Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty

Draft Process: Resurrected as a Refugee

2012-02-09T08:55:00.000-06:00

40º ~ a dipping down of temperatures into the 40s for the next few days, nearly a dead calm, must stare hard to find a hint of breeze in the leaves (leaves on bushes only, trees winter-bare as should be the case), graygraygraygraygraygraygraygray

18th c. apparatus for reviving the apparently dead! Click for link.

A strange thing happened on the way to the draft this morning, dear reader. I did my self-reminder last night and then again after the alarm went off and I snuggled back under the covers for 10-more-minutes-please. I confess, I had a hard time clearing my brain for poetry. There's been a lot of intensity at work lately surrounding a large project. Problem-solver that I am, my monkey mind kept wanting to go back to that knotty subject and try to find a way to please everyone and still be realistic (tilting at windmills, anyone?). But, this is not the strange thing to which I refer.

As I rested in the aftermath of the alarm and focused my energies on my sickly speaker, I knew I wanted to chart that time when her disease seems to be responding to treatment but before there is a definite sense of "cure" or at least "management." (The quotes are for the way health care professionals use those words.) This is a time of hope but also of disbelief and fear. At the same time, the donor cells keep coming back into the conversation, and so I came up with the line "the donor cells infiltrate my dreams." I'm loving exploring the speaker's connection to the anonymous source of her donor blood / cells and how she feels changed by this donation/transfusion/transplant not only in body but also in personality. So, I started thinking about how the speaker might have unfamiliar dreams, the dreams of the donor.

And here's the strange thing that happened on the way to the draft. After going through my morning routine, I sat down with my journal turned to the page where I'd scribbled the above line after getting out of bed. But, for some reason, I didn't start the draft with that line. Why? I have no idea. Normally, I would re-write the line a bit more neatly and see what happened from there. Instead, I got sidetracked with the idea of the sense of healing and started the draft this way.

Monitor, needle, and chart,
each new diagnostic hints
that I am healing, ...

I ended up drafting a total of eight tercets and only got back to the line about the dreams in the seventh tercet, and then it became "They infiltrate / my sleep." Amazingly, this led me to a surprise ending that I love (of course, I usually experience a rush of love right after drafting).

So, here's to letting go of the reins a bit and listening to the speaker and the poem and "learn[ing] by going where I have to go." (Roethke)

Turning to the title, I still have Blood Dazzler on the desk after Patricia Smith's reading Monday night. By the way, she mentioned that as she drafts, she reads each line aloud and lets the sound help craft the next line. While I don't go line-by-line, I do read aloud, a lot, in the process, once I have a critical mass on the page/screen. I highly recommend it.

In any case, I flipped open Blood Dazzler, and after only one false start, I hit upon the title of the draft, a line from "Golden Rule Days": "and was resurrected as a refugee." No real tweaking required, all I did was trim off the first two words and voila.

What I'm Hearing: Patricia Smith @ UALR

2012-02-07T08:10:00.003-06:00

37º ~ some sun, some clouds, chilly mornings and cool days, winter in Arkansas 2012

Last night, I had the great good fortune to attend Patricia Smith's reading at the University of Arkansas Little Rock, sponsored by the UALR English Department and flawlessly planned by Professor Nickole Brown. I knew the Smith came from a background of slam competition before turning to poetry of the page, so I anticipated an exciting night. I was not disappointed.

No demure and docile poet here, no staid professor intoning with great seriousness. Smith's voice soared and dipped as she captivated us all. While I was looking forward to hearing poems from Blood Dazzler and was a bit sad that Smith only read two from that book, I thoroughly enjoyed each poem she presented. Smith is an expert with the persona poem, taking on the voice of John Lee Hooker, Tyrell (a barbershop owner in Chicago), Ethel Freeman (a woman who died outside the Convention Center in New Orleans during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and, in the book if not last night, the voice of Katrina herself.

The best thing about Smith's reading style is that she does not sacrifice the poetry for the performance. Throughout the poems, the attention to language, rhythm, and sound shines through, even while Smith brings the words to life on the stage. As a page poet with little background in theatre, I found a lot I might learn from Smith, most importantly, another affirmation that it is okay to love the words and let that love come through in the reading. During my days in graduate school, there was a way of thinking that tried to stomp this out of us. We were told to read "straight" and not let our voice rise and fall, not caress the words or add extra emphasis with body or timbre. (This, the kind of reading that brought me to poetry in the first place, when I heard the likes of Joy Harjo, Quincy Troupe, and Li-Young Lee and they drew me into their magic spells.) Slowly, I'm shaking loose that straightjacket, and I am more than thankful for Patricia Smith for showing me the way, again.

Finally, I'll be looking forward to April when Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, Smith's new book, comes out from Coffee House Press.

Bleary-Eyed but Satisfied: A Weekend in Review

2012-02-05T13:30:00.002-06:00

50º ~ nearly at our predicted high for the day, a week of 50s on the horizon

I'm bleary-eyed, mentally exhausted, and ready for a break from these words, word, words!

Still, I'm satisfied.

Cool computer graphic of the human eye. Click for link.

Yesterday, I spent roughly six or seven hours proofreading and entering corrections for the journal of academic writing I edit at school. According to Microsoft Word, there were 16,407 words in the document. I had read each essay three or four times over the course of the last six weeks, but yesterday was the final proofread before sending the text to our designer for layout.

Each essay had been read by multiple faculty members during the selection process and global revisions were suggested then. Once we settled on the selections, I read and did the heavy-lifting of suggesting revisions to the student-writers, who had the chance to agree with our suggestions or disagree and make their own suggestions, with me being the guardian of the files, inputting final decisions. Then, the faculty members on our editorial board each did close proofs of two essays before everything came back to me to put in a certain order (a fascinating process) and to proof again. After all of that, I still found two surprising mistakes ("altercation" for "alteration" and one subject-verb agreement error with an is/are situation) along with a half a dozen questionable commas and many cases of uncertainty that had me going back to the MLA Handbook and The Little, Brown Handbook just to be sure.

I must say, my brain was quite sufficiently scrambled by the early afternoon yesterday, and I was reminded again that while this kind of activity does not require manual labor, it is still WORK and there is a kind of exhaustion that sets in, a fatigue of the eye and brain that pleases me. (Also, the tendonitis in my rand hand is out of control, particularly in my thumb.)

Today, I began with doing the readings for my Creative Writing I class for the week. We are still at the beginning when we are reading established writers rather than class-generated material, and I've read the stories and poems many, many times in my life. Still, I go through and remind myself why I've picked these examples and what I hope my students will learn from them.

Finally, finally, I was able to get to some poetry time at the desk of the Kangaroo. I've spent the last two hours submitting three packets (all to journals with New in the title). Yep, two hours and only three packets. This is because I've taken the leap off the non-simultaneous submission board. Starting in December, I've kept a list of the top-tier journals I'd like to try this year. Most of these top-tier journals do not take simultaneous submissions due to the overwhelming number of writers sending work their way. For these journals, I see the need for this and am willing to bend my rule of only sending to places that take simultaneous submissions. If any of these places keep my work for over a year without a word to me, I'll know to scratch them off the list in the future.

So, my submission days usually end up with the packets being sent to more journals, but the time spent at the desk averages out to be about the same. The biggest time-eater of the process is the review and revision of each poem. Here are the fine-tuning revisions. Do I really need that "the," that "while"? Can I tighten that line, that stanza, this poem? & etc. Then, there is the sort through the guidelines and the compilation of the submission packet.

Again, I'm bleary-eyed and mentally exhausted, and again, I feel that sense of a job well done.

Now, to collapse in front of a few episodes of Law & Order as a reward.

Draft Process: A Sluggish Dullness Sacrificed or Shed

2012-02-02T09:33:00.000-06:00

48º ~ we continue on our path of upper 60s, lower 70s as we usher in this new month, and while I celebrate the warmth and the lower than normal utility bills, I worry and mourn melting ice caps & glaciers, the great self-created migration of the climate that may destroy us all (feeling a bit apocalyptic?)

Dear Reader, here are my notes on today's draft, which was a slow and steady process rather than any rush of inspiration. Today I offer an example of the work to pull each word from thin air.

I did remind myself last night that I'd be drafting today, and I wondered if the sickly speaker had more to say. However, I didn't dwell on it and drifted off to sleep with no new lines offering an interruption. This morning as I bathed and readied myself for the day, I thought of the speaker and her frustration at the doctors and their lack of communication with her, and, perhaps more importantly, I wondered if she was healing. It turns out she is, and the first few lines appeared to me: "Some days have passed without a fever." I spun out the scenario in my head and then lost track of it a bit as I moved into the kitchen for breakfast and was interrupted from my reverie by two cats intent on being fed. Luckily, I noticed my own distraction and grabbed the grocery list notepad and scribbled down my thoughts. Then, I was able to feed the cats and eat my own breakfast without worry.

Some of you may wonder why I didn't just run to the computer and get to work. Here's the deal: I do not work well without quiet and calm. Also, I do not function well if I haven't gone through my routine for the morning. (A little OCD perhaps?) Also, each weekday, I make C. his breakfast to carry with him to work. I do this because I love him not because I feel any sense of wifely duty. I make no apologies. So, once I am showered and fed, the cats are fed and exercised (played with), and C. is prepped and out the door, then, then I am able to clear the desk, and get to work.

So, once I got to the desk today, I had my scrawled notes. I opened my journal and transcribed/revised until I had a sense of where the poem was going. I did not stop to do a word bank today. I suppose I have a much stronger grasp of the speaker's diction, which relies more heavily on Latinate usage than I might and a more baroque (although sometimes broken) syntax. With the draft gathering weight, I turned to the computer and fleshed it out. In the process, the opening lines changed a bit. Here's how it begins for now.

Six days have passed without a sign
of fever. I keep my own chart,
pulling loose six fragile threads

So, I'm already getting to the speaker's agency in her health care. What the poem explores is the fact that the whitecoats refuse to share her results with her, and the nurses just go about their routines. I suppose some of this stems from a recent visit I made to my own doctor. I was only having a prescription refilled and didn't need an exam, but the nurse still took my temp, pulse, and blood pressure and duly noted these in my chart. However, she did not offer to tell me the results. The nurses never do and neither does my doctor when she comes in. This always frustrates me, and sometimes I remember to ask, all the while trying to be polite. So, the sickly speaker has developed a way to tell if her temperature really is gone by noting how many numbers the nurse writes in the chart. (Three digits before the single dot of the decimal point means fever is back.)

Also in the draft, the speaker feels cut off from any offer of hope from the whitecoats, so she embraces her own feeling of recovery and begins her own exercise regime at night. Yes, images of Sarah Connor from The Terminator (what was it, T2?) in the psych ward doing pull-ups on her bed frame ran through my head, as well as the narrator of The Yellow Wallpaper creeping around her room's perimeter. I tried to re-invent these images, and my speaker has to contend with being attached to machines, so there's that, too.

A whitecoat with his records via Science Photo Library

I said earlier that this was a slow and steady process today. What I mean is that the answers to "what comes next?" in the poem didn't immediately surface. There were a lot of stops and starts and "wonderings." Finally, I arrived at something I'm happy with for now. For a drafting day, that's a victory.

Turning to the title, I followed my old routine of seeking inspiration from other writers. This time, I happened to pick up Louise Gluck's (forgive the omission of the umlauts!) book of essays, Proofs & Theories. This is the first time I've turned to prose for a title, but Gluck's essay style is definitely Latinate and full of complex syntax, so I thought I'd take a chance. It didn't take long to find this quote "What has been sacrificed or shed seems only opacity, a sluggish dullness" (from her Introduction to The Best American Poetry 1993). I pushed and pulled at that until I came up with today's title: "A Sluggish Dullness Sacrificed or Shed."

fini

Random Flights of Monkey Mind

2012-01-31T08:29:00.001-06:00

55º ~ oh dear weather gods & goddesses, they say it might reach 71º today (with rain for good measure), the last day of January?

I am suffering from great fits of monkey mind today and wish I had some cohesive post to offer up to the loyal readers of the kangaroo. (See, now I've got a monkey and a kangaroo...there's a lot of hopping and screeching going on in there.)

Forester Kangaroos, click for link

Red Howler Monkey, click for link

I knew this shift to teaching on MWF was going to be hard on my poetry mind, and that is bearing out. So far, Thursdays have been okay for drafting and spending dedicated time in with my "butt-in-chair" for poetry, but Tuesdays are more of a struggle. I'm in the thick of things with students, the journal I edit on campus, and the reading series I run. All of these things make me happy and fulfilled, so I'm not complaining, just observing. That's all you can really do with monkey mind. Observe and try to re-center, re-focus. (No, I don't meditate regularly, but I've been to a few classes, so I know the lingo.)

Flitting around in my self-talk is the fact that yesterday while browsing the blogs, I read, out of the corner of my eye, so to speak, a blogger who stated that he was going to try to focus more on the poetry world and less on himself because readers were sick of bloggers talking about themselves. Uhm, yikes! That's what I do, talk about my own process, my own successes and failures. Oh no! Readers are sick of me! I should give more and take less!

What I am reminded of in times like this is the need to be gentle with myself. To accept that every one of us has a different process, different interests, and a different time line. Here I am. This is me, imperfect, but whole.

On a happy note, I'm in the midst of reading Blood Dazzler and eagerly looking forward to Patricia Smith's reading at the University of Arkansas Little Rock next week.

On another happy note, my creative writing students are stunning me with their raw literary energies. I've just read over their first two weeks of free-writes & exercise prompt responses. Holy buckets! I cannot wait to read their workshop pieces. Wahoo!

Reader, I am Resolved

2012-01-29T11:38:00.001-06:00

44º ~ a drop in the temps last night reminded us it is winter, but a return to warmer climes and bright sun today fool us again

Yesterday, I spent several intense hours with my weather manuscript, the title of which is now in shortened form: Such Weather as This. Here is a brief outline of those hours.

~ take current manuscript out of binder and toss on the futon
~ print any fairy tale poems I might consider including & toss on the futon
~ check on any random poems that don't fit the sickly speaker series that have not been included in the weather book previously, print a couple & toss on the futon
~ mix well (this was harder than I thought as papers like to stick together, esp. those that have been grouped in a binder for six months)
~ reform (hah! re-form?) poems into stacks of like-minded work
~ remember that all of the folks who have seen the manuscript have advocated a non-linear approach to themes and arcs, go for some "random" element to order
~ pause to take care of some laundry
~ get out the card table and begin re-grouping the poems, giving no thought to previous order (this was last part was easier than I thought, as I was able to ignore the page numbers already printed on certain poems more than I thought I would be able to)
~ become greatly frustrated with self for wanting to tell a linear story
~ weave in a few fairy tale poems but keep noticing how different they are in texture and tone, being that they are solidly narrative and the rest of the book is lyric
~ finally gather up the new order
~ pause to return to the laundry
~ return to desk and do a "save as" on the last version of the mss., creating the next version and inputting the results of my manual labor
~ copy, cut, & paste; copy, cut, & paste; repeat, repeat, repeat, & etc.
~ notice again how the fairy tale poems don't fit, except one -- "Midwest Nursery Tales," which is the most lyric of them all and the least reliant on the "Once upon a time" opening
~ abandon new version of file and go back to the one before
~ make toast with butter & peanut butter because that's how I like it and "gluttony" is my middle name
~ remove three poems that didn't make the cut during the "new order"
~ add "Midwest Nursery Tales"
~ move three existing poems around given what was learned from the "new order"
~ revise table of contents (something I always do by hand b/c it helps me see the order of the poems in the big picture)
~ print out new version of the version before the big shuffle and call it a day
~ reward self by going to neighborhood frou-frou salad & pizza restaurant & get a "Santa Fe" with extra dressing

19th c. weather balloon, click for link

And now, Reader, I am resolved. I will send out this manuscript for six more months to finish out the academic year of reading periods & contests. If there are no offers for publication after that, then these poems are going in the drawer for a bit. After all, the manuscript is in its third year of circulation, and while I have changed the order and the title and shifted a few poems here and there, it is largely the same book. It is hard to justify the time and expense of sending it out over and over to places that have already seen it. Yes, I've made it to the semi-finalist and finalist phase a few times, but at some point, I feel I need to give myself completely to the next project (the sickly speaker). Also, I do know that many contests change readers each year, but I'm guessing that the overall aesthetic remains about the same.

So, today, I will prepare my packets for five publishers and send this chunk of poems out into the weather once again. Hopeful & pragmatic at the same time.

Draft Process: The Radiant Shimmer of Supplication

2012-01-26T09:27:00.001-06:00

46º ~ rainy, cold, & gray, a repeat of yesterday, much fog this morning

Getting into the swing of my new routine at school means shifting my drafting day to Thursday, and I confess, I had a bit of a rocky start today. I tried and failed to call up the voice of the sickly speaker last night and earlier this morning, although I did remind myself that this was going to be a drafting day. I did manage to figure out what the speaker might be thinking about at this point in her treatment, so I had a wee grip on something as I started.

I decided to read through all of the sickly speaker poems and see what might shake loose. I did know that the speaker was itching to write a letter to her mentor (the Dear Madame letters that appear once or twice a month in the series), and I knew that I wanted to continue to make clear the distinction between the mentor and the other major woman in the speaker's life, "the woman [she] called mother by mistake."

After I'd read a handful of the existing poems and checked to see when the last letter poem was written, the first few lines came to me. They survived into the actual draft. Here they are.

Dear Madame--

Have you heard from her,
the woman I called mother by mistake?

She visits me at night, I swear.

The rest of the draft explores the speaker's absolute surety that this woman has been visiting outside her window at night, but as always, they are unable to communicate. The speaker worries that this woman will somehow see her as radically changed by her blood transfusion and wants her to know she remains connected to her. Also, the speaker believes that her mentor can somehow complete the missing link between the two and she begs her mentor to seek out this other woman and explain.

We've had a lot of wet and cold weather here lately and that seeps into the poem in the form of hoarfrost on the window. Sadly, it hasn't been cold enough for hoarfrost to form here. Instead, here's a picture of the beauty I imagined for the speaker (remember, she only has a tiny window above her bed and no other connection to the natural word).

from Science Photo Library, click for link

I said above that it was a rocky day of drafting. After I had those first few lines, I flitted back and forth between a word bank from Quan Barry's work and the draft. Somehow the words from the word bank did not slip easily into the draft as they have done in the past. I suppose this is a good thing, as it means I'm learning the speaker's voice more clearly; however, I still held at the forefront my desire to use evocative language, charged with energy. The draft also took a wrong turn about 2/3 of the way through, and I spent a good while figuring that out and righting the forward progress, so to speak.

I'm not on solid ground with this one, but I'm thrilled to have been able to set aside the uproar of other duties for this little bit of time and to have crafted something new.

Where I'll be at AWP: 3 Off-site Readings

2012-01-24T07:53:00.000-06:00

32º ~ no complaints for today, good sun, highs around 60º, rain to return tomorrow

Adanna Literary Journal: Off-Site Reading

Saturday, March 3, from 7:00 P.M. to 8:15 P.M.,
in the Hilton Chicago Hotel (the conference's "headquarter" hotel),
Private Dining Room 1. Despite the rather distinct name of this dining room,
our reading is public.

Readers Include:
Jennifer Arin (Reading Coordinator)
Kristin Berkey-Abbott
Debra Bruce
Sarah Busse
Maryanne Hannan
Ann Hostetler
Kathleen Kirk
Jacqueline Kolosov-Wenthe
Sandy Longhorn
Julie Moore
Christine Redman-Waldeyer (Founder, Editor)
Helen Ruggieri
Christine Stewart-Nunez
Ingrid Wendt
Laura Whalen

Miscellany

2012-01-22T10:44:00.000-06:00

45º ~ thick fog persists even this far into the morning, gray gray gray gray gray all around

Today I offer a bit of this and that.

Many thanks to Adam Tavel and Eric Anderson, poetry editors at Conte for including my poem "Prophecy" in the latest issue (7.2). It's a wonderful, compact issue full of both humor and foreboding. A quick note on the poem must include a hat tip to Luke Johnson. I drafted this poem based on a word bank collected from Luke's book After the Ark, which I responded to here.

~~~~~

Another set of thanks to the editors of Crab Creek Review and Weave. Both journals recently sent me happy emails to kick-start 2012 in the right frame of mind. I'm thrilled to have finally made it into these journals after several rejections in the past few years. Revise & try, try again, is my ever-faithful motto.

~~~~~

Huge thanks to you all, dear readers, for voting on the title for manuscript #2. I realized that What Blooms in the Marrow is probably more apt for a title to my sickly speaker poems, although it does come from a line in "It Matters, the Kind of Wound," which is in mss #2. The poem opens with an image of "minor cuts" and how that blood "renews itself-- / tiny blooms in the marrow." There are two or three poems in mss #2 that point to the poems in the sickly speaker series but don't fit with the series as they feature completely different voices/speakers.

~~~~~

I've been thinking about tinkering with mss. #2 and adding the best of the fairy tale poems to it, since they are grounded in the Midwest and the sickly speaker is not. Big project. Gathering strength.

~~~~~

February is going to be a BIG MONTH for poetry in central Arkansas.

Draft Process: A Dark and Gelatinous Ruin

2012-01-19T08:37:00.000-06:00

29º ~ the sun rising and burning off a thin cloud layer, predictions of upper 50s, maybe 60 for the next few days, a small breeze to the south, even smaller to the west, my robin has been replaced by the cardinal, who does not hurl himself at the window, thank the stars

A brief interjection before the process notes: many, many huge thanks to Traci Brimhall for mentioning the Kangaroo in one of her posts, "A Little Delirium," at Her Circle. I was only sorry that I didn't have a draft note up a few days ago for anyone who visited. My patterns have been upended by the beginning of the semester, and I have a new teaching schedule this time around. I'll be teaching on campus MWF (along with my online sections) and am now scheduling my drafting day for Thursday. For any new readers, I schedule BIC time (butt in chair time) four times a week during the academic year, but some of that time is given over to other poetry business and reading. My goal is to draft one new poem per week when I am teaching.

I'm happy to say that the sickly speaker (my current project, a series of poems whose speaker is a woman with a difficult to diagnose/treat illness, who is hospitalized) did not let me down. Last night before bed, I did my self-reminder about using this morning to draft. Sure enough, an hour after laying down, the sickly speaker spoke up. I fumbled for my journal (someday, I will remember to move it from the desk to the bed before I lay down) and scratched out what she had to say. This time it was about how she is learning to predict her fevers based on a certain type of headache that appears first. In other words, she is learning the course of her disease.

The draft today begins much as it began last night:

Before the fever replenishes and returns,
the pain advances on the hollow spaces
behind each eye.

For the time being, the poem is drafted in four stanzas of five lines each. This is very uncomfortable for me, as I love the couplet and the tercet. However, after the first stanza appeared as one unit and then the next stanza developed, quite naturally, as five lines again, I tried to listen to the poem and not to my comfort zone. Time will tell.

As the poem developed, the whitecoats (what the speaker calls the doctors) inserted themselves as a disapproving force. Here, I should retrace my steps and say that before I turned to drafting the poem, I gathered words from Quan Barry's Asylum. One of the things that Traci says in her blog post, linked above, is that she was advised to "revise toward the strange," and then she includes Yeats saying that in the later years he revised only "in the interests of a more passionate syntax." Those two things were percolating in my brain and I thought they were good advice for initial drafting as well. Also, one of the things I love about Barry's work is the "passionate syntax" and "the strange" combinations of images that work so well for her. So, I wanted to borrow some of her energy by making a wordbank. I gathered words until I came upon the word "alms." Instantly, in my head, I heard the rhyme with "balm," something my speaker craves. That worked its way into the second stanza, with the speaker trying to prove herself worthy in the scathing eyes of the whitecoats.

Some bee balm for my sickly speaker (click for link)

When I reached what felt like the end of the draft, I went searching for the title. For any new readers, when I began writing this series back in August, I started using bits of lines from Lucie Brock-Broido for my titles. I don't always use the bits word-for-word, but often as a jumping off point for the title. Today's title comes from Barry's poem "lullaby" (one of my all-time favorites from Asylum). The line that leaped out at me is "...your kisses dark and gelatinous. They ruin things." I used the word "jelled" in the poem, so "gelatinous" fit really well. I tweaked the line to "A Dark and Gelatinous Ruin." I'll let things rest for the time being and see what rises.

~~~~~

And now to turn my attention to that unwieldy NEA application!

Where I'll Be at AWP: F114 Redefining Lyric

2012-01-16T13:10:00.000-06:00

62º ~ a fierce wind, gray skies, heating up to 70º today, chance of storms to follow

When one of the original participants had to step aside due to a timing conflict, I was lucky enough to be asked to join Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum's wonderful panel for AWP. I'm humbled by the company and thrilled to be among such wonderful poets.

F114. Redefining Lyric: Five Poets Featured on PoemoftheWeek.org Read Their Work
(Robert Wrigley, Nicole Cooley, Tim Seibles, Daniel Khalastchi, Sandy Longhorn)
Waldorf, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor
Lyricism, most commonly associated with poetry, is applied to nearly every genre of narrative writing: plays, essays, music, stories, film, nonfiction, and novels. But what happens when it works the other way around and narrative elements of these forms are applied to lyric poetry? Join PoemoftheWeek.org for a celebration of its first five years with a reading by five of its award-winning and emerging poets whose work explores this question, redefining lyricism and poetry itself along the way.

*If you aren't a subscriber to Poem of the Week, check it out ASAP. Pure awesomeness.

Help! Should I Change the Title of Manuscript 2?

2012-01-15T11:06:00.001-06:00

46º ~ beautiful, beautiful sun, strong breeze trying to become a wind, forced to re-drape the window due to the return of the robin (aka, my personal Angry Bird)

This morning, another rejection for manuscript #2 arrived, so, based on much advice last month, I've been sitting with the book and trying to decide how I can improve it.

I've just spent the last hour re-reading the book. I'm at a loss for re-ordering the poems AGAIN. If there is some magic key that will unlock the "right" way to do this, I don't have it. Grrrrrrr....

One suggestion from all of the great advice was that I might have been trying to do too much with the title. It has been "In a World Made of Such Weather as This." Several people cautioned against using such a long title, but I was certain that was IT. Now, I'm less certain. So, in my re-reading for poem order, I also collected some new phrases that might work as a title. The interesting part of this exercise was reflecting on the phrases and seeing if they covered the book as a whole.

With these phrases, I created a poll (see right column at top), and I would LOVE to know what you all think, Dear Readers. Please vote! The poll will be open until noon on 1/22/12. (I'm getting the book ready for some February deadlines.)

To vote, you might want to know more about the book. Here are some thoughts.

1. It remains rooted in the Midwest, the landscape and the people.
2. It explores death through elegies for that landscape and those people.
3. There are a lot of birds in the book.
4. There is a lot about the wind in the book (see #1).
5. There are some made-up saints and their penitents.
6. A glacial erratic is a large rock moved by a glacier, so that the Midwest is dotted with these looming giants that don't belong geologically, but can't be moved (i.e. we are a stubborn people).
7. There are many poems about the body and mortality.
8. There is a lot of grass in the book, and not that 'hippie-hay' kind of grass. Prairie grass, my friends.

Okay, please vote.

Where I'll be at AWP: Launch of A Face to Meet the Faces

2012-01-14T13:45:00.000-06:00

58º ~ welcome back oh brilliant sun and warmer temps

Here's just one of the events I'll be attending at AWP in Chicago!

Book Release Party

Thursday March 1st

6-7:30 pm

The Jazz Showcase

806 S. Plymouth Ct.

(4 blocks from the ChicagoHilton)

Featuring readings by

Tara Betts

Eduardo C. Corral

Nina Corwin

Matthew Guenette

Quraysh Ali Lansana

Marty McConnell

Tomás Q. Morín

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Patricia Smith

Brian Turner

Winner: Best Spam Ever

2012-01-13T09:42:00.000-06:00

30º ~ the bright sun has fought over the overcast shroud

Best piece of spam I've ever received as a comment on this blog:

"I think kangaroo costumes are best for carnival festival..."

I think so too! :)

Draft Process: That Which Blooms Beyond Where it is Planted

2012-01-13T09:03:00.001-06:00

26º ~ hazy, whitish overcast sky, a very weak sun after a bright shot of it to start the morning, central Arkansas is bundled up against the cold, all hats and gloves that last for years from such infrequent use, a male cardinal just lit on the tree, his black mask stark against red feathers

She has done it again, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. The sickly speaker spoke up this morning to the point that I had to interrupt my normal routine and grab my pen and journal. I confess that I began thinking of drafting a poem within a few minutes of waking, needing to remind myself that this was the time I had carved out of the week to put my butt in the chair. (It's also worth noting that I was in a foul mood for much of the day yesterday and it slowly dawned on me as to why: after several weeks of being on my own time and being able to put my BIC each day, I am now on school time and I didn't balance myself well enough Monday - Thursday. A lesson I often need to repeat in order to remember.)

In any case, what bubbled to the surface this morning was a continuation of recent drafts, the speaker's state of mind and body post-transfusion. I continue to ponder the questions listed in the last few process notes, and here is what she had to say as I was trying to put on my socks (for heaven's sake, it's cold, how rude a time to interrupt!).

This new blood has taken root,
my donor replete and replicate.
I felt it first as a flutter in the womb

The poem goes on, in seven tercets, to explore the way this surge of health has the speaker sinking back into her body, from which she has become a bit dissociative. The whitecoats have a huge role in the poem and are kind of creepy, which I like. The poem also deals with the speaker feeling as if she is a host to a parasite in her acceptance of this donor blood.

As I read the draft again, one interesting parallel is that if the poem is read on its own, outside the sequence, it could easily be read as an unwanted pregnancy or at least a speaker who isn't happy about what a pregnancy will do to her body or maybe a speaker who has had trouble becoming pregnant and has had to rely on doctors and such. Still, I know in my heart that the speaker MUST feel those donor cells in her womb. I want there to be this notion of a new life because a transfusion (or transplant for that matter) does mean the body being regenerated by another body, a marking of something new.

As for a title, I still had Quan Barry's books on the desk from yesterday's post and picked up Asylum after my own struggle for a title went nowhere. Flipping through, I found this line from part IX. NAPALM of "child of the enemy," "Like all effective incendiaries / I won't only bloom where I'm planted." (So, yeah, I bow down to Barry's prowess!) That idea of blooming went right along with my first line and the idea of those donor cells replicating, so I tweaked it to: That Which Blooms Beyond Where it is Planted.

Here is a picture of a pot of hyacinths that a friend surprised me with on my birthday. I am transfixed by how the weight of the bloom bends the stalks. They definitely seem intent on blooming somewhere other than where they were planted!

**I do know that a blood transfusion only supplies a healthy dose of cells and that they don't replicate (that would be a bone marrow transplant), but I'm working with how the speaker's mind is thinking of things. Perhaps this is fodder for further exploration. Yes, I'm now thinking that she definitely needs to have had a marrow transplant and I need to learn more about that.

What I'm Reading: Water Puppets by Quan Barry

2012-01-12T15:26:00.000-06:00

36º ~ 2 p.m. and just a nudge above freezing, low tonight = 20º, we are lucky that it is only for one night and the warmth returns soon, a brisk wind = wind chills, not something we deal with often here

A decade ago, I was browsing the poetry shelves at The Tattered Cover in Denver, CO, one of the best independent bookstores in the country, when I came across Quan Barry's first book Asylum. It had a fantastic cover and had won the 2000 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, one of the top contests on my list. I added it to the stack of books growing on the floor at my feet and eventually cracked the spine when I'd returned to my apartment in Fayetteville, AR, at the conclusion of the trip. As I read, I remember being transformed and knowing I had found a new poet to love. To my delight, the book was actually assigned later in a grad school class.

In 2004, when Barry's second book came out, again from the University of Pittsburgh Press, I ordered it ASAP. While I love Controvertibles and see the same shimmering language and agile poet there, I confess to loving Asylum more.

Last year, Barry's third book, Water Puppets, came out, again from U Pitt Press, this time winning the 2010 Donal Hall Prize in Poetry. I have been gradually reading it over the last month or so and am so happy to say that the book lives up to its predecessors.

If you haven't read Barry's work, what you need to know up front is that these are political poems while also being deeply personal in the sense that they struggle with what it means to be a "person" in this chaotic, war-fraught 21st century world. The tenor of the poems reminds me of that classic, "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche. While the poems are not necessarily autobiographical, they do reflect Barry's history or having been born in Saigon and then being raised in Massachusetts. The Vietnam War permeates the pages, but these poems are not historical relics. Barry also touches on popular culture, often referencing popular films and current cultural figures. Of course, there are references to the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the way those poems echo the poems that center around Vietnam just blow me away. I have to read these books slowly, as the poems will not allow me to look away from the tragedy of war. That may be Barry's greatest gift, her ability to take on tragedy and transform it into something with a "terrible beauty" (a la Yeats).

As to the craft in these poems, I am swept away by Barry's language, which dances from common diction to elevated academic phrases, and by the way the poems move on the page. There are poems here that are composed of short lines and only a handful of stanzas, and then there are poems with long, Whitmanesque lines that run for several pages, and there are also prose poems, that form that always makes me wonder (in Barry's case, a positive wonder).

In fact, it is one of those prose poems that gives insight into the title of the book, Water Puppets. The prose poem is one of several toward the end of the book that are simply titled "poem." This one begins:

The stage knee-deep and so blue it looks solid. Then a pod of dragons surfaces, their golden bodies lithe and playfully skimming the surface, the water beading on their backs.

This led me to make one of those wonderful discoveries where poetry teaches me about some new thing in this world. I learned about the long tradition of water puppetry in Vietnam. (Just google the phrase and check out the videos on YouTube. Amazing.) However, the poem isn't simply an attempt to describe a traditional art. Instead, it moves beyond that and leaves me gasping. After a description of the puppets and their movements, the speaker says this:

Know that the United States considered using nuclear weapons against these people. Close your eyes. Imagine the guilt-free life you might live someday, then remember why you don't deserve it. Eventually the puppets whirl down into the obscuring blue water.

Being Vietnamese and American, Barry is positioned to expose both sides of the war and its aftermath. She transforms that experience into an empathy for the global community as it struggles with our current conflicts. But before I get to that, I want to say something about the craft of the poem I've just quoted. Look at the first sentence. We first get 'the stage' juxtaposed against 'knee-deep' and the knowledge that it 'looks solid,' which forces us to realize it is NOT solid. With that sentence and its sounds, its phrasing, I am hooked. I am transported and willing to be told something new. Also, do not underestimate the skill it takes to weave nuclear weapons into a poem about a puppet show and pull it off.

Now, here's a poem that moves to a more global view. "If only I had been able to form the idea of a substance that was spiritual" begins:

The soul is segmented.

Even in the dark it glows, each thoracic bulb

brilliant, pastel, both primordial & futuristic.

Once I saw a pod of sperm whales sleeping

in the long night of the sea, their bodies

vertical like a forest, tails to the surface,

the massive trove of their heads

like stopped pendulums trained down straight

toward gravity. It too was a vision

of the corporeal rendered faultless.

What else is there to say? That I should have

loved more?

The poems in this book open up all of the complicated relationships between people, poems that question how we justify violence, not only against each other in a formal war, but also against the flora and the fauna and the planet itself (the cover photo is of either an oil derrick or a natural gas derrick burning off some excess). The long poem "Meditations" takes us through the justifications for the invasion of Iraq, the release of Nelson Mandela, persecutions in China, back to Vietnam, to Haiti and Afghanistan, and elsewhere while the speaker engages with a group of people clearly having some culture shock. Another long poem, although with a completely different form, "History," exposes the male gaze / female object relationship and openly discusses how this can't help but effect a woman's sexuality. And then, there is this very short poem, which I will quote here in its entirety.

"vigil"

I dreamed of this--each night the image of it

Burning on the ocean, Lima's great white cross

With its thousand lights, its truth. What I prayed for:

Make me a better person, make me forget you.

Now, there's no one I'm praying to forget (although I remember those times in my life vividly); however, that first part of the prayer "Make me a better person" seems to be what the speaker grapples with throughout the book. It echoes how I felt after reading almost every single poem in the book, and that feeling provided the hope to balance the tragedy exposed in many of the poems.

Support a Poet / Poetry
Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today
Water Puppets
Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

Please Bear with Me

2012-01-10T07:46:00.000-06:00

50º ~ 90% chance of rain today, although not started yet, this marks the fourth day with no sun and I'm about to go crazy...have become a weather wimp

Please bear with me, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. I have a bit of a cold and this is prep week before classes begin on Saturday (online) and Wednesday-next (on campus), which means I have that slight anxiety that every beginning of the semester brings, but also, with it, a great burst of energy to be back doing the work that I love. I have a great line up of classes and I'm super excited about this semester, although with two trips up north thrown in, I may be a little frazzled (and frozen!) by April.

Never fear, the poetry posts shall return. To whet your appetite, I'm planning a reader response of Quan Barry's three books. She is one of my top 5 contemporary poets. Okay, now I want to stay home and write that post, which means I better get up off the chair and into the car!

Four Amateur Collages

2012-01-08T12:09:00.002-06:00

49º ~ the abnormal highs have taken leave of us and we return to the 40s and 50s, still quite nice for January, heavy gray overcast sky today

Sometimes, when I'm not reading or writing, I make collages. Here are four recent attempts.

Draft Process: Vessel in Which an Ancient Urge Rises

2012-01-06T10:02:00.001-06:00

42º ~ the forecast says the high will reach close to 70º ~ a bit stunning as the first week of the new year ends, good sun but a thin haze, the robin continues to haunt the tree but no longer approaches the window, the world understands this is the bird's territory, keep away

A couple of ideas about the sickly speaker have been tumbling about in the background.

1) continuing to mull over how she feels about her inability to participate fully in her own treatment, the distance between patient and doctor/nurse
2) wondering about her love life
3) wondering about her thoughts post-transfusion

In the meantime, checking in with my own body, I've been "suffering" from my usual bout of winter dry skin and annoying hangnails. Not a very pleasant topic, but it plays into the poem and I want to be honest, so there you go.

As I was playing with the cats after breakfast, the first few lines of a new poem wormed their way to the surface. I confess I cut the playtime a bit short to get to my journal. A few treats and I'm sure the cats will forgive me. I was thinking about how the speaker might feel about the donor who gave blood for the transfusion (I touched on this in one previous poem) in the days after the procedure. Suddenly, I knew she would want to taste her own blood...which hints a bit at how some people who self-harm do so to feel anything at all or to override some deeper pain. I'm not sure the speaker is someone who self-harmed in the past, but I do know that the medical staff would not allow her anything with which she could draw blood, which leaves only her own body. Combine this with my hangnails and voila. I knew the speaker would taste her own blood because she had peeled her own cuticles to bleeding. Then, I had to figure out why she would end up with the hangnails in a controlled medical setting. So the poem begins:

The furnace here is faulty, heaves a dry heat
past the needle of the thermostat.

My lips are prone to chap. At night, I peel
my cuticles, gnaw & pull, cannot resist ...

A 19th century furnace for gas lighting, click for link

The poem goes on to explore this connection the speaker now has with her anonymous blood donor which opens the door to a question of intimacy, in particular bodily intimacy. The speaker continues to be frustrated by a lack of connection with her medical staff and her lack of connection to the outside world.

Today's draft was a bit different than the others in that it didn't fall instinctively to a close. I'm not saying that when I draft, each poem arrives neatly in a package, but I'm usually able to work through to what I consider a naturally ending during the session. This poem flipped and flopped and gasped like a poor fish in the bottom of the boat. In fact, in the middle of drafting this post, I stopped and tortured the poor thing some more.

Then, there is the title. I've been slowly making my way through Quan Barry's Water Puppets, which feels much more political to me than her past books, or to be more precise, the political nature of the poems is much more urgent and blatant. In any case, I first cast about for a title on my own and then began letting my eyes drift across the lines from Barry's book. Eventually, I saw this line from "lion," "the ancient drive rose up in only one." As I used an idea of intimacy and the urge to connect in a bodily way in the poem, this struck a chord. I fiddled a bit and came up with "Vessel in Which an Ancient Urge Rises." I am not trying to be coy by using "vessel" instead of "body." The speaker is slowly but surely separating at the mind / body level and because of her disease and the treatments beginning to see her body as a vessel separate from her "self." This question of identity and the body is age-old and complicated enough in a healthy person, adding disease to the equation muddies the water even more. And so we swim through.

Draft Process: The Calendar is Turned

2012-01-04T10:26:00.002-06:00

40º ~ several chilly days have set in, warmer air promised for tomorrow, my body refuses to let go of the cold this morning even though I sit inches from the heater, the sun is making a valiant effort to defeat a thin cloud cover, there is a crisp wind

I've been thinking about the sickly speaker a lot the last few days and wondering how I might find her ~ recovering or regressing? The answer: regressing. The arrival of the answer: an hour after I'd gone to bed, which meant turning on a light and scrambling for the journal to catch her voice. It turns out that her eyes have been wrapped with gauze again, something that came up in an earlier poem during a spike in a fever. I have no idea why that tidbit came back, but there it was. Another mysterious part of the mysterious illness & its treatment. I scribbled down a handful of lines and fell back asleep. This morning, I was excited to have a beginning already formed.

In this case, the whitecoats (what the sickly speaker calls doctors but not nurses) have also ordered her arms to be bound and that is a new development. This proved to be a bit of a problem, since the whole vibe of the poem began as a letter to the speaker's mentor, known only as Dear Madame. But if her arms are bound, then she couldn't actually be writing, so I had to deal with that as well. I tried taking the letter form away from the poem and it fell apart. So, it became a letter dictated in an empty room and the speaker must grapple with the knowledge that this line of communication is closed to her (she receives no visitors).

The draft begins:

They've wrapped my eyes with gauze
forcing the lids closed against the fevered light.

They've swaddled my arms to my chest,
attached more tubing and more alarms.

What's interesting is that for most of the drafting process, once I got to the computer, there was another stanza at the beginning. The line I have here as the first is the one that I scribbled out last night, and by taking out the other "first" stanza and condensing it, I was able to create the title, "The Calendar is Turned, the Year Anointed."

Oh, and I was able to use a recent incident in the poem. About a month ago, a young robin began attacking its own reflection in the window above my computer. We had to hang a sheet over the outside to "break the reflection" as the website we consulted advised. On Jan. 2, at 8:58 a.m., the robin returned and began the cycle again. (Yes, I looked at the clock.) We were more quick with the sheet this time and the robin cussed us out from another tree while we were scrambling through the branches of its territory. So, without giving too much away, I was able to use this idea in the poem. Wahoo!

from Science Photo Library, click for link

On another note, one of the threads that seems to be developing is the speaker's frustration with her lack of agency in her own treatment. In some cases, this is due to a lack of communication from the whitecoats and in some cases this is due to her own lack of trust in her own mind & body. Does she want to get well? I have no idea, but I'm enjoying the ride to discovering the answer.

Making Up with the Old Manuscript

2012-01-01T12:22:00.000-06:00

54º ~ sun fighting through overcast skies now and then, keeping the faith, a slight breeze, bright orange-red berries on the bush outside the window

Two weeks ago, you all saw me through the messy mess of the manuscript blues, as I detailed here. THANK YOU! After days of eating, napping, & watching Law & Order, and after hearing about my dad's improvements post-surgery, I was feeling more in the mood today to take a look at the book again, with all that wonderful advice simmering beneath the surface. Oh Happy Day, the book and I made up! I did take out two poems that I had stuck in there the last go 'round, but other than that, I didn't mess with it. I actually read it through and remembered why I loved the poems before. Yay!

Some thoughts, especially for those who left comments and sent emails.

In the past, I have sent the manuscript out to several trusted readers, and they made great suggestions about re-ordering things (you know who you are and you know that I am deeply grateful!). The book went through a major re-ordering for the 2010 - 2011 season of submissions. That's when it got great responses after an initial tepid year.

In the late summer of 2011, I tinkered with the ordering again and began sending out what I call version 7 in August of 2011. What strikes me about this is that I've only heard back from three of the 15 publishers to whom it was submitted (yes, I'm submitting more widely this year, as I'm either terrible at market research or this book is not a niche fit). So, my frustration and whining from two weeks ago may have been a bit, ahem, premature to say the least. One should at least give the folks some time before leaping to the conclusion that the book sucks, right? Impatience has been one of my personal gremlins from day one...just ask my mom! In any case, I'm laughing at myself a bit for throwing my fit in December.

Switching tracks, one of the suggestions that came up was changing the title. As some of you know, I've been firmly attached to In a World Made of Such Weather as This for quite some time. Several knowledgeable folks have suggested tightening it or changing it. Today, I'm fooling around with Worlds Made of Such Weather as This, which only lops off two syllables, but it's a start. I do worry that the same readers might get the book this year who read it last year under the same title and chuck it aside b/c they rejected it last year. This would mean, they wouldn't see the re-ordering and the addition of a few new poems and the subtraction of a few older ones. (I know the odds of this may be a bit low, but it's still something that worries me.)

In the end, I'm feeling much better about the book and so, so grateful to have such a wonderful support system out there to prop me up when I start to falter. You all are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I send you endless thanks and a photo of a channel along the Arkansas River. Rivers are the epitome of revision and patience, and they make me happy in all their various forms.

The Numbers Set Me Back on My Heels

2011-12-31T11:59:00.000-06:00

56º ~ while luxuriating in these days of warmth & sun, a subtle sadness permeates as there is this evidence of climate change, note (the lack of leaves on the trees means the sun has unfettered access and swaths the desk & my body

As I've aged, I've come to realize that I'm not really a resolution person. At one point, a therapist commented that I was one of the most self-aware people she had ever counseled. I do not say this to brag. For whatever reason, nature/nurture/astrology/etc., I'm the type of person who is almost constantly aware of my imperfections, and I've fought hard to loosen my grip on my attempts at perfection, which were more harmful than helpful.

Still, there are goals I keep in front of me all year round.
1. To slow down and push back against this speed-hungry & product-driven world.
2. To be kind & patient with those I love and with those who are acquaintances or even strangers.
3. To read & support my fellow poets by buying their books, subscribing to journals, or using the library.
4. "To live deliberately...to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" a la H. D. Thoreau.

I do like the way the close of a year provides a chance to reflect and celebrate. Here are my numbers.

42 poems drafted ~ This number set me back on my heels, in fact, almost set me spinning off my chair. I am thrilled with this number, given the summer of troubles we had and the fact that I launched a reading series this year. Thrilled!

1 reading series launched ~ Of course, I had lots of help from colleagues and friends, and I am thankful for each and every one.

56 rejections ~ This number reflects the journals rather than individual poems. I usually send 4 - 5 poems in a packet, and if even 1 poem is accepted, that's recorded as an acceptance, so the other 3 - 4 poems would have been rejected. It's fuzzy math to be sure. Doing the multiplication sets me back on my heels as well.

20 acceptances ~ Again, this number reflects journals. All together, 33 poems were accepted as some journals accepted more than one poem at a time. Again, I'm THRILLED with this number and so happy to know my poems are finding good homes out there in the world. Thank you all for the support through the drafting stages and beyond.

10 hours per week ~ my average time (during the academic year) at the desk of the Kangaroo working on drafting, revising, manuscript ordering, submissions, reading, blogging, and recording acceptances/rejections. Slightly higher in the summer.

~~~~~

As 2011 comes to a close, I hope you all are warm, happy, & well-fed. May 2012 bring us all more victories than defeats, more laughter & love than tears & grief, and more time with poetry than with the dirty laundry gathering in piles around the house.

Not a Lot of Poetry Going On Round Here

2011-12-29T11:02:00.001-06:00

48º ~ gorgeous weather w/ highs in the low 60s, bright sun today, a little breeze

There hasn't been a whole lot of poetry going on around here over this holiday break. As I've commented before, I do best with a set schedule, and that usually means a teaching schedule to "keep me honest" about my writing time. Plus, after the semester is over, we often spend several days catching up on household tasks and lots of days visiting with friends and family. I am learning not to beat myself up over these non-poetry days, and most importantly not to judge my own progress against that of others.

I am content to have seen many family members and friends and am looking forward to seeing a few more on New Year's Eve. I am content to play with the new cats and help them settle in here. I am content to watch endless episodes of Law & Order (the original), which I am streaming while I play endless hands of spider solitaire. My brain was in serious need of mush-time, apparently.

Mostly, I am content to learn that my dad's surgeries are complete and his hardware is now turned on, as of yesterday. By all accounts, the Deep Brain Stimulation therapy is a modern miracle. My mother described watching my dad's body "loosen up" by degree as the doctor activated and adjusted the signal now being provided to his brain by electricity rather than by dopamine. The biggest amazement, apparently, was when they had him write his name before activation (a nearly illegible scrawl) and after activation (almost back to his pre-Parkinson's, legible, handwriting). Dad was even able to snap his coat and buckle his seat belt without assistance. This may not seem like much, but for us, it is a miracle. Now, he begins the long journey to lowering the meds which have caused such lethargy & some confusion. We are hopeful, hopeful, hopeful. Here is an image of what's inside my father now.

Click for link

Still blown away by this. Lots to process.

~~~~~

Thanks for stopping by, even with sparse postings!

Solstice Gratitude

2011-12-22T10:12:00.001-06:00

45º ~ solid gray skies, a drizzling rain, no wind

Happy Solstice, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. I am a creature of the light, and I take heart that the days will slowly lengthen toward that other tipping point at the summer solstice.

Having returned from Iowa earlier this week, I have to take a moment to comment that the upper Midwest finally treated me to an enjoyable weather trip in December. In years past, when I've traveled this time of year, I've been met with snow, ice, and freezing temperatures. This past weekend, we had bright sun and temps in the upper 40s. Someone needed to pinch me to make me believe it. Blessings.

Now, I'm reflecting on my gratitude for good news from the poetry world over the past week.

First, Jessica Goodfellow awarded the Kangaroo a Liebster Award while I was away! Since I've done this a number of times, I'm going to skip the rigamarole and just say THANKS to Jessica. If you haven't checked out her blog, Axis of Abraxas, please do! Great insights about poetry and writing in general, as well as updates from the Pacific Rim.

Next, news of two acceptances. The fine folks at Pebble Lake Review accepted "Fairy Tale for Girls who Gather Maps" and will also host an audio file for the poem, which I recorded yesterday. I'll let y'all know when the new issue goes up and the poem is available to read/hear. Just on the heels of that good news came an email from the folks at Sou'wester, who accepted two poems, "Inventing a Rain Spell" and "Cornfield, USA III" for the special weather issue, forthcoming in 2012. This is my second appearance in Sou'wester, which is always a thrill, and I'm super psyched for this acceptance b/c this is the first of the three haibun to find a home. Many, many thanks to the editors and readers of these two journals for showing my work some love.

Finally, tons of gratitude to those of you who chimed in on my manuscript blues, either in the comment section or by email. I am so grateful to have you all in my life. After my sojourn up home and my return to this, my southern home, I'm feeling a bit braver about returning to the manuscript and giving it a good re-reading. You all ROCK!

Some rocks from Heber Springs, AR. Solid!

Family Update

2011-12-16T21:01:00.000-06:00

30 degrees with a chance of flurries ~ yep I'm in Iowa
After an all-day drive, I just wanted to give everyone who has been reading a quick update on my dad. He came home yesterday, having had no post-op troubles this time around. He spent most of today sleeping but was up and about by the time I got to the house this evening. Thanks to everyone who sent good thoughts. 14 days until they activate the hardware and begin the therapy. Exciting and nerve-wracking at the same time. Also, so many thanks to those who have offered wisdom about the book, both here and in emails. You all are wonderful, amazing poet-friends. I'm lucky to have you on my side!!!! (Yes, that is the overuse of the exclamation point. What can I say? I'm exhausted!)

Manuscript Blues: A Messy Mess

2011-12-15T10:12:00.001-06:00

57º ~ oddly warm here for the past 48, moisture everywhere, leftover rain, cement seeping, light rain here and there through tomorrow, then the cold returns

This morning my father is having his second (and last) surgery to finish placing all of the hardware he needs for Deep Brain Stimulation therapy for Parkinson's Disease. Tomorrow, I'll be on the road to Iowa to visit and see for myself how he is doing. (C. will be home with the cats, recovering from his semester.) Dad's hardware won't be activated until the very end of December, so we won't know how much improvement he will see until the first of the year, but I just need to check in and give everyone hugs.

from creativecommons.org, click for link

That being said, I'll be offline for a few days more. You can see that I have been fairly quiet already this break, after Monday's draft. I confess, Tuesday was a disaster in terms of poetry. One of my goals for the break is to re-visit In a World Made of Such Weather as This, my 'second book.' As most of you know, the manuscript has gotten lots of love in terms of semi-finalist status and a bit of love as a finalist; however, it has not made the final leap to publication, and I've been sending it out in what I consider its strongest form for two years (with a re-ordering between year one and year two). In any case, I thought I was ready to take another look under the hood and see if I needed to tinker with it more.

It's hard for me to describe what happened on Tuesday when I opened up the binder and started reading the poems. After the first poem, I started questioning everything. I wondered what I had been thinking. I beat myself up. I felt sick. I was tired of all the poems I was reading. I half-heartedly shuffled a few poems around. I told myself to stick with it and just keep reading. I stopped reading and closed the binder in defeat. I'm now wondering if it is even a book. Most horrify thought: it is not a book and I've wasted my time on it. I feel sick again, now, just thinking about it.

On reflection, I suspect I know what is happening. I've "broken up" with those poems. Traci Brimhall writes about this transition at Her Circle Ezine. The new series I'm working on is so exciting and full of energy that I've moved on to a new passion. Since the sickly speaker poems are shaping up as a true series with an arc of a plot that the poems will follow, I'm caught up in that cohesiveness. My weather book is definitely NOT a project book. It is a 100% mix-tape book, with common themes and threads floating throughout, but no definitive arc that moves through time and place. Connections that seemed natural and instinctive when I put those poems together have evaporated in the face of how easily the new project poems are sliding together.

Today, I sit here gathering questions.

If nearly every poem in the collection has been published individually, is that enough? Is that too much? Do I suffer from over-exposure?

Is the poetry world more apt to publish a project book over a mix-tape book?

What does it mean to collect these loosely connected poems in a book and send it out into the world?

Is it all about audience at this point, growing the audience for all of the poems together?

When does one decide to abandon a collection?

How does one deal with this abandonment?

One thought that is running through my head is that I need to go back to square one and pull the whole thing apart and find the poems that still sing to me and see what I have then.

Another thought is that I'm being too hard on the book and need to leave it be and see what happens with this round of submissions. But how long do I keep putting the book out there without revision and can I continue to do so when my passions have moved on to other work?

While nothing about this work is physically taxing, the emotional exhaustion is real.

Draft Process: Left a Refugee Here in a Sterile Country

2011-12-12T11:23:00.003-06:00

42 ~ 70% cloud cover with bright highlights where the sun breaks through, no sign of the territorial robin and the window now un-draped ~ winter inches closer & the heat runs on & off, on & off, on & off

Today's draft process requires that we 'go round by Laura's house' a bit. (This is a saying in C.'s family for when his mother gets overly involved in telling a story and doesn't get straight to the point...I happen to love it when she does that, as I do it too, plus you get all kinds of bonus details.)

Yesterday, I sorted through the pile of loose papers that had grown and mutated over the course of the semester. Many of them went to the recycling bin as I couldn't remember why on earth I'd saved them. However, I found one print out of the rules for the Poetry Society of America awards. I've been a member of the PSA for years and have never taken advantage of the waived fee for members submitting for these awards.

While I still didn't enter any individual poems this year, I did decide to enter a group of the sickly speaker poems for the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for a manuscript in process. This led me to re-reading all 17 of the poems I've written so far, and to revise a few along the way. As I sorted through the poems and tried to come up with an order, I realized several things.

1) Writing these poems will require me to work more with a fiction writer's mind than I have done in the past, if I want to create a collection that tells the story of this speaker, which I think I do. I also think I want to tell the story over the course of a year, with the dates that head the epistolary poems as markers of this. Perhaps she will remain confined for the whole year or perhaps she will recover and return to her home and the poems will explore that as well. I'm not sure yet.

2) Most importantly, I need to work harder to distinguish the different women in her life. It is easy to note the doctors and nurses, and then there are the 'mystics' who are non-medical but associated with the hospital in some way. The two primary women are the mentor the speaker addresses in her letters and 'the woman [she] called mother by mistake.' In looking at the group of poems, I realized that I couldn't include the two poems about the pseudo-mother in the sample I sent b/c the readers would not have enough information to distinguish the two characters and I didn't want any confusion to taint their reading of the work.

As I went through my morning rituals today, I toyed with the idea of drafting a poem. It's 'break' time and I want to be productive, but I have to fight the inertia that tries to take over when I'm not on a schedule. It helped when I realized that I didn't draft anything on Friday. (How did that happen???) So, I went back over what I described above as I set about reading Quan Barry's Water Puppets. Since I haven't used the word banks much in the past few drafts, I didn't stop to write down words; I just let the poems wash over me. About five or six pages in, I read a phrase about the speaker being 'born again' (in a non-religious sense), and I started to mull that over with my speaker's situation. Pretty soon I had to put down the book and go to the page.

The draft begins:

When the fever shifts and loosens,

I understand absence, being born again

to solitude, the population of my hallucinations

elusive and in hiding.

What happens is that whenever the speaker 'wakes' from her fever, this is when she misses the mother figure in her life. So the poem is a way to provide some history and backstory about their relationship. As I scribbled in my journal the lines were all over the place and out of control. When I went to the computer, the lines immediately suggested this tercet form with each line slightly longer than the one that proceeds it in the stanza. It was weird how easily the poem drafted itself into this form. Rarely do I figure that out so quickly.

After I had the poem drafted, I went back to Barry's book for a suggestion of a title. I flipped to the last poem in the book, "ode," and found this line, "Thus refuge here in the blasted moonscape." When I first read it, I misread 'refuge' as 'refugee,' and I knew I'd found what I was looking for since my speaker is a bit of a refugee. No one visits her, no friends, no family. By the way, I figured this out because I had to write a paragraph of description when I entered the sample in the PSA contest. In any case, I rephrased the beginning of the sentence and came up with my title "Left a Refugee Here in a Sterile Country." This fits with the poem's focus on the pseudo-mother b/c she is the one who brought the speaker to the hospital.

From Science Photo Library, click for link

Well, my speaker refers to the doctors as 'whitecoats' not 'bluecoats,' but I love how these doctors seem to be peering down at the patient/specimen, which gets at the 'refugee' feeling.

I'm hopeful for more poems over the next three weeks and more time to read and be inspired. As ever, thanks for reading and keeping me company on this journey.

Break Dance, Break Out, Break Down, Break Through

2011-12-10T11:58:00.001-06:00

41º ~ brilliant sun aimed directly at the desk for the moment, one window draped with a sheet on the outside to stop a territorial robin from hurling himself against it (this morning's wake up call)

Today's title is brought to you by the Holiday Break. I turned in grades yesterday! Wahoo! Of course, I'll have things to do over the break, but I won't be "on" every single day as I am during the official semester. Wahoo! (Did I already say that?)

This morning was a morning for poetry business. I received an acceptance this past week and three or four rejections to go along with it. I was thrilled to the acceptance from Natural Bridge, the lit mag from the University of MO - St. Louis. Natural Bridge published the very first poem I had accepted while I was in grad school. While I can definitely tell I've come a long way from that poem, having it published at the national level provided an injection of confidence when it was sorely needed. Also, NB accepted "Cautionary Tale for Girls Kept Underground in Summer." After a long string of rejections for the fairy tale series, having blossombones pick up one two weeks ago, and now this acceptance, I feel more energy for that project. I'm going back over the remaining poems with the fine-toothed comb of revision. I already found several major changes needing to be made in some of the poems I felt really good about in August. It just goes to show that I do need to take more time; however, I think the rejections play a huge part in giving me the sharper sight to see the flaws.

On the heels of this revision and the recent rejections, I sent out some more poems this morning as well. Along the way, I found this gem in the New Letters' submission guidelines:

d) We encourage writers to create emphasis through word choice, placement, syntax and sentence pacing, instead of overuse of exclamation marks.

Hee Hee. I am definitely going to use this in my Creative Writing class in the spring, but I may also introduce it to my comp students as well. Sometimes they have to hear this kind of thing from an outside authority before they really believe me.

In other news, we had our first sticking snow this past week as well.

Sadly for C., the roads were fine and there was no snow day for his school. He gives finals next week, and then we can both enjoy the break together with the new cats, George & Gracie. Heaven!

Miscellany

2011-12-06T08:44:00.001-06:00

34º ~ winter is inching its way in here, our lows are in the upper 20s this week, highs in the upper 40s/lower 50s, overcast and dreary after two days of solid rain

There's a lot going on here at the desk of the Kangaroo and little of it is poetry related, although I did manage to devote Sunday to submitting some of the new poems.

To follow up on my new attempt to be better about reacting to positive rejections and requests to send more, here's a little story. In September I received a kind note from an editor at a journal I admire and in which I've appeared in the past. The editor expressed regret at not taking (quickly enough) several of the poems that had been withdrawn due to publication elsewhere, and rejected the last poem they had under consideration. She then asked me to send on something else. I finally got around to doing so on Sunday morning. At 8:18 p.m., I received a rejection for the group. This time, no personal note from the specific editor, but a general "good rejection" (requesting that I submit again) signed by "The Editors." So, it's three steps forward and two steps back. Nonetheless, I persevere.

In the meantime, the papers have arrived like the first snowfall, and I'm about to embark on several days of non-stop fun.

On a more serious note, my dad had surgery yesterday, and while the surgery itself went very well, he is having a hard time shaking off the effects of the anesthesia. We are hopeful that a few more hours will show more improvement. This is the first of two surgeries to implant the mechanics needed for Deep Brain Stimulation, one of the most promising treatments for Parkinson's Disease to date. Any healing thoughts will be appreciated.

In happier news, C. and I have returned to being cat people, adopting George and Gracie. These two cats are not siblings and are about four years apart in age; however, they were abandoned together 13 months ago on the steps of a local animal rescue group. They have been kept together at a foster home and needed to be adopted together, which may explain why they were still available a year later. They are soooooooo sweet and playful, although fairly skittish yet. We knew we wanted two cats, so this was perfect since they already knew each other and didn't have to go through that awkward period of cat adjustment.

I know, I know...this is NOT a cat blog, and not a family blog, but sometimes life interrupts poetry y'all and that is all there is to it.

George

Gracie

Draft Process: What Collects in the Dark Tunnels

2011-12-02T11:07:00.001-06:00

52º ~ brilliant slanting sun, very little wind, a few robins left over from the flock

After the Thanksgiving break, I was a bit shy about returning to the drafting process this morning, but that's to be expected. It's amazing to me how missing one week makes such a huge difference.

As I mentioned earlier this week, I've had an idea brewing about my sickly speaker. She has a fever of unknown origins and a difficult to diagnose disease that relates to her blood in some way. The procedure I wanted to include in a draft was a blood transfusion. I also ended up thinking about the bone marrow biopsy our cat went through as we tried to diagnose her disease. So, I kept playing with the ideas as I went through my morning routine.

Somewhere between the shower and breakfast, I remembered that I'd written about the coming winter in the last draft and the poem began to coalesce as the speaker commented on the ice on the window and the ache in her hip from where they collected a bone marrow sample.

The poem begins:

The cold has settled in, the window wreathed

in crystals sharp as the ache in the bone of my hip

where the whitecoat scooped the marrow.

It progresses to the fact that the transfusion is set to begin and the speaker speculates about how her health might improve based on this new development.

It alternates between couplets and single lines, and uses only a few words I gathered from Quan Barry's new book Water Puppets, which I just bought a few weeks ago. It turns out, again, that the poem was already percolating away and I didn't have to rely on the word bank for much. I suppose I am moving away from the process, which is fine. I'll take the poems any way they come. For the title, I did fish around in the book for some line that might work and came up empty. I did come across the phrase about a "dark trap where things collect" in the poem "de natura vincularum." That sparked what became the title of the draft as I thought about the veins and tubes associated with a blood transfusion: "What Collects in the Dark Tunnels."

This picture is from Science Photo Library (click image for link). It shows a woman getting a transfusion of goat's blood to treat tuberculosis. Here is the info:

Tuberculosis goat blood transfusion. This procedure was carried out by the French doctor Samuel Bernheim (1855-1915) and involved transfusing 150 to 200 grams of blood from the goat to the female patient. It was hoped that this would cure the tuberculosis, but transfusing animal blood into humans had been banned since the 17th century due to the procedures killing the patients. This is because the blood would not have been compatible. This scene was later the subject of a painting by Jules Adler. Artwork from the seventh volume (first period of 1891) of the French popular science weekly 'La Science Illustree'.

Uhm, yeah, my speaker gets human blood, no worries, but I love this image so I'm using it.

Quick Links as I Rush Out the Door

2011-11-29T08:26:00.001-06:00

41º ~ the clouds departed, the sun returned, still a cold, cold breeze ~ a massive flock of robins populates the backyard

As a follow up to yesterday's link, here are two more that talk about the submission process and teach me something new along the way.

links from Science Photo Library

1) Traci Brimhall talks from the poet's perspective of submitting on Her Circle: "Hazards of the Passion: What I've Learned About Submissions." New piece of information: remember to thank the editors when the issue comes out. I'm pretty good about expressing my gratitude when I get the acceptance, but I don't always remember to say 'thanks' when the issue comes out.

2) Diane Lockward talks from the editor's perspective on her blog, Blogalicious: "What I Learned as an Editor." Diane served as the guest editor for the first issue of Adanna, and I am indebted to her for including two of my poems there. Favorite bit from this blog, one poet submitted 96 poems. I've made some mistakes in the past, but I have to say, I haven't over-submitted to that extent.

Finally, the AWP Conference Schedule is up and this year they have an interactive tool that allows you to form your personal schedule. Cool. Check out F114. That's me, reading with Robert Wrigley, Nicole Cooley, Tim Seibles, and Daniel Khalastchi, as we represent Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum's wonderful Poem of the Week. Holy Moly! I might pass out from admiration of my fellow panelists. (I'll also be reading with the diode and Barn Owl Review folks on Friday night. More details to follow.) Wahoo!!!

I'm off to the grading salt mines. See y'all on the other side.

Welcome to Rush Week, and I Don't Belong to Any Sororities, My Friends

2011-11-28T07:40:00.001-06:00

33º ~ coldest morning so far by my count, a high of only 45º on the horizon, then 50s for the rest of the week, still soggy from all the rain but only solid cloud cover today

The Arkansas River on a cloudy Thanksgiving in Little Rock

So, it is rush week for me and I'm not sure how much I'll be posting here, but I hope to be back on Friday with a draft. We had my parents in town for Thanksgiving, which accounts for the absence of a draft this past week. I've got an idea bubbling away about the sickly speaker. Much of her story began with our cat, LouLou, and her incredibly difficult to diagnose disease, which involved fevers and lots of drawn blood. So, while the sickly speaker is NOT LouLou, is in fact human and with a whole host of other issues, there's a particular procedure I'd like to use from LouLou's experience. Shhhhhhh. Don't jinx it. Check back on Friday.

The rush of this week is that it is the last week of classes and next week = finals. That means I'm about to be buried under a slew of papers, some already waiting for me to begin grading this morning. There will also be one exam that needs to be written. Unlike the end of the spring semester when the summer stretches out before me and I don't even think about the next semester's classes, at the end of the fall semester, I'm already preparing my January syllabi so that I can get a bit of my own personal work done over the "break." That word is in quotes because there won't actually be a break. I'll be working on classes, the reading series, and the journal throughout my time off. I'm thankful to have a job doing something I enjoy doing and which I can often do in my pajamas in my home office.

As I rush off to work this morning, Dear Kangaroo Readers, I want to pass on this link from Tara Mae Mulroy's blog Poetry and Effrontery. She offers some great advice about the submission process from not only the point of view of the writer but also the point of view of the editor, particularly the graduate student editor. After over a decade of doing the business of submissions, I thought I had it all figured out. Still, there is more to learn. Two things that stuck out to me. 1) If you get a personal rejection that is unsigned, consider photocopying it and including it in your return submission, as most of the staff know each other's handwriting. 2) If you get a request to submit again, do so immediately.

I know I've heard that last one before but I guess I need to be hit over the head with a two by four to get there. THANKS, TARA MAE!!!

Thankful for Some Good Poetry News

2011-11-23T10:31:00.001-06:00

52º ~ eerie white cloud cover, a sparrow scratching in the leaves on the neighbor's roof, the world still damp after two days of flooding, interstate-closing rains, our cycles now seem to be drought or flood, drought or flood, I worry for the planet

I've been AWOL from the desk of the kangaroo as the semester hits light speed. We had a big meeting Monday morning for a committee working on an NEH grant. I'm thankful to be working with a great group of folks and I'm thankful that this one isn't my baby. It's huge! Half of my students are in the midst of turning in research papers (due by midnight tonight), and the other half (the comp students) will be turning in their final papers in another week or so. I'm using Thanksgiving to gird my loins for the onslaught of comma splices and fragments, but also to build up some energy to celebrate the great papers as well.

While I've been swamped with grant-writing, quiz-grading, and paper-collecting, some good news has arrived from the poetry world.

Mossy rock near Heber Spring, AR (my photo)

1. I received a grant from the Sally A. Williams Artist Fund at the Arkansas Arts Council to help defray costs for AWP. It won't cover the whole amount, but it will help out in a major way, as I have no funding from PTC this year. I met Sally when I was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship in 2007, and I know the Arts Council lost a true gift when Sally passed away a few years ago. Her family and friends used part of her estate to create this wonderful opportunity, and I'm more than thankful to have qualified this year.

2. Six weeks ago or so, Jeremy Schraffenberger, one of the editors of North American Review emailed me about some poems of mine he'd read in another publication. He inquired about my sending on anything new I might be working on. Through this exchange, two exciting things happened. First, NAR accepted "Having Been Outside the Body," the first of my sickly speaker poems to find a home. And second, in our email exchange, I let Jeremy know that I was from Waterloo, IA, the twin city of Cedar Falls, IA, where NAR is housed at the University of Northern Iowa. In the end, the gracious folks at UNI invited me to do a reading on campus in March, and I am thrilled to do so.

As most of you may know NAR is AWESOME, but it is also the oldest literary magazine in the US, founded in Boston in 1815. Wow. I just lost my mind for a minute there. I was totally oblivious to this great treasure while I grew up within a stone's throw of its home. When I learned about it years later, you can bet I was kicking myself.

All of this proves that getting the work out there (and doing the hard work of drafting & revision first) matters. That there are other people out there reading the work and that magical connections can happen this way. I have no fancy connections to the movers and shakers of the po-biz world, and in this case, it didn't matter. The work mattered. Yay for poetry and yay for poets & editors!

3. This week, George David Clark, who has taken over as Poetry Editor at 32 Poems, as John Poch passes the torch, accepted "The Ashes of My Familiar," the second of the sickly speaker poems. This is super exciting since these poems are a departure from my old familiar Midwest poems and super exciting because I love 32 Poems with a mad passion.

In the way of explaining po-biz for any emerging writers out there, I first worked with GDC when we was a grad student and poetry editor of Meridian, another favorite journal of mine, and he accepted a poem of mine. GDC and I have crossed paths since then at AWP and we've kept track of each other and our work.

4. Finally, yesterday, Susan Slaviero, who is doing amazing things at blossombones, an online journal that features work about the female experience (although not limited to female writers as far as I understand), took "The Contents of Our Tales," the opening poem in my series of Midwest fairy tales. Again, I'm thrilled by this. In part I'm thrilled because the fairy tales have not soared out into the world in the way I imagined they might. Several people mentioned there being a kind of blacklist against fairy tale poems and I guess I've seen some of that, or maybe, not all of the poems are as strong as they need to be. I'll be checking to see if more revision is in order before sending them on their way again.

**I am not naming these editors for the sake of name-dropping. Let's face it, this is the poetry world. Nobody outside our circles knows or cares who these people are. I'm naming names because the whole thing seemed such a mystery to me when I started submitting work and I had to forge my own way through this mystery. I want this blog to offer a bit of light for those beginning writers who still feel in the dark about how it all works. Also, I'm naming these people because editors are often left out of the "let's celebrate this publication of mine" moment and without them, without their reading and reading and reading through the piles of submissions, the publication wouldn't happen at all!

***Keeping it real, I also recorded several rejections over the last few weeks, just to keep the old ego in check!

Draft Process: Over Which a Feast Weight Passes

2011-11-18T08:53:00.001-06:00

38º ~ one of the coldest nights so far for the season, but a warming trend through Tuesday, bright sun today, the remaining leaves fluttering like torn flags on the stripped branches

Well, she's done it again, Dear Reader. My sickly speaker got so insistent that I kept running into the office to scratch out her words while I was trying to make the coffee.

The prelude: Last night, I did remind myself that I had time and space to write this morning, but I didn't really fixate/focus on drafting at that point. As I was going through my morning routine, I did think about where the speaker might be today and what she might be thinking about. Since this whole set of poems began with the idea of a fever and an illness that escaped diagnosis, the fever tends to come up a lot. This morning I was thinking back to the previous drafts and trying to remember what the speaker has had to say so far. I wondered if I needed to re-read all the other drafts before I started.

Uhm, no.

One of the earliest drafts I wrote included a reference to the speaker's meals of rare meat and red wine (an allusion to "The Yellow Wallpaper" that I couldn't avoid/resist). Then, a later draft featured a "thinning diet" of a "thin slip of soup" and "a thimble" of either wine or water (I can't remember without looking the draft up). So, I was thinking about food, I guess, and the speaker arrived with this:

Two days after the fever breaks,
they return with plats of meat.

Fat & juice congeal on the plate.
The wine has been replaced.

from Creativecommons.org (click for link)

After I got the coffee brewed and got to the desk, I went straight to the computer and typed out the lines I'd scratched into the journal. It seems I've moved away from word banks and clustering. The poems build themselves more slowly as I have to search the dictionary of my own brain/life to find the best words, but that's the real work, isn't it? I suppose I'm glad to move away from the word banks a bit, although I still believe in their power to propel me onto the page without any dilly-dallying.

Just counting the lines, I see today's draft matches Wednesday's: 22 lines, all in couplets. Hmmm, when is form a crutch? Something to watch for. Did I cut this poem off too soon? I confess, that when I reached a certain point on the screen I started thinking about how to "wrap it up," although I want to avoid the trite epiphany endings. Endings are also a bit different now that I know there is a series of these poems in the works. There is more of a sense that the ideas of the poem may continue to evolve in different patterns and progressions, so I don't have to try to say everything about this speaker all at once. For me, these are strange times.

To the title: I admit that I thought about going to my mainstay, Lucie Brock-Broido and mining her work again for the title. However, laziness overcame me and I stayed rooted in the chair. (In an organizational fit, I shelved a bunch of books yesterday, so nothing was in reach. Yes, if I lean over, I can just touch the edge of the book case, so it's only two steps away, but the chair was so sure beneath me and the electric heater is aimed right at my feet. You understand.) In any case, I decided to try my hand at a title that would fit with the others and hit at the illness-altered state of the speaker's mind. Who knows if it will stick.

I think now, I will need to print out all of the sickly speaker poems and see what's what.

Until the next installment, then.

Draft Process: Inside, the Ice Assembles

2011-11-16T08:32:00.001-06:00

60º ~ the rain continued into the early hours of this morning ~ as far as I understand it, this is going to be one of those days where the temperature falls throughout the day ~ lows tonight in the mid 30s ~ the wind continues to stir the trees

No, the calendar has not leaped ahead to Friday, constant Reader. I am simply off schedule as noted at the end of last week. This morning as I woke up, my sickly speaker came to the forefront of my mind and stayed there. After I read the blogs, I glanced down and saw the copy of Mary Oliver's American Primitive, still open on the desk from yesterday's post. I read another of my favorite poems from the book, "Ghosts," which is about the near extinction of the American bison during the 19th century and the cost of that excessive hunt.

I was not planning on writing a poem today, I confess. I put the book down and wondered how different a poem I might write if I gathered words from Oliver instead of Lucie Brock-Broido. They are as different as night and day in diction. Then, without even thinking about it, I heard my sickly speaker's voice. She said, "They say the seasons are turning." And Poof! I grabbed my journal and the poem began itself. It did not pour out of me whole, but I got a great start. I should also say that between blogs and Facebook, I've taken note that friends in more northern climes are commenting now about snow more regularly. That matters to the poem. It begins:

The nurses say the seasons are turning.
I see little but one squat square of sky.

On days when the fever lets loose of me,
I notice now the gathering clouds, the way

their weight is shifting toward snow.

Frost appears in the poem, too. (click for link)

It goes on in couplets, as most of the poems in this series go, for 22 lines. I had been wondering about the speaker making progress in her battle against this undiagnosable illness, but that wasn't to be today. She has more to say about being sick.

I've also been chaffing a bit at the fact that the speaker is contained within this hospital (asylum?) and thus there's not a lot of the natural world in the poems. In some ways, today's draft speaks to that as well. The speaker identifies with and yearns for the natural world but cannot reach it due to her illness.

For the title, I did return to Brock-Broido, to her book, Trouble in Mind. I found the phrase "Inside, the ice assembles" in the poem "After Raphael," and it works perfectly for this poem about the coming of winter and the state of the speaker's body & mind.

As for Friday, well who knows now what will happen. I may return to my "schedule," or I may not. It's that nearing-the-end-of-the-semester, oh-my-the-HOLIDAYS-are-here time of year so anything goes.

Poetry & Grief

2011-11-15T08:33:00.001-06:00

61º ~ the rain it does rain down, steady mostly, with sudden bursts of bucketfuls ~ that carpet of crunchy leaves on the lawn? now a sodden blanket

On Sunday, a friend of mine from college was by his mother's bedside as she breathed her last breath. Over the past several years, I've kept up with her battle against cancer via Facebook updates and a few personal emails & letters along the way. What I know is that this woman cherished her life and her family & friends and she was cherished in return.

Today, I need to post this Mary Oliver poem for my friend, G., and for all of us. It has helped me through so much, and it is one of the first poems that made me want to be a poet.

In Blackwater Woods

Look, the trees

are turning

their own bodies

into pillars

of light,

are giving off the rich

fragrance of cinnamon

and fulfillment,

the long tapers

of cattails

are bursting and floating away over

the blue shoulders

of the ponds,

and every pond,

no matter what its

name is, is

nameless now.

Every year

everything

I have ever learned

in my lifetime

leads back to this: the fires

and the black river of loss

whose other side

is salvation,

whose meaning

none of us will ever know.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Mary Oliver

from American Primitive, 1983


from creativecommons.org

Artistic Obessions: The Horizon

2011-11-14T14:08:00.001-06:00

80º ~ hold on, friends and fans of the Kangaroo, there's been a wicked wind blowing for three days now and it seems to have an unlimited supply of energy, stripping the trees to about 30%, the yards are carpets of brown and yellow crunchy leaves, a fat storm to the west should usher in cooler temps tomorrow

I keep this picture on the side of the file cabinet at my writing desk. It was taken in the summer of '78 and my grandmother's inscription on the back states that I'm with Bonnie, probably one of the last ponies or horses that she and my grandfather kept on the farm.

I'm glad the details are fuzzy with age, although I did play with the color a bit as the surface has faded over time.

Why am I showing you this off-center pose? Because I've been thinking about what obsesses me and how those obsessions bleed through into my poems and deeper still how those obsessions began. Sometimes, when I do a reading or look at the manuscript I'm currently sending out, I get a bit shame-faced about recurring words / images. Then, I look more closely and try to be sure I'm earning those repetitions. Handling the patterns correctly builds cohesion; overuse or repetition without expansion build boredom. With revision, the shame fades and confidence returns.

What I noticed the other day was my fixation on the horizon. For anyone who isn't from the Midwest / Plains and wonders why my work is so full up with that demarcation line, I hope this picture informs you a little bit. Living in the South as I do now, I miss being able to see for miles and miles and miles. I miss the pure power of a wind that gathers strength uninterrupted (although we are getting a hint of it down here today). I miss the sunsets that stretched and stretched and stretched across my field of vision.

When C. and I were visiting Iowa a few years back, he commented on the lack of trees, and I was stunned. Couldn't he see that grove over there? Couldn't he appreciate the way those pines were planted to stop the wind from eroding the field we were driving past? Of course he could; however, down here in Arkansas, we live among the pines and hard wood forests of the southern edge of the Ozarks. (Timber is a huge industry, especially in the county where C was raised.) We both love trees it turns out, only I love them as individuals or in small groups and he loves them on a grand scale.

In any case, back to the horizon. How do these obsessions form? That's material for a psychological study, I suppose, but I do remember being fascinated with that distance even as a child, that sense that I could walk or ride for hours and not reach what I was seeing in the distance. And in that distance, anything at all might happen. There were no real boundaries, no sense of being closed in, which seems a bit frightening now that I think about it. I was nothing but a tiny dot on the landscape, even with the heft of Bonnie beneath me. On the other hand, with that distance all around me, I'd surely see any threat with enough warning to high-tail it home as well. Maybe that's what I miss most of all, the ability to be on the lookout for danger without having to build a fire tower to do so.

Finally, here's a Wordle of the weather manuscript so you can see my other obsessions. (MOM: Sorry that "dead" and "mother" are right next to each other. I promise, it's not that kind of book!)

Placeholder

2011-11-12T09:06:00.001-06:00

50º ~ the leaves are changing daily, the Japanese maple deepens to a brick red tone, clouds show off the colors best

Today's post is a bit of a placeholder. There's no draft process this week. On Wednesday night/Thursday morning a cold/flu bug got the best of me and I was down for the count until midday yesterday. Then, the papers that have been lingering here needing grading got the priority.

True confession, Dear Reader, I'm just a little burned out, singed around the edges and needing a bit of a break from poetry.

I've been thinking about that old Nike ad: "There is no finish line." I get the inspiration behind that, and I've been thinking about it in terms of poetry. Yes, I'm frustrated because book #2 hasn't found a home and I've moved on to book #3, and I just keep writing poem after poem because, hey, that's what I do; I can't stop doing it. However, there is a tiny voice (that corrosive, eroding voice) that questions why I continue to sweat over the page when the finish line eludes me. I guess I need the weekend to slap some duct tape across the mouth of my internal doubter.

I am not writing this because I seek encouragement or comfort. I write it because the goal of this blog is to be real, to be honest about what the writing life is all about for me. Sometimes it's not all happy, happy, joy, joy, 'fun with words,' party time. Sometimes, it's trying to drag the plow through the hardest, most drought-stricken topsoil in the hope that the weather will turn in my favor at the end of a hard day's work.

Until then, here are a few pictures from the neighborhood from last week. The colors are even more saturated now.

Reflections on Building a Reading Series

2011-11-09T08:09:00.000-06:00

50º ~ bright, clean sun after a squall line of thunderstorms ushered in a cold front last evening, a bit of wind leftover yet

Last night was our third and final event in the Big Rock Reading Series for the semester. We had a smallish crowd, but a wonderful event. I'll spend the next few weeks mulling over some of the information gathered and lessons learned, but I wanted to share a bit that's surfaced already.

It's all about the audience. Of course, I want to hear the readers no matter how many people are in the audience, but now that I'm in charge of planning the events, I feel an extra pressure to be sure there are others there to share the joy.

In particular, since we are a community college, we are trying to reach a group of students who often don't even know what a reading is before we bring it up in class. We do an audience survey at each event, and the participants identify whether they are students, faculty, staff, from another college/university, or from the community at large. In this way, we can zero in on responses from our students. Overwhelmingly, the students who do attend have wonderful things to say, often including a comment about this being their first time at such an event and their desire to hear more.

When I began planning the series, I scheduled each of the events for this fall on a Tuesday night, the second Tuesday of each month to be exact. I was following the footsteps of a lot of other monthly activities in the area, thinking to build a sort of muscle memory. However, this backfired a bit last night. You see, we have had classes come and attend the two previous readings, and that was great. However, it is hard for any instructor to give up three evening classes (or parts of them) over the course of one semester. I'm pretty sure using a Tuesday and a Thursday next spring will serve us better. We are also considering doing one daytime event, which will draw in participation from those daytime classes. This kind of shifting of the schedule goes against my experience with other reading series, but it is important to be flexible and adaptable, as is the case with most things in life.

Of course, we are also striving to build a relationship with our community, central Arkansas, and the lovers of literature living here. I know they are out there. Here is where our location hurts us a bit, I think. We are not hard to find, but we are a bit isolated perhaps, surrounded almost entirely by homes and apartments. It is not like going to a reading at a bookstore or at one of the other colleges in the area, where there are restaurants, shops, and bars in abundance within a stone's throw. One suggestion has already been made to form a partnership with either the local library, which is more centrally located, or another business and do one of the readings per semester off campus. That is something to think about as a way to bridge the gap.

Overall, while the series requires time, sweat, and a lot of help from a lot of other people, I'm so happy that we have launched ours to such success, and I hope we can grow and improve in the coming months.

Finally, here is a shot from last night. The reading featured two current MFA candidates from the U of Arkansas MFA program. We are hoping to do one reading per year with the program as a way of offering a reading experience to the writers and to educate our students about the ways they can make writing a part of their lives. Corrie Williamson read some amazing poems that left the crowd breathless. Then, Kaj Anderson-Bauer kept us enthralled with a story about an imagined afterlife set in a place a lot like North Dakota. Ben Nickol, a recent fiction graduate from the U of A came along to cheer on Corrie & Kaj. I love my people!

L to R: Ben Nickol, Corrie Williamson, & Kaj Anderson-Bauer

Saving Daylight

2011-11-07T07:49:00.000-06:00

57º ~ 75º highs in the forecast for today and tomorrow, then a cold front brings us back in line

I understand all of the arguments for daylight savings time and moving clocks back and forth. What I know is that it was easier to wake up at the right time today because the sky was lightening again when the alarm went off, after weeks of darkness. It does make me wonder how much exhaustion occurs from forcing the body to live outside of the sun's own time.

It's that time of the semester (week 12 begins today) when we are all just putting one foot in front of the other, clinging to every holiday advertisement, not for the joy of gift-giving and mouth-stuffing, but because once the holidays hit, we know it will all be over. We are at that point in the marathon when the body is all machine and the brain something we drag along behind us.

Yes, there are papers waiting to be graded. Yes, I took the day off yesterday. It was necessary.

On a bright note (hello daylight!), tomorrow night we cap off the Big Rock Reading Series for the semester. Wahoooo!

Draft Process: We Live in Black & White

2011-11-04T11:38:00.002-05:00

50º ~ the autumnal blusters are upon us, complete with gray hovering skies

The story of today's draft is convoluted. Wednesday night, I fought the insomnia beast at 2 a.m. and my mind went wandering to my sickly speaker. Caught in the lethargy of exhaustion, I failed to get out of bed and write down what was happening, but I remembered it well enough Thursday and had it at the back of my mind this morning.

What happened in the night was this. The speaker started talking about how "the woman [she] called mother by mistake" came to visit her. The poem spun out from there. As I was getting ready to write this morning, I started with that, but something about the situation kept bugging me. Finally, I pulled out the draft from last week and took a look. Sure enough, there was a kind of separation in that draft and a sense that this woman would not be visiting, even though she is the person who admitted the speaker to this hospital/asylum. There is also a sense that the doctors (whitecoats in the speaker's language) want to get blood from the woman in the mistaken sense that she and the speaker are related. The speaker feels a need to protect her, this pseudo-mother.

So, I scratched that beginning and started over with the idea of the pseudo-mother, for lack of a better title, sending anonymous gifts to the sickly speaker, anonymous to remain hidden from the whitecoats. What struck me about all of this is that writing a series of linked poems like this means I have to take some elements of fiction into account in terms of plot and character if I want them to hold together as a whole, and I think I do.

More and more, the speaker wants an audience, and some of the earlier poems take the epistolary form to solve this. Today, I needed for her to be able to tell someone about these gifts, so she writes a letter to "Dear Madame," her mentor, which is where the whole series began back in August. Today's draft begins:

Dear Madame--

Be on your guard. There are secrets here
which I will seal with glue & string.

The woman I called mother by mistake
sends me gifts addressed by an anonymous hand.

For clarity, the mentor-figure and the mother-figure are two separate women, and while I first thought that only the mentor-figure was of great importance to the speaker, I now see that the mother-figure is, perhaps, equally important.

As for the process of the draft, after I scratched out the false start, I did turn back to Lucie Brock-Broido for some word gathering. However, I've switched to Trouble in Mind. I didn't need to gather as many words this time, but I did still go through and look for a title. The phrase "We live in black & white" comes from her poem "Physicism." This worked for the draft given the correspondence by letters and the fact that one of the gifts the speaker receives is a series of photos, and while they aren't mentioned to be black & white photos in the poem, they could be.

Some Poetry for You (and it's FREE)

2011-11-02T08:43:00.001-05:00

46º~ gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous: repeat until tired of sweet sun that doesn't broil and blue skies that go all the way up

Today, I have some poetry I've fallen in love with to share with you. Say what you will about online journals, I love them. I love the ease with which I can share the work I love, and yes, I'm always careful to include attribution; I am, if nothing else, a teacher of composition and research skills through and through.

~~~~~

First, the most excellent poet Carolyn Guinzio (a friend of mine) and Stephenie Foster (new to me) have started a journal for women poets and artists: Yew: A Journal of Innovative Writing and Images by Women. While my style remains a bit more mainstream, I have been inspired by the first issue (3 pieces per month, 12 months a year...cool!). Check out work by Laynie Browne, Andrea Baker, and Doro Boehme. To top things off, I LOVE their logo.

~~~~~

Next, another Browne poet, this time Susan Browne, whose poem "Too Poetic" is up this week at Linebreak, another favorite online journal. Check out this gorgeous poem that includes this nugget:

"I won’t say a thing about the V of geese rising
above the chain-link fence, their calls

sounding exactly like nuns keening...."

~~~~~

Last, here's a poem from Heidi Lynn Staples, "Things Between Themselves," distributed by Poets.org in their email daily dose of poetry. I can't quote from this one because the lines I want to quote are the closing couplet and you really need to read your way down to them to get the full THWACK as they knock you backwards off your chair.

The Only Poet who Doesn't Like Halloween

2011-10-31T08:32:00.000-05:00

42º ~ near perfect weather predicted all week, highs around 70º, a little rain perhaps midweek, ahhhh autumn in Arkansas, what we wait for during the broiling months

This morning I have a little poetry news to report and then an explanation, of sorts, about my apathy for Halloween.

First, I spent my writing time this weekend polishing off the fellowship application I wrote about a week and a half ago. Wow, time slips by so quickly. I'm glad I started early. The deadline for this opportunity is November 15th, but I try to practice what I preach with my students and avoid the procrastination blues. I'm glad I did, since letting the draft sit for 10 days and then overnight after revisions on Friday, showed me two typos on Saturday morning, both missing words. It really is true that when you read over something you've written, your brain fills in the blanks. For me, I have to read out loud and sssslllllloooooooowwwwwwllllly to discover my errors. My students can attest that I sometimes don't take this kind of time with assignment details! So, on Saturday morning, I did the final touch-ups and then hit 'send.' I LOVE being able to apply and submit online, saving me time for the real work of the writer, reading, writing, and revising.

Second, I have a new poem out today in Waccamaw, Dan Albergotti's fabulous journal. You can read "Cautionary Tale of Girls and Birds of Prey" along with many other fine poems and some great fiction, essays, and interviews as well. Check it out!

And third, a brief explanation of why I don't like Halloween. The costumes. It's all about the costumes. When you are a creative type, people expect great things from you on Halloween. If you doubt me, just cruise through the blogosphere or over to Facebook and check out the pictures posted from Halloween parties that occurred this weekend. The costumes are amazing and witty and intricate and unique. I just don't have it in me. I think this may also be linked to my avoidance of performing in any type of theater production. My creativity just doesn't extend to 'becoming someone / something else' in the flesh and I always feel heaps of self-judgment when I try. No, I'm more comfortable staying at home and dishing out the candy to the munchkins. That's where you'll find me tonight.

by Joe Lercio, via creativecommons.org

Boo!

Draft Process: Tongueless, I Conjur Her at Will

2011-10-28T09:26:00.002-05:00

46º ~ some grayness to the beginning of this day, leftover clouds from yesterday's rain should clear shortly, the intensity of autumn is upon us, wearing new thick flanneled pants and a sweatshirt, the electric heater kicks on and off

Wow! I'm thrilled with today's draft process, Dear Reader. (I confess, a crowing opening like this scares the humble Midwesterner within.) Still, it was a breakthrough kind of day.

As I puttered through my morning routine and saw C. out the door, I was thinking of drafting and thinking of my sickly speaker, wondering if she had more to say. Yes, indeed. As I waited for the coffee to brew I started wondering how the speaker wound up in the hospital/asylum where she now lives. Hmmmmmmm. Then, shazam. I had a line: "My mother brought me here."

I ran into the office to jot it down in the journal, and as I wrote, I realized that the speaker doesn't have a mother. (Just that instant knowledge about the character rang true.) And I remembered a poem I wrote a while back, "Body Sewn Together with Twine and a Dull Needle," which appears in The Collagist. In that poem the speaker talks about "a woman [she] called mother by mistake," and I knew I had my answer.

The opening of the draft now looks like this:

A woman I called mother by mistake
brought me here when the fever

made me shiver even in a scalding bath.
The water lapped the edges, spilled ...

Slowly, it has been dawning on me that while this series about the sickly speaker began in August, I have, in fact, written several precursor poems pointing in this direction. The above mentioned poem in The Collagist is one. Another is "Lament at the End of a Long Convalescence" recently published by Connotation Press. This makes me wonder if there are others. I will have to review some older material and see.

Now, I arrived at the "whole draft" pretty quickly today, and the breakthrough was that I didn't rely on a word bank or reading to get inspiration. Once I had that spark while standing in front of the coffee maker, I was on my way. It was interesting, though, I did keep reminding myself to use the dense, rich, intricate language of Lucie Brock-Broido, and to keep reaching for the truth about the speaker. The poem took a few wrong turns, but I think I was able to identify them fairly well. Time will tell, of course.

When it came time for a title, I tried to come up with one on my own to no avail. Since I've made the practice of using bits of lines from others (mostly L B-B), the titles all have a similar feel. I tried on several of my own making and was not happy. Going back through my notes, I realized that I had used Rilke's Poems from the Book of Hours once and I returned to it. After much searching, I finally seized on a line from "Put out my eyes, and I can see you still," "and tongueless, I can conjure you at will." Rilke's book is a meditation in conversation with God, which actually works fairly well with my speaker, even though she is not concerned with God. She is, however, in conversation with people who are not with her, so the meditative quality and the lack of response parallels Rilke. In any case, I changed the line a bit and came up with this: "Tongueless, I Conjure Her at Will."

I do have one worry about the draft. As many readers know, there are previous drafts in which the speaker communicates with her mentor, who is a woman. Right now, I see that mentor as distinctly different from this new woman who has entered the narrative. Given that I'm not naming anyone, if this "pseudo-mother" remains, I may have to work to distinguish the two. This is also problematic because they aren't with the speaker, so their own voices aren't present and distinct. Hmmmmmm.

Oh, and there are chrysanthemums in the poem, so I thought I'd show you all a picture of the mums I planted a few weeks ago. Here is a moment when my life helped with my art. After I planted the mums and the blooms all opened beautifully, I couldn't resist running my hand over the flowers. When I brought my hand away, I smelled the scent of the mums on my fingers and was amazed at the intensity. I had either forgotten their smell or never taken the time to notice it before. In a totally organic way, the flowers and their scent fit perfectly into today's draft, and if I hadn't taken that moment in the sun with those blooms, it might not have happened. Wow!

Until the next time, be happy, be well.

Pounding the Pavement for Poetry

2011-10-27T08:34:00.005-05:00

55º ~ the high today only 57º, always struck by those days when the temperature begins near its high and sinks, rain in the offing, 'spooky' weather

Yesterday, I was not at the desk of the Kangaroo because I was 'pounding the pavement for poetry' as I told my boss. One of my goals at school for this year has been to increase our creative writing program.

These are not my feet. Courtesy of creativecommons.org

Program may not be the best word here, since we are a community college and do not have an official program in creative writing per se. However, our school has grown in leaps and bounds in terms of numbers enrolled and we have about a 70% base of students who plan to transfer to one of our state's four-year institutions. Creative writing fits into their plan as a humanities elective that will help them in that transfer. However, many of our students have had little experience with creative writing and are unaware of what an introductory workshop class entails. I really believe that a lack of knowledge leads many of them to choose Intro to Music, Intro to Theatre, Intro to Visual Arts, etc. instead of Creative Writing I. Notice that even the title of the class is "different." (Caveat: I love all of those other intro classes and mean no disrespect!)

Our entire division (fine arts & humanities) set out on a quest to increase our visibility on campus last year (2010 - 2011) and to increase the knowledge among students about the electives we offer. With the transient population of a community college what this means is an on-going information blitz.

In doing my part yesterday, I went to the different ENGL classes (Comp I, Comp II, and World Lit) being offered on MWF between 9 and noon to spread the word about my offerings for spring 2012. I'm on the schedule to teach Intro to Poetry and Creative Writing I on MWF, and I want those classes to make. If history is any indicator, the creative writing class should be fine; however, we need to get some buzz going about the Intro to Poetry course. I taught it online last spring and had a great time but want to see if we can make it work as an on campus class as well. Technically, this is an 'academic' course involving the study of poetics and including a research paper; however, I also allow students to workshop their own work if they would like.

It was fun to get to pitch the classes, and I am thankful my boss groups all the ENGL classes on the same floor of the same building so I wasn't running up and down the stairs/hills of campus. As one might expect from gen-ed classes, the majority of the students were underwhelmed by my presentation. Yet...yet, in each group there were those two or three people whose eyes lit up, whose body language changed, whose hands reached up for the offered fliers I brought. All this makes me eager to see what waits for me in the spring!

And tomorrow, I have a blissfully clear calendar for drafting day! Wahoo!

Improved Lighting Reading Photo Recap

2011-10-24T08:04:00.000-05:00

54º ~ amazing fog cover out there this morning, shrouded leaves and gray light

I had an amazing time in Fayetteville Saturday night at the Improved Lighting Reading Series, held at Nightbird Books on Dickson Street. I was fortunate to read with three other lovely & amazing writers: Tony Presley, Amanda Auchter, and Mark Spitzer.

Matt & Kaveh, co-founders of the series

Amanda

surprise visit from beautiful niece Katie!

Tony not only writes, he sings & plays, too!

Matt puts a hex on the crowd

Matt introduces me

me (thanks Laura!)

Mark

Draft Process: The Ashes of My Familiar

2011-10-21T09:54:00.002-05:00

45º ~ beautiful slanting light, harder to get out of bed in the mornings as the sun rises later and later, a gentle teasing of the leaves all there is to show for wind

This morning as I puttered through my habits, I kept the idea of drafting a poem at the forefront of my mind. I mulled over my sickly speaker, trying to find out if she had more to say. As I mulled I realized that to continue working with the same speaker, there would need to be some new development in her situation. I also realized that, eventually, she would have to get better or die, I suppose.

This brought up the fact of Lou-Lou's death a few week's ago. Some of you may remember that these poems began in response to all of our trips to the vet these past few months, translating from veterinary medicine into human medicine as a way of working through.

So, I was wondering about death and my speaker, and it dawned on me that someone could die in the same institution and she could comment on it.

Having done all of this pre-thinking, meant that my normal word gathering business was skewed a bit. I did read some Lucie Brock-Broido, but this time, just the notes section from The Master Letters, and I did collect some words. However, since I knew what direction I wanted the poem to go, the words suggested lines much earlier in the process, so I gathered fewer words than usual. Given this shift in process, the poem came out much more sporadically and involved much more crossing out of lines.

I find this interesting and am trying not to judge which is the 'better' process.

As I drafted, I began with the death of a woman down the hall from the speaker. This morphed into the woman in the next room, and finally, came to rest with the death of the woman housed in the speaker's room before her, her "pretty predecessor" as she says int he draft. The poem, in couplets again, begins:

Another woman kept this room before me,
I am sure. There is a husk of her temper yet

that rides the air. When I breathe in the burnt
remains, a strengthening returns. Rest assured,

A glass-making furnace in lieu of a crematorium, click for link

With this draft, I did not have a title pre-selected from a line from a L. B-B. poem. Instead, the poem took several twists and turns (a few of them wrong and needing correction) as the relationship between the speaker and her predecessor developed. Here, I had to struggle against "The Yellow Wallpaper" again, as I didn't want to repeat Charlotte Perkins Gilman's amazing work. Still, that story is embedded in my DNA (a result of repetitive teaching), so it bubbles up into my work.

Once I had the draft in some form with what I felt had an opening, middle, and closing, I turned back to L. B-B. in search of a title. Since I've titled the first dozen poems in this way, I felt compelled to do so again. In "Rampion" (mentioned last week), I found the line "One day I will be buried with the ashes of my familiars." I cut that down to "The Ashes of My Familiar," and hopefully the poem will show that the familiar is not of the animal variety but the human one. Still, I think I may have zeroed in on that line as a result of Lou-Lou's death and cremation. That is how my life finds its way into my art. So be it.

Asking the World for Money: Or, Poets as Orphans

2011-10-19T09:01:00.003-05:00

45º ~ our highs won't get out of the 50s today ~ heat on briefly this morning, A/C on two days ago ~ bright sun today after the day and a half of rain & clouds ~ the world cleansed

What I've been doing this morning is probably my least favorite activity of being a poet, even beneath recording rejections. Today, I've been working on a fellowship application; in other words, I'm about to ask the world for money to help support my art.

This particular fellowship is open to writers of any genre and it has caused me to really think about the position of poets in practical terms. For one thing, the application asks about advances received. Ahem, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, etc., ... probably not applying for this fellowship. Still, the question applies for the prose writers out there applying. For this question, I crafted an answer about why such a thing doesn't exist for most poets.

In crafting that answer, I realized that in my day-to-day poetry life I am doing the work of both the artist and the agent. "Well, duh!" you might say. Of course, I've known this forever; however, today, I had to quantify what I do with my time. Do you know how long it takes to submit one's work to publishers? I spent four hours going through submission guidelines and preparing my manuscript/letter/check/SASE/etc. on Sunday. On Monday, I spent 20 minutes at the Post Office getting the packets mailed out (including wait time in line). Add to this the time spent sending out individual poems. It adds up quickly.

While I know that an agent isn't the 'magic bullet,' and I do acknowledge that prose writers have to court editors and research the market as well, not to mention going through the torturous process of landing an agent in the first place, I do think the poets are at a disadvantage here.

Granted, no agent will work for free, and the whole system is based on advances and royalties, neither of which I know much about, unless you count the nominal prize attached with Blood Almanac's publication. So, I'm not advocating to change the system, just to acknowledge it.

In the meantime, the application also asks for the normal stuff: bio, details of the work, financial situation & use of funds, reviews of past work, sample of current work, CV, etc.

I've just spent a good half hour updating my CV. Luckily, I do a pretty good job of keeping the list of publications up to date, as I've developed a habit of including updating my CV when I record acceptances and when the work is published; however, there are lots of things that have happened in the last six months that I hadn't included: creating the Big Rock Reading Series, taking over managing editor duties for a student magazine on campus, reading here & there, etc. Whew.

Finally, there is the general sense of discomfort of blowing one's own horn that follows the whole process. The application requires one to jump up and down, shouting "HERE I AM! HERE I AM! I AM WORTHY OF YOUR PATRONAGE! PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE!" (Money that is, not porridge.)

Mark Lester as Oliver Twist

This, my friends, is hard and perhaps harder for having to claim that what I do is worthy of financial support, which is not a message poets receive from the world that often.

Improved Lighting Reading Series 10/22/11

2011-10-18T13:10:00.000-05:00

48º ~ the left over residue of a dreary rain, but I found it lovely, the temperatures are courtesy of a cold front "sweeping in from the Canadian plains" (according to our local gurus)

Many thanks to Matt Henriksen for inviting me up to Fayetteville for a reading on Saturday and to Katy Henriksen for designing this beautiful poster.

Monday Bleck!

2011-10-17T08:28:00.003-05:00

56º ~ reached the upper 80s yesterday and will do so again today, then Tuesday = a high of 65º, mercurial, temperamental, etc.

Dear Reader, this poet is empty. I've got nothing today, nothing but a long to-do list at school and very little motivation. Can we please rewind and have another Sunday? I used mine up with grading and didn't get my day of rest.

To provide a little boost for me and a little reading material for you, I direct you to the new issue of the Valparaiso Poetry Review, available online. In it, you will find a host of wonderful poets like Doug Ramspeck, Joannie Strangeland, Brian Simoneau, and others. Along the way, there is the last of the saint poems: "The Summer Saint." I hope you enjoy it.

Until the next time...Bleck!

Draft Process: Long Sliding Toward Oblivion

2011-10-14T09:19:00.000-05:00

52º ~ a squirrel with its jaws pried wide open around some treasure cautiously descends the tree in the neighbor's yard, bright morning sun begins to make its way over my shoulder, the revival of Wednesday's rain remains, no breeze to speak of

It's been a wild week with the death of Lou-Lou, the hosting of another successful reading for the Big Rock Reading Series, and the inevitable collection of papers to be graded. This afternoon, there is an appointment at the auto-shop for the 60,000 mile maintenance & oil change on my Honda.

Still, I put my butt in the chair this morning. Knowing that I might struggle I bit, I wanted the most help possible, so I returned to Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters, a book which has been fruitful in suggesting titles, but which is also jam-packed with words that ricochet around my brain and make sparks.

Here's a picture of today's process.

I've really begun to like the idea of mapping as I go. So that when two words wind up on the page together and suggest something (this is the hard part to explain), I circle them or draw arrows or lines & whatnot so I don't lose the energy of that combination as I continue to sink into the draft. I included the book as well so you can see that I mark up the poetry I read. In fact, the more marks the higher on my list of favorites.

Today's draft "Long Sliding Toward Oblivion" gets its title from a line in Brock-Broido's poem "Into Those Great Countries of the Blue Sky of Which We Don't Know Anything." It ended up being an epistolary poem to the sickly speaker's unnamed, female mentor (playing off Emily Dickinson's & Lucie Brock-Broido's letters to an unnamed 'master'). It begins:

Dear Madame—

There is news. A range of mystics has arrived.

They shuffled me off to a sepia room,

a soft sieve for my fevered breath.

So, my speaker continues to suffer from fevers and weird sleep issues and her mentor continues to remain at a distance, leading to a bit of pleading in the tone.

One cool thing that happened in the drafting was this. I had gathered the word 'dormant' and then later the word 'rumor' and they landed near each other on the page of my journal. Seeing them together I loved the idea of a 'dormant rumor' so I circled them. The idea seemed to fit the sickly speaker whose illness remains a mystery to her and her doctors (as far as she knows...with a first-person point-of-view, we really don't know what the doctors know). Then, Brock-Broido has a poem called "Rampion," and I had forgotten the definition of that, so I had to look it up. It's a Eurasian plant with edible roots. When I saw the phrase 'edible roots' in the definition, I grabbed that too, loving the sound of it and the feel of it on my tongue. Seriously, say it out loud a few times. Wonderful collection of vowels and the hard consonants of the 'd' in 'edible' and 't' in 'root.' So, I wrote that in the journal and then *SMASH* I saw the two phrases come together so that the speaker says:

...I sup / on the edible root of a dormant rumor,

Moments of making like this remind me that I love being a poet. Silly, maybe, but there you go.

Quick Pic: BRRS Alison Pelegrin

2011-10-12T08:41:00.000-05:00

62º ~ a bit more cloud-cover than usual, 30% chance of rain, running the sprinkler to guarantee it

I haven't received the official photos from last night's reading yet, but here are a few I snapped. It was another great success, and I can't say enough about how wonderful Alison Pelegrin is as both a poet and a human being. If you run a reading series, you should book her! I know the Big Rock Reading Series is the better for having hosted her.

the crowd begins to form

photo by Tim Jones

Alison signs books for her adoring fans

my friends chat in the after

photo by Tim Jones

Now it's off to school to start grading a new set of papers newly arrived in my inbox. Ah, the life of a teaching poet.

Personal Poetry Updates

2011-10-10T08:05:00.001-05:00

61º ~ sunrise on the east side of the house, still dawn on the west, predictions for beautiful fall weather (temps in the upper 70s) hold for the week

Amidst the turmoil of illness and the sadness of death (of our beloved cat, Lou-Lou), the world of poetry churns on. Here are a few announcements.

I'll be reading in Fayetteville, AR on Saturday, 22 October, for the Improved Lighting Reading Series. These readings take place at the fabulous Nightbird Books on Dickson Street. We start at 7:30 that night, and I'm thrilled to be reading with Amanda Auchter, Tony Presley, and Mark Spitzer.

If you are in the area, please stop by. There will be Earnestine giveaways of some sort. :)

Having done my MFA at the U of Arkansas in Fayetteville, I'm super excited to be invited back to my favorite college town in one of its prettiest months.

~~~~~

Saturday, I received my contributor's copy for the latest South Dakota Review, which is under the new leadership of Lee Ann Roripaugh, the first woman editor and only the third editor in the history of this wonderful journal.

This issue is AMAZEBALLS and you must get a copy ASAP to read poems by Adam Clay, Mary Biddinger, Bruce Covey, Matt Mauch, Heidi Czerwiec, me, and so many more (not to mention the fiction and nonfiction, too!). Also, I love the new larger format. So weighty in the hands.

~~~~~

Tomorrow is our second event in the Big Rock Reading Series. Wahoo. I simply cannot wait for Alison Pelegrin to get to town and unleash her poetic powers on the PTC audience. I'm not sure they know what's about to hit them. If you are in the area, the reading starts at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday night. All information here.

Alison is a good friend and an awesome poet. She has two full-length collections from the University of Akron Press: Big Muddy River of Stars and the HOT OFF THE PRESSES Hurricane Party. I've read both and YOWZA. Also, I definitely think Hurricane Party should win some kind of design award for this cover. Spectacular.

~~~~~
In the meantime, I also received two out-of-the-blue emails from poets who had read my work in other journals and wanted to let me know what they'd enjoyed about the work. I've written here before about my own mission to reach out to those writers whose work speaks to me whenever I'm reading a journal or book. Being on the receiving end of such emails reminds me to double my effort in the future. It really is spectacular.

One of those sending an email is also an editor for a long-standing and extremely well-respected journal. He asked me to send in some of my work. As we all know, there is nothing guaranteed about this kind of solicitation, but I wanted to mention it here for those who wonder if this kind of thing really happens. Yes, apparently it does. Apparently it is true that editors read other journals and seek out the work of those writers they admire. (I hear tell that if you write fiction, this sometimes applies to agents as well.)

So thank you to the two people who took the time to email me last week about my poems. It was a hell week on a personal level, and those emails dropped into my inbox at the perfect time.

~~~~~

Until next time, friends and fans of the Kangaroo, be safe, be happy, be content.

What Loss Looks Like

2011-10-09T09:17:00.000-05:00

62º ~ beautiful fall weather abounds, a lack of rain, dry weather predicted throughout the fall & winter, squirrels are squirreling & the light is slantwise

Our Lou-Lou lost her fight with myelofibrosis on Friday. And so, yes, Dear Reader, we are without a cat in the house for the first time in over seven years. It's a quiet, empty feeling. Most of you may remember that Libby died in June from hydrothropic cardiomyopathy. Both of these deaths were unpreventable and proved just how little we can control in this world. While Libby was fairly young at seven and a half when she died, Lou-Lou's death was even harder to bear as she had just turned three in July. Her disease, where the immune system turns on the bone marrow and the red blood cells, usually strikes in cats between kittenhood and three years old.

Perhaps I share too much; however, in the telling of the details there is a way through the sorrow (for me). I know that others prefer to grieve in silence.

Many thanks to all who sent condolences on Facebook. As I said with Libby, I am surprised at how much those small words "So sorry for your loss" help ease the grief.

Finally, here's a picture of the desk to show what loss looks like for me.

There has been a lot of tossing things on the desk at random: receipts, journals, money, bills, clothing, half-hearted to-do lists, etc. Yesterday was spent in lethargic repose; today I have a bit more energy to tackle some of this.

Knowing that the poetry is out there waiting to be read, waiting to be written, is perhaps one of the most helpful things of all.

Fingernails

2011-10-03T07:55:00.001-05:00

47º ~ rumor of frost in the northern counties of the state, low 80s for the projected highs all week, delirious fall weather

Today's title references 'hanging on by one's' rather that some statement about fashion and polish. It also references an emotional state of hanging on rather than one of being overwhelmed by physical tasks. We just don't know what is going to happen with Lou-Lou's health and that is difficult to say the least. All of this emotion for a cat, and I struggle to imagine the magnitude of emotion for a close friend or family member suffering serious health issues. Yes, I have been so lucky in my 40 years on this planet, but I see that the suffering will arrive at some point or other. This is what my cat has to teach me.

The opposite of what I mean!

~~~~~

In the meantime, I did get some submissions out the door yesterday, although I did not follow my wonderful, orderly process, as detailed here. Instead, I haphazardly sent out to several places that have special calls for which my poems my be a fit. I also chose to send two groups of poems to non-simultaneous submission journals (well, one asks that the write wait six weeks before sending on to other mags). It's odd, that normally I feel constrained by the non-simul. sub. journals, but yesterday it helped me feel like I was making some small progress in the face of chaos.

Rest assured, I have not abandoned my process method or simultaneous subs (as I still believe in them the most). I have a stack of poems waiting to be sorted and my spreadsheet printed and ready to go.

~~~~~

Finally, I have tried to skim the blogs and keep up as best I can, although I know I'm missing much. I did catch on in the middle of a discussion about Annie Dillard's policy on seclusion. Here is Shawn Smucker's original piece, citing Dillard's statement on her website.

I’m sorry. I’ve never promoted myself or my books, but I used to give two public readings a year.

Now I can no longer travel, can’t meet with strangers, can’t sign books but will sign labels with SASE, can’t write by request, and can’t answer letters. I’ve got to read and concentrate. Why? Beats me.

Apparently, this caused quite a lot of commenting and Dillard-bashing, leading Andi from Andilit.com to post this response. My favorite part of Andi's post is this:

Plus, whose to say she isn’t helping us, her community of writers, with her very writing? Like Shawn, my favorite writing text is hers: The Writing Life. In those pages she has given me more wisdom than she could ever give in an email.

I completely agree and have no problem with Dillard's seclusion. She is fortunate that her amazing writing talent has been recognized and celebrated to the point where she can choose seclusion. And even if we aren't able to financially sustain ourselves on our writing alone, we can all probably take a lesson on turning off the noise for a bit.

However, on the flipside, I will say that I gain much from my internet community, and I love to talk with writers of all skill-levels. These relationships nourish me and encourage me in times of doubt. I hope to always be able to engage in those relationships, yet I recognize that when one rises to the level of superstar of Dillard's proportion, the requests for one's time might become burdensome. I would hope, then, that my writing will provide its own dialogue with my readers as Dillard's does with me.

Here is one Dillard quote that lights the fire within:
"The secret of seeing is, then, the pearl of great price. If I thought he could teach me to find it and keep it forever I would stagger barefoot across a hundred deserts after any lunatic at all."

That's what writing is for me, an attempt to discover the secret of seeing, a staggering after wisdom in whatever guise it chooses.

So be it.

Camille Dungy Reading: 3 Photos

2011-10-02T13:17:00.001-05:00

72º ~ that wonderful October mellow sun, the air a bit too cool for all windows open

Many thanks to Camille Dungy for posting pictures from her trip to Little Rock in September, as my pictures from that night did not turn out.

The beautiful Camille Dungy with me.

Camille Dungy & my former PTC student, Toby Daughtery

Camille Dungy & my former AGS student, Jessica Otto, also a former student of CD

Draft Process: Small Forgotten Fevers

2011-10-01T10:41:00.000-05:00

61º ~ bright autumnal sun shining on the slant, small breezes move the smaller branches

Dear Reader, today, I did not feel much poetry, but the old B-I-C (butt-in-chair) rule did not fail me. I am uncertain of this draft, but I am happy to have written some few lines in the midst of stress and chaos.

Sticking with my tried and true method of drafting since early August, I picked up the nearest text and began. Today's draft is brought to you by work from the recent issue of Copper Nickel, one of my top 5 favorite lit mags in the whole wide world.

I word-gathered from work by Laura Eve Engel & Adam Peterson, Elizabeth Cheever, Zachary Sifuentes, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and A.E. Watkins. At first, I thought I'd found a title/jumping off place when I matched two words in my journal: rivalry & miracles. So I started trying to draft "A Rivalry of Miracles" and my sickly speaker remains, never fear. However, after eight lines, I needed to use the phrase 'a rivalry of miracles' in the draft and I no longer felt like it served as well as a title, so I moved it. Then, mid-draft, I was sort of stuck, so I went back to the poems and scanned for possible titles or guidance. In A.E. Watkins' "from Allerton in Winter" section IV, I found "some forgotten fury." I love the alliteration there, and as my sickly speaker always has a fever, I changed 'fury' to 'fever,' and thus today's draft: "Some Forgotten Fever." It begins:

Here the bed is made of iron,
flat & straight. My cursive spine

breaks the line. To sleep, I turn

Like the other poems in this series I've ended up writing, this draft is in couplets; however, there is much more enjambment going on here and the lines are shorter than before. Perhaps my own sense of urgency is filtering through.

In the meantime, I am wary of sticking with this process so long. What say you: should I abandon the process of word gathering and stand on my own as it were? Should I move on from this sickly speaker? Or should I let it all ride and see where it takes me?

Status: PPD

2011-09-30T09:03:00.002-05:00

61º ~ glorious weather after a high of 91º yesterday, a cold front arrived in the night and wiped the heat from our memories, all is sun and slight breeze and chill

Today's drafting process is postponed, or in the parlance of baseball, PPD. Lou-Lou has had a bit of a crisis this past week and needs to have some treatments at the vet today. All are hopeful because she has responded to her medications in the past and the docs have ruled out secondary infections and the like. It looks like a change in the dosages and times per day they are given is in order.

from creativecommons.org ~ click for link

I shall return to the desk tomorrow with pen and journal and attempt a draft.

In the meantime, I've finally got a stack of poems ready to go out into the world and I haven't had a lick of time to do submissions in the entire month of September! Time to re-prioritize!

Photo Prompts

2011-09-28T15:26:00.001-05:00

86º ~ yep, summer is back, going to be near 90º tomorrow, clear, clean skies, sparkling sun

Life is cluttered right now, but I try to keep my poet brain engaged by observing the world. These images may become fodder for later work. Here are two from yesterday. Sorry about the size, no time to download and adjust.

surprise lilies are my favorite

this bee wanted to read from The Lorax at our Banned Books Week reading

Alison Pelegrin @ the Big Rock Reading Series

2011-09-26T07:49:00.000-05:00

55º ~ looking like mostly blue skies today, with a high below 80º, then a warm-up predicted through the week, topping out at 88º forecasted

Draft Process: Before & After Photos

2011-09-23T08:51:00.001-05:00

55º ~ it is hard to express the joy of these cooler mornings after a summer of endless, beating heat, cloudy today, foggy too, wonderful soaking rain last evening, replenishing us all

I was eager to return to the desk today, to set aside all the clutter and muck of day-to-day life and just be in a world of words and my imagination. Of course, I'm not good at completely divorcing myself from my life (thus there is a bit of autobiography in nearly everything I write, but just a bit, don't be saying the speaker of my poems is me, please). Therefore, today's draft continues with the sickly speaker and is informed both by my recent battle with sinus infection / head cold and Lou-Lou's seeming relapse that is puzzling the vets. (Yes, that is plural. There are three doctors on her case. We are lucky!)

Here is how I prepared to clear my mind, to make a path for poetry.

With the desk clear and Aaron Copland's Billy the Kid on the iTunes, I sat down with Camille Dungy's books. I bought her two most recent volumes at the reading I attended: Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press) and Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press).

I've really fallen in love with my current draft process. Read and collect words haphazardly in the journal. Read and collect lines that hint at titles that might work for my sickly speaker. Let the title and the word bank coalesce into the beginning of a draft. Knock on wood, it hasn't let me down yet. Today, I added a new twist. As I collected the words I started adding arrows and circling two words together that jumped out at me. My journal page is a lovely mess.

I started with Dungy's Suck on the Marrow but put it aside as the subject matter is the terrible history of slavery and much of the language is so charged with that history that I was having trouble divorcing individual words of that charge. This is not a slight on the book at all, and I look forward to reading it for its own sake very soon. Smith Blue, while still quite political, is a book of conservation, recording what is being lost in our world due to climate change, war, and the other devastations we visit upon ourselves.

In fact, that word "devastation" is part of the line that led to the title of the poem. I read the first few poems and gathered words at a furious pace. Then, in the poem "Daisy Cutter," I found this line "You taught me devastation / ... ." Dungy's sentence continues, but I was caught by just those four words and I made them the title of the draft: "You Taught Me Devastation." It begins:

Madam, it is your skill set to which I cling.
Most ingloriously, I confess.

Again, the poem is drafted in couplets. They seem to fit this speaker's voice so perfectly. I hope I'm not missing an opportunity by sticking with them so much, but time will tell. This speaker is a bit disjointed and abrupt. She makes associative leaps, and the brevity of couplets works for that.

So, this is what the desk looks like after the process is over and the draft as a whole has been printed. Yes, Lou-Lou insisted on "helping" me from start to finish today, although now that the process is over, she has disappeared. Muse anyone?

As always, thanks for reading. Knowing someone is out there, wondering if I drafted on Friday, helps.

Reading Attended: Camille Dungy at the Central Arkansas Library System

2011-09-21T08:26:00.002-05:00

62º ~ sound the bells, it's foggy out there friends and fans of the weather, we're on the cusp of fall & temperatures are finally stabilizing into a more comfortable pattern

Life has been fast and furious and a bit stressful these days. Lots and lots going on with school and I received papers from all of my students on Monday. In the meantime, Lou-Lou's blood work is not good and we continue to go through testing to find a better approach to her treatment. My own health is nearly back to normal after a three-week stint of sinus infection / serious head & chest cold. All of this is not to whine but to set the scene.

There were three or four literary events in central Arkansas last night. I'm not sure why this happens but it seems to happen at least once a semester when people at different institutions all decide one day is the perfect day for their reading/performance. I had narrowed my choices to Kevin Brockmeier reading just down the street at UALR or Camille Dungy reading downtown. Then, all of this other stuff seemed to get in the way and I was ready to say 'uncle' and just sit on the couch. Somehow, I rallied in the afternoon and made my decision. I am soooooooo glad I did, as the night uplifted me and energized me in a way that only literature can.

I chose to attend Camille Dungy's reading in part because I've seen Kevin read several times and I know I'll have other chances to hear him because he lives here in Little Rock. If he ever comes to a town near you, do yourself a favor and go hear him. He's an amazing fiction writer and a great reader.

Wish my author photo was this glam!

I had heard Dungy read at AWP as part of a panel in the past, so I knew I was in for a great night. Dungy came to Little Rock as part of the Poets House "Language of Conservation" program. We were so lucky to have our zoo chosen as one of five across the country to be funded for poetry installations (Joseph Bruchac was our curator for the project and each poet-curator traveled to the other cities to give readings at the various libraries). While Dungy is the author of three books of her own poetry, she is also the editor of Black Nature, an anthology of poetry that explores nature writing by African-American poets.

I loved Dungy's set list. She began with a poem from her first book What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (which just may be the best damn title ever). Then she read a few poems from the anthology: Lucille Clifton (may she rest in peace), Ishmael Reed, Marylin Nelson. Then, a few poems from Dungy's most recent collection Smith Blue, an amazing book from Southern Illinois University Press, one of my all-time favorite poetry publishers: "The Blue," "On the Rocks," and "On Ice." Then back to the anthology: George Marion McClellan and Arna Bontemps, two poets new to me whom I plan to find out more about, especially Bontemps. On to Dungy's own Suck on the Marrow (she is awesome at book titles!) for "Aspire" and "Survival." Then the anthology for Robert Haydn (favorite!!!), Gerald Barrax, Sr. and Anne Spencer, another I really need to find out more about. Dungy concluded with two of her own poems "What a Snakehead Discovered in a Maryland Pond and a Poet in Corporate American Have in Common" and "How She Keeps Faith."

Yes, I was scribbling furiously to get this all down, but I was able to stop and absorb the poetry, too. Dungy is an AMAZING reader. She gives each word its due. No rush, no fuss. Pure love of language embodied at the podium.

I found myself intrigued by her comments regarding black nature poetry. She pointed out that for African Americans, a relationship with nature is not one of the Romantic ideal. It involves a tie to having once been considered property and a part of nature itself. It involves a tie to toil. That was the word she used, 'toil.' And this set me to thinking about my own relationship to nature in my work. As a lot of my poetry is based in the landscape of the rural Midwest and the agriculture that includes, I realized that the word 'toil' rang true for me as well, although certainly not to the extent of an African-American history with slavery. Still, when you grow up around working farmers, there is a love of the land and a respect for the natural world, at the same time one is fighting against the elements as well.

I also loved what Dungy had to say about being a nature writer. She said that to do so one has to observe closely, that it is a matter of what we look at and how we look. So, when she was on a cruise in the Antarctic to mark her father's retirement, Dungy watched and watched and wrote observations of everything. She was able to see that this land of ice of "millennia on millennia of cold" was melting. She was able to see that the penguins in Antarctica were being plagued by ticks that should have died off due to cold but were now thriving in warmer temperatures. Then, she was able to take all of the political and emotional importance of those observations and weave it into her poems.

I'm still stunned.

Here is the beginning of "Survival" from Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010)

The body winnows. The body tills. The body knows

sow's feet, sow gut, night harvested kale. The body knows

to sleep through welted dreams, to wake

before the night succumbs to morning.

If you don't own one of Dungy's books, then go out and remedy that as soon as you have enough change in the cookie jar to do so!

Finally, I was so happy to see two former students in the audience, both of whom attended the Big Rock Reading Series last week. Talk about growing a community! Jessica Otto was once a student of mine at the Arkansas Governor's School back in the day. Toby Daughtery was a more recent student of mine at PTC and I've written about his inspirational story before. I was so happy to see them both in the room! (Sorry y'all, the pics we took didn't work out. Next time!)

Many, many thanks to Camille Dungy for coming to Little Rock and sharing her work. Her reading was just what this weary soul needed.

How to Create a Reading Series

2011-09-19T08:25:00.004-05:00

65º ~ massive thunderstorm last night, beautiful dangerous lightning and house-rattling thunder, everything sopping wet as the sun begins to rise through cloudy skies

This post is in response to Kristin's request on last Thursday's post.

As most of you know, through the help and support of many of my friends and colleagues, we launched the Big Rock Reading Series at Pulaski Tech last week. Here's the story of how it all came together, in a perhaps disjointed tale.

Backstory

Pulaski Tech, where I teach, is a growing community college. In fact, we just moved up one notch to become the fourth largest institution of higher education in Arkansas, with 11,900 and some students. For my first five years on campus, I served on the library committee, and through that committee, we were able to host several readings. I mention these events because they helped teach me all that goes into putting on a great event, which, for me, involves an incredible amount of planning and coordinating with other offices on campus. I also mention these events because the data on attendance and the written feedback we received from each was key to floating an organized reading series by the administration. We were able to demonstrate a need and we knew what would be needed in terms of resources.

Speaking of resources, I also learned a lot about how to do this on a shoestring by attending a panel discussion at AWP in DC. That panel featured writer-instructors from a variety of community colleges who hosted reading series and other literary events with almost no budgets. The key component I learned about: setting up a foundation fund and running the series on donations. While we can't pay our readers a huge honorarium and we can't offer travel expenses, I would not ask someone to come and read for free. With a couple of anchor donations and then many smaller ones, we are able to pay our writers a very modest honorarium and in the case of Alison Pelegrin who will be driving up to read for us, we will take care of her hotel stay. By creating the reading series at PTC, we are able to use resources like the PR/Marketing office to create promotion and get out press releases. This has been INVALUABLE!

So, how does one create a reading series?

Preparation, preparation, preparation.

Secure a venue & date and get the details in writing. Think about all the details: size, seating, accessibility, lighting, mic/speakers, parking, if there will be a cover charge, etc.

Contact writers well in advance and let them know upfront the details in terms of location, pay, expected audience size, and if books will be sold how and by whom. Get the details in writing and be sure to get good contact information in case of emergencies. One new twist we weren't expecting was video rights. We taped the event for students who couldn't attend and to have as an archive, but our authors alerted us to the fact that some publishers require permission for publishing videos (especially on YouTube). For future events, we will be getting written permission in advance for video postings.

If you will be setting up a donation fund, start asking for donations as early as possible. Again, we used our Foundation office on campus, so I don't know the legal details of this if you plan an independent series.

Promotion, promotion, promotion.

With the date/time/location/author(s) secured the time for promotion begins. We had a three-pronged system. One: flyers & posters to promote the reading on our campuses and at local libraries/bookstores. Two: email blasts (collected the email list at previous readings and by going online and collecting addresses for English faculty from institutions in the area). Three: press release to the local media (we were fortunate and the story got picked up by the state-wide newspaper).

Facebook. I suppose this is a fourth prong of our PR system, but it's so big, it's kind of it's own thing. I created a page for the Big Rock Reading Series and sent out an invite to "like" it to my regional friends. As with social media, the page grew from there. We use the page to promote future readings and to post photos and feedback from previous readings. It's also a good place to post links to campus maps and directions if you are targeting a community-wide audience as we are.

Word of mouth. Yep. I never stop talking about the series with colleagues and friends.

Prepare an event program. For us, this is a simple 8.5 X 11 sheet folded in half. I used Microsoft Publisher to put it together and it was quite easy. Our PR office had created a logo for the series, which is awesome. The program features the author bios and websites, a list of upcoming events, and our donor list (THANK YOU!). We also included two half sheets stuffed inside (many thanks to the student workers who copied, folded, and stuffed). One half sheet was a survey and one was a donation form. The survey was awesome and has given us even more data to use for future fundraising.

Reading. Reading. Reading.

Be in touch with the writer in the days leading up to the reading and on the day of. Be sure you have water and a place for the writer's book(s) to be sold if that is part of the deal. If the books are not being sold by a bookstore at the event, designate someone you trust to handle the sales and get a bit of cash change before the event. We sell books for cash or check and I volunteer to cover any bounced checks (although that hasn't happened yet). I'm looking into getting Four Square for my iPhone so we can also do credit card sales.

Arrive at the location well in advance. I arrived an hour early to start setting up (we display our division's course offerings and our student journals). Believe it or not, we had audience members arriving 45 minutes before start time. Check the lighting, the mic/speakers, seating, and whatever else you've arranged.

ASK FOR HELP! We use student ambassadors to greet arrivals, hand out programs, and provide directions within the building. A few of my English faculty colleagues jumped in to help with details I overlooked. For example, as the coordinator of the series, people wanted to talk to me. I hadn't figured on that. I was hauling tables around and setting up displays and fielding questions/discussions from audience members in the meantime. It was chaotic. I will search out volunteers and do a better job of delegating next month!

Coddle the writer(s). Be sure the writer is comfortable with the mic and set up. Be sure he/she has anything he/she needs to be comfortable (including water). The writer is the whole reason for the event. For that hour, he/she is a STAR! Treat him/her as such. Depending on your situation, you might offer to take the writer(s) out for a meal before or after the event. I'm fond of going out afterward as we were all amped up and used the meal as a way to unwind and bask in the joy.

The Day After.

Collapse from exhaustion on the inside but keep putting one foot in front of the other for the day job or family obligations or what have you.

If you did a survey, crunch the data. If you didn't, take the time to write out a narrative of how the evening went and what you might do differently in the future. We learned that it would be good to have a calculator at the book sale table. We learned that the moderator needed to repeat audience questions during the Q & A. Small things add up. The data and/or narrative will be important if you are seeking funds for the series or applying for grants in the future.

Begin promoting the next event, depending on length of time between readings. For us, there is a month between readings for the three months of the semester, then breaks for holidays and summer. Promote early and often, but not so often that you become a pest. :)

I'm sure I've forgotten a bit, so chime in with questions if you have any!

Good luck!

Draft Process: Becoming the Sickly Speaker

2011-09-16T09:17:00.001-05:00

58º ~ overcast, 30% chance of rain we would welcome

Dear Reader, it seems I have become the sickly speaker of my recent poems. As many of you know, since the beginning of August, all of my drafts have featured the same speaker, a woman who is hospitalized for some strange and unknown illness. No, I'm not in the hospital or even close to it. My nagging sinus infection has been confounded by a head cold. I'm whiny.

Still, after a knock down week of launching the reading series, I told myself last night to be prepared to write a draft today. I made a note to myself, "Draft a Poem" and left it on my keyboard so I would see it first thing.

It worked again.

At the reading, we talked about B-I-C (butt-in-chair), and you know what? It's rarely failed me. Not never failed me, but rarely.

It worked again.

I sat down at the desk with cold medicine taken, a cup of coffee, and an aching arm. On the night of the reading, I fell up the stairs. Yes, 'up' the stairs. My right arm bore the brunt of the fall and I have a wicked purple bruise in the rectangular shape of a stair edge. The bruise is almost exactly half way between my elbow and my shoulder. My arm hurts! I'm sort of surprised by how much it hurts as I didn't feel like I fell that hard.

Back to the draft: I began by reading some of the poems in Sarah J. Sloat's new chapbook Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair (dancing girl press, 2011) and collecting some nouns and verbs. While I love Sloat's poems, nothing was jumping up for a title. So, when I had a page full of words, I went back to Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters in search of a title. I found one in the poem "Housekeeping," which includes this line, "You have been outside / The body now."

Today's draft is "Having Been Outside the Body" and is another epistolary poem to the speaker's female mentor. It begins:

Dear Madam--

The progress of August is past.
The chart reads relapse.

In terms of form, the poem contains both couplets and single-line stanzas. The bruise makes an appearance in stanza two. I first searched for images of bruises, but they were too ugly to share. Instead, here's an image of a the rhinovirus, cause of the common cold, damn it!

from Science Photo Library, click for link

Nickole Brown & David Jauss at the Big Rock Reading Series

2011-09-15T07:47:00.002-05:00

57º ~ cold air coming in the windows, yep, cold air, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

While I wanted to post this yesterday, it turns out that I was flattened by exhaustion and a busy day at school. Still, the glow of a wonderful event lingers.

I'm thrilled to say that our first reading in the Big Rock Reading Series was a definitive success!

Nickole's poems and Dave's short fiction balanced each other well. The images from both linger in my brain as I return to my senses.

During the reading, I made a big point of the fact that these two writers live among us right here in Central Arkansas. I made this comment for the sake of our PTC students, many of whom encounter literature for the first time when they enroll in an ENGL class with us. For many of those students who attended the reading, it was their first chance to hear writers at work. We had the audience fill out a survey so we could collect data for more fundraising. Their comments blew me away.

Nickole Brown & David Jauss

Based on the data we collected, we could identify those in the audience who were PTC students. Here's what a few of them had to say (anonymously) for the question, "What did you most appreciate about tonight's event?"
"The way the readers seemed to open up from a sacred place with there [sic] work."
"This is my first time attending a reading. I enjoyed it a great deal. It is inspiring to hear people share themselves in a setting like this."
"It is just wonderful to have local writers present their works in person."
"True honesty in there [sic] stories. So real!"

Ok, so we still need to work on the there/their/they're error, but the sentiment here is what counts. Wow. This is why we do what we do.

Many thanks to Nickole and Dave for helping us launch this series! Next up will be Alison Pelegrin, a poet from southern Louisiana and a good friend of mine. I can't wait to grow the literary community even more on October 11th!

So Seriously Beside Myself

2011-09-12T08:55:00.000-05:00

68º ~ what's that on the horizon? a high of 91º for today and 96º for tomorrow, yep, that's right, summer 2011, the summer that would not quit!

Dear Readers, it's hard to convey exactly how excited I am for tomorrow to get here. Tomorrow night at 6:30 p.m., we launch the Big Rock Reading Series with readings by Nickole Brown and David Jauss. While, I'm the chief cook and bottle washer of the operation, I've had tons of help and support from colleagues, friends, and family, for which I am thankful. (It's amazing how many tiny details there are to getting a reading series up and running, especially one that is run on donations only so as not to infringe on anyone's line-item in the school's budget!)

I couldn't be happier that Nickole and Dave are reading for us. They both teach creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. As the two-year college across the river, we send a lot of students over to UALR, so it will be a great collaboration, and I'll get to see many former students in the audience. Wahoo!

Rest assured, I'll have my trusty Flip camera there and will try to post some clips in the days after (if I can pick myself up off the bed of exhaustion!). Until then, let this amazing poster whet your appetite (designed by Amy Green of Pulaski Technical College's Department of PR/ Marketing).

Find us on Facebook, too!

Draft Process Beginning with Revision

2011-09-10T11:31:00.000-05:00

77º ~ all bright sun, a soft breeze, windows open, may have to water the lawn

A day late, but there's a draft on the table. Not sure if it will "live" to become a poem, but it's there.

There's a lot of chaos in my world right now. Still not 100% health-wise, re: sinus infection. Lou-Lou got some disappointing results in her most recent blood work. Some difficult issues both at work and with my family. Nothing dire, but those normal life moments that require a lot of mental & emotional energy to sift through and decide how to move forward.

Again, those could be excuses not to write. I wasn't sure I would today. Instead, I began by revising all of the drafts from the past month and a half. (Thus the title of the post today.)

Here's the process. I keep a folder with printed copies of each draft. This is where a piece stays until I feel like it is a poem strong enough to be submitted to journals. I start with the draft on top, which would be the most recent. I read each poem out loud, often many times. I listen for extra words that could be trimmed. My biggest issue is over-writing; I'm especially fond of unnecessary adjectives. I cut and trim, usually a word here or there, sometimes a whole clause or sentence. I try to be objective about how the poem works. Sometimes, I need to add a stanza or more likely cut one and rewrite it from scratch. As you might guess, the most recent poems need the most revision. The older ones have been through the process once or twice and usually move out of the folder to be readied for submission.

In doing this today, I realized that I've written some really strong poems and I'm feeling good about sending a lot of them out into the world. This surprised me since I wasn't exactly feeling all aglow with positive vibes as I began. However, the positive energy that I had when I reached the end of the folder translated into trying to draft a poem.

Continuing on my recent process, I picked up the new issue of The Journal that arrived a few days ago.

Cover art by Krista Drummond

Wow. This issue is chock full of good stuff. I started to read and jot down nouns and verbs that jumped off the page. As I filled up the page in my drafting journal, I started looking for lines that might make a good title. (That sickly speaker continues to haunt me.) As I was reading Jeannine Hall Gailey's "[Experiment in Sleep Deprivation]" from her series The Robot Scientist's Daughter, I came across this line: "They try to tamper and tame her piece by piece." Voila!

I drafted "To Tamper and Tame Me Piece by Piece" and my sickly, yet rebellious, speaker had more to say again today. I'll keep listening to her until she's done. The draft begins this way.

They try. They plot behind charts burgeoning
with multi-colored papers. Etched results
of specimens removed from the rubble

of my body.

As I said, I'm less sure of this one than I've been of others in the past, but I have hope it will become a poem through some serious revision. It's written as 6 tercets for now, although a lot of the poems from this speaker have been coming out as couplets. When I look at the larger project, I may have to think about the form in the bigger picture.

For now, I'm just glad to have some new poems to send out into the world as the September floodgates of new reading periods open.

Tsk, Tsk, Tsk, My Draft Will be Late

2011-09-09T13:20:00.000-05:00

80º ~ so gorgeous outside I'm doubly angry that I'm not feeling 100% health-wise

Well, no draft today, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. I had to take C. to work this morning as he has some plans with a colleague after work for which they will carpool. Then, Lou-Lou had to have her two-week blood work done. (We check blood every two weeks while we slowly decrease her meds, ever mindful of the chance of relapse.) Once I got home it was after 10 and that meant having to check in with my online classes. Oh, and I'm still fending off that sinus infection, but feeling like things are moving in the favor of health.

Yes, this is a long list of excuses. Today, I had to admit defeat, but I'm not deterred. The first thing on my list for tomorrow morning is "draft a poem." Then, I get to organize my September submissions. Woo hoo! Look out editors, here I come.

I'll also spend the weekend putting the finishing touches on our first event for the Big Rock Reading Series. I'm fortunate to have the support of folks at PTC, so I'm able to launch this series on campus. Tuesday night is the big night. I am super excited about this, but I forget every semester how many tiny details there are to nail down. We are doing three events per semester. Amy I crazy? Time will tell.

Finally, go read what Laura Davis, editor of Weave magazine has to add to the poetry community discussion. (Read my rant here.) My favorite new thing from Laura's post:

4. BRING your non-writer friends to the next lit event.

This is a big one. Next time you head to a reading, bring along you BFF from college or that friend from work you've been meaning to hang out with. You never know how people will be affected by a reading. This will help open the poetry doors to a wider audience and strengthen the community.

If you live in Central Arkansas, I hope you'll come out Tuesday night to hear Nickole Brown and Dave Jauss read for the Big Rock Reading Series. And, I hope that you'll bring a non-writer friend along!

Practicing What I Preach

2011-09-08T08:38:00.002-05:00

63º ~ still beautiful, but darn it, those 90s are coming back, boooooo

So, yesterday, I got up in the pulpit a bit. To back up those words, here's a picture of the four books I purchased in July/August.

I Stand Here Shredding Documents    Kristin Berkey-Abbot, Finishing Line Press, 2011
The End of the Folded Map   Matthew Nienow, Codhill Press, 2011
Fat Girl   Jessie Carty, Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011
Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair Sarah J. Sloat, dancing girl press, 2011

Yep, these are all chapbooks. That's just pure coincidence. I buy large and small, heck, I even buy broadsides when I get the chance. And while I've fallen down a bit on my "What I'm Reading Posts," rest assured that I talk up the poets I like here and yonder on the campus. If a book doesn't match my taste I simply don't write or talk about it because there is enough ill-will in the world and I do not choose to be a professional critic writing professional book reviews.

Of the four, I've read Nienow's already. LOVED IT! Wonderful poems of landscape in the 21st century and comments on the human condition. I look forward to sitting down with the other three soon.

**Remember, if you buy the book directly from the publisher, they get a much better profit margin than if you buy from Amazon. If you really want to buy from an online bookstore, try Better World Books, where much of the profit goes to aiding literacy efforts here and abroad and you can purchase carbon offsets for your shipping for a nickel. (BWB doesn't always carry books from the smaller publishers.)

Buy or Borrow a Book of Poetry Today: Not a Post on the BlazeVox Kerfluffle

2011-09-07T05:54:00.000-05:00

57º ~ still dark out so hard to report conditions, the casters of fore have all fat suns in the next seven days, no rain, no clouds, no storms, and no highs above 85º, uhm, wow!

I'm up earlier than normal, unable to sleep for all of the tasks to be done. These are good tasks that I'm excited about for the most part. I just can't seem to get my brain to turn off and quit tasking and trouble-shooting for a few hours so I can sleep.

In matters of poetry, I've been thinking a lot about the fallout from the BlazeVox kerfluffle. Read all about it here. I'm not interested in rehashing what happened or in any pointing of fingers and raising of voices. What I am interested in is poetry.

First, everybody just calm down. Poetry has been around, according the brilliant Lucille Clifton, since the first human being walked out of a cave, looked at a sunrise/sunset, and said, 'ahhhhhhhh.' It's not going anywhere. It's part of the human condition. How we get our words out to our audiences will change, of course; it has to as technology and communities change. There is nothing devastating in that change.

Second, who in their right mind thinks that poetry is going to earn anyone besides a few Billy Collins and Rita Doves anything substantial in terms of monetary profit. Look at the long history of publishing since the invention of the press, and you will find a long history of authors self-publishing or paying in some way to get their books to market, whether that payment be in cash exchange or favors. I, for one, am not doing this for the money, although I hope to break even and usually do so every year in terms of strict dollars and cents. I do this thing, this poetry making, because I have something that needs to be said and poetry works for me. If you are jealous of the money-making fiction writers, go write a best-selling novel. I've heard it's not as easy as you might think and many prose writers struggle to break even as well.

Third, (yes, I'm listing my points in exactly the way I tell my students not to; it's early, cut me some slack), third, as long as any publishing entity is upfront about their methods, then I'm cool with that. Let the interested parties work out the details with their eyes open. And here is my closest contact with the BlazeVox kerfluffle. It seems to me that information wasn't communicated at the right time and then everyone lost their minds. I'm glad it seems to be settling down, maybe.

Fourth, as I said on Facebook, if you are a poet and you would like people to buy your book, please ask yourself this: how many copies of contemporary books of poetry have you purchased lately? If you don't have a lot of loose change, how many copies have you checked out from your public or school library (you can inter-library loan almost anything these days)? By doing both of these things, you help insure the continuation of your art form AND YOUR AUDIENCE. By not doing them, you contribute to its diminishment, although it will never disappear forever.

Fourth and a half, as I said on Facebook, if you are a poet and you aren't actively working to get poetry off the floor of academia and into the hands of regular readers, then you aren't growing the community. Sure, for some of the most experimental work, this isn't a sure thing, but how do you know until you've tried. Have you asked your local art space if they will let you display books? Have you requested a table at your local farmer's market and sold poetry? Have you created a broadside of one of your poems and stapled it to telephone poles around town? Have you hosted a poetry event during April or some other time of the year? Have you read for free just because you love it? After over a decade of teaching, I know this much for sure: if you bring your passion to the audience, some of it will rub off on somebody. (I've created English majors out of former business majors this way, god help them!)

Finally, do not be too quick to dismiss the audience of people who are not "professional" poets. At one reading I did several years ago, there was a couple in the audience in their early 60s. They weren't poets, writers, or professors. They showed up because the reading (which was held on a rural university campus) was advertised in their tiny local newspaper. My poems resonated with the man's own experiences on the land. As I read, I saw how engaged he was; I watched his head shake in acknowledgment that, yes, this is a way he sees the world, too. They bought a book. Also, even more magical, there was a rural route school bus driver in the small crowd. He was shy about approaching me and waited until almost everyone else had gone. When he did, he pulled out his pocket journal filled with his own poems. There was a time this might have sent me shrinking backwards. Instead, I talked with him for five or ten minutes about the joy of writing poetry and encouraged him to keep writing. Then, he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his other pocket. On it was a child's poem with marker decorations. One of the little girls on his bus loves poetry and they talk about what they've written during the long ride to the consolidated school. I almost cried. The man didn't have enough cash to pay the full price for my book. I sold it to him for $8 instead of $14. Best, $1 profit I ever made.

I do not make money from my art. I try to help my press make as much money as possible, since they are the vehicle for my words making it to my audience. To that end, I give the press a small donation every year (they are a non-profit and grants are harder to come by than ever). I work hard at marketing my book and I encourage folks to buy directly from the press or the distributor so that more money will go into the publisher's pocket. I work hard at promoting poetry in as many ways as possible in the hopes the audience will grow and grow and grow. I do that because I believe that poetry (and all art, really) has the power to make us better human beings, to help us come to terms with our lives, and to help us come together as a global community, which is really the only hope this planet has, in the end.

Children's Books Needed

2011-09-06T07:26:00.000-05:00

58º ~ cool breezes, all the windows open, A/C shut down!

Ok, I know that the fans of the Kangaroo are also fans of helping children in need, so here's one way to do that.

Erin Dionne, author of Notes from an Accidental Band Geek has a great project that needs new or gently used children's books (picture, easy readers, & chapter books). Read all about the amazing gift her family made to the children and families of Rhode Island in the name of Dionne's grandmother. I'm stunned.

The books will be used during supervised visits conducted by the Dept. of Children/Families of RI in a home that Dionne's family purchased and donated to be used in conjunction with the Providence Children's Museum, which also hosts supervised visits.

Wow.

And what a great reason to go visit my local independent bookstore!

We Interrupt This Labor Day Sloth

2011-09-05T09:05:00.000-05:00

67º ~ the Weather Channel website says it best

You may remember the day I posted a clip from the same website that proclaimed temperatures at 114º. This is the opposite of that. This is perfection.

I've had to take the weekend off as I'm fighting back a head cold that wants to be a sinus infection when it grows up. Right now, I'm winning the battle. Thank god for Labor Day with the extra day of rest.

I'll be back at it soon. In the meantime, there's been more interest in my fairy tale poems. Cynthia Reeser of Prick of the Spindle interviewed me and the results are up on the blog Plumb.

Draft Process: Exhaustion Induced Poem

2011-09-02T09:22:00.000-05:00

79º ~ one more day of upper 90s with heat indexes near or over 100º and then, and then, I can't quite believe my eyes, the forecast calls for highs in the 80s and on Tuesday I see a 77º, oh sweet relief from the heat, please be true

I offer only a brief draft process today for two reason. 1) This week did me in, so it's just a miracle that I was here at the desk today and I drafted what looks like a poem. 2) I'm using the same process I've been using for two weeks, so very little new to report.

Today's draft resulted from the same word gathering & title finding that I've describe for the past two weeks. Today, I used Matthew Nienow's wonderful chapbook The End of the Folded Map, which I've read three times now. The gift of the chapbook, so short a read, so easy to re-read and re-read and zero in on the poems. I suppose I should approach full-length collections the same way, but I'm more easily daunted there.

I liked gathering the words from poems I've read a few times recently. I didn't get caught up in Nienow's voice or in the intricacies of the poems. I zoomed in and grabbed the strong nouns and verb. Looking for a title, I went back and looked at the lines I'd underlined on previous reads. I came up with two possibilities: "the rough question of her tongue" from "Lupa" and "the wine shows a blood's sheen."

from creativecommons.org

I went with the latter and now have "The Wine Shows a Bloody Sheen" drafted out. I'm still stuck on this speaker who is hospitalized for some illness that could be both a mental illness and a physical one. In any case, she sees the world through an unusual lens. The poem begins:

Above this metal bed, there is a window.
I crane my neck for a view of the boxed sky.

It's is written in couplets, of which there are twelve, all with lines about this long. I was definitely feeling the influence of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the Rest Cure as I wrote today, although I tried to not be too literal about the reference. I haven't taught the story in several years, but I've taught it so many semesters, that I have it nearly memorized.

Oh, there are geese and wolves in the poem.

In re-reading the "sick bed" poems I've been writing, I've noticed something interesting. There's very little weather or Midwest landscape in them. Hmmmmmmmmm. Has that obsession gone to ground? Time will tell.

Dedicated to Student Success

2011-08-31T08:25:00.001-05:00

77º ~ gray cloud cover after several days of total sun, a juvenile cardinal looking all scruffy is learning to fly from the tree outside my window

Today and tomorrow, I'm 100% college instructor, so the poetry will have to wait until Friday. We are hosting our fall Student Success Fair where all of the offices on campus show up in one space and distribute information to students. Our academic division has joined the fray to promote our programs. It's been two weeks of preparation (you should have seen the boxes stacked in my office!) and now we are ready to go. Thankfully, I have lots of great colleagues who will help cover our table all day today.

See you all on Friday when the poetry drafting resumes.

David Jauss & Nickole Brown: Sept 13, Big Rock Reading Series

2011-08-29T07:53:00.001-05:00

From Draft to Publication

2011-08-27T10:43:00.001-05:00

84º ~ bright sun, barest hint of a breeze, high and dry thinking of those in the path of Irene

Given that several instructor friends have mentioned telling their students about this blog, I thought I'd provide a set of links for some recent publication. For each poem, I will link to the publication where the "finished" poem (no poem is ever really finished) appears online and then link to the blog post in which I describe how that poem began.

While there is no magic five step process to drafting a poem, I know that when I was a beginning poet (and even still today) I loved to see how a poem unfolded itself on the page. I hope my notes might provide just a glimmer of insight for those students out there working to find the way from draft to poem. Of course, what is missing is a description of the hard work of revision along the way.

"Backdrop for an Archetypal Bloodline" appears in Anti- Feature # 68.
Draft process is here.

"Urban Archaeology: Reading the Remains" appears in Anti- Feature # 68.
Draft process is here.

"Requiem for the Girl with Sparrow Wings for a Heart" appears in diode 4.3.
Draft process is here.

"This is Not my Body, This Body that Refuses" appears in diode 4.3.
Draft process is here.

"The Wife Who Wanders Explains her Actions" appears in diode 4.3.
Draft process is here.

"The Starving Saint" appears in The Rumpus.
Draft Process is here.

Draft Process: This Vigil I Keep

2011-08-26T08:48:00.000-05:00

72º ~ while a third of the nation waits for Hurricane Irene, we revel in a return to more normal temps and a lowering of the god-awful humidity that has plagued us for so long, clear skies, the sun tips through the leaves over my left shoulder, the time of daybreak arriving noticeably later these days

Hello to any students from Al Maginnes' class. I hope you find something useful here!
Hello as well to any students from Matt Foster's class at Central High...go Tigers!
Many thanks to Al and Matt for suggesting the Kangaroo as a resource for their student-writers.

Today, I came to the desk on rocky footing. It's been a hell of a week. I've taken on several new responsibilities at work, and I'm feeling the stress of starting up several projects at once. Time is at a premium and I wake up two to three times a night with my brain racing. I keep a "to do" list by the bed so I can add to it as new tasks become apparent. So, I'm stressed and tired and anxious about what awaits me at school today.

And all of that has the makings for an excuse to not write. These are the dangers in a world where most poets do not make their living from writing poems. We have jobs and families and friends who all need us. So, I'm happy today, that I kept my BIC (butt-in-chair) and prioritized poetry for these few hours.

Here's a picture of what my process looked like today.

There is coffee, because it gets my brain snapping out of the fog of sleep.

If you've been following along, you know that I've fallen into a very workable habit. I read the work of a poet I admire and gather (ahem...steal) words from them that are full and ripe. I gather strong nouns and verbs and the occasional adjective, although I know I'm adjective heavy in most poems so I try to steer clear as much as I can. I used to gather these words in regimented rows and then number them and use a random number generator to create pairs that would spark lines. The process has changed over the last few weeks. Now, I let the words fall where they may on the page, and they seem to be generating their own energy there.

I read until I come to a line that feels like it has enough power to become a title, enough suggestion to hint at a complete poem. Today, I've been reading from a little pocket book I picked up a while back. It's Rilke's Poems from the Book of Hours translated by Babette Deutsch. It's more philosophical and spiritual than the Brock-Broido and Baggott that I'd been using last week and the week before. Still, there were some stunning words there. In the poem "If Only There Were Stillness," I found the line "the vigil I would keep" and I was off.

Oh, and I also used a few of my inspiration cards to mix a few images in. This helps me not be tied too closely to the book I use as a leaping off point. For more on the inspiration cards, go here.

The draft became "This Vigil I Keep for Comfort" and falls in line with the speaker I've kept returning to since the beginning of August. This is the speaker who is ill and grappling with a body that will not heal. (Again, I'm fine. Mom, don't worry!) The poem begins:

These hands cradle the fragments
of hushed gestures. They possess
a stammer and a tremble,

The poem ended up being eight tercets, which is right in my sweet spot. Per the usual, I'm in love with the draft at the moment and keep reading it out loud over and over, savoring the sounds and making minor adjustments. In a few days I will hate it, so I'm going to revel in the love as long as I can!

No Fairy Godmothers

2011-08-24T14:33:00.001-05:00

71 degrees ~ wonderful thunderstorms rolling across town, drove home through a serious downpour, celebrating the RAIN!

Amidst the fury of busy-ness this week, I'm very happy to link to my guest post at Escape Into Life. Poetry editor Kathleen Kirk invited me to write a bit about why I ended up creating my fairy tale poems. It was great fun to draft the post, and it helped me say more concisely what the project is all about.

If you have the time, I hope you'll click over and read. It's a short one!

No Time to Say Hello, Goodbye

2011-08-23T07:08:00.002-05:00

79º ~ thunderstorms in the offing, an amazing one last evening with lots of jagged lightning and impressive thunder, a few more days of upper-90s and then looks like more normal temps (i.e. 90-ish most days) ~ humidity swelling all doors

from creativecommons.org

From: Alice In Wonderland
Music: Sammy Fain
Lyrics: Bob Hilliard

I'm Late, I'm Late
for a very important date,
No time to say hello, goodbye,
I'm late, I'm late, I'm late

So goes the song of the White Rabbit and so goes my life (all drug references excluded, please). School is in full swing and I'm committed to several extra projects this week and next.

I WILL be here Friday for my drafting time, and I'm squeezing in some other work time when I can. I'm still whittling down my stack of submissions, and I've been working on answering some interview questions for an upcoming publication.

I'll catch you all on the flip side.

Draft Process: Fragile Breathing

2011-08-19T08:36:00.001-05:00

73º ~ it's early yet, on the way up to 97 - 100, mostly clear skies, the sun beginning to break through the leaves above the roof lines over my left shoulder, near calm

There's a reason I do my drafting and other poetry tasks first thing in the morning, Dear Reader. This first week of school proves again that by the afternoon and evening, I'm wrung out, done, unable to compute. So, I'm happy to report that this morning was a success.

As with my last several drafts, I went casually word gathering to start the day, although I switched from Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters to Julianna Baggott's Compulsions of Silkworms & Bees. Still, as I word gathered, I kept an eye out for a line that might suggest a title. For some reason, this way into the drafts keeps working (knock wood), so I'll keep exploiting it.

Baggott's style is distinctly different from Brock-Broido's, with Baggott's tone more down-to-earth than Brock-Broido's, I think. While at first a bit uncomfortable, after a bit, I was glad in the shift of gears. When I came to Baggott's poem "For Theodore Roethke," I found my title in the following line, "this garden of our fragile breathing."

The draft for today is titled "This Garden of My Fragile Breath." It is, again, an epistolary poem, this time set in tercets (nine total). My speaker remains a sickly woman, although no fever this time. Instead, failing lungs. As my grandfather died of COPD, I found myself drawing from some of the images surrounding his experience with lung disease.

Bronchial Tree of Lungs from SPL

I've found a groove in writing these poems in which the sickly speaker addresses a healthy "other," the "you" in the poems, who might offer her comfort. Again, I'm not going through any major illness right now, so I'm surprised by how much I have to say about the matter.

Strange muse, but I will not turn her away.

Tales from the South

2011-08-17T14:58:00.004-05:00

87º ~ great little thunder shower this morning, now bright sun and humid air heating up

Last night I had the great pleasure of attending Tales from the South and hearing good friend Hope Coulter read. Tales from the South is a locally produced radio show featuring southern writers presenting stories from their own lives. These are often humorous or poignant or a mix of both, as was Hope's tale, "The Lake." Raised in Alexandria, LA, Hope spent many summer days of her youth on the lake, and this tale led us through her learning to water ski, accounts of the adults in the group staying up late with a few adult beverages, and one hungover uncle's toppling into the lake the next day. Beneath the humor and coming-of-age details, Hope laced just the right amount of nostalgia without falling into the dreaded over-sentimentality. There was also an acknowledgement of all the difficult times yet to come in her life that she could only feel vaguely encroaching as she grew closer to adulthood. Beautiful.

The shows are taped on Tuesday nights at Starving Artist Cafe in North Little Rock, and are broadcast on local NPR on Thursday nights. The show reaches more than 130 million listeners worldwide on World Radio Network, airing at 9:00 a.m. CST on Sunday mornings. If you get a chance to listen, tune in. You won't be disappointed.

Counting the Ways: Submission Process Notes

2011-08-16T09:26:00.001-05:00

73º ~ ack, just saw a 100º forecast for Saturday, looks like our brief "cool spell" with highs in the upper-eighties and lower-nineties is on the wane, still, today's sky is clear and the breeze is not at all oppressive

I've got a new schedule at school this semester that allows me two hours at the desk of the Kangaroo before I have to head up to campus. I think I'm going to like this.

This past weekend through today, I spent time drafting a guest post. When the post goes live, I'll let you all know where to find it. What I learned, again, is that with prose, I definitely need the guidance of a solid editor, and I'm thankful for the one I had this time around. My prose tends to get all loosey-goosey with extra words and purple phrases, as I've just demonstrated. I can still recall the notes in the margins of my college essays reminding me to "condense" and "tighten." In poetry, I'm cool with that. In prose, not so much.

This morning was really just polishing, so I had time to turn to poetry submissions. I got sidetracked on August 1 submissions because I was doing a draft a day. One lesson that I think is important for beginning writers is this: yes, you need to do the writing, but if you want your work to be read by more than a handful of people, you also have to do the work of publishing, which means researching markets, sending out packets, and managing data.

Here's my process:

I keep an ever evolving Excel spreadsheet. It lists the title of the journal, whether they take simultaneous submissions, reading periods, number of poems per packet, and a list of acceptances and rejections that is dated so I can see my history with a journal in one glance. This prevents me from submitting too often or too soon after an acceptance.

I keep far too many file folders in a large file cabinet. Each poem gets a file folder and that folder contains significant revisions and the "final" version I'm submitting. Each journal gets a folder and that folder contains all of my submissions and correspondence with the journal. Some of these folders are quite fat now, after a decade of submitting.

I do realize that there are now online services to help with all of this, especially Duotrope. I like the idea of these services, but my system works for me. While I do think services like Duotrope can help keep a writer organized, they cannot replace the years of research I've done with each of the journals in my stacks. I've got lists of names of past poets published that I keep on notes in the journal folders. I've got my own notes on editors or particular themes / styles that a certain journal might favor.

Now, when it comes time to submit, I print off my spreadsheet and check off the journals that have existing submissions. Then, I go through and highlight each journal with an open reading period and check to be sure it's been 8 months to a year since I last submitted, unless the editor asked for more work (another item noted in the spreadsheet).

Next, I gather all the files for the individual poems that are available for submission. This means checking if they are currently out at other journals (simultaneously submitted) and if so, to how many journals. In the past, I used to send one batch of poems to 10 - 15 journals accepting simultaneous submission. Now that I have a bit more success, I limit each batch to 5 - 7 journals. I sort through the available poems and create submission packets of 3 - 5 poems. These I arrange in a row on my desk, as it usually ends up being 3 - 5 groups.

Then, I turn back to my spreadsheet and gather the folders for all of the journals that fit the criteria. These I lay out over the groups of poems, matching each journal to the group I think will best "fit" the tastes of the journal.

It looks like this.

Finally, I scoop them all up in a tower so that I can grab one group at a time to work on. That looks like this.

I used to have marathon weekends where I'd tackle the whole tower in a day and a half. That's exhausting and doesn't really work with a teaching schedule like mine. Now, I can spend an hour or two here and there and whittle down the tower until it's gone. Obviously, that's where I am in the process today as I get ready to head to campus.

In the next few days, I'll work through the stack. Right now I have 4 groups with 5 poems per group and 5 journals matched up with them. If patterns from the past hold, I'll find several journals that have changed their reading periods or are running special themes or other such details to derail the submission. Would I rather be writing poems? Maybe, but then those poems would gather dust in a drawer rather than finding an audience. It's all a matter of balance.

We Will Sell No Line Before Its Time

2011-08-14T11:51:00.005-05:00

83º ~ the weather returns to its proper order and we are happy, thunderstorms have ceased for the time being, the leaves are plumping up, the air is easier to breathe

Those readers of a certain age will recognize the parody in the title of this post. For those who don't, check out this video.

GRRRRR. Blogger won't let me embed the video from YouTube. Click here for the classic wine commercial to which I refer.

This morning, I've spent my writing time in two ways. 1. Preparing the manuscript for the first round of fall submissions. 2. Revising the drafts from the past few weeks. In both cases, I struggle to remember that, for me, the writing and revision process requires lots of time. I do not get it right on the first try.

This is frustrating and means I usually start sending things out too early. In the case of the manuscript, that is especially true. Would I be so worn down by rejection if I'd only waited another year before beginning? Still, when I first sent the book out, I felt confident in the work. I'm more confident now. It seems I am always stuck in the Roethke line "I learn by going where I have to go." The manuscript is in its seventh version and weighs in at 63 pages, exclusive of front matter. Wahoo.

As for the poem drafts, I am totally psyched to say that I have nine drafts produced between July 29th and today. As most of you know, my summer plan to draft and draft and draft was derailed. Had all gone according to plan, those poem I'd drafted in June would have been simmering away on the back burners of revision and might have been ready for submission. This morning, I had to keep reminding myself to not leap to the submission process. Several of the drafts from the past two weeks feel really strong to me. However, I must remember the cycle: Day 1, draft a poem and usually feel a high that makes me love the draft; days 2 - 7 approx., re-read the draft and question my right to call myself a poet, revise, revise, revise; days 8 - 14 approx, re-read the draft and fall in love again while continuing to revise in tiny ways. This cycle is contingent on being able to have lots of quiet desk time. During the school year, it will lengthen to weeks and months. The danger is falling in love with a draft without letting it sit and age. I cannot count the number of times I've submitted a poem before its time and been embarrassed when I received the quick rejection and re-read the poem, only to see the flabby bits sticking out that needed to be trimmed or the glaring cliche I missed in my moon-faced lovey-dovey time (my two most usual problems).

So, while I might not have a slew of poems ready to go for those magazines that open their reading periods on September 1, I am happy to do be doing the work and I will let the voice of Orson Welles remind me that sometimes its okay to be slow.

Draft Process: Alchemy & Mortality

2011-08-12T09:33:00.002-05:00

70º ~ oh sweet relief of thunderstorms rolling over us for the past three days, bringing much needed rain and heat relief, that pesky high pressure system that had us trapped has lumbered to the west where it belongs

It's been a busy school week, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. Full-time faculty reported back on Monday, and I've had meetings and prep work filling my schedule until today. I also forgot that it takes a few days for the body to adjust as well. I found myself drifting off at 2:00 or so, another indication that I really need to keep a schedule in the summer to keep me fighting fit.

This morning, I went back to what's been working well, reading The Master Letters by Lucie Brock-Broido and letting words fall on the page of my journal willy-nilly, some drawn from the book, some from the ether. I read and word gather until I come to a line that feels like a title, something strong enough to hint at a poem.

Today, that line was "the alchemy of my merely / Mortal form" from "His Apprentice." I did adapt it slightly this time to "The Alchemy of My Mortal Form" as the 'merely' seemed unnecessary in a title. The first line uses the first word I noted in my journal this morning, "quickens."

At my wrist, the mottled skin quickens
at your touch, doctor. Do not trust the pulse.

Symbols of Alchemy from Science Photo Library

It seems I'm stuck on the idea of a speaker consumed with fever, as it happens again in today's draft. That fever weaves into my general knowledge of alchemy and the use of fire as transformation. I'm also still working in couplets, although the couplets today are more traditional, with more fully end-stopped lines at the end of the couplets.

I promise you all that I am healthy. I suspect that all the feline medical terminology & tests of the summer are bubbling up in the poems these days.

More gratitude to Lucie Brock-Broido, as her work, like Emily Dickinson's, is full of leaps and arcs. After writing such strictly narrative poems this summer for the fairy tale series, it's been thrilling to return to the lyric form where I am most at home.

RAIN! and Announcements

2011-08-08T16:46:00.007-05:00

100º ~ the rain cooling didn't last long, but at least we got 1/4 inch in the gauge

It's the week before classes at school, so my posts may be sporadic, but here are some announcements.

~ Mary Biddinger selected my childhood library (Waterloo Public Library) as one of four libraries to receive Saint Monica and a lifetime subscription to Barn Owl Review. I love that Mary donated books to libraries based on nominations and I hope to do something similar soon.

~ In other Mary B. news, check out "Saint Monica Wishes on the Wrong Star" on Verse Daily today.

~ In a World Made of Such Weather as This racked up another semi-finalist nod today.

~ I'm thrilled to say I've got two poems up on Anti- as well. This is one of my favorite online journals, and I am so thankful to the editors for supporting my work.

Stay tuned, y'all.

Draft Process: Ungentle Sleep

2011-08-07T11:51:00.001-05:00

100º ~ oh, yes, that's a trip-digit BEFORE NOON, friends and fans of the Kangaroo, I discount all forecasts as they've been on the low side for days, meteorologists dreaming again

This morning, we experienced an internet outage and it was perfectly timed. I had been futzing about on the web, reading blogs and generally wasting time. I say 'wasting time' not because the blogs are a waste but because my goal was to finish my seven-day poem-a-day self-challenge. Rather than push myself to draft, I was letting the blogs distract me. When I get back into my school schedule, I won't have time to drift around the blogosphere. I'll have to draft within a certain time in order to get to school on time.

So, while C. grumbled about the lack of an internet connection, rather than join him as I usually do, I swept all of the extraneous paper from my desk, grabbed my journal, plugged in the classical music, and got to work. Since I've enjoyed two good drafts using the Lucie Brock-Broido book, I returned to it again. Today, I decided I would read until I came to a line that suggested a title and then go from there. I couldn't restrain myself from stealing words; however, I've seen a different result if I place the poems randomly around the page rather than in columns. The columns work very well for a word bank and random pairs, but if I just toss the words onto the page, knowing I'm not going to number them, then some unexpected sparks appear. Plus, certain words call to other words or cause me to write down words of my own.

Today's title is "I Have Gone Shimmering into Ungentle Sleep," which comes from Lucie Brock-Broido's poem "From the Proscenium." Oh, and the fever is still present today, just in the lines of the poem rather than the title. It begins:

This fever is my tutor. It lectures
scarlet on my cheeks, pale quarter-moons

on all my fingernails...

The Poet's Fevered Pillow

I had an interesting experience with form as I drafted today. Once I'd gotten about nine lines on the page of my journal, I felt the momentum strong enough to switch to the computer. After I'd drafted two chunky stanzas there, I realized the form and the content were at war. Something wasn't right. I decided to let the white space in by indention and hard returns. The image of the poem became familiar and comfortable, but when I read it again, the form and content still weren't married. Back to the drawing board, I wound up with couplets straight through. One thing that adding the indention and extra returns does for me is help me see where I want the lines to break. All that extra white space makes me pause more when reading the draft out loud and I can see more clearly where I want the pauses to actually be.

Tomorrow is return to school day. I'll be on campus from 8:30 - 4:00. If I'm up for it, I may try to extend my draft-a-day, but I'm not betting the farm on it.

Draft Process: Day 6 of 7

2011-08-06T11:09:00.000-05:00

94º ~ three more trip-digit days in the forecast and then a 'cool down' to the upper 90s, some small breezes in the upper branches, closer to the ground all is listless

Today's draft was much a repeat of yesterday's process, and a writer loathes nothing more than ineffective repetition. I'll just nod my head in thanks once more to Lucie Brock-Broido. Again, I used a line from one of her poems for the title of the draft. "Seized with a Small Fever" comes from "To a Strange Fashion of Forsaking." Again, I used some of her words, but today more of my own. I even had some inspiration cards splashed around for image jolting.

Yes, both yesterday and today, the lines I chose for titles contain the word 'fever.' No, I'm not sick, but perhaps this unrelenting heat influences me more than I notice. Also, I like the fact that fevers can bring an altered state of mind, which lets me find more magic in my speakers.

Today's poem begins:

The linen here is burgundy, well-laundered.

This vessel rests beneath a gold-leafed
chandelier dimmed to sweetness.

The poem alternates between single-line stanzas and couplets. Also, I use the word 'antipyretics.' Not one of the words I found in Brock-Broido's poems, although she reminds me that I can use Latinate words if they fit the tone of the rest of the poem. As a composition instructor, I'm constantly warning my students against using the "ten dollar words" to try and sound "smart." We are working in those classes for logical communication, straight-forward arguments. A poem is something all together different, and while I love a poem grounded in everyday speech, it's also fun to stretch my wings and see what I can do with a more academic diction. Brock-Broido certainly brings it out in her poems, and it doesn't hurt her 'accessibility,' at least not for me.

And here is Lou-Lou (gaining health every day), adoring The Master Letters as I try to work.

One more day of my mini-poem-a-day self challenge. I can't believe I have six possible poems waiting in my 'In Progress' folder. Tomorrow, that could be seven! Can't wait to dive in and revise.

Draft Process: Minor Fire & Lucie Brock-Broido

2011-08-05T11:26:00.000-05:00

92º ~ what is there to say, really? the heat goes on and on and on, the humidity is there to lick the skin to sweat in five breaths, the sun - merciless

Today, the road to a new poem draft was a long and winding one. It was C.'s first day back at school for professional development days, and I return on Monday. The energy in our house shifted yesterday. I felt it. There is a renewed sense of purpose and the hope that we will create better habits this year than last. For teachers, the return to school may be a bit like January 1 for the rest of the world, a time of goal-setting and looking-forward.

After C. departed for his meetings, I piddled a bit, needing to do the laundry before the full heat of the day began to tax the energy infrastructure. We've been asked to reduce our demand during peak hours from noon - 9 p.m. I also took care of several bits of paper hanging out on my desk, and, oh, I ordered new shoes online, another marker of the new school year.

Finally, I sat with a clear desk and a fresh journal (wahoo). I turned on the classical music (the only music I can use while writing) and...NOTHING. A BIG FAT ZERO HAPPENING IN MY BRAIN. I did hear the cicadas again today, but it seems the length of their rattling is shorter each morning. Also, I went back and forth with self-talk:

"You HAVE to write a poem today, you are doing one draft a day through Sunday and that will be seven new possibilities!"

"Ah, I could slack today, I've done so well the last few days...snooze...it's cool."

I cheered when my better angel won but still didn't know what to write.

Eventually, I decided I just needed to mark up the fresh journal in any way possible and began a stream of consciousness doodling. This led me to money. I scrawled down four key moments from my childhood that had to do with money (of course, I might be making these up, as my fictive memory is now legend in my family). I tried to write a poem about money and got nowhere...to essay-like.

I got up and wandered around some, moving wet laundry to the dryer, giving the cat some treats, looking out the window at the heat, etc. As I wandered back into my office, it struck me that I should re-read Lucie Brock-Broido's The Master Letters. I've had Emily Dickinson's letters on my brain for a few days, and Brock-Broido's book is inspired by the three "Master Letters' discovered on Dickinson's death. I love Brock-Broido's deft use of unconventional language. There is a spark in my body when I read her work, and it did not fail me today.

As I started reading, I also jotted down words in my journal. I wasn't thinking of a word bank, in particular; I just wanted words that felt good on my tongue and in my gut. The second poem in the first section, "Also, None Among Us Has Seen God," contains the line "the fevers of a minor fire." I scribbled that out and knew I wanted to use it as a title for a poem, but I wasn't ready to draft yet. I kept reading. I only made it through two more poems, getting to "Unholy." This poem is an epistolary prose poem addressed Dear Master--. As I read, churning in the back of my mind was the patriarchal address used by both Dickinson and Brock-Broido. My draft clicked. I wanted to write an epistolary poem (though not a prose poem) to my masters: Dickinson & Brock-Broido.

Another great photo source, Science Photo Library

I did use the previous line for my title: "Fevers of a Minor Fire."

August 5th

Dear Madam--

Feminine form of Lord, I address you
with a tongue calloused & lumbering.

The poem turned out to be three stanzas of eight lines each, with the date, salutation, and signature, adding three extra lines. I did end up using several of the words I'd "stolen" as I read, so I guess I fell back on the word bank model without setting out to do so.

Drafting this poem made me happy because I felt lit up inside and while every line didn't just magically appear, the drafting was rewarding once I got started. I know I borrowed this feeling from Brock-Broido's work, and, as always, I am in her debt.

Draft Process: Inventing Rain

2011-08-04T10:34:00.001-05:00

92º ~ rain to the north and west of us, not likely to head our way, the skies already lightening from dense gray to hazy blue, angry at being passed over again

In case you've missed my quite obvious obsession, I do not do well with long stretches of extreme weather. This past spring, we had flooding rains for weeks and weeks, which included the unprecedented closure of the interstate between Little Rock and Memphis. Now, we have record breaking heat. Yesterday, we topped out at 114º before the heat index was calculated. Today, we are supposed to get to 106º. I've lost track of the number of 100+º days.

As I set about writing a draft for today, I couldn't shake my obsession. As I sat at the desk with my BIC (butt-in-chair), staring at the sad leaves on the tree outside my window, I noticed something. No cicadas. I have no idea if they are gone for the season or not, but they've been my accompanists these past weeks, and now, silence. Thus began my drafting.

Listen. Today the cicadas are silent.

No drilling, persistent rattle,
but plenty of perfect skin-forms
still cling to the siding and trees.

(Eerily, just as I typed the above, I began to hear the cicadas again...I hope I haven't angered the cicada gods, as I'm not fond of the little buggers or their skins.)

The poem became "Inventing a Rain Spell" as the speaker went about collecting the skins and creating her own ritual to get it to rain. The poem alternates between single-line stanzas and tercets, beginning and ending on single lines.

from creativecommons.org

Close friends know that I am, frankly, freaked out by these skin-shells. My husband, C., likes to collect them in his man cave. They give me the willies. Too perfect for me to believe they are dead tissue, I imagine them flicking back to life at any second. So, the poem was a bit of a departure for me as the speaker actually handles the skins. Also, just getting the picture for the blog today was grossing me out. I can't really look at the image directly.

For something prettier, I finished my journal today. Here's what it looks like. BTW: I realize there's some thing going around the internet about "putting a bird on it" and how women should stop doing that. Well, pppppplllllllllbbbbbbbbbbbttttttt (raspberries) to that. I love birds and I won't stop just because some hipster thinks they've become a cliche. So there.

We Interrupt This Program

2011-08-03T14:34:00.002-05:00

111º ~ with heat index = 117º ~ I do not lie

Yes, I did get a draft under my belt this morning but nothing new to deliver in terms of process notes. It was all BIC and time to stare out the window word-gathering.

What seems more urgent just now is this.

I clipped this from The Weather Channel's info on Little Rock just moments ago. Dear Lord, it's enough to make one reconsider living in the wintery bluster of the north.

Please, please, please make smart energy choices, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. Mother Nature is showing us the error of our ways, and I don't like it.

Draft Process: How to Write about the Death of Your Pet Without Mentioning Your Pet

2011-08-02T13:00:00.000-05:00

97º ~ heading up to 103 before the heat index is figured, grab an oxygen tank, friends and fans of the weather, it's getting hard to breathe out there, the dirt has turned to concrete beneath our feet despite attempts to keep things watered during the night hours

I'm happy to report that so far, I'm on track for a poem a day through Sunday. Whee. I'm still starting with Meeks' Biogeography and letting the poems there help my mind loosen up. To do justice to Meeks, I'll need to re-read the book with more concentration later. Right now, I'm just letting the words and lines crash over me like waves of sound (I tend to read out loud).

No surprise, then, that today's draft is "Biogeography: 8/2/11."

Dear Readers, I confess that I've been wallowing in a blue funk for the past few days and trying to figure out the cause. I know I'm having some back-to-school stress, but I also had to admit to myself, finally, that I'm still mourning the death of Libby, our beautiful tabby cat. At the time Libby died, Lou-Lou, our black & white frisky cat, was fighting for her life against an unrelated disease. Now that Lou-Lou is getting better and is more her old self, the grief for Libby is setting in. It's such a minor loss when compared to friends who've recently lost human loved ones, but it's what I have going on in my heart right now, so here I am.

Once again, I managed to take the emotions and facts about the cat and place them in a poem without mentioning Libby. The last time I did this was when I started "Fairy Tale for a Girl with a Fever of Unknown Origin" and I used some details from Lou-Lou's medical files for that, applying them to the girl. Today, I let my sadness for Libby guide me. I began with noting the environmental conditions (drought), in large part because of Meeks' influence, and then, I let the poem drift to "This I've labeled a killing summer, / although the heat was not / to blame / for a faulty heart / long undetected."

from the National Drought Mitigation Center at U of NE Lincoln

At first, I had two chunky stanzas, one of eight lines and one of nine. I have a habit (bad? good?) of wanting balance in my stanzas but on re-reading there was nothing I wanted to add to the first or remove from the second. This got me to questioning why I'd broken the lines and stanzas as I had. I re-read (out loud) and realized the poem has a lot of nature in it and a lot of meditation and my mind drifted to Charles Wright and some of his poems with lots of indented lines spread over the page. I started working through the poem adding more white space and breaking up the chunks. It turns out, this unlocked even more drafting for me and I was able to trim some of the excess language as well. Much happier with it this way, even though I recently read someone giving advice to poets by telling them to stay away from the tab key. To that I say: to each her own!

~~~~~

On a happy note, I had an acceptance for a poem in my inbox this morning. Wahoo! Maybe the acceptance dance will also serve as a rain dance today. A girl can dream.

Draft Process: Another Biogeography

2011-08-01T10:29:00.000-05:00

87º ~ 100, 101, 102, 100, 100: thus read the predicted highs for the week ~ sigh ~ sweat ~ laundry ~ sigh ~ sweat ~ laundry ~ impossible to even run short errands without feeling it

Today's draft post builds on my last draft post (7/29/11), in which I discussed Sandra Meek's Biogeography as inspiration. I've read half of the book now and while my poems are drastically different from Meek's, which take on a more global view from time to time, I am indebted to her for the idea spark.

Today, as I was reading more from Meek's book, I had my notebook open and ready, not sure where I would go, but wanting to try to draft a poem a day for this week. So, I kept repeating "I will write a poem" all morning and I held that thought in the back of my head as I read. One of the things I wrote down in my journal was this: "Embrace the I." For a while now, I've tried to distance myself from the "I" in my poems. I have worked to avoid autobiography and simply write poems inspired by the things I've heard, seen, done, experienced, etc. without telling the facts of my life. I've done this as a conscious attempt to subvert the idea of confessional poetry. One of the ways I've done this is to use the third person almost exclusively. Of course, with the nursery tales, that also fit the form.

However, as I've been reading lately, I've been watching how other poets I admire, Meek among them, work with the "I." And you know what...I could care less if they are revealing "facts" about themselves or if they made them up. I like the closeness of the "I," the revelation of the speaker.

After reading another section of Meek's book, I started having an inkling of where I wanted to go but needed one more push. That push came by reading over the draft from the 29th. Again, nothing came pouring out of me and there was a lot of hemming and hawing, but still, I got down a draft: 10 stanzas written in couplets, "Biogeography: 8/1/11." It begins:

Traveling to the house of born and raised
is slow going. I dredge a map from muscle memory

that says north by northeast and tells me
when to turn, when to stop and gather strength.

my childhood home, from a recent real estate listing

For now, I'm just happy to have gotten something down, whether it lives or not. Good blogger & poetry friend Karen J. Weyant reminded me of this when she reported that she'd written a poem a day for July and at the end found she had 16 drafts that might be poems. Duh! Headsmack! I'd let myself fall back into that trap of thinking every draft I began had to lead somewhere final. I am now reminded that there must be room for failures, for drafts that die on the page; otherwise, the pressure of perfection stifles all the words in my head. Snuff!