The animal in my attic

There is some sort of animal scrabbling about in my attic. Must be a squirrel or a raccoon. It seems to move around at night. The cats are occasionally intrigued; I mostly cringe. I guess there are people who specialize in evicting such animals. Maybe I'll get a poem out of it anyway.

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This blog has been like Short Attention Span Theater lately.

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Books and journals are piling up. I don't need to take a month off work to write ... I need to take a month off work to read. And yes, when you work in a library, sometimes books just follow you home. We can renew most things over and over again indefinitely (unless somebody else wants it badly enough to recall it), which is kind of a blessing but kind of a curse too.

In a related event, I have made a small concession to middle age and purchased one of those little wallet-size magnifiers. What I really need to do is go to the eye doctor and get stronger bifocals. Sigh.

* * * * *

I've just recently discovered the blog "A Voice Box," which has audio recordings of poetry readings from the Bay Area. It is exceedingly cool.

Generally at lunchtime I spend 15-30 minutes walking, listening to music on my cute little iPod shuffle. I think I'm going to try loading that thing up with poems and listening to those instead. There are quite a few good poetry podcasts these days, and I just don't have time to listen to them, or attention span. But maybe they can accompany me while I walk.

I might miss the music, though. Well, we can give it a try.

If only I could walk and read at the same time. That would be efficient.

* * * * *

Really liked this poem by Sharon Bryan on Poetry Daily: "Bass Bass" -- I like how Bryan's language is very playful but has a definite serious undertone (more than an undertone). Also, my father was a bass player, so I have a soft spot for poems with a bass in them. That's long-a bass, not the fish. Though I have nothing against fish poems.

I do like the playfulness, though. I imagine a lot of poets started out by just being fascinated with language, the ways you can play with it. I remember when I was a little kid, both of my parents used to play language games with me -- for example, my dad always called the elevator the "alli-grue-a-tater" which never failed to make me laugh. (I was kind of a little baby word nerd, I admit it.) It's easy to forget how to play like that. I forget, a lot. Maybe that's the assignment I should give myself: just write silly shit for a while and have some fun with it.

Assignment. See? Already it isn't play. Good grief.

* * * * *

What I really want is cookies. Coooooooookies.

Artistic hubris redux

Walking through various airports last week, I found myself looking at people and thinking about how every single one of them has a story, or many. Every one of the hundreds of people I saw in those airports, and every one of the thousands of people I flew over in one jet-fueled tin can or another, has a story that is to them the most important story ever, the story his or her life depends on. Every one of those people has this whole other world inside that I will never see.

I've had sorrows and I've had joys. Mine are no greater than anyone's -- I'm tempted to say "and no less" but there is always someone out there who's got it better and someone out there who's got it far, far worse. The point being, none of it's unique. There's really nothing about any of my stories that's any more important or any more interesting than anyone's. Nothing. We all love and we all suffer, and the particulars of each are of interest only to ourselves, really. (If we're lucky, ourselves and a few close companions.)

I see friends going through what they go through and while I feel for them, for their griefs and their celebrations, part of me can't help but stand apart and think: yeah, that's what life is, and we just keep going on, so what of it? Is that horrible of me? That's probably horrible of me. But there you have it. There are all those million million stories out there, and what difference if I tell mine, or yours, or his, or anyone's?

When I write, lately, I get bogged down in one of two things. I get bogged down in the overly particular, the overly personal, the endless I, I, I. And then I think, dude, who the f*ck are you that anyone should care. Or: I get bogged down in the grand sweep of philosophizing, the stupid royal "we." And again I think, dude, why should anybody care, plus you sound like a blithering egomaniac with your grand pronouncements.

Tell me something. Point me to a poem that will show me why these stories matter. Give me something that walks the zone between the too-personal -- the small and claustrophobic -- and the grand but remote sweep of epic. Point me to a poem that will remind me why we do this. Because right now, just at this very moment here in my living room with a cat napping against my knee and newspapers piling up unread and the TV on mute and cars going by on Walnut Street headed south towards who knows where, I seem to have misplaced the reasons for poetry.

I'm sure I'll remember on my own eventually. I usually do. But just in case: point me to a poem that reminds you why. Maybe that will help.

Legal oddities and artistic hubris

Tomorrow is Election Day, and we've got a hotly contested mayoral race here. In Indiana, it is illegal to sell alcohol during the hours that polls are open (6 am to 6 pm). Considering some of the people we've elected before in this state, I'm not sure it does much good to make sure we're not roaring drunk when we vote...

* * * * *

Lotus just brought me a paper clip. Seriously, he found it, jumped up onto the coffee table in front of me, and presented it to me. He is very pleased with himself. I would have a cat with an office supply fetish.

* * * * *

Not much poetry going on around here the past few days. I think the Muse is peeved with me for not picking up on the poems she was trying to foist upon me out in Santa Fe.

However, a week from Thursday is the Mark Doty workshop & reading, which should be fun. We've been asked to read all of the "Heaven" poems from his most recent book in preparation for the class. Not a bad homework assignment, methinks.

What with running off to Santa Fe, craziness at work, and other stuff, I am behind schedule for planning my grant-funded manuscript-putting-together retreat. With any luck, that will happen soon. I am oddly nervous about doing it. Other people seem to have more confidence in my ability to do this than I do. Of course, I think that's because I know the scope of the task ahead of me and I'm being more realistic. *grin*

The artistic ego is a funny thing. It takes enormous hubris, I think, just to put words on the page -- and even more to send them off somewhere for an editor's consideration. "Hi, this stuff came out of my brain and I think a bunch of people need to read it." And yet, every artist & writer I have ever met has, however well disguised, a pretty deep sense of inadequacy about their own work. It's a funny mix of egotism and insecurity that fuels the creative mind.

I mean really. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of books out there, and I want to add to that deluge ... why? But for whatever reason, I do want to.

Go figure.

* * * * *

Remember: vote early and often!

Back home again in Indiana...

The trip to Santa Fe was short and relatively packed, what with events related to the family wedding I was there to attend, and trying to spend time with family members, some of whom I don't see very often. I didn't get much sightseeing in (but thanks to those of you who passed along recommendations, which I'm saving for next time) -- I did see enough to know I'd like to go back someday! It's a fascinating little town, not like anywhere else I've ever been; it's been a long time since I found myself in a landscape so completely new to me -- unexpected light, unfamiliar smells -- juniper, sage, salsa. The dry desert air sucked the moisture right out of me. Next time I'm taking chapstick.

The whole time I was there I had this nagging feeling that a poem was almost in me, like a sneeze that won't quite happen. There was one morning when I spent an hour or so sitting at a table in the sun in the courtyard of the hotel, scribbling nothing in my journal and reading some poems, and I almost caught the poem then, I think. But not quite. Sometimes I just need to hold really still for several hours, glancing now and then out of the corner of my eye to see any suspicious movement, before the poem shows itself.

Next time I go to Santa Fe, I'm hunting poems. I like to travel looking for poems the way some people travel looking for the perfect souvenir. I know there are poems in Santa Fe, in that brilliant desert light, in the wings of the humongous crows soaring everywhere (we have crows in Indiana too, but I swear the New Mexico ones are bigger). There's a vocabulary there which I didn't have the time, this trip, to figure out. But I'll be back.

Santa Fe

So I am in Santa Fe right now. This is the first time I've been to the Southwest at all! So everything is very new to me -- the land, the light, the smells. I'm here for a family wedding, and between the wedding-related events & the difficulty of getting my little group of family members all moving in the same direction at the same time, there's not a huge ton of time for sightseeing. But I've been able to spend several hours downtown (in the general vicinity of the Plaza), and I have to say, this seems like a really neat town. Also, everybody here dresses much better than people in Indiana do. Also, looking around all the little shops makes me wish I had a LOT more money than I do. :)

I went into a nice little bookstore called Collected Works; when I'm in a new town, one of my favorite things to do is to go into a local bookstore and try to buy a couple of books by local poets. Collected Works had a pretty decent poetry section which included quite a few local and local-ish poets, and I found three that appealed to me after dipping into them just a bit, so that was a big bookstore success (one book each by Pat Mora, Valerie Martinez, and Carol Moldaw). Also popped into a couple of galleries and several other little shops. It is definitely the sort of "interesting shops and galleries" town I love spending time in, and I think I will try to come back sometime when I can be more leisurely about things. I'll keep an eye out for particularly good poetry readings out here, and maybe try to time a visit so that I can hear somebody fabulous.

Speaking of which, I had hoped to make it to a reading by Sheryl Luna and a couple other poets at the Institute of American Indian Arts this afternoon, but the stars just weren't aligned quite right, or whatever. (Plus I was slightly mistaken about where the reading was, and made it to the IAIA museum about one minute before the reading was scheduled to start, but the reading was about 20 miles away at the IAIA school. Oops. I wouldn't have been able to make it out there anyway, unfortunately.) Sorry, Sheryl -- next time!

I do want to come back to Santa Fe; it doesn't strike me as someplace I am drawn to in an "I really want to live here when I win the lottery" kind of way (which is how I feel about Provincetown), but it's certainly a place where I'd like to spend a little time. I'd also like to get out of town and investigate the landscape a bit, do a little light hiking, that kind of thing. I have to say that after a dreary, rainy, chilly few days in Bloomington, the brilliant sunshine here is most welcome indeed. I'd like to go hunting for poems here, which would probably mean traveling alone (something I enjoy anyway). October seems like a particularly good time to be here, so maybe next year. Anybody know what the queer community is like here? I haven't been able to get a sense of that yet.

Upcoming Indianapolis events

For anyone who may be within driving distance of Indianapolis: On Thursday, November 15, Mark Doty will be reading at the University of Indianapolis. And earlier that day he will be leading a creative writing class there, which has a few open spaces for community members. At least -- there were still openings as of this morning, when I reserved my spot! It doesn't sound like it is a workshop where he will be looking at our own work; the faculty member who's coordinating it said she would be sending out a pdf of the reading we are supposed to have done before the class. Cool -- homework! Here's all the info on the reading and the class (and also here).

Then the next day (Friday, 11/16) Doty will be giving a talk at the Indianapolis Art Museum, "meditating on selected objects from the collection." Like Thursday's class, the talk requires registration in advance. I will probably have to miss this, since that would mean taking a second day (or at least most of the day) off work. But I am totally going to the class and the reading.

And I'm totally getting my copy of Dog Years signed. :)

There is a Q&A after the reading. If anyone has any really good questions they'd like me to try and ask him, let me know!

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Best spam subject line of the month: Change your baby banana to a large banana. I think that one even beats the Big Dick Fairy ones I keep getting. Bwahahahahaha!

Copper Canyon on tonight's PBS NewsHour

I never get these things until the very last minute. If you want to get alerts whenever they're going to run a poetry story, instructions can be found at the bottom of the email I've copied here....

=====================

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* POETRY SERIES ALERT
* An E-mail Service of the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
* and the Online NewsHour
*******************************************

*FIT TO PRINT

October 22, 2007

Despite the challenges of making a profit in the poetry publishing business, there is still a lot of poetry being produced in the United States. As part of our ongoing NewsHour Poetry Series, tonight we take a look at the ups and downs of Copper Canyon Press and other local Seattle poetry publishers.

Copper Canyon Press has been putting out books for 35 years. With a million dollar budget and a staff of eight, Copper Canyon relies on foundation and government grants, and private donors to publish about 20 poetry books a year. In the poetry publishing business, 5,000 sales is a bestseller, but every so often, there's a blockbuster that brings in real money. One such bestseller is the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser, which has close to 100,000 copies in print.

For online coverage of the Poetry Series, go to the Online NewsHour at PBS.org.

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

******************************************
NewsHour Poetry Series Alert subscribers receive an e-mail notice every time a
poetry piece is scheduled to appear on the NewsHour.

The NewsHour Poetry Series is funded by The Poetry Foundation.

To subscribe to NewsHour Poetry Series Alert, please send an e-mail to listserv@pbs.org from the e-mail address you want to subscribe, with the following in the message body: subscribe newshour-poetry-l

Landscapes and perspective

Blogging 'round these parts may be light to nonexistent for a few days while I get ready for a quick trip to the Southwest, where I've never been before. Hello, totally new landscape. Hello, red and green chilies. (Drool...)

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I'll probably jinx it by mentioning it here, but I sent out a short story a few days ago, for the first time in several years. I've had one short story published, way back in 1992, but I just don't write fiction very often. I wish I did. I spent several hours tweaking the story I sent out last week and found it pretty enjoyable; writing fiction feels like work in a way that writing poetry doesn't always, and I like how it feels. How you dive into the flow of the words and stay there, maybe for hours. Writing a poem, or revising one, tends (for me) to involve a lot of staring into space; a lot of writing a few words or a line then scratching half of it out; a lot of feeling my way through narrow corridors with all the lights out, not quite knowing where I'm headed, following my senses as best I can. Writing fiction feels like running, picking a direction and heading for it, working up a bit of a sweat.

I was never very good at running, either. *grin*

I sent out a few poems, too. 'Bout time I got back in the saddle.

* * * * *

I have a publication date for my chapbook now. Pre-orders will begin in June (if you asked for a postcard or an email, you will get it then) and the chapbook will be published in late August of next year. So you might not hear much about it until summertime -- but believe me, I will keep you posted. If you don't promote yourself, who will, et cetera.

* * * * *

Thinking, the past few days, about the nature of distance, the nature of memory, the nature of what's past. I don't miss the person I was, back then. Funny to come to that conclusion. Funny how two separate, entirely parallel lines never actually touch, but appear to converge as they recede towards the horizon.

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My decrepit old iPod hates me.

Not much poetry

Microsoft wants to read your mind. Cue the evil dancing paperclip....

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Factoid: It's very difficult to blog when one has a very large, very fluffy cat flopping himself lengthwise across the laptop and presenting his belly for rubbing.

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Very pleased today to get the word that a poem-ish thing* of mine will be appearing in the not-awfully-distant future in Bloom (the queer one this time, not the Bloomington lifestyle mag I was in before).

*I think it's a prosepoem of sorts, actually, but it might be a highly-compressed little essay thing, or a micro-fictiony-thing without much in the way of plot. I'll call it a prosepoem, since I don't really know any better.

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Glamorous Job (© Rebecca Loudon) department:

If you are interested in volunteering as a Floor Warden to aid in clearing the Wells Library during an evacuation, please contact me.

I thought they only had wardens in prisons & asylums. Hmmm....

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FINALLY got my copy of the new Bruce Springsteen CD today. I made the dire mistake of pre-ordering it directly from the label (Sony), because they were offering a special free lyric booklet along with the purchase. I've been really excited about this CD -- I love me some E Street Band -- and when release day came and went with no package in my mailbox, I started to worry. ("Is there anybody alive out there?") Finally, eight days after release day, I had an email from Sony letting me know that they'd had "a problem at our distribution partner" and shipment had been delayed. They did take off the shipping charges and gave me a couple bucks off the CD, but I still could have gotten it cheaper at Best Buy -- and most importantly, faster. The lyric booklet is kind of neat, but not worth a two week delay. Grrr.

But I have it now. What time is it? It's Boss Time!

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Sunday, several members of my old writers' group got together for a little reunion of sorts. We met once a week, every week, from 1985 until sometime in the mid-nineties ('96 or '97 maybe?), and met sporadically for a couple years after that. Many of us have continued to stay in touch, even if loosely, but this was the first time in quite a few years that most of us had been together as a group. It felt like we'd never been apart, except that our usual routine of going around the table and "checking in" about what was up with us that week became a check-in about what had been up with us for the past ten years. That group was always much more than just a writers' group, which I attribute in part to the strong commitment to feminist principles that underpinned everything about our process, in part to the fact that we all worked hard to communicate clearly and really listen to one another, and in part to pure damn luck in gathering together a group of truly remarkable women.

Not all of us have continued to write seriously (or at all). But to my great astonishment, four of us are now talking about getting together more or less monthly to share and critique poems, along with another woman who used to come to our readings all the time and has been known to mention us as an influence on her own work. I would not have predicted this as an outcome to our little reunion, not in a million years. But I am absolutely thrilled that it's happening.

All the way home from S.'s house out in the country, which is where we met yesterday, I had a line from Paul Simon in my head: "After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same." Yep. That we are.

Quiet night

Last night's reading went well, I think. We had a very full house (it's a small room, so it doesn't take much); I'm bad at audience-counting, but I guess we had about 40 people and it felt packed.

* * * * *

Quiet day today; quiet night tonight. I spent a while in my tiny little study at the back of the house, reading and writing a bit and listening to the next door neighbors who were apparently having a small social gathering on their back deck.

Got out Adrienne Rich's Dream of a Common Language and read her "Twenty-One Love Poems" for about the billionth time. How is it that poems I've read so many times, over the course of twenty-plus years, still have the power to move me so deeply?

* * * * *

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living.

[Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems, VII]

* * * * *

As often, I'm thinking about the choices I've made that have led me here, where I am: this small house, this night, this quiet.

* * * * *

I choose to walk here. And to draw this circle.

[Rich, XXI]

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It's the choices I don't remember making that circle back on me, nights like this. Even so, I chose this life and I'd probably choose it again.

Probably.

Diva

So very pleased to wake up to the news this morning that Doris Lessing had been awarded the Nobel. I haven't honestly read that many of her books (and she has a ton of 'em), but I did read The Grass Is Singing and The Golden Notebook and some of her short stories as an undergrad, and I remember being especially moved and inspired by The Golden Notebook. (It's been on my "really should reread this now that I'm older and maybe know a little more" list for a while now.) I think I've read a couple others of hers as well, but can't recall titles off the top of my head. Anyway, happy news.

* * * * *

My poetry group's annual reading is tomorrow evening. I like it much better when we have a Saturday night reading; I'm always so low-energy on Friday evenings after a long work week. I'm going to take a niblet of vacation time tomorrow and leave work an hour or two early, which should help; at least it will give me time to come home, change clothes, have a bite to eat, feed the cats. Note to self: print out poems before going to bed tonight!

We are reading at Boxcar Books, which is a nice little indie bookstore specializing in lefty political stuff. They do have a smallish but generally well-chosen poetry section. They are kind enough to let us use their back room for free -- it's nothing fancy, but it's a nice little space with room for 20-30 people to sit and listen. The bookstore is run by a cooperative of young folks (mostly in their twenties, I think); I always feel a little bit old when I go in there, but they do good work, and have a number of community projects they're affiliated with, including a very active Pages to Prisoners program. Nice little place, and it's fun to read there.

I need to start thinking about the reading I'll be doing in the spring in connection with my grant; it's none too early to start finding a space and choosing a date. I hope that when my chapbook comes out I'll be able to do a few more readings. In a smallish town like Bloomington I don't get to read that often -- there just aren't that many venues -- but I do enjoy reading, when I get to do it. Didn't used to. I used to have stage fright something awful. I'm not quite sure what I did to get over it, but now I'll get up in front of pretty much anyone and read poems. (Extemporaneous speaking is another matter entirely. *shudder*)

Some of my favorite readings ever have been the student readings at the Fine Arts Work Center summer program. You're limited to reading one page, which is not much, but it turns out to be about right for the number of people there. Every year so far there have been at least a couple of students who've astonished me with amazing work -- they attract such a high quality of students there. And although the workshop faculty aren't required to attend, in my experience they always have, and it's pretty sweet to look out into the audience and see people like D.A. Powell, Carl Phillips, Robin Becker, Sonia Sanchez, et al. (Sonia Sanchez was especially cool, going around afterwards to everyone who'd read and thanking them for reading and giving them a hug. She's great.) At those readings, students very often read something they've just written or revised that week, which lends a certain air of risk and excitement to the whole thing.

One of the poems I'm reading tomorrow night is pretty new (I've been working on it since the beginning of August) and probably not quite entirely finished. That's enough risk for a home-court reading, methinks.

* * * * *

Summer has finally snapped like the last string bean, and instead of highs in the low 90s (which we had as recently as Monday) we're topping out around 60. It's a bit of a shock, but at least it's seasonal. I love October, usually. Love it best when the trees are orange and the sky is brilliant blue. There's a certain shade of blue that only happens in autumn. I could live inside that blue, could love it forever. Every year I try to write about that particular sky and every year I fail miserably. Figures.

Found poetry

This list is excerpted from a list of related keywords found in a recycle basket at the library where I work. I don't know what the person's original search was, but it couldn't have been as interesting as the list they tossed. I've left out a bunch from the list, but these are all in the order in which they appeared on the original pages.



Telecommunication
(A found poem)

Animals on television
Arabs on television
Arthurian romances on television
Asian Americans on television
Blacks on television
Body, Human, on television
Businessmen on television
Closed-circuit television
Color television
Crime on television
Detective teams on television
Digital television
Grazing (Television)
Heroes on television
Home video systems
Homosexuality on television
Internet television
Justice, Administration of, on television
Lawyers on television
Libraries and television
Man-woman relationships on television
Medicine on television
Melodrama on television
Military television
Nihilism (Philosophy) on television
Nuclear energy on television
Nuclear warfare on television
Nurses on television
Older people on television
People with disabilities on television
Physicians on television
Racism on television
Realism on television
Sensationalism on television
Sex on television
Slow-scan television
Terrorism on television
Underwater television
Video art
Video dial tone
Video telephone
Violence on television
Women heroes on television
Working class on television
Youth on television
Zapping (Television)
Aggressiveness on television
Archetype (Psychology) on television
Astronautics--Optical communication systems
Bisexuality on television
Clergy on television
Death on television
Family on television
Gay men on television
Identity (Psychology) on television
Indians on television
Interviewing on television
Myth on television
National socialism on television
Occultism on television
Pioneers on television
Prehistoric peoples on television
Religion on television
Saints on television
Suffering on television
Tattooing on television
Teenage boys on television
Vampires on television
Whites on television
Women employees on television
More information: Here are entered general works on television
and general technical works on equipment.

--10-08-2007

Interesting tea

I always think that, being professionally bookish as well as being a spinster poet and what-not, I should be the kind of person who drinks interesting tea. So I go to the natural foods co-op and I buy all kinds of tea -- yoga-doing, karma-enhancing, aromatic tea. I make tea one evening, drink half a cup, and months later can't remember why I bought all those boxes of weird-ass tea in my cupboard and in the snackie drawer of my desk at work, and wonder how on earth it is that I've run out of diet Coke again.

My poems, however, drink interesting tea. They take long walks at all hours of the night. They probably do yoga and have dreams worth recounting. They live in rooms with delightful fragrances wafting through the air, and spend their evenings reading. They might be vegetarians. They certainly know more about wine than I do.

I'm not entirely sure I trust the things.

The Atchison, Topeka and...

So, looks like I'm going to be spending a couple days in Santa Fe later on this month for a relative's wedding. I've been to Colorado (only east of the Rockies though) and California, but the Southwest will be completely new ground for me. I'll be flying into Albuquerquererqerquqeruque* and either taking a shuttle or renting a car to get to Santa Fe, so I may conceivably be able to spend a few hours in ABQ on the way in.

Anyone have great suggestions for stuff I should see or do, given that my free time will be pretty limited? I'd especially love to find an interesting bookstore, of course. (It's not a BOOKSTORE ADDICTION. It's PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT. Dammit.)

Looking forward to some delicious Mexican food, for sure... yum!

_______________________________
*Yes, I can spell Albuquerque. I just like putting on a few extra querques.

Quick note

Poet Troy Jollimore, author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, is this week's guest blogger over at the Powell's Bookstore blog.

Here's an excerpt from his first post, which compares being a poet with being a philosopher (which he also is):

Typically, answering the question "What do you do?" with either "I'm a philosopher" or "I'm a poet" will get you a pretty similar look. A look which, if it could be rendered in English, would go something like this: "How peculiar — I mean interesting — I just remembered something quite important I have to do somewhere rather far away from here — please don't ask me who my favorite philosopher/poet is or anything like that — nice meeting you, I'm going to back away slowly now, smiling awkwardly the whole time."

Should be worth keeping an eye on this week to see what else he's got to say.

Frequently Asked Question

One of the most common searches that leads people to my blog is "artistic resumes" (and various variations, like "how to write an artistic resume"). Unfortunately this doesn't lead them much of anywhere -- just to a post I made a year and a half ago, in which I was looking for information on how to write an artistic resume!

And by "artistic resume" (for all you Googlers out there), I don't mean "how to format a regular resume so that it looks all pretty and artistic" -- I mean a resume listing one's artistic accomplishments.

Anyway, I got some good advice in the comments on the original post, and the artistic resume I created at the time seems to have worked (I was runner-up that year for the scholarship I was applying for, and this year I actually won the thing), so I think I probably did OK with the resume. Because this is such a freakin' popular search (and because there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of information out there), I am going to write up a post compiling all of the advice along with my experience, and I'll post that in the next few days. Meanwhile, if anyone has any advice they'd like to add, comment here and I'll include it. Thanky!

Poem of the week, & thoughts on critique

Went out to an old friend's house yesterday evening to talk poetry and have some dinner. She lives on a hill out in the country, and as evening fell, a group of deer wandered down towards the pond. The dogs kept a close eye on them so we didn't have to worry about being attacked by marauding deer, though. Good dogs.

Anyway, we talked about workshopping/critique -- when it helps, when it doesn't. In my old writers' group, which this friend was a part of, we talked about "heart" and "craft" critique -- sometimes you just need to hear whether the piece rings true and can then feel empowered to go back and work on it, while hearing about line breaks or commas or whatever would be overkill and can sometimes paralyze you from wanting to work on the poem further; sometimes you need to hear about what's working or not with the craft, the mechanics of the poem. I no longer think it's quite that easy to separate out these two facets of how a poem functions, but for a long time it was a helpful way of talking about critique, and especially a helpful way of bringing beginners into a workshop setting.

What occurred to me last night was yet another way of categorizing critique: that which urges the poet to clarify, and that which urges the poet to complicate. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive, of course, just as clarity and complexity are not mutually exclusive in a poem. But I've realized that when I feel frustrated and unsatisfied with critique, often it's because the people responding to the poem are thinking primarily in terms of clarity. I can push myself in that direction pretty satisfactorily; what I like to get from a workshop or critique group (I almost typed "critique grope" but that would be something else entirely) is a recognition of what is complex and mysterious in the poem, an exploration of where that complexity arises and where it leads the poem, and suggestions about how to nudge the poem further in the direction of its own mystery.

In both of the workshops I've had with D.A. Powell, he has quoted Rachel Zucker: "Revise towards strangeness." I think that is, in general, excellent advice.

* * * * *

I don't remember for sure which blogger recommended Nancy Pagh's book, No Sweeter Fat. Peter, was it you? Anyway, I'm quite grateful. I actually ordered it some months ago, but my book backlog is just crazy right now, and I've only just gotten around to reading it. There's some terrific stuff in here! This one is a little different from some of the other poems in the book, but I thought y'all might particularly appreciate it:


Among the Vegetarians
(apologies to WW)

Sometimes I would like to turn and live
among the vegetarians --
they are so placid, and so self contained.

They understand the eggplant's secret
firmness, the tabula rasa the bean curd is.

I contemplate them long and long.
Death does not linger on their breath.
The darker crevices
of their cutting boards are safe.

They exist without asking another
animal to kneel and spill itself.

The gentle eyes of the vegetarian
flash liquid revelations
to me and I accept them.

Theirs is an appetite to know and be filled
with the scallop the coho the razor
clam's dignity apart.

My hunger takes
the cream-white flesh of the halibut
the migrating eye of the halibut
the scythe-mouthed strike of the halibut
the graveled bed of the halibut
the cold gray sea of the halibut
in every bite.

It is incised, protean, unassuaged
by toast.

My hunger wants more than the halibut
and finds it in the halibut.

Believe me sometimes
I think if you were as much of this world
as the halibut
I would have to eat you too.


--Nancy Pagh
from No Sweeter Fat (Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 2007)

Classified ads

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. ;)

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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!)

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

:)

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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.

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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.

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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.