Bleary-Eyed but Satisfied: A Weekend in Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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 Chicago Hilton)

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

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

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

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. 

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Water Puppets
Quan Barry
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011

Please Bear with Me

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!