Quotes and more

"Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
Virginia Woolf
A Room of One's Own

"There is no reason to write a book unless the process of imagining it changes one's life forever."
Richard Manning
Grasslands

"I was an earth thing all along
my feet are catching in the brush"
A. R. Ammons
"Breaking Out"
A Coast of Trees

~~~~

Books on the side table waiting to be read:

Unaccustomed Earth Jhumpa Lahiri
Cocktails D. A. Powell
the true keeps calm biding its story Rusty Morrison

Smattering

Tomorrow, I go back to work. A week of meetings and professional development. Students on the 18th. My goal will be to blog once a week. My teaching schedule is still in flux. One of the realities of teaching at the community college level is that there is no consistency in student enrollment. Classes that make easily one semester might struggle the next, even for full-time faculty. I'd rather start the semester off with a bit more surety, but there you go. I should know by Tuesday what I'll be teaching for sure and when. The situation is even more tenuous for adjunct instructors, and they have my sympathy.

I am pleased with my accomplishments for the summer. The book is shaping up and facing its first readers. Thanks to those who've taken the time to give me feedback. I'll send it off for the first time by Sept. 15th. I only hope that I'll be able to keep my writing balance when back to teaching. As always, it is helpful to have a supportive husband along the way.

I've just discovered (or rediscovered, maybe?) the idea of the palinode, a poem that retracts what a poet might have said in an earlier poem. I'm fascinated by the idea, as I've been struggling with several poems I've written in which I know I've captured a "truth," yet the poems seem so harsh and filled with blame/regret/anger. This palinode reminds me that I might have captured a momentary truth, but I can always retract and change my focus. I've always known that poetry (art) could do this, but it's nice to see it in action.

I've been reading the current issue of Hayden's Ferry Review and highly recommend the poetry gathered there. Of particular note is the international section, which features poems in the poet's orginal language on the facing page opposite the translation. This should be mandatory when publishing translations. Having never seen Bengali in print before, I was stunned by the beauty of its characters. I couldn't read the original, of course, but some readers will be able to, as I am of some remnants of French, and seeing the original against the translation only widens the dialogue. Aside from the translations, the journal is simply beautifully produced and worth the read.

Elegy for the Library Checkout Card

So, I've been using InterLibrary Loan from my school's library and using the public library a good deal. As I thumbed through a book last night, it struck me once again how much I miss the old checkout cards. I loved being able to see who had read a book before me. All the different handwritings and names made me feel connected in some way.

Granted, I also like the due date slips that are pasted into the book with the due date stamped. This way I can see how many other readers have checked out the book. I feel sorry for books with no other stamps than mine. Granted, the library might have just changed the slip, but still, that one date looks so forlorn. If I'm browsing the shelves and see that no one has checked the book out, I just might take it home so it will earn a stamp!

However, our public library uses recyclable due date cards. Each card has four dates, month and day, printed so that depending on how the card is flipped in the slot, a different due date shows up. The "save the planet" part of me loves this idea, but it doesn't let me know the history of the book, which saddens me.

I do know the reasons for pulling checkout cards, and I'm a huge fan of privacy laws, so I'm not seeking a return to the old. I'm just mourning the passing of a tradition that made me feel a part of a larger circle, I guess.

Wordle

Thanks, Monda, for posting about Wordle.net. I have been mesmerized all afternoon. Here is a Wordle of my poem "Berries Frozen in Fog." Watching the program create the image, I "see" the poem in a new way. Fun. Loads of fun.

(Sean, if you read this, you will be soooooooo proud of me. I learned how to do a screen shot and convert from a TIFF to a JPEG. Holy Cow!)

Here's the poem as it appears in MARGIE vol. 5:

Berries Frozen in Fog

Small orange bursts burden the branch. The weight
makes bend and curve, shows all there is to know

about belief. The fruit’s skin glows like blown
glass that breath itself might break in half.

This is winter in the west, my refugium
(from the French fugere, which means to flee),

my high ground under siege. This fleeting
wind has dragged the arctic down to me.

The day proceeds, decidedly outmatched.
Slow thaw. The sprig springs back. The tipping point

is met. The ice melts off the leaves the way
that grief lets loose, gently undoing the latch,

when no one else is watching, slipping past.


Now, back to the new submissions!

Embarkation

August has arrived. For those unfamiliar with the world of poetry publishing, most of the journals and publishers work on an academic calendar. Things move slowly, slowly during the summer months, if they move at all. Many lit mags and book contests are closed to submissions during June and July.

Yesterday, a handful of lit mags opened their reading periods. Come September, the floodgates will be loosed. It's time to warm up the printer and buy the paper.

However, soon, the paper and printer will go the way of all things 20th century. A good portion of the journals are now accepting submissions via electronic means (either email or an online submission manager). A poet-friend and I had lunch this week and exchanged recent experiences with online submissions. There are many pros and a few cons, it seems. The pros have to do with saving money on postage not to mention paper and ink, receiving confirmation on receipt, ease of withdrawing a piece if necessary, and saving time in general. Our one beef with the electronic submission format has to do with the responses we receive. Both of us have received snail mail rejections with notes of encouragement from mags that are now using electronic systems. We've both gotten vague replies via email from the same mags that encouraged us in the past. It is near impossible to tell if the rejection is the standard one or if there is a personal message within.

Case in point. I recently received this email from a journal I absolutely love and admire and have been submitting to for years. In the past two years, I've felt like I was gaining ground because in snail mail rejections, I've gotten personal notes of encouragement. Here's the email:

"Thank you for giving us the chance to consider your work for publication in The anonymous Review. Though it does not fit our current needs, we appreciate your interest in our magazine and your commitment to quality writing. I really enjoyed reading your poems. Keep up the great work."

Those first two lines seem to be the standard rejection, but the next sentence brings in the "I." Is that the personal message? It seems unlikely that editors have the power to edit within the system, but I'm still curious. Does the electronic system prevent editors from sending personal notes?

Let me be clear. I'm not criticizing this journal, or any of the others using electronic submissions. By and large, I prefer to submit electronically. I'm just throwing the uncertainties out there. Anyone who tries to get their work out there knows that the process, aside from the very clear guidelines provided by most journals, is muzzy indeed.

I've got my list of 20 mags with open reading periods, I've got my batch of poems all polished and shiny, and tomorrow I'll begin the process of sending my poems out there, if I find the courage to begin.

Sprawl

The internet is an amazing, sprawling thing. In the past 24 hours, I've added 2 new blogs to my list that I check daily: Hayden's Ferry Review and Kenyon Review. I like the trend of journals turning to blogging. There is often such a long lag-time between issues, and there is so much potential for posting extras. I just can't keep up with who is out there. These two blogs have been in existence for quite awhile without my discovery.

In a post yesterday on the Kenyon Review blog, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky brings up the ever present debate about talent, craft, and hard work. Are writers/artists born or made? Can we teach an art to someone born without instant talent? In his introduction, he says, "Good writing can come from talent or craft or plain hard work, but great writing requires all three." Then, later, as he proposes the long view of building on talent/will/desire to create/etc. through careful practice, he imagines a student disappointed by a tough critique in workshop. This is Lobanov-Rostovsky's response to the student:

"It’s not that 'we just don’t get it.' You just didn’t get it right! But no worries, mate, because you don’t have to prove yourself a genius by writing a perfect first draft. Geniuses revise. (I’m having that printed on a t-shirt as we speak.) And your first book won’t be your best book. You’ll mature; you’ll ripen. You’re not a morning glory, but a slow-growing vine. Only your author photo will remain unchanged as the years pass."

I love it! "Geniuses revise." My new motto.

Lit Crit

I've been reading D.A. Powell's latest post on the Harriet Blog over at Poetry's website. I'm so thankful Powell took the time to write this post, as it reflects many of my own feelings about literary criticism. I admire scholars of literary criticism, but I have always shied away from delving too deeply into criticism, mostly from the fear that any one school of thought might influence my poems. I prefer to rely on instinct and imagination.

Here's the quote I love the most from Powell's post:
I think it’s okay for poets to step away from the academy for a while and just read, write, see a movie, eat a plate of chicken and waffles, write a little more, go to sleep, dream about catching tigers in red weather.

As far as criticism and reading other writers, I'm encouraged by Powell's defense of reading by instinct, accepting what resonates and passing on what doesn't. It works for me.

What I'm Reading: The Usable Field

About ten years ago, I was in the habit of noting when and where I acquired my books. I'd jot down the month/year and the city on the inside of the back cover. Somewhere along the way, I dropped the habit, and now I wish I hadn't. I'm no longer sure when I started reading Jane Mead's poetry, but I have her first two collections well-earmarked: The Lord and the General Din of the World (Winner of the 1995 Kathryn A Morton Prize) and House of Poured-Out Waters. This week, I bought and read, devoured really, her third book, The Usable Field.

Mead comes closest to being the poet I wish I were today. As one of her blurb writers, Alan Williamson, describes it, "Confessional detail and philosophical argument are reduced to traces, but their resonance from underneath leaves no doubt that this work is serious." As I've been sifting through the poems in my new manuscript, I am haunted by the question: Is this too personal, too confessional? Mead builds beautiful poems that are clearly based on her real-world experiences and the truths she has discovered; however, the poems rarely reveal anything personal. How does she do it? Vexing.

Here is the opening of "Sister Harvest Brother Blues"

Because there is no earth-light,

because there is none other, we remain

wayward and hampered. No one


will be going this day with us.

The main force is the usable field

or sun on the useless bunchgrass,--


Here is the opening of "With No Praise from the Far Dark Reaches"

I believe in the horse and the marshes--I believe

in the crow,--talisman of apple tree and pear.

I believe in the wall. This wall and the other.


Did I say the willow? I believe the willow

knows what the dead know, passing over.

Many of the poems have the feel of the elegiac, and several of the poems reference "the dead." Those of you who have read my recent poems might have seen me do the same. In fact, as I began reading Mead's book, my little inner critic-demon was chirping away that Mead was doing what I'd set out to do and much better.

Most of Mead's poems in The Usable Field are short, intense, contained. They are largely one page or less, with a few exceptions. I have to admit that I favor the short poem. I've never had the attention span necessary for lengthier works. Mead manages that great trick of poetry, compression, with masterful force.

I'm grateful for another distant mentor.

Practicalities

Today, I'm actually following my own advice. Each semester, I remind students about the importance of backing up their work, and each semester several students (and often myself) lose whole papers, stories and poems to computer glitches. So, today, I'm actually going to use the external hard drive that I purchased six months ago to back up all my files.

Another practical application on tap for today is the actual construction of the computer file for Glacial Elegies. So far, I've just been shuffling hard copies of poems around; however, I finally feel ready to create that lengthy document. Much tinkering to follow....

Overcoming

As promised, here are 5 ways of overcoming the doubts and obstacles.

1. Celebrate the victories, big and small.
Each acceptance, each public reading, each note from a reader means the work is paying off. I still get a thrill when an editor takes the time to compliment one of the poems he or she has accepted. Sometimes, when the doubts are there, I look back at my collection of contributor copies to remind myself that others have found my poetry worthy of a public space. Sometimes, I look back at my emails from the folks at Anhinga to recapture that energy.

2. Cultivate supportive friends and family members.
Writing is hard, isolated work. Largely, we writers spend a lot of time inside our own heads. When the doubts arrive, reach out to a good friend, colleague or family member. Let their words remind you that the process of discovery necessary for each new poem, story, essay, or other art piece is worth your time and energy. My dad admits that he doesn't really "get" poetry, but he tells me that he is proud of what I've done, regardless. It might sound sappy, but it helps.

3. Try not to wallow in self-pity or self-recrimination.
This is a take on Megan's comment from the previous post. I do have a habit of wallowing in self-blame. A lot of valuable time can be lost this way.
3 1/2. If you must wallow, set yourself a time limit.
Give yourself one evening with Ben & Jerry or a bottle of wine. Vent. Then get over it.

4. Create a hands-on tool kit for jump-starting new work. The best way I've found to break the cycle of the doubtings is to get back to the page. I'll often ask a fellow poet to give me an assignment and a time limit. It might be a bit contrived, but it gets me back to the work and away from the couch. I also use submissions for this purpose. Sometimes focusing on the business side of things gets my mind off the doubts and back to the work. After all, in order to send something out there, I have to believe it is ready for public consumption. This often leads to revisions, which leads to ideas for new poems.

5. Pobody's Nerfect.
My mother, in all her wisdom, knew from the time I was very young that I have a tendency to beat myself up over mistakes. She once gave me a bookmark with "Pobody's Nerfect" on it. Lately, the phrase has come back to comfort me. Be kind to yourself. Each day offers a new chance to overcome the doubts and jump back into the writing. If you feel like you've let the doubts stifle you, just remember that there's always another chance to get back to the page.

Questioning

My friend Megan Chapman has a great, brave post on her blog this week that contains a journal entry in which she questions her art and herself as an artist. (Megan gives away a piece of art to a random commenter once a month...check it out!) Many folks have chimed in through the comments, but I find myself lingering on the questions and thinking about my own questioning/doubting/ second-guessing.

If you read this blog back in June, you know that I sent out about 20 submissions containing new poems. I've now gotten back a few rejections; at the same time, I've been combing through the new manuscript with the most critical eye yet, and I'm finding some weaker points. As the summer is now about 2/3 over, and school/work is looming on the horizon, I've also taken a moment to reflect on what I've accomplished. All of this reflection, leaves me thinking I could be doing more. I have not written every day, as I intended. I have not read all of the books on my "unread" shelf, as I intended. I have spent some days on the couch watching baseball and Netflix films. I have spent some days reading political thrillers instead of poetry/literature. I have spent some days reading other people's blogs rather than writing. Does this mean I am not serious enough about my work? When given the entire summer, with no obligations and therefore no excuses for not working, I feel a bit like I've let myself down.

Megan talks about having to be a sales person to get her work out there on the market and wonders about how that might influence her. I know that for me, perseverance in submitting work, in marketing myself as a "serious" writer, has been the only way for me to get published. Most of my individual poems go out to dozens of magazines before being accepted. Blood Almanac was accepted after over 50 rejections. When hearing of other writers and how their work is accepted almost instantly and from the press/publication of their choice, I begin to wonder if my work holds up.

All of this questioning must seem a bit self-indulgent, but I think it is important to acknowledge the doubts that run like a minor current through my mind on a pretty constant basis. For me, it is important to acknowledge the doubts and then find ways to overcome them.

Next time...methods to overcome the doubts.

AWP Registration

Registration for AWP in Chicago opened yesterday - here. Last year, AWP in New York sold out of registrations well before the conference.

Roots

"This is Iowa...and not only are the people nice, they have a hard time believing anyone else is not nice." -- Joseph Geha in the essay "Where I'm From - Originally."

I'm reading a collection of essays written by Midwestern authors called Townships, edited by Michael Martone and published in 1992. I've had this book for about 9 months, and I no longer remember what reference led me to it; I'm simply grateful that Martone solicited these essays and published them.

When I entered the MFA program at the U of A, I had only a vague sense of my subject matter; however, the creative writing program at Arkansas is, if nothing else, a program built on the strong literary tradition of Southern writers. Two particular classes got me thinking about regionalism and where I fit as a writer. One was Dr. Brinkmeyer's class on the Southern Novel and the other was one of Skip Hays' form & theory classes, the one on the novel. Reading Faulkner, O'Connor, and a host of others, it became clear that there was a definite sense of what it means to be Southern and to write. Reading broadly, I could also identify this definitive regionalism in authors of New England and the West. Even authors who exist outside the mainstream in these areas echo, reflect, and refract that sense of region. What's left? The Midwest. What are the basic tenets of a Midwestern regionalism/aesthetic? I have struggled with that question ever since.

Martone makes a point in his introduction that the Midwest has defied definition from the beginning. For all intents and purposes, it stretches from the Ohio Valley to the Rocky Mountains. It covers eastern forests, sweeping prairies, all the great northern rivers that feed the Mississippi, and the short grasses of the plains. This is a massive amount of land peopled by a great diversity. While many of us are connected to the land through a family history with farming, there are just as many of us connected to the urban blue collar of factories & city jobs.

So, does a sense of Midwestern regionalism exist in literature? Does it begin with Willa Cather and Sinclair Lewis? I think the net surrounding and defining what it means to be a Midwestern author is there; however, it must be larger, looser and more accommodating than the rest. The essays in Townships are helping me grapple with my own sense of regionalism.

I laughed at the quote from Geha because I am constantly frustrated when faced with people who are just mean-spirited and small-minded. None of this is to suggest that Midwesterners (or myself) are constantly good and moral; we are all flawed individuals.

Perhaps place no longer matters quite so much in literature, given our global age. Perhaps these questions of regionalism drift to the antique. Perhaps my own personal struggle between rootedness and mobility lacks the power of political, economic, and social struggles. All I can do is write what comes out of me and try to say something true about my experiences in this lifetime.

Glacial Progress, 2nd Installment

It's been about a month since I posted news of Glacial Elegies. When working on Blood Almanac, I kept all the poems in a simple file folder, which presented problems when I tried to look at the sequence and shuffled the poems unknowingly or when I knocked the folder off my desk every other day. Wednesday, I did the same with my folder for GE. Suddenly, it struck me...get a three-ringed binder. Not sure why I was so slow to think about using some kind of binder, but there you go. For me, going to any office supply store can be a dangerous outing. I've never been a fashion horse, but just set me loose in a room of paper, post-its, pens, binders, & etc., and I can quickly lose all sense of my budget.

In any case, I found a three-ringed binder with a colorful pattern of blues, purples, and greens. I'm usually quite practical about these things and just get the black or white binder; however, there's something earthy about this design, and it caught my eye. I spent yesterday printing up all of the poems I'd previously organized in my GE folder. (Last month, I laid out all the poems on the wonderful 8 ft. conference table my husband had the good sense to buy. I got down the basic order for the poems and some sense of the section breaks.) After printing the poems, I punched the holes and loaded them into the binder. It's much more organized than the folder; I can flip through the poems more easily, and I get a better "feel" for the book. It might seem new-agey/touchy-feely, but loose pages are harder for me to imagine as a book.

What surprised me is that I have more than met the minimum number of pages (usually 48) that most presses require. When I was working on the first book, it felt like pulling teeth to get to the minimum, and even then, Anhinga asked for more poems before publishing the book. In this go around, I guess I held back from envisioning the entire manuscript. Perhaps having the first book out there gave me some breathing room to just let the poems happen.

Now, I have the luxury of removing a few of the poems that might not fit and spending the next 6 weeks thinking about and crafting a few poems that I think need to be in the book. There are a couple of angles regarding death & mourning that I haven't covered yet that I'd like to explore. At the moment, I'm feeling really good about meeting my first deadlines for submission, which begin at the end of September. I'm sure the book will continue to evolve, but the basic structure is there, and that is satisfying enough for now.

What I'm Reading: Elegy

Without doubt, Larry Levis died far too young at the age of 49 in 1996. Elegy is the collection he had very nearly completed in the months before his death. Philip Levine edited the collection at the request of Levis' family.

I have read individual poems from this collection in the past, but the cumulative effect of reading poem after poem is that of an almost unbearable sadness. The last nine poems are titled in this vein -- "Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand," "Elegy with a Thimbleful of Water in the Cage," "Elegy Ending in the Sound of a Skipping Rope," etc. While all the poems in the book explore the fragility of human connections, how easy it is for those connection to become lost and broken, the elegies capture the human condition perfectly. These poems explore the need for relationships juxtaposed against the need for solitude. They illustrate the sad fact that we often destroy what we love, and this is frequently shown through the age-old conflict of humanity versus the natural world.

This is a book that weighs on the reader. What astonishes me now, looking back over the poems, is that Levis confronts his (and our) mortality so straightforwardly. For instance, in "Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It" he writes, "We go without a trace, I am thinking," followed by "What are we but what we offer up?" Then, in another tone altogether, in "Boy in Video Arcade" he writes, "So Death blows his little fucking trumpet, Big Deal, says the boy." The defiance of youth in the face of death just sucks the air from my lungs.

I'm sure Levis' death so soon after writing these poems and at such a relatively young age for our times contributes to the weight of these poems; however, the poems are haunting and powerful of their own accord, whether the reader knows the backstory or not.