72º ~ Yup, almost noon on the last day of July with Iowa-like temps in Arkansas, a sweet respite of a summer
For those interested, here's a glimpse of the non-writing work that goes into being a teaching poet during the summer.
By chance, tonight I have a reading in downtown Little Rock. It's a joint reading with two other poets, and we've each been assigned about 15 minutes of reading time. As most of you know, the biggest pet peeve of most writers is when someone goes over his/her allotted time at a reading. So, I started out the morning trying to come up with a set list that fit the time. I have the happy "problem" of reading again in Little Rock, after doing a book launch here in February and then participating in the Arkansas Literary Festival in April. So, as I picked my poems, I wanted to try and add in a few that folks wouldn't have heard at those other two venues; however, I still wanted to focus on The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths as it is my most recent publication.
This proved harder than I thought it would be, and I spent over an hour coming up with a 15-minute list. Then, I practiced it...twice. When I practice, I make marks on the copy I will read, noting where I need to take a breath, where I want to pause for a half a beat longer than normal, where I want the enjambed lines to really blur, etc. I also note if there are any definitions or pieces of information the audience might need, and I mark my second-to-the-last poem so I can give the audience a signal that I'm about to wrap up.
I claim a wee bit of stage fright, and I've found that this kind of preparation soothes the nerves, and, more importantly, keeps me going when I flub a line.
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I confess, I haven't written as much this summer as I'd have liked to, but I've spent a lot of time adjusting, organizing, and prepping since the news that Trio House picked up The Alchemy of My Mortal Form. The knowledge that this book has a home and will soon have a physical form spurred me to tackle some outstanding stacks on my desk. Namely, stacks of poems that are not included in any books or in any manuscripts for future books.
Even with three books out there, I'm stunned by the number of poems I have that didn't fit. These poems are no less strong than the poems that made the cut for collections, and now I have a good healthy stack of them. I'm toying with the idea of a chapbook, and I've spent some time shuffling those poems around now that I have them all in one place.
Yes, I hope, some day, to be entirely digital (to save the trees), but there's enough 80s left in me to need hard copies to play with when trying to group and order poems.
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I've also spent a bit of time going through a ton of articles I've ripped out of Poets & Writers, The Writer's Chronicle, and other writing journals. Mixed in with those are printouts from articles available online. I'm organizing those for my upcoming classes this fall. At the undergrad level, I'll continue to teach the intro to creative writing workshop, which is multi-genre. At the grad level, I'm teaching a course on first books of poetry. Now, I've got the articles and papers that had been cluttering up my desk wrangled into one of the two courses. It's about time to start getting those syllabi together!
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Here's hoping that all of this organizing, de-cluttering, and re-thinking sets me on the trail of new poems soon!
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