comes to a place where he does remember something, "never forgetting" what is in the end most important, to "cherish these tiny little heads." Again, the poem sneaks up on its conclusion, circles around it, eases towards the ending until it feels inevitable -- like the boxer's knockout punch that at first seems to come out of nowhere but then you realize he's been setting it up all along, circling and circling with footwork that didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular at first. (Okay, the boxer thing is maybe stretching it a little.)

Anyway, here's the poem.


Mr. Pate's Barbershop

I remember the room in which he held
a blade to my neck & scraped the dark
hairs foresting a jawline: stacks of Ebonys
& Jets, clippings of black boxers --
Joe Frazier, Jimmy Young, Jack Johnson --
the color television bolted to
a ceiling like the one I watched all night
in a waiting room at St. Joseph's
while my cousin recovered from gunshots.
I remember the old Coke machine, a water
fountain by the door, how I drank
the summer of '88 over & over from a paper
cone cup & still could not quench my thirst,
for this was the year funeral homes boomed,
the year Mr. Pate swept his own shop
for he had lost his best little helper Squeaky
to cross fire. He suffered like most barbers
suffered, quietly, his clippers humming so loud
he forgot Ali's lightning left jab, his love
for angles, for carpentry, for baseball. He forgot
everything & would never be the same.
I remember the way the blade gleamed
fierce in the fading light of dusk & a reflection
of myself panned inside the razor's edge
wondering if I could lay down my pen, close up
my ledgers & my journals, if I could undo
my tie & take up barbering where
months on end a child's head would darken
at my feet & bring with it the uncertainty
of tomorrow, or like Mr. Pate gathering
clumps of fallen hair, at the end of a day,
in short, delicate whisks as though
they were the fine findings of gold dust
he'd deposit in a jar & place on a shelf, only
to return Saturdays, collecting, as an antique dealer
collects, growing tired, but never forgetting
someone has to cherish these tiny little heads.

--Major Jackson

Title goes here

Fascinating:

I also find it sad that I read so many young poets are constantly changing their manuscripts after not placing in a contest. When everything is so oversaturated and so many contests are run by committee, taking your losing to mean anything is dangerous. Having been a screener for contests, I can say that I've seen so many manuscripts look overlabored. You need to let go of your manuscript. There's only so much you can do.

Unless you have a bad title. Here's an embarrassing confession: for years I sent out my manuscript and never placed. I called it the dumbest, dullest things! Aesthetics of the Damned was one. Hoaxes and Scams was another.

As soon as I called it Blind Date with Cavafy (all the poems were basically the same ones that appeared under the other titles), I started being named a finalist. And I won pretty quick. After many, many years of bad titles. This is my theory: most screeners, most poets are insecure in making aesthetic judgments. The mention of Cavafy made it clear that I knew something about poetry. The humor of the phrase "blind date" juxtaposed with the literary allusion signaled I was a poet. I am very embarrassed to admit this, but I think it's true. There's so much out there, and most people are tentative, they need clues that they're giving the right book the award. That isn't to say this is why I won, but I did notice that I started making it past the initial rounds much more often. Choose a smart title. Most titles suck. They're boring and pretentious and vague.

In my experience, titles are hard. I like my chapbook title (Breach) but poem titles frustrate me. As for the (soon, soon...) full-length collection, I think I know the title, but once I start shoving poems together it may not work anymore.

There are lots of ways to come up with titles:
~~use the title of one of the poems in the book (which puts a lot of pressure on that poem, eh?)
~~pull out a key (or not so key) phrase from one poem (which still spotlights that one poem, but not so blatantly)
~~title that serves as a key to somehow unlock the "meaning" of the book
~~title that names the overriding story or thread or tone of the book
~~others??

How do y'all come up with titles?

* * * * *

Spent a couple hours at Panera today, drinking too much coffee, eating a Dutch apple/raisin bagel (toasted, with low-fat cream cheese), and reading (Lucia Perillo and Major Jackson, to be specific). Drafted two poems, one of which may be a keeper, then had to pull over in a parking lot halfway home because another one was banging on my brain. I love it when that happens.

* * * * *

Really wishing I could make it to AWP in January, but it seems highly unlikely given the price of hotel rooms in NYC. I truly can't afford to spend three weeks' salary (or more) on a conference, even though I think it would be lots of fun. Sigh. I am, however, going to keep an eagle eye out for cheap airfares, and try to sneak out to Provincetown in the early spring for a long weekend -- March or early April or so. I really want to see a North Atlantic right whale (super endangered species; there are maybe 330-350 of them living) and they hang out just offshore that time of year.

* * * * *

Two weeks from Monday, classes begin at the university here. Much as I complain about the lack of parking, newbies going the wrong way on all our one-way streets, and impossibility of getting a table at Panera, I secretly love it when the students return. All those new young faces, all those fresh starts. It reminds me that you can always start something new if you need to. And it reminds me of how thrilled I was to arrive in town as a bright-eyed freshman back in 1979 (god I'm old), and those first months of discovering so many of the things I still love about this town.

Seek and ye shall find ... something

Odd web searches that have led people to my blog in recent months:

• land mammal with highest blood pressure (well, work has been kinda stressful lately...)
• is turkey a mammal (ummm, do you mean the country, or the bird?)
• lousy poets (none of those here! you go away now!)
• fun experiments that go boom (mad scientist, huh?)
• sucker fish costume (dude, it's nowhere near Halloween...)
• blackbirds pooping on outdoor tables (yeah, that's why I like to eat inside)
• i wasn't accepted at breadloaf (me neither. Oh wait, I didn't apply.)
• ariel view of sharks (I don't think Plath had any shark poems. I could be wrong.)
• can i go to work with a scratched cornea (dude, stay home. That's a good excuse.)
• what kind of mammal is living in my yard (I'm gonna take a guess and say ... a heffalump?)
• low residency mfa, cheap (SNERK! dream on...)
• jackal clockradio garden (the hell...?)
• cranky violinist on beach (Paging Rebecca Loudon!)

It's hot here. It's been over 90 degrees for ten days running. Saturday we might have a cold snap -- it might top out at 89. The humidity has also been at least 50% even in the heat of the day, and up to 80-90% at night. I don't approve. I think my brain is parboiled.

The news from here

I was going to sit on this announcement until I had the actual contract in hand for fear of jinxing it, but then I remembered that I don't believe in jinxes.

Anyway, I am pleased to announce that I will be joining Carol and Jenni in the Finishing Line Press stable of authors. My chapbook, Breach, will be published sometime in 2007 or 2008. Yippee!

Of course, when it's available for pre-ordering I will post the details here on my blog. If you're afraid you might miss it, or just want a more personal notification, drop me an email (ahaines at gmail dot com) with your email address, and/or your snailmail address if you'd like a postcard. I'll be delighted to spam you send you both, if you want. :)

More details to come as I have them....

Poem of the week

This is from Dan Bellm's One Hand on the Wheel, which I mentioned here yesterday. It was published in 1999 by The Roundhouse Press.


Consolation

Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,
et vitam venturi saeculi.

After I kiss his forehead lightly once
goodbye,

after the closing of the box,

where does his suffering go --
of course it's the Catholic heaven
he expects, the resurrection of the body
and the life of the world to come

but where does his suffering go --

I mean whatever of it
that is not part of me --

The fearsomeness of his face has been
drained now and recomposed,
injected with a semblance of spirit,
the lips held shut, so like himself,
but with a semblance of rest

because in heaven
the pain of the body and soul is supposed
to be forgotten and past but it is lost,

or does it suffer without him on earth
and where does it remain
to wait
for more life --

Most of the universe is missing
but it isn't lost,
I expect it's here somewhere, world without end,
hiding in plain sight,

all the suffering banished from God's heaven,
all the imploded substance
and the trapped light.

~<>~<>~<>~

Suffering as subject

I was growing impatient with myself for writing so many poems lately about happiness, gratitude, having come to terms; when my sense of this life is that suffering is the ground-note, physical and emotional, the suffering of the body and of the spirit; that pain is what binds us as physical and spiritual beings; that life is hard, full of joy for sure but hard; that we are born of pain and that in all human likelihood we will pass through pain as we die.

And so it was with a certain relief that I began to read Dan Bellm's marvelous collection One Hand on the Wheel, about the poet's experience of his father's death following a lifelong difficult relationship, the tremendous pain of being so intimately connected with someone who does not approve of you, the physical reality of death, the way pain mingles with relief. Reading these poems knocked a lot of words loose inside me and I drafted two new poems today, poems I am curious to find out where they go. So thanks to whoever (I can't remember who it was) recommended this poet on their blog a while back. (Interlibrary loan is a wonderful thing!)

I have also just started reading Lucia Perillo's new book of personal essays, I've Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness and Nature, which takes a head-on, unsentimental look at the suffering of the body and its intertwining with the mind. Good stuff. The book itself (from Trinity University Press) is physically very nice, with a good sturdy binding and paper that feels good between the fingers. I've only read a little bit of this book so far, over lunch at the Village Deli today, but it probably contributed to knocking loose those words.

I think it is fine, by the way, to write poems about happiness and joy, though I think it's best if those poems are aware, in the back of their little poem minds, of the fact of suffering. I think it can even be a political act to write poems about happiness, to dare to be happy & express that. Some days, it is just plain good to be alive, and I like it when a poem can remind me of that. I just don't think poems should take happiness for granted, is all. Nor should people.

Yeah, that's all starting to sound a bit like a manifesto, so I'll cut it off there. Be well, all.

My poems are registered as weapons...

Note to Jay Robinson of the Barn Owl Review: Hey, sorry about the top of your head. I sometimes wear duct tape wrapped around my scalp when reading poetry, to avert just such injuries. You might try that.

Seriously, I was quite floored when I read this interview and found such nice things said about my poem! All the more so because judging from the buzz around ye olde blogosphere, there's going to be a lot of really fine work included in the inaugural issue of Barn Owl Review.

I've had so much good news lately that the only thing to be done is to get cracking and send out a bunch more poems. That way I'll get a bunch of rejections and the world will be restored to its rightful balance.

:)

* * * * *

This writing retreat looks really lovely, doesn't it? It's not one of the fancy ones where you get to stay there for free and they feed you and everything, but the cost seems pretty reasonable, and it looks to me like a place where one could get a lot of writing done.

* * * * *

According to this article, the debut album by Two Nice Girls is being re-released, with extra tracks and essays and photos! This is totally awesome news. I was a huge, huge Two Nice Girls fan back in the day. Their most famous song was "I Spent My Last $10 (On Birth Control and Beer)" and part of it went like this:
I spent my last ten dollars
On birth control and beer
My life was so much simpler
When I was sober and queer
But the love of a strong hairy man
Has turned my head, I fear
And made me spend my last ten bucks
On birth control and beer.
Imagine that, totally tongue-in-cheek, all countrified, with wailing steel guitars and so forth. It was brilliant. They also did a great mashup of "Sweet Jane" with Joan Armatrading's "Love and Affection" and (though it wasn't on aforementioned debut album) one of their songs actually mentioned my all-time favorite book of all time, Harriet the Spy. They were big fun in concert, too. I am so ordering this reissue. You can get it via cdbaby (right here!), which is one of my favorite places to order music. They're fast, and all their customer communication is really adorable.

* * * * *

90-plus degree heat for the past three days, and predicted to have more of the same for the next week and a half or so. And this being Indiana, it's humid, too. This weather makes me miss the ocean! I hope you are all staying cool, calm, and somewhat collected.

Happy things

Thing One: Discovering Genre: Poetry, the classroom anthology that includes work by several of your friendly neighborhood bloggers, won an award from the Association of Educational Publishers (and here's the official awards list). Cool!

Thing Two: Ed Byrne, editor of the nifty Valparaiso Poetry Review, nominated my poem "Swallowed" for the Best of the Net anthology. Again, cool! Watch his blog this weekend to see which other poems he's nominated.

Thing Three: Whoops, I'm still sitting on Thing Three! (Kind of like the princess and the pea. Only, you know, not.) I want to wait until a few more t's are dotted and i's are crossed, which might be a few weeks actually, but then I'll have a small announcement. I know, I hate it when people do this too. La la la. :)

It's August tomorrow. I can't believe it. Where the hell did my July go? Come back, July! I wasn't through with you!

Belfry

Yesterday in Province- town, they finally hoisted the old belfry back up onto the top of the public library. They were actually originally supposed to do this the week that I was there, and I'm sorry I wasn't able to see it in person! The building dates to 1860, and used to be an Episcopal church; it's a gorgeous, classic New England church building, and the restoration is really lovely. There's even a 62-foot half-scale model of a Grand Banks fishing schooner, the Rose Dorothea, inside! I've spent a number of hours sitting in that library, browsing and writing. (It does get hot and steamy in there on warm days, though.)

I look forward to seeing the "new and improved" P-town skyline, complete with restored belfry, the next time I visit.

* * * * *

Rain, rain, go away . . .

* * * * *

Meditating, lately, on gratitude. I have come to the conclusion that what I experience as "living in a condition of gratitude" is what some other people may experience as "prayer." Whatever it is, it seems to be relatively good for my writing, or at least seems to create a space within which I am likely to get some writing done. Lately I am more interested in just getting writing done than in worrying about whether it's any good or not, which is probably why I have been terrible about getting anything sent out for the past few months. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I should probably get back on the submission track sometime soon, I suppose.

* * * * *

The back-to-school sales have begun, already. Holy cow....

Bonus poem

A very rough draft from yesterday. After a week of listening to Carl Phillips talk, I think his penchant for making really long sentences rubbed off a bit. *grin* I'll take this down within 24 hours or so.


[and, it's gone.]

Me and some poems

1. Me

Bloom: Celebrating Life in Bloomington has uploaded parts of the April/May issue to their website, including the article about the Bloomington poetry scene. To read profiles of & poems by a bunch of Hoosier poets (Cathy Bowman, Roger Mitchell, Jenny Kander, Patricia Coleman, Tony Brewer, and yours truly), go to the Bloom Magazine archive and click on "The Beat Goes On: Bloomington's Poetry Scene." The article is in pdf format.

2. Some poems

I thought it might be interesting to offer a list of the poems we talked about in Carl Phillips' workshop the other week (other than the student workshop poems). We talked about various aspects of these poems, primarily focusing on how they create and disrupt patterns (language, syntax, placement on the page, etc.) and how we can use what we see in these poems to help us revise our own work. Some of them were already familiar to me, but a number of them were new, and I feel like I learned quite a lot about how to read poems as well as about writing/revising the things myself. Anyway, these are not necessarily in the order in which we discussed them, though we did start off the week by looking at the Jarrell & returned to it frequently in the course of our discussions.

Randall Jarrell, "90 North"
Martha Collins, "hang" and "burn" (from Blue Front)
Robert Creeley, "The Souvenir" and "Kore"
Carol Frost, "To Kill a Deer"
Robert Frost, "After Apple-Picking"
Marilyn Hacker, "Pornographic Poem"
Robert Hass, "At Stinson Beach"
Langston Hughes, "Island"
Laura Jensen, "The Red Dog" and "The Crow Is Mischief"
Brigit Pegeen Kelly, "The Dragon"
Peter Klappert, "No Turtles"
Yusef Komunyakaa, "Venus's-Flytraps"
Sharon Olds, "I Go Back to May 1937"
Muriel Rukeyser, "Looking At Each Other"
Sandro Penna, "The Stars Don't Move" (trans. W.S. DiPiero)
Louise Glück, "Mock Orange"
Ellen Bryant Voigt, "Largesse" and "Song and Story"

I was reminded all week that reading poems with other poets & talking about what we can learn from them, as poets, is something I really miss in my life right now -- and is probably my biggest motivation towards getting an MFA. I will always write on my own, and summer workshops are great for getting my workshopping fix; but studying the work of other poets, contemporary & otherwise, just feels so important to me right now -- and having some guidance with that would be absolutely lovely. I really liked how Phillips guided us through these poems & what he chose to emphasize about them -- it felt like a very useful & fruitful approach. Definitely something I could stand a little more of.

Looking out...

library window
Originally uploaded by land mammal

...from inside the Provincetown Public Library, towards the east end of town (towards Truro). You can see a bit of the bay, past the crowded buildings, and the curve of the Cape.

Good news in the blogosphere

Congratulations to Carol Peters, whose chapbook Muddy Prints, Water Shine will be coming out in the New Women's Voices Series from Finishing Line Press. I first met Carol in D.A. Powell's revision workshop in 2005, and renewed the acquaintance last summer when we were both in Provincetown the same week though for different workshops. She is a terrific poet with a good eye for detail & landscape, and I'm betting her chapbook will be worth reading.

Back to the world of 8 to 5

Going back to work after a week of vacation-slash-workshop can feel a bit like slamming one's head into a brick wall. I'm very fortunate in that I have a job I actually like, which helps. It also helps that I have a ten-day retreat to look forward to in the fall. One of this weekend's tasks will be putting together the application for that. (I'm applying to one place; if that doesn’t work out, I have another in mind. But I have a good feeling about the first place.)

I am starting to think about what books I'll want to bring with me -- some to inspire me, some to study how they're put together, some just for pleasure. We talked a bit in my workshop last week about putting together manuscripts, which was pretty interesting. Sounds like there are about as many ways of thinking about manuscript structure as there are poets, and maybe more than that. I have a lot of weather in my poems, so I'm toying with the idea of trying to create some kind of a seasonal structure -- but what I want to do is try about three or four different things (including straight chronological order and straight alphabetical order, just for grins) and read through the poems and see what sort of connections I can discover. I drafted a new poem in 4 sections (well, newish -- at least the first section is material I've worked with before) in Provincetown which is, I think, helping me understand some of my larger project and how the connections among poems might work. Maybe.

Which poetry collections (single collections, not selected/collected) do you especially admire in terms of structure?

* * * * *

I usually try to respond to blog comments, but I've not been good about it for the past week or so. Sorry about that. I was a little preoccupied with Provincetown. :) I would try to catch up, but y'all aren't going to go back and look at this point, right? I appreciate the comments though. It was nice to be having a wonderful time & be able to share a little of that with others. It was too good a week to keep it all for myself.

* * * * *

Gorgeous, gorgeous slender crescent moon in a French blue sky out there, a flock of swifts spiraling around over the houses, crossing past the moon. Fireflies beginning to rise. Who says the Midwest isn't lovely?

It's no fluke...

8. Diving
Originally uploaded by land mammal

Okay, I'll refrain from further whale puns. Sorry. ;)

Left Provincetown today, leaving behind absolutely perfect weather. I'll be on my way home tomorrow. This morning I went out on a whale watching cruise, something I do at least once every time I visit P-town. Something about getting out on the water and seeing these magnificent creatures is just thoroughly addictive. It was a lovely way to end a productive, enjoyable, and even (gasp) relaxing week.

Last day

Fine Arts Work Center
Originally uploaded by land mammal

It's an absolutely gorgeous morning -- warm, with abundant sun, well-fed birds hopping about in the mulberry tree outside my bedroom window. I sat outside in the sun, in a chair in the gravel courtyard, until I couldn't stand it anymore.

I picked up Robin Becker's newest book, Domain of Perfect Affection, here -- I really love her work -- and was reading it. Realized, a couple of poems in, that this week has made me a better reader of poetry. Which is something that I wasn't necessarily expecting to get from this workshop, but am VERY pleased to have found here; I think reading poetry and writing the stuff go so hand-in-hand as to be impossible to separate in any meaningful way. (It's that way for me, anyway.)

So I am going home with that, and with a few new drafts, and with some excellent exercises/prompts I want to work with, and with a certain sense of fullness that comes from living this way for a week -- as if poetry were central to everything.

Which it is.

Always.


[Above: The Fine Arts Work Center campus. My little apartment is at the top of the set of stairs you see here, and the studios where the writing classes meet are along that balcony. It's an unpretentious building, for sure, but magic happens here.]

C'mon in ... the water's fine

happy dog on foggy harbor beach
Originally uploaded by land mammal

Since I plan to give out my blog URL tomorrow in class when we all share email addresses, I want to take a moment to issue an official welcome to any of my classmates from this week who may stop by this blog. Welcome! (Did that sound official enough? Did it have authority?)

I want to encourage you to look over to the right-hand column of this blog and investigate the links you'll see there (the ones listed under where it says "I read too many blogs" -- which I do). There are a lot of really cool blogs there, almost all written by poets, many of whom are very fine poets. It's one kind of cool way to learn about how poets live, what they think about, how they negotiate the day to day. Which is to say, pretty much like non-poets, except that we use weird-ass words like "enjambment" and mean something by them.

It has been a good week here in Provincetown. Tonight is the potluck barbeque, open studio time for the visual artists, and student reading. After that, our class plans on going out somewhere for drinks or what-not. (Not THAT kind of what-not, ya pervs.) I always love the student reading; both years I've been here there have been at least a couple of pieces that have really grabbed my attention. And it is a fun audience to read for.

It's hard to believe the week is almost over, though. It is always hard to leave. I've met some really cool people and had some great conversations. I don't want to dive prematurely into the whole "wah wah wah it's over" thing, but things do start winding down soon... sigh.

Today, though, is an absolutely beautiful day. There is abundant sunshine and a cool breeze, and I have poems in my head. Life is good, y'all. Life is good.

[Above: A really cool dog I met walking along the harbor in the fog; click photo to enlarge.]

This place...

foggy harbor beach 2
Originally uploaded by land mammal

This place is under my skin for good, I think. I woke to fog this morning, walked down by the harbor for a while, stopped at the Portuguese Bakery for a croissant filled with linguiça and cheese. Then four hours of class, talking about poems, being in a room where nobody thinks it's weird if you spend five whole minutes talking about whether to put a comma at the end of a line or just rely on the line break to dictate a pause. Then walking down Commercial Street for a while, running into a fellow poet, sitting at a picnic table near the harbor talking about the old "to MFA or not to MFA" conundrum. Going out to dinner with two other poets, talking about teachers we've known, books we've read; stopping at the new dessert café on the way back. Going to a reading and a slide talk, stopping by the computer lab to print out a few poems, stopping by the bulletin board to put my two-sentence bio for tomorrow's reading in the envelope labeled for same.

A couple of you have said things like "hey, next year I might apply." I want to disabuse y'all of the notion that one must apply here. They have in the past had individual advanced workshops for which one had to submit an application (though I don't think that was the case for any this year), but for the most part, you just register and plunk down your deposit. Even so, the caliber of students here is astonishingly high. This is my third workshop and pretty much everyone in all three workshops has been a serious, committed poet, not a weekend dabbler looking for ego strokes. Judging from the folks I've met and what I've heard at the student reading every year, the same is true for most of the workshops here. We've got people with MFAs in our workshop, even one who's already had a book accepted by a good press. Somehow this place manages to be at once noncompetitive and yet selective.

So if you're the sort of person who likes summer workshops, or might consider liking them, I highly encourage you to consider FAWC for next year. (Heck, there are probably spaces open in some of the workshops remaining this summer.) And if you're the sort of person who teaches in summer workshops, or might consider teaching in them, I don't know how one goes about getting oneself invited to teach here, but if you're interested I would encourage you to inquire.

It isn't perfect here. It's expensive to come here, and the mosquitoes are large and hungry. And fabulous as the FAWC staff is, they have yet to figure out how to give us more than twenty-four hours in a day.

Other than that, it's pretty damn grand.


Also also: from Free Will Astrology for the week of July 12:

The German word selig can mean both "ecstatic" or "blessed." It implies that profound bliss can be a divine gift; that deep pleasure may generate or come from spiritual inspiration. The English language doesn't have a term comparable to selig, maybe because our culture regards ecstasy with suspicion. Religious people tend to believe that the blessed are those who are good and kind, certainly not those who are skilled at cultivating ecstatic states. People who worship rationality, on the other hand, like intellectuals and scientists, often think of ecstasy as at best an irrelevant state, and at worst a non-productive or deluded indulgence. Personally, I'm in alignment with the values embodied by the word selig. It happens to be your specialty this week.

[Above: Provincetown harbor beach in fog. Click the image to enlarge.]

How it's going

It's going very well, thank you.

Oh, you wanted more details than that. Well, okay. :) So every day we have class from 10 to 12 and 12:30 to 2:30 (it was originally scheduled for 10 to 2, but Carl felt that was a heck of a long stretch to have class without a lunch break, so we have a half-hour for lunch). It seems to work pretty well. We start out by discussing some specific poetic issues, starting with one or more poems from the packet we got on the first night; we've talked about poems by Jarrell, Creeley, Laura Jensen, Marilyn Hacker, Martha Collins, Langston Hughes, & Brigit Kelly; for tomorrow we're reading Komunyakaa and Frost. Somewhere in there Carl gives us a writing/revision prompt or exercise, which is optional. (I actually haven't done any of them yet, but I want to do all of them & do plan to try them!) Then we have a short break, and come back & workshop 3 poems. After our lunch break we workshop 2 more poems, take a short break, and come back for a looser discussion of "the writing life" issues -- more general issues & questions we may have. Today, for example, we talked about putting manuscripts together. (You guys, I am really nervous about trying to do this! I know that's silly.)

Then we have free time in the afternoon for writing, reading, napping, exploring the town, going to the beach, whatever; and at 8 there is generally a reading and an artist slide talk. Last night was Carl's reading, which was a bit too short (better to leave us wanting more, I suppose!), and a slide talk by painter Andrew Mockler, which was quite interesting. I don't know much about art, so it is always interesting to hear visual artists talk about their process. There are always, it seems, useful parallels to be drawn with the writing process.

Last night a small group of us ended up at the Squealing Pig for drinks and conversation. What I love about being here is that we can talk about the silliest, dumbest stuff, and then all of a sudden the conversation shifts back over to poetry for a while. It's like poetry is a part of regular life and not some special thing you have to set aside for an appropriate time, you know? What a concept.

Today I visited (ahem) a couple of bookstores, including the used bookstore. I don't know why I feel it is my personal mission to support independent bookstores wherever I go. One of these days the floor of my house is going to collapse under the weight of all those books. I did buy Annie Dillard's new novel, which is set in Provincetown, and I also found (used) a complete volume of Cavafy, who people keep quoting at me so maybe it's time to actually read him.

Plus, it was nice just walking down Commercial Street. Here at the Work Center you can feel a little bit set apart from the bustle of the town, which is lovely sometimes and peaceful, but it's also nice to get your feet wet in the flow of the crowd, as it were. It is Bear Week in Provincetown; I'd never been here during Bear Week before. I guess there are a few more bears here than usual, but I'm not sure I would have noticed if someone hadn't mentioned it, honestly.

Tonight Gail Mazur reads, and a slide talk by Marian Roth, who does pinhole photography. Should be fascinating.

[Photo above: Race Point Beach]

Postcard from Provincetown

apartment 7
Originally uploaded by land mammal

The front door of my little apartment here at FAWC. Welcome. This is where it all happens...

Postcard from the Province Lands

1. Province Lands
Originally uploaded by land mammal

Taken from the observation deck at the Cape Cod National Seashore's Province Lands Visitor Center. Here you're about three stories up, looking out over scrubby trees over the endless dunes with Race Point and the Atlantic Ocean at the horizon. This scenery goes on and on and on all around you and photographs don't nearly do it justice.

(Click on the photo to enlarge it.)

Just checking in from Provincetown

Everything is going wonderfully so far! No glitches with the air travel; found a lovely little bookstore not far from where I spent the night in North Dartmouth, MA (why do I feel a personal responsibility to support every independent bookstore I can find??? no wonder my house is drowning in books); got to Provincetown in the late morning and spent about three hours on Race Point Beach, during which time I felt every little bit of tension in my body completely dissolve and wash away (and I also wrote a quick little poem); checked into my little apartment at FAWC and bought groceries and got settled in before a sudden downpour; had our orientation & our first quick little "get the logistics of this in order" class meeting; went to a good reading tonight by Tony Hoagland and Jason Shinder; came back to my room and drafted another new poem -- a funny one (at least I think it's funny!), which is unusual for me but how could you not want to write a funny poem after hearing Tony Hoagland?

It was hot and humid and relentlessly sunny all day, so the downpour and the clean cool air that followed was like a blessing.

My little apartment is on the second floor, and one of the bedroom windows looks out directly into the branches of a mulberry tree, absolutely laden with ripe and unripe berries. Which means that, in the morning, I bet there will be a whole bunch of hungry birds chomping and chirping about two feet from my head. This makes me almost giddy with happiness, the thought of awakening that way.

I think Carl Phillips is going to be a very good teacher. It's going to be a wonderful week.

This place is magic, I swear it.

And I still can barely believe how fortunate I am to have received this scholarship and this grant, that I can be here without having to worry that I'm spending money on something frivolous like poetry (which we all know isn't frivolous at all, but...) instead of repairing the house or whatever. Because coming here the past two summers has stretched me financially -- it's been worth every penny, but it was difficult -- and to be able to take in the blessings of this place without that difficulty is just ... such a gift. And to have it affirmed by multiple (!) outside sources that yes, this is what I should be doing and yes, this is where I need to be right now and yes, the work I may be able to do here is worth a certain investment ... I can't begin to put into words just how full that makes my heart feel.

So I'll try to keep the "OMG I am so lucky girl" chatter down from here on out, but I had to say it tonight. Because I am feeling very, very lucky and very, very blessed. And I think putting a little gratitude out into the world is probably a good thing all around.

The Project

Good news from the Indiana Arts Commission: they've approved my project modification. This basically means that the funds that would have gone, in the original proposal, towards my workshop tuition -- now covered by the Ali scholarship (thank you, thank you, FAWC!) -- will now be used in other ways.

I feel like I've been walking around in this state of wide-open gratitude for the past couple of weeks, since finding out about the grant. Really, I've been feeling pretty darned grateful ever since May when I found out about the scholarship. It is amazing to me, and kind of scary too, that people who don't even know me can take a look at some of my work and believe in me enough to make this kind of an investment. It makes me want to work really hard, to put myself on the line a little bit more than I otherwise might. I guess that's the whole point of it. Ultimately, I have to write because of what comes from inside me: I have to motivate my own self, not depend on encouragement from others. Writing is ultimately a pretty solitary act. But damned if the occasional encouragement doesn't give me a good and helpful kick in the pants. :)

So here's a quick rundown of the project I proposed and for which I'm getting the grant. The main thrust of it is to get my #$%*! book manuscript banged together, finally. To that end, the grant is covering travel & housing expenses for my workshop next week, which is a revision workshop -- the review panel really liked that I'd specifically chosen to focus on revision at this stage of the game, and my hope is that I will try to think about how revision might feel different as I begin to work with a bunch of poems as a body of work, how the poems might inform one another as I work to revise them.

Then I will be packing my bags again in October and heading off for a ten-day writing retreat. (I haven't applied yet, but I have someplace in mind; gotta get that application in now!) I want to take stacks of poems, and scatter them around the room and put them in piles and spend the time constructing that manuscript. Of course I'll revise poems as needed, and maybe write new ones as I find places where I need new ones in the manuscript. I also plan to take a big stack of books and get a bunch of reading done, and I'd be very surprised if I don't also draft a lot of new poems just by virtue of having that sacred time and space set aside & surrounding myself with words. But the main goal will be to come away from the retreat with a workable draft of a book-length manuscript.

Then I've also got a little chunk of money in the budget for contest and submission fees. Optimistic, huh? :) I should be able to send it out to about ten places. I'm not thinking about that part too much yet.

Finally, in March or April of next year, I'm going to do a big bang-up gala reading. I plan to invite a couple of other local poets to read with me. I'm nervous about it, because I've never "headlined" a reading before -- usually I just read with my poetry group or as one of a lineup in someone else's event -- I wonder whether anyone will actually come? I guess we'll find out.

One of the requirements for the grant is that there should be some "public benefit" derived from my project. This is sort of interesting, because the ultimate outcome would be to get the book published and maybe that benefits somebody besides me (sort of), but if that happens it won't happen during my grant year. I'll get it submitted during the grant year, but I doubt I'll hear back from most of the places before the funding cycle ends. The spring reading is part of my "public benefit" component. The other part: blogging! I plan to blog about the whole process -- managing the grant, going to the workshop, wrestling with the manuscript, sending it out. My hope is that other poets will be able to learn something from my experience, even if it turns out to be "how not to do it." *grin*

It was interesting putting together the grant application. I went to a workshop for potential grant applicants, at which a couple of Indiana Arts Commission staff members explained the process and answered questions; that was so helpful and if you're thinking about applying for a grant and have the opportunity to attend something of that nature, it's well worth it. Besides the "public benefit" part, one aspect of the proposal that they stressed was that it should represent taking the next step in your artistic career. That meant I had to spend some time thinking about what that might mean for me. Even if I hadn't been awarded the grant, that process would have been so helpful to me: asking myself what I was ready for, what could I do to really push myself, what seemed equally feasible and terrifying? Because I'd thought about just asking for a really nice laptop, and I could certainly use a new laptop to replace my on-its-last-legs one, but would that make me a better poet? Nah.

So that's the basic road map for this grant-funded year. It all feels like a very big step to me, but (and I hope this doesn't sound too ego-y) it also feels like a logical step. It's about time I got cracking. I'm forty-six years old; if I want to have a book published before I'm fifty, I don't have a lot of time to waste.

It's pretty funny being this open about the whole process, saying out loud "yes, I am working on a book manuscript and I'm going to try to get it published." I hope I'm not jinxing it. This is all going to be an interesting experiment....

Tell me about your teachers

As I prepare to head out to another summer workshop, I am thinking a lot about what I want the week to be: what I want to learn, what I'm willing to put forth, what I have to bring. I've heard from multiple sources that Carl Phillips is a very good teacher, so I think I've got a great week to look forward to.

Anticipation, as it so often does, makes me look back as well. I'm thinking about some of the writing teachers I've had over the years. Since I haven't (yet!) done an MFA, these pretty much fall into two groups: those who taught me when I was an undergrad English major, and those who've taught me in summer (mostly one-week) workshops.

I'll be the first to admit that I had some pretty terrific teachers as an undergrad, and that I did a pretty piss-poor job of taking advantage of their gifts. I was probably not too different from a lot of other twenty(ish)-year-olds in that one of my biggest goals, in each poetry workshop, was to prove that I was talented. Maybe part of that was the phenomenon of being graded, and being the Good Student who wanted to maintain her high GPA. But that attitude got in my way so big time -- I was reluctant to take risks that might not work out, to go out past my comfort zone, to fail productively. Plain and simple, I didn't want to look bad. I would have learned so much more if I'd been willing to risk looking like a fool sometimes.

I've had some pretty terrific teachers since then, in summer workshops, too. Most have been at least good; some have been amazing. I love the intensity of a short one-week workshop. I love the challenge of going into a room full of strangers, and having to almost immediately drop a lot of defenses, take risks, put myself out there, make myself vulnerable. At its best, it is exhilarating. At its best it changes me, often in ways I don't begin to understand for weeks or months after the fact.

That necessity of walking in and almost immediately making yourself vulnerable, instead of having a few weeks or class sessions to ease into it and get to know your fellow poets as you do in a longer workshop, means that it's absolutely essential for the teacher to create an atmosphere in which it is safe enough to do that. This means in part: discouraging snark, discouraging show-offiness, encouraging risk-taking, demanding & offering honesty, demanding & offering respect. It also means, sometimes (and here's where some people will probably beg to differ), making an effort to find anything to praise -- and sometimes, acknowledging a student's failure. Both can be difficult to hear. Both can be difficult to trust. (And trust is so key here.)

The best teachers I have had, and I'm thinking of two in particular, have managed to say to me in so many words that I had talent, that I was doing very good work -- and to say it in such a way that it terrified me, made me feel like throwing up. Because what I got from the praise was that I was holding something alive and powerful in my hands, and that I had a responsibility to do something about it. They told me that I had a lot of hard work ahead of me, and knowing how hard that kind of hard work is, the prospect was (and is) daunting.

And that's my favorite praise of all time, the kind that makes me feel like throwing up. The words from those two teachers are the ones that I hold on to and come back to when it does get difficult, the tapes I replay when it's dark inside my head. Because I trust that that praise is real. It's not just blowing sunshine up my ass. As a summer-workshop student, I'm wary of praise; it would be easy, I think, for a teacher just to sit there and tell their students how wonderful they are -- knowing that after the week is over they may never see those students again, and knowing that, frankly, that's what some students want to hear.

People will pay good money to go to summer workshop after summer workshop and be told that they are amazing. I don't want that. I want to be pushed towards places that scare me. If at some point during the week I feel like crying or I feel like throwing up, that's probably a good thing. I want to be asked to work harder than I would ask myself to work. And I want to be given an environment, a temporary community, in which I feel safe enough to do that, in which I know my effort will be respected and taken seriously. If I can have that and also some good hard laughter and some silliness now and then, even better.

Yeah, I don't ask much, do I?

Bear with me here for a moment while it gets weird in here: It's kind of like sex. You put yourself in this position of vulnerability, where you could very easily get hurt -- and sometimes a little bit of pain even makes it better. The power of the experience comes directly from that vulnerability and openness. Also: attentiveness to what the other person(s) may be experiencing is important, the cues (verbal and nonverbal) they give you. And faking it doesn't do anybody any favors.

So that drifted away a bit from thinking about teachers to thinking more generally about the workshop experience, but of course it is usually the teacher who has the most responsibility for setting the tone of the workshop experience. And even though you may get valuable feedback from your fellow students, it's usually the teacher you want most to hear from, their words you're paying for.

I think, too, of my sensei, back when I was a serious martial arts student. There were days when she pushed me so hard and so far past my comfort zone that I hated her, and that was an important part of my growth. I think that happens more in a long-term teacher-student relationship, and there isn't necessarily enough time to reach that point in a one-week workshop -- but I can think of at least one teacher about whom I have thought, if I worked with you for long enough I'm sure I'd hate you at some point, and then thank you for it later. (And I find myself wishing that I could have that opportunity. I am so weird sometimes.)

And so, a request. Tell me about your teachers. (Name names, or don't, whatever you are comfortable with.) Do you respond best to a Paula Abdul, relentlessly pointing out the positive, cheering you on, believing in you even when you suck? Or does a Simon Cowell help you more, not mincing words or putting up with any of your crap, dishing out the tough stuff you end up thanking him for later? Or are the best teachers maybe a little of both? Does some praise help and some praise hinder? Are there aspects of the teacher-student relationship that interest you, that I haven't touched on here? I am fascinated by this dynamic, if you hadn't already guessed.

Full

Last night the moon kept me awake most of the night. I didn't even realize that was what it was until I peeked out the window at like 4:00 and oh hello.

* * * * *

I'm working with some new material -- or, to be more precise, material I've been working with for about a year now, but didn't really recognize it until now. One thing that happens as I get better at this writing thing (or at least as I continue to stick with it) is that I am more and more able to be aware of my process, of what spurs me on and where to push myself harder and what my options are in various directions, without letting that awareness get in the way of ... whatever it is that happens. The trick is to stay out of your own way, but it's easier to get out of something's way if you can see it coming.

The balance of naming and mystery. Embracing both.

* * * * *

Sometimes a kind word or two is all it takes to kick ass into a slightly higher gear. And don't think it's not appreciated; it means the world. Even if it scares me (which it does).

* * * * *

The word embodied. The funhouse mirror.

I am so eager for what waits for me. Like that full moon, it's out there shining.