What I'm Reading: Pause, Traveler + "Poems that Get Their Hands Dirty" (Author Interview)

80º ~ clear skies, beautiful air as the dew point is down at 60º, the best kind of summer in Arkansas, enough rain with yesterday's storms to feed the yard and prevent us from having to water


I first came to know Erin Coughlin Hollowell through her blog, Being Poetry.  And by that knowing, I was able to follow her journey as her first book was accepted and then published.  It was super fun to meet up with Erin in Boston at AWP and get my hands on a copy of Pause, Traveler (Boreal Books, an imprint of Red Hen Press, 2013) and have Erin sign it for me.

Recently, I finished reading the entire book, and Erin agreed to participate in an author interview for the Kangaroo.

SL: First, congratulations on the publication of Pause, Traveler.  Boreal Books (an imprint of Red Hen Press) did a fantastic job on the production!  It is a beautiful book both inside and out.  Also, many thanks for agreeing to participate in this interview.

The title of the collection intrigues me.  The poems are divided into five sections that are steeped in place/setting, and yet, the speaker seems ever traveling, until the very end, when she pauses.  We begin in the grit and grime of New York City; then flash back to the speaker’s childhood and family connections somewhere outside the city, perhaps in rural Pennsylvania or thereabouts; next, a cross-country journey touching on that eastern connection and then moving through the upper Midwest and plains.  The fourth section contains few clear references, but by the fifth section, the speaker is definitely in Alaska, yet still questing and questioning in some ways.  Can you talk about both the title of the collection and the arc of the book?  Was it always titled this?  Did you write the sections chronologically or did the poems come at random with you ordering them later?

ECH: By the time I came to rest in Alaska, I had moved fifteen times in about thirty-four years. And when I say moved, I mean whole states, not just moving from one block to another. If I added those short moves in, the number would be significantly higher. I really yearned to find a home. Or at least I wanted to stay in one place long enough to begin to explore the nuance over the new. So much of the poetry I was writing was steeped in place, but in very different places because of my many travels.

At some point, I ran across the Latin phrase “Siste viator,” meaning “Pause, traveler,” that was used on crossroads and roadside tombs. There was something so evocative about the idea of pausing during life’s travels, both at crossroads and at the end point. Since so much of the book was about movement, both physical and emotional, it seemed to fit. The poems weren’t written in any sort of chronological order, but as I was putting the collection together, I separated them into New York versus Alaska sections, then a section of the poems about roadside attractions, and finally two sections in which the movement is more emotional rather than physical.

SL: In these poems, much has been stripped and fractured, even Elvis’ songs are “threadbare,” and the speaker of the poems, most definitely a woman, appears to be searching for something to believe in, something solid, an “easily mapped terrain” with “no dangerous edges.”  Do you think this speaker reflects the larger search and sense of being lost for American women who grew up post-Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem or am I reading too much into the poems?

ECH: I think that for many women, the path has not been very clear if you weren’t following the prescribed “get married, have kids” route. If you were in a bad relationship, you tried to tough it out so that you wouldn’t have to admit failure. Life is so much more complicated when you start claiming autonomy. A lot of women are still looking for Prince Charming. I know that I was, and I kept making choices that led to sadness. Part of the journey of these poems is learning how to be whole.

SL: There is also an element of the working-class in the poems.  We are not seeing the glamour and glitz of New York or the prosperous rural landowners.  Instead, we see the struggle of everyday people just trying to keep food on the table, shoes on the feet, and a roof over it all.  In fact, in one poem, you raise garbage men to the level of deities.  Do you think there is a connection between class issues and the speaker’s journey?  Do you align yourself with other working-class writers?

ECH: This is an interesting subject. I’ve never really thought about the issue, but I do come from the first white collar household in a lineage of blue collar households. My family was a success story because my father worked very hard to put us in better and better circumstances. It was never in doubt that I would go to college, but I’ve never had a clear vision of a career path. I just wanted to write, and so if that meant that I had to work as a temp in New York City, or as a high school English teacher (hoping to use summer vacation to write), or as an arts administrator (so that I wouldn’t lose my connection to the arts but could still support myself), well then I was okay with it. Living in Alaska, you quickly learn to be adaptable to whatever job opportunities arise, because your dream job probably doesn’t exist here in quite the same form it has in the lower-48.

SL: At the individual poem level, you move easily between narrative and lyric, often melding the two.  Would you say a bit about your writing process?  Do you have a comfort zone in terms of style or form (line lengths, stanza breaks, etc.)?  Do you consciously set out to write poems of varying styles?

ECH: Most of my poems arise from an image, the windows in a diner weeping with condensation, a truckload of butchered pigs. Sometimes from a line that seems gifted to me, “a small bird needs a small branch.” I am attracted to brief lyric poems, drop in with a gorgeous image and get out before I mess it up with too much thought. As I look over my work, I realize that I’m much more physical than cerebral. Things happen in my poems. For the most part they are peopled and tangible. With the new collection that I’m working on, I am spending a lot more time experimenting with form, different line lengths, prose poetry. And still, as I read over these new poems, I find that for the most part they are about the physical world, rather than philosophy or the speaker’s ruminations. I guess I just like poems that get their hands dirty.

SL: As I read Pause, Traveler, I was struck by your attention to sound, something I am always looking for in contemporary, free verse poetry, and something that isn’t always there.  For example, in “Atlantic Avenue Idyll,” you write, “Below, the surge and slack of salsa / carries through the pipes and cracks.”  And, in “His Barn,” there is this: “Askew, timbers skewer gray sky.”  In “Way of a Wave,” the poem opens with “Gusts rattle loose windowpanes, / wind hurling volleys of hard rain. / The dark sea strikes all day.”  I’m interested in your drafting and revision process here.  Does this attention to sound (particularly assonance and consonance, although also the give & take of stresses) come naturally to you at this point in your writing career or do you fine-tune the sounds during revision?

ECH: Oh, if you could read some of the poetry I wrote in high school and early college, you’d collapse under the Hopkins-ness of it. I loved Gerard Manley Hopkins and I read him quite a bit early on. And Dylan Thomas, oh, I rolled around in the richness of his work. So from the beginning, I was very aware of sonic devices like assonance and consonance, as well as sprung rhythm and cadence. At this point, I think it’s in my bones. I will sometimes try to heighten the effect during the revision process, but honestly, I usually have to cut back to keep from being too purple.

SL: And, here’s the question that comes up at every reading ever given by any author.  Which authors do you cite as your mentors; which books do you return to over and over for inspiration?  Who are you reading now?

ECH: Yeats, Hopkins, Thomas in the early days. Then Pattiann Rogers and A.R. Ammons. Lately, I return to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s books The Orchard and Song, as well as anything by Li-Young Lee. Kevin Goodan and Michael McGriff have been recent poetry crushes. I’m currently reading Erick Pankey’s incredible book Trace and C.D. Wright’s Deepstep Come Shining. The last book that set me back on my heels was definitely Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render/ An Apocalypse, just stunning work.

SL: Finally, as this is your first book, would you be willing to share your story of publication?  If so, would you talk about how long it took for the book to find this form and how you found your way to Boreal Books?  

ECH: Many of the poems in Pause, Traveler were honed, if not developed, during my time at the RainierWriting Workshop while I earned by MFA. I sent the manuscript out to some contests, made some contacts with possible presses at AWP, began collecting a few rejections and a few perhaps-we’re-interested notes. I contacted Peggy Shumaker, one of my mentors from RWW, for further advice about where it might find a home. She suggested that she would be interested in seeing the manuscript for Boreal Books (www.borealbooks.org), an imprint from Red Hen Press (www.redhen.org) that she edits. The mission of Boreal Books is to bring Alaskan writers and fine artists to wider audiences within and beyond that great, but remote, state. The authors published by the imprint are excellent company to be in. I was thrilled to send it to her for consideration, and even more thrilled when she said she wanted to publish it in 2013.

Peggy Shumaker is a wonderfully generous editor (and amazing poet), and I have been very pleased with the support that Red Hen Press has given the book. I feel lucky that Pause, Traveler has found such a wonderful home.

SL: Thanks so much, Erin, for the book and for taking the time to answer these questions.  I will be looking forward to whatever comes next for you.

ECH: Thanks, Sandy. Your carefully considered questions were a joy to answer, even though they took quite a bit of reflection. What a privilege to have the chance to consider my work with you.

Well, Shoot, I Went and Drafted a Poem

86º ~ conditions much the same as earlier posting


As I've been repeating for the last month, drafting new poems didn't seem to be the thing this summer. And, then, what do you know, BOOM, a draft landed in my lap.  In fact, the first few lines began in the shower, as happens quite a bit for me.  Perhaps it isn't lady-like to bring this up, but there you go. I was washing my hair when I heard the line, "Beware the stick man stripped of muscles and passing lean." As I continued through my normal routine, trying to shake the sleep away, several more lines arrived via my inner antennae.

I don't mean this to sound mysterious, but I have no explanation for where these lines began. I couldn't tell you what I was thinking about just before I heard the above, and while I heard it in my own interior voice, that voice was charged with possibility.

Eventually, I scrambled to my journal and jotted down what I could remember. And just now, I've transcribed that to the computer and revised my way into a full draft. For now, I've titled it "Notice Posted to All Midwestern Women," because the stick man is a "Prairie Devil," described in the poem in opposition to what I think of as a Southern Devil, all seduction and finery. At present, the draft is only 13 lines of medium length, four tercets and a single concluding line.

While I have no plans to push myself into a generative phase, I'm pleased to know that the skills are still there, hibernating as I gather material.

Central Arkansas: Continuing Ed. Creative Writing Workshop in September

82º ~ bright sky washed clean by stormy rains last night, a bit more bearable weather


For my readers in Central Arkansas:  Pulaski Tech is expanding its offerings of continuing education classes, and I'll be leading a creative writing workshop (all levels) for three Saturdays in September.  Information on classes and registration are here, but you have to click on 2013 Spring Course Schedule, which may seem a bit confusing.  Sorry.

If you are interested, feel free to email me with questions.  If you know someone who might be interested, please pass it on!

Here's the description of the course.

The State of Poetry Book Publishing in America Today

88º (10:00 a.m.) ~ on our way up to 102º if the forecast holds true, heat index could top 115º in places, a chance of severe storms and rain as a cold front confronts the heat, crossed fingers


Yes, I've been absent.  No, this summer has not progressed as I thought it would.  I'm pretty much okay with that and am trying to embrace the fallow period of regeneration.

However, during the fallow periods, the rejections continue to arrive, and here I am speaking particularly of the book rejections.  After over a decade of placing individual poems in national journals, those minor, individual poem rejections might sting for a moment but then I'm on my way to submitting somewhere else and I forget that pang.  Also, given that I might have any number of individual poems circulating at any one time, there are enough acceptances scattered about to soothe those little paper cuts.

With the book, things are entirely different.  One manuscript circulating in search of that elusive acceptance, with each submission requiring a submission fee in many cases (more on that later).  This means that the rejection wound has no chance to heal until, perhaps, one day when an acceptance arrives.  Until then, the wound starts to heal and is then sliced open time and time again, festering, oozing, throbbing.  I exaggerate for effect.

As many of you know, book #2 (fairy tales & saints, glacial elegies) for me has been on this journey for years (I do not exaggerate).  Yesterday, I received another rejection for it, and I've been racking up rejections for book #3 (the fever book) as well.  What sparked this post was the information that came along with yesterday's rejection.  The editors noted that they received over 700 manuscripts for this one contest.  Over 700 manuscripts.  Holy poets, Batman!

How on earth does my manuscript stand a chance of rising to the top in that ocean of words?  Of course, there must be many of these 700 manuscripts that are quickly dismissed for being too short or too long or for not following any of the myriad rules required for submission.  And, I imagine that some of the manuscripts reveal themselves as having been submitted without being proofread or polished.  Still, that leaves hundreds that will be seriously considered.

When I first started on this journey I was told the following:
1.  Publish the individual poems in national journals in order to establish a reputation and show an awareness of the poetry business. (done)
2.  Have others you trust read your manuscript and make suggestions for revision.  (done and done and done again, with thanks to all my readers)
3.  Revise and polish. (done)

After that, what is there?  Hope, magic, luck? Karma? (Ack! What righteous poet did I offend unknowingly?)  Does it all really depend on networking and schmoozing? (I hope not!)

I confess, I've acquired a bit of a complex.  Consider the mixed message: my individual poems place in national journals (hooray, I'm a "good" poet); my books fail to be published (ack, I'm a "terrible" poet).

Now, back to the idea of reading fees, and let me say first that I admire publishing houses that take a chance on poetry, and I know that the editors, production staff, and marketers are doing all they can do to keep it together and running smoothly.  However, as I said on Facebook recently, I am completely open and willing to include a reading fee when I'm submitting for a contest, wanting to support the winner (should it not be me) and the publication/marketing of the winning book.  However, I am puzzled by presses that require a reading fee for non-contest submissions.  These presses often label these as open submissions but charge the same amount as the contest.  The reason why is this: presses need to subsidize the cost of publishing poetry.

*Aside, when a friend from another academic field read my FB post about this she was stunned.  "You have to pay someone to read your manuscript on the off chance that they might publish it?" she asked.

I am of two minds here.  Yes, I want to support American poetry, and I do so by buying far too many books of poetry each year (my towering stack of to-read books and the negative balance in my checkbook will prove this).  However, is it a good model to ask poets to subsidize the publishing house where they hope to someday publish?

This is a personal matter that each poet approaches differently.  I confess, I have paid reading fees during open submissions to presses that I love, but I'm rethinking that, as I simply can't afford it on a community college instructor's salary and with two books circulating.  I am open to paying a reading fee that is half what the contest fee is as a way to help with the overhead costs (minus judges, minus monetary awards to the winner).  Again, everyone approaches this differently.

And this issue of presses (mostly independent presses not affiliated with a university or major New York publishing house) needing to be subsidized makes me wonder, are they publishing too many books each year?  Ack!  Of course, I don't want there to be fewer poetry books published, but if the business model can't sustain the list to the point that emerging poets have to subsidize the house, don't we need to look at the model again?

Finally, I'm a huge proponent of poets supporting poetry by subscribing to lit mags and buying books of poetry.  That seems to me to be the healthiest model out there.  If all 700 poets who submitted manuscripts to the contest I referenced above were to buy (and read) ten books of poetry a year, well, you do the math.  Yes, books of poetry are expensive.  Most paperback copies are now around $15 with some well above that.  And, yes, if you are in grad school or raising a family, $150 a year (ten books of poetry) will pinch.  But, if we, the poets, get frustrated by the rising costs of reading fees, don't we need to be part of the solution?

I suppose then, that my challenge, my call to action, is for each of us to evaluate what value we place on poetry, and by that I mean, of course, poetry written by others.  If all a poet wants is to write his/her own poems without supporting his/her peers, then I suppose we will be fated to the current model in which more and more publishing houses are forced to charge reading fees outside of contests.

This is a touchy issue, I know, and I hope if you are still reading at this point, that my comments will be taken as intended, as a way to open dialogue, as a way through the difficulty toward a better situation for us all.  I'm open to suggestions!

Vive la poesie! 

The Wandering Kangaroo Returns

78º ~ enjoying a spectacular summer here in AR, with brief periods of high heat & humidity tempered by stretches like this, stretches of pure perfection


As I stated on FB at the end of last month, the summer of poetry writing has fallen apart here at the desk of the kangaroo, and I'm okay with that.  Instead, my creative energies have sent me to the collage table more often than not.  Here are a few recent examples.

11 x 14 (Mat cut off by scanner) with 3D elements

2D postcard

2D postcard

2D postcard

I spent the last week traveling up home for my summer visit with family and my 20th college reunion, which was a whirlwind of flying, driving, dorm living, and emotion wrangling.

Now, the month of July stretches out uninterrupted and C. & I have no plans at all between now and Aug. 12, which is our return date for school.  I've got several major projects for school that need work, but I'm letting the rest unfold as it will.

Happy 4th of July, y'all!

What I'm Reading: Equivalents

88º ~ hot, hot, hot with humidity that rises throughout the day, bright sun with a chance of storms that I do not believe, as they've avoided our neighborhood for so long


I picked up Jessica Baran's Equivalents (Lost Roads 2013) on a whim at AWP, in part because of the book design.  It is a hand-pleasing square, 6.5" x 6.5".  I also picked it up because Baran won the first Besmilr Brigham Women Writers Award, which champions work by female poets who live outside the literary centers on the coasts.  In fact, the deadline for 2013 submissions is just a week away.  While I haven't submitted, after reading Baran's book, I'm inclined to do so.

The notes at the back of the book tell us that Baran takes the title of the collection from the work of Alfred Steiglitz, specifically his set of photographs of the sky, taken from 1925 - 1934.  The collection is divided into three sections, where each section has a title but the poems within are numbered rather than named.  We have "On Dailiness," "On Dissonance," and "The Panorama."  The first two sections contain lyric prose poems, while the third contain poems with traditional line breaks.  The first two sections contain philosophical musings about the modern world (think technology / white noise versus nature / enough calm to contemplate), while the third is a reflection on John J. Egan's panoramic painting of the Mississippi River housed in the Saint Louis Art Museum, containing many of the themes of the first two sections as well.

As I sank into Baran's syntax (sometimes sparse and fragmented, sometimes prone to catalogs and lists), I kept coming back to the movie, Koyaanisqatsi (1982), the title of which is a Hopi word for "life out of balance."  The film contains no plot and no dialogue, but is a series of scenes exploring the consequences of modern technology on the natural world and on our society / lifestyle.

Baran's themes run in similar veins, without, perhaps, the clear call to action as in the film, and her poems are definitely not plot driven, instead piling images and aphorisms one after the other until we are weighted down with contemplation.  She uses the language of commerce, capitalism, and politics, interwoven with the language of artifice, photography, and film.  For example, the first poem in the book opens with this:

I'm not interested in propaganda. The space where you arrived is empty when you leave. The lake is open to questioning. Everyone has a different method: of lending, of accruing debt. Water can be boiled in all sorts of weather, but the pot cannot be outsourced.

Everywhere in the poems, we are reminded of the artifice of modern life.  The poet is clearly looking at the world through a specific lens, a lens that may be adjusted or exchanged for another, shifting views and ultimately shifting truths.  Nothing is stable, and we are all facing that gigantic, empty sky of Steiglitz' photographs, which come to symbolize the greater void in living a life out of balance.

Baran's first section, "On Dailiness," is probably my favorite, as it contains many comments on domesticity (and therefore often comments on the female).  In poem number four from this section, she highlights our disconnected nature, a disconnection that began way back when groups of humans gathered into societies and started "taming" the wilderness in order to live.  After describing sheets, sofas, a bed comforter and other daily items of housekeeping, Baran continues:

An anthem to dailiness. An American history of lost civility; the decline of small gestures. ...  Is this the clearing you were looking for? It's not what you expected: not the rich black burnt thatch long lost woodsmen cleared in a wood of pines. Not the tractor-flattened part of the meal-colored prairie. Just a carpet sample thrown on faux terrazzo tiles.

In these poems, we are confronted with a town crier whose words bounce around a cluttered, over-stimulated town square, and we ultimately fear / know that no one is listening as we hear proclamations that "consumption levels are off," "decades collapse," and "[i]ndustry encroaches on nature--a great Modernist trope."  Meanwhile, we must all "self-curate or vanish" as "[i]t's never easy getting words to work" and "[p]lace doesn't matter any more."

While all of this may seem heavy, political, and heart-crushing, it is also comforting to know that there are others out there observing and commenting on the cacophony of 21st century, American life.  It is the job of poetry to slow us down, to open us up to the clutter and the void, and to lead us on, wherever the journey takes us.  At this, Baran excels.

What I'm Reading: Small Porcelain Head

85º ~ as promised we have waves of high temps with humidity-induced "feels like" in the 100s and then days of respite, sadly we've missed much of the rain that peppered the state over the last few days, had to water the front garden today


While drafting, revising, and submitting sputter along at agonizing paces, I'm returning to my reading goal.  Today, I've read Allison Benis White's Small Porcelain Head  (Four Way Books, 2013) twice.  Yes, that's right, twice.  Allison and I have an AWP friendship, cemented by a pedi-cab ride in Denver, and while we do not correspond regularly, I am always thrilled to see her smile, which reaches right up to a sparkle in her eyes, whenever we cross paths amidst the sea of other writers at AWP.

Small Porcelain Head was on my to-buy list in Boston this year, and here I am, finally, giving it the time it deserves.  I read the book twice because each poem is an intense, fragmented, short, lyric prose poem, and from the first page, I was gripped with a sense of tragedy and urgency, an undertow of violence against the female body, that lead me in a rush, headlong through the book.  (If you favor a clear narrative with much explanation and abundant details, this is probably not the book for you; however, I found the fragments and sparseness intensely powerful.)  On the second read, I made myself slow down and absorb each poem.

Here's how Allison creates that sense of urgency and dark tragedy.  Many of the poems feature fragments of if, then, therefore arguments.  We are so used to these statements that we keep moving forward, looking for the logical conclusion, which doesn't arrive, except as a general thematic wholeness after the entire book has been consumed.  By fragmenting the logic, the reader is often left without any solid footing, which is the same predicament of the speaker of the book (sometimes a girl or woman with a doll, sometimes the doll itself).  For example, the first poem in the book (all poems are untitled and the table of contents lists the first phrase of each in lieu of such), is made up entirely of two "if" statements without any "then" or "therefore."

If pain is only weakness leaving the body,
black curls, still wet, painted on her fore-
head.

If pain is a desire for dark shapes, even
when dried, glistening, if you are reading
this.

The title of the collection is vital to creating a context for the poems, and throughout the book, we read about, or from the view of, such diverse dolls as porcelain, wax, tin, cloth, conjoined, and paper.  We confront dolls with strings and keys used to "animate" them.  Often the dolls are damaged in some way, heads pulled from bodies, wax faces melted, bodies hollowed out or torn open, hands or feet broken off and missing, etc.  Often, we are reminded of how the dolls' bodies have been manipulated, especially regarding those that come with a pull-string that activates the voice.

Throughout it all, there seems to be a human speaker attempting to navigate a great loss, a grief too large for comprehension, and that speaker questions the worth of going on with living.  In one poem, the speaker states, "Love for the world ... is ruin."  And in another, she refers to a doll that speaks when her stomach is pressed down, stating:

No, she is mute as the moments I accept
God or make a voice from objects, pressing
her stomach, pressing her stomach, not
screaming.

Without being stated directly, I found themes of pregnancy and motherhood, and most thoroughly, the female body as object, manipulated by both outside forces and internal pressures.  After describing a doll with her arms raised and a turnkey in her head that creates a moaning, the speaker states:

After a while, we moan and lift our arms
in order to feel what she feels: her pose is
agony.

As I sit here, flipping through the collection one more time, I'm stunned by what Allison has created with so few words.  This is definitely a set of poems that should be read all together, and I think in order, to gather their true force.  These poems also highlight both concision and diction, as each word bears a tremendous weight.  While they might be prose poems, there is something of Emily Dickinson here that lures me in via the fragment and the condensed yet fraught imagery.  As I contemplate re-reading the book in the future, I imagine much more will rise to the surface, reminding me of both philosophy and the best of poetry.

What I'm Reading: Wild

85º ~ heat and humidity simmering before 9:00 a.m. on the way up to a heat index of 110º, oh joy!


Here's a rare post on a prose book, Cheryl Strayed's Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.  While the book does chronicle Strayed's hike along the PCT, at its core, this is a book about weathering profound grief.  In Strayed's case, that grief revolves around the death of her mother, who was in her mid-forties when she died of lung cancer.  Strayed was in her senior year of college when her mother died.

I'd heard numerous interviews with Strayed on NPR and read lots of positive comments on blogs and social media before I opened the book.  I was surprised, though, at the connection I felt almost instantly.  Strayed grew up in Minnesota and graduated from high school just a few years before me.  For a few years, we were both in the same state, both going to colleges only a hundred miles apart.  She's the age of my sister, and when I look at her author photo of her blonde hair/blue eyes, I realize I went to college with any number of girls who might have appeared just like her.  More importantly, she knew she was a writer even in college, just as I did, although it took her awhile to work out the kinks and become a writer, just as it did for me.

With deep honesty, Strayed details her downward spiral after the death of her mother, including her use of sex and drugs at the period in her life as a way to try to make her way, motherless, in this world.  As she hits rock bottom, she decides to make a drastic life change by heading west to hike the PCT.  She is completely unprepared and inexperienced and spends much of the book learning by doing (which often left me feeling anxious and stressed for her).  Throughout the book, Strayed displays an incredible ability to remain self-aware and willing to share that self-awareness with true honesty.  She pulls no punches with herself or with the reader.  She lays herself bare both physically and emotionally, and through that action, she comes to terms with the death of her mother and with what she is making as a kind of life.

Here are the parts of the book that jumped out at me, with page numbers from the 2012, Vintage paperback.

51
"Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves, and so I chose to tell myself a different story from the one women are told.  I decided I was safe.  I was strong.  I was brave.  Nothing could vanquish me.  Insisting on this story was a form of mind control, but for the most part, it worked.  Every time I heard a sound of unknown origin or felt something horrible cohering in my imagination, I pushed it away.  I simply did not let myself become afraid.  Fear begets fear.  Power begets power.  I willed myself to beget power.  And it wasn't long before I actually wasn't afraid."  (Strayed's italics)

60
The one book that Strayed carried the entire length of her hike and didn't burn as she read, to lighten her load, was Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language.  At this point in the book, Strayed mentions the poem "Power."  The poem features Marie Curie and ends:

She died a famous woman denying 
her wounds 
denying 
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

100  describing her mother's incredible physical pain in her last days
"The way she begged for something that wasn't even mercy.  For whatever it is that is less than mercy; for what we don't even have a word for."

111  describing what it was like as "the only girl in the woods, alone with a gang of men" and her trail-induced dirty/stinky body
"By necessity, out here on the trail, I felt I had to sexually neutralize the men I met by being, to the extent that was possible, one of them."
***this sentence lept out at me as a parallel to what women have been doing for decades in the workplace

141  regarding the drudgery of the trail and the endless steps that make up the hike & MATH!
"I walked on, a penitent to the trail, my progress distressingly slow."  (Ultimately, this slowness is what heals Strayed, as it forces her to confront her grief in elemental ways.)
"In my perception, the world wasn't a graph or a formula or an equation.  It was a story."  (This describes Strayed's attempt to use her map and compass to navigate through the snow and how she never really took to math...uhm...DITTO!  This quote sums up my relationship to the world as well and may explain why I'm terrible at telling distances, weights, and measurements of all kinds, but I can tell you the "relation" of things.)

209  describing the moment she loses her boot and how she expected someone to "come laughing from the woods...saying it had all been a joke."
"But no one laughed.  No one would.  The universe, I learned, was never, ever kidding.  It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back."
Yes.

304  describing the Rich book and lines of poetry
"Often, I didn't know exactly what they meant, yet there was another way in which I knew their meaning entirely, as if it were all before me and yet out of my grasp, their meaning like a fish just beneath the surface of the water that I tried to catch with my bare hands--so close and present and belonging to me--until I reached for it and it flashed away."
Yes, Yes, Yes!

Would You Say I Have a Plethora?

88º ~ in the words of Glenn Frey, "the heat is on," a punishing sun, humidity low now, but on the rise, no breeze to speak of


So, there are two 80s references for you, dear readers.  The first, in the post title, = The Three Amigos; the second = Beverly Hills Cop. If you are unfamiliar with these allusions, get thee to Netflix and get thee quick!  Ahem, it seems I'm unable to write without ripping off others today (sorry to you, too, Shakespeare!).

Ok, I'm in a bit of a dither.  I'm a bit disgusted with myself.  I'm a bit out of control.  Here's the issue; I pride myself on being super organized.  When I've described my way of tracking submissions in the past, many of you have commented on just that organization.  Well, today, I proved myself a bit of an idiot.

One of my summer goals was to rip up and reorganize into two chapbooks what has been circulating as manuscript #2.  Now, that manuscript has been making the rounds FOR YEARS and has existed in so many iterations that I've lost count of the number of different ways it has been organized.  However, somewhere in all of the reorganizations, I forgot to keep track of the poems I pulled from the manuscript and set aside.  So, this morning as I was working on the remainder of the manuscript after taking out all of the fairy tale & saint poems earlier, I realized I had two more stacks: body poems and elegy/prairie poems.  Then, it dawned on me that there was a body poem that wasn't in there, "Vespula Cures," published by the lovely folks at Connotation Press, lo these many years ago!  When I went looking for that poem, holy crap!, I found nearly a dozen poems that were languishing in the purgatory of a "published poems" folder on my desktop but that hadn't made it to a manuscript, or had but had been removed st some point.

I pulled one thread and a whole sweater unraveled at my feet (one of my plethora...hee hee).

So, I've spent the last two hours, printing off copies of poems from 2010-2011 (pre-sickly speaker) that weren't included in any current manuscript.  Then, I shuffled my new chapbook piles, and I do have the makings of three chapbooks: fairy tales/saints, body, and elegy/prairie.

So, this was a good chunk of work, but I'm kicking myself for how long this whole process of book publishing is (be it chapbook or spine-book) and how much I set myself back by losing track of perfectly good poems, poems that coalesce in a new way now that they are grouped in smaller portions.

This, then, is the work of poetry, stumbling blindly through the dark, going by instinct built on years of practice.

Onward!  (Or, in other words, "Write, very old one, write like the wind!")

Draft Process: Had We Been Born Boys

82º ~ preparing to weather at least seven days in the high 90s with the heat index tipping toward 110, the humidity reaching "unbearable" stages, still from inside the house the sun and the breeze cheer me


Welcome back to a more positive outlook, dear reader.  I did take the weekend off from poetry, spent it with Cheryl Strayed's Wild (though I still have the last section to read), the Chicago Cubs (1 for 3), housekeeping, and collaging.  Still, as I read Strayed's intense memoir, I found myself jotting notes in my journal about the angry sisters.  One of those notes prompted today's draft.

That note was the phrase "had we been born boys."  While gender is not at the forefront of Strayed's story, which is about navigating the loss of her mother, the undercurrent is filled with gender, as Strayed remarks again and again how few women are also hiking the Pacific Coast Trail, and as she comes to terms with her own use of sex as a way through grief.  Somewhere in the reading I thought of the angry sisters and how they wield the tools of their father (hammers, saws, axes, etc.) with ease, and how influenced they are by their father's view of women.  (And here, some autobiography seeps in, as, yes, I am one of three daughters and no sons.  Yet, I'm happy to say that the angry sisters have taken on a story of their own that deviates wildly from mine.  For example, anyone who has ever seen me try to use a hammer would testify that I am a total klutz and unskilled at building/fixing things.)

At first, my draft began with the above phrase as the first line, but it quickly became apparent that the phrase would become the title of the draft.  The rest of the poem is just 15 lines, three stanzas of five lines each, each line roughly eight syllables, give or take...I'm no formalist.  This line and stanza length presented itself quickly and wholly in the first stanza, and then I had to tinker to get the next two to fit, but that tinkering helped me focus my images.  The three stanzas imagine how the sisters' ease with their father's tools, the influence of his "stash of girly magazines," and their quest for vengeance would be different if they were born male.

My worry about this draft is that it all seems so completely obvious, a feminist cliche.  Time will tell, and I have to remember Anne Lamott's encouragement of shitty first drafts!

Staying on Target: Writing Without Deadlines or Distractions

73º ~ they say the heat & humidity will arrive by Monday with temps in the upper 90s and humidity bringing the heat index up into the 100s; for the next 3 days, though, oh, the glorious late spring delirium remains, window thrown wide open in celebration

A scene from Star Wars.

Gold Two: [the Y-wings are running the gauntlet toward the Death Star reactor-port] The guns - they've stopped!

Gold Five: [realizes why] Stabilize your rear deflectors... Watch for enemy fighters.

Gold Leader: They're coming in! Three marks at 2-10!

[Gold Two is slain by Darth Vader and his wingmen; Gold Leader starts to panic]

Gold Leader: It's no good, I can't maneuver!

Gold Five: Stay on target.

Gold Leader: *We're too close!*

Gold Five: Stay on target!

Gold Leader: [shouts] Loosen up!

[he too is picked off by Vader and Company; Gold Five tries to escape but is fatally winged]

Gold Five: Gold Five to Red leader, lost Tiree, lost Dutch.

Red Leader: I copy, Gold Leader.

Gold Five: It came from... behind!

[crashes]

The above is from the original Star Wars (1977), now known as Episode IV: A New Hope.  I confess, I love science fiction, and although I don't read it nearly as much as I did when I was younger, I will forever be a Star Wars/Star Trek geek.  

Why am I talking about this?  Because as I was pondering what to write in this blog post and how to address the fragmented nature of my week, this scene popped into my head, along with the urgent, repeated "Stay on target."  So, here's the scoop.  This week, I've managed to revise and polish a handful of the angry sisters poems, and I've read a bit from Cheryl Strayed's incredible memoir, Wild, but I haven't written a new draft, and I haven't felt really good about my writing self.  I've been getting the first set of rejections for the fever manuscript and I suppose that isn't helping.

Yes, I did get the A/C repaired, tackled an out of control backyard littered with sweetgum balls and in need of mowing, replaced the fried refrigerator, talked to the alarm company and got our system reset after the power surge knocked it offline for a bit, and now, I'm battling fleas!  Our cats were up to date on their treatment and still the biting buggers got in (I suspect I brought them in from the out of control back yard, which is populated by an opossum, perhaps a raccoon from time to time, and an outdoor neighborhood cat...yes, we live in the CITY).  Still, I'm not teaching, so tackling those tasks on top of laundry / dishes / vacuuming / etc., really doesn't mean I have NO time to write.

Yet, I am failing to stay on target in terms of my writing goals and I don't know how I feel about that.  I do know I am my own worst critic, my own worst task master, etc.  See, last year, I decided I would write a poem a day in June.  I did this b/c the sickly speaker had gathered such momentum that I wanted to finish her story.  This year, I don't feel that compulsion.  The angry sisters poems are still floundering in the darkness.

Also, truth be told, I'm confused about pacing.  I wrote all those poems for book #2, which has failed to be accepted in either contests or open reading periods (with 3 verdicts still out there but not looking good).  I published a great majority of those poems in lit mags, and now many of those poems are five years old or more.  I've read them at readings and heard back from folks who've read them online or in print.  I'm beginning to feel disconnected from them. If and when they actually do appear in book form, will my connection to them return?  Now, the sickly speaker is out there and many of those poems have appeared or are forthcoming.  I've read them at readings here and there; I've gotten feedback from readers.  And now, she's being rejected in book form as well.  

What do you think about this?  Just giving up on the idea of the book and publishing the individual poems in journals and letting that be that.   So be it.  Is that enough?

But back to today's post title (see I'm all over the place), what is my target for these long, undistracted days of summer when there are no clear deadlines, no papers needing graded, no students needing responses to their frantic emails, etc.?  Am I a "bad" writer if I don't produce copious numbers of drafts this summer?  Who is judging me?  What would happen if I took a break from poetry?  If I simply ignored my desk and made my way about my daily household chores and then watched hour after hour of mindless TV reruns while playing solitaire on my iPad?  Would that make me a "bad" person?  

For someone with perfectionism issues, the idea of staying on target is a double-edged sword.  Yes, it drives me to "succeed" at the goals I set for myself, but it also makes it really hard to cut myself some slack when I "fail."  (I may not be using those quotation marks correctly, but I'm trying to indicate those measurement words that mean something different to us all.)  And the question at the center of it all: Just exactly who is it I'm trying to please?

If you are still with me here, thanks for staying on target (ahem...reading); I'm sure "this too shall pass."  The goal of this blog is to be honest about the writing life, and this is the state of my writing brain at the moment.

Jello Wrestling, Or How a Draft Becomes a Poem

75º ~ the beauty of spring continues to linger into what is normally something like a hot summer already in early June, partly cloudy but no complaints, calm air, everything lush & green


I confess, I have never wrestled in Jello.  I confess, I used that as the title to this post to get your attention.  I suppose I could have said, "Catching a Greased Pig" as well.  Still, there is something to be said of the analogy between wrestling and revision.

Again today, I turned to my "In Progress" folder and called up each of the drafts I've worked on since November.  That's right, November.  I truly don't believe there is a right or wrong number of days to wait before starting on revision, as long as there is some kind of waiting period to clear the mind.  Some of the poems I've just worked on have been in the folder for six months; however, that is more of a result of my academic life & responsibilities than of any need to wait that long.

The waiting period is crucial, though, because it provides perspective.  The first poem I worked on today was drafted on 14 November 2012.  This poem is one of those that arrived with great energy, and I've continued to remember the opening stanza without really trying to memorize it.  Based on the copies I have printed out, I worked on the poem again in January 2013, making a major change in point of view to the second half of the poem.  All this time, as I've been haunted by that opening stanza, I've also known, I mean known, that something wasn't quite right about the poem, and yet I could see the potential.  I knew what I wanted the poem to do (in an abstract way) but I hadn't figured out how to get it there.

Yesterday and today, I returned to it again, and something simply clicked.  I had to cut away some lines I thought I loved in the second stanza and add something new there.  I had to change the lineation in two or three places.  As many of you know, I'm fond of indenting and creating white spaces; however, there is a craft to this as well, and while it might look like the poet has simply used the enter and tab keys willy-nilly, this is not the case.

To revise well, I have to have a little distance from the initial rush of the first draft so I can catch my breath.  I have to be able to listen, really listen, as I read the draft aloud over and over, tinkering with the linebreaks and the word choice.  The poem really does seem to know where it wants to go, but I have to be able to hear it.

And that, my friends, is the most frustrating thing to read or hear when you are trying to figure out how revision works.  Still, after years of writing, I have to relearn this with every poem.  At a certain point, the poem and I are wrestling with each other.  We grapple with sounds and breath, and eventually, neither of us wins but through the struggle the poem is made.

I'm thrilled to say that I have six poems now, each in its own folder, that seem nearly ready to go out and meet the world.  These will be the first six poems since I finished the sickly speaker series last fall.  I'm hesitant, of course, but also eager to see what reaction they might receive.

A Little Chaos and A Sickly Speaker Poem up at Anti-

68º ~ some kind of blessing after the storms, a cool, cool day with very little humidity, tho lots of sun and a sweet, sweet breeze


A weekend trip to the in-laws culminated in returning home to find a wee bit of storm damage.  This was the subtle kind of damage that didn't make itself apparent right away.  No, instead, we surveyed the yard and the roofs and found all intact after Saturday's severe thunderstorms and strong winds.  Only later did we learn we'd suffered the dreaded "surge" and our heating & A/C unit's "board" was blown, so no fan action.  Also, our refrigerator was fried and something in our alarm system is messed up.  All other major appliances intact, and the fridge was 10 years old.  So, repairs and replacements are in the works.

In happier news, the new issue of Anti- is up, and it is stellar, simply stellar.  I'm so happy that one of the sickly speaker poems makes an appearance.  In fact, "The Alchemy of My Mortal Form" is one of the first of the poems from that series.  You can read about the drafting process for this specific poem here.

Today, my plan is to sort through the current drafts of any angry sisters poems and see if I can revise & polish any of them into submittable form.  I've got most of the sickly speaker poems that haven't already found a home circulating, and to tell the truth, I'd sort of forgotten the next step with the angry sisters.  Their poems were simply gathering weight.  Now, onward with the whittling and the tweaking.

Hope everyone has survived storm and fire and all our other current plagues in one piece.

Blurbing

81º ~ a stronger breeze than yesterday, cloud cover, the chance of storms


Reader, today, I spent the morning at the desk by finishing my read-through of a manuscript for which I've been asked to craft a blurb and then crafting said blurb.  I've written a handful of blurbs over the last couple of years, and it dawned on me today that nobody every talked to me about writing one.  I've gone blindly forward, so I thought it might make a good blog discussion.

First, what do you all think of blurbs?

If I know a poet personally, I skip the blurbs. If I've read previous books by the poet, I skip the blurbs. If I've read a poet's poems in the journals and those poems inspired me to buy the book, I skip the blurbs. I don't live in a large enough city to support large selections of poetry at the bookstores, so I don't tend to browse the shelves, where reading blurbs might come in handy. Instead, I often use the blurbs to check my own reactions to a book I've just finished, especially if I'm having doubts about my own reading of the poems.

Lately, I have taken to glancing at the writers of the blurbs, as the blurbers are often from the same aesthetic as the writer of the book.  For years when I was just starting out as a poet, I didn't understand the incredible diversity in poetry today; after all, we don't label and shelve books of poetry based on their approach, language poets on the bottom shelf, new-formalists on the top, narrative poets using the American vernacular stretched through the middle, etc. Lately, though, as I've built my personal library of poetry books and as I've read and read and read as widely as possible, I've come to know the groupings more by instinct and muscle memory than by any outward label.  This can help me place a poet new to me before I open the pages, but it guarantees nothing about how I will receive the work.

So, what do you do if someone asks you to blurb?

First, I'd say only say "yes" if you can honestly say you like the work and feel a kinship for it.  No, you don't have to be exactly the same kind of poet as the writer of the book, but a connection of some kind is necessary, lest the reader of the blurb feel fooled.  When I was asking for blurbs, Mary Ann Samyn was so smart.  She asked for a copy of the manuscript and the right to decline after she'd read the poems.  (This is something I forgot until just this moment!)

Also, consider the time it takes to read a pre-publication manuscript and craft the blurb.  Recently, I've had to decline some requests in order to focus on my own work.

In any case, once I've said yes and received the manuscript, I read through and take notes on the themes that pop to the surface.  I'm old school and need to have the manuscript in hard copy, so I take my notes on the title page, which I've clipped together with all of the front and back matter.  That way, I'm reading just the poems, undistracted.  As I read, I turn over each page into a "read" pile on my left.  When I come to a poem where I feel certain lines really speak to the major themes of the book, I underline and annotate on that poem.  When I flip it over, I turn it crosswise to the rest.  That way, when I've finished the whole stack, I have a dozen or so poems that I pull to re-read.  These are the poems I use as references for my blurb, along with the notes I've taken on the title page.

In terms of logistics, if the publisher or poet has given me a word-length or other requirements, I keep those in mind as I start to draft.  I keep it in present tense, like a good literary analysis instructor.  Not everyone does, but I like to include at least one short quote in the blurb.  For those people who use blurbs to make choices about what to buy/read, I think this is a great way to offer a snippet of the poet's voice.

Once I have a draft, I email it to the poet and ask for his/her feedback.  I am completely open to any response, and I'm willing to scrap it and start over if the poet feels I've misrepresented the book in any way.  After all, it's an honor to be asked to blurb and I wouldn't want to let the poet down.  After the poet and I have settled on the draft, it goes to the publisher who may or may not want revisions (most often cutting due to space issues on the cover).  Again, I'm willing to work out whatever is best for the book.

So, what are the benefits of blurbing?  1) I get to read the manuscript before almost anyone else.  2) I get to exercise those analytical skills that I don't use when writing poetry.  3) I get the free publicity of having my name on the back of someone else's book.  And who knows?  Perhaps, someone will read the book and my blurb and look up my work.  4) I get to give back and cheer on another poet.

Any blurbers out there with other thoughts on the topic?  Feel free to leave a comment.

Submissions or Bust!

80º ~ seriously cannot believe how lucky we have been with the weather these past weeks, all sun, breezes, and green today, windows open, open, open!


Monday, I took the day off from reading/writing and spent time with C.  We aren't really holiday type of people, so this meant going out to lunch and running a few errands.  I ended the day with drinks with a good friend.  Perfection.

Sadly, this all translated to yesterday being a total disaster work-wise.  I couldn't concentrate on any one thing.  I was fragmented.  The time at the desk was near to torture, but I kept my BIC (butt in chair) and muddled through.

The pay off?  Today was great.  I already knew my goal when I sat down: Submissions or Bust!  I did manage to get three submission packets put together and sent out to three journals.  I've definitely scaled back on the number of poems I send out, and I'm okay with that.  Slowly, slowly I've learned which journals are the best fit for me and which journals I really want to see my poems appear in.  All that accrued knowledge means I'm more apt to shake off a journal I once might have submitted to because I now know my chances are slim to none, my work simply not matching the work of the journal.  I'm also always open to submitting to a new journal if the mission statement/call for submissions seems to fit.  I know a lot of folks like to re-submit to journals that have published them in the past, and I do some of that; however, I like the broadness of being in many different types of journals, scholarly & independent, online & in print, magazines & anthologies, etc.

After I ran out of steam on submissions, I turned to book #2, which has languished in semi-finalist, finalist, "great manuscript but we have to pass" purgatory.  One of my missions for the summer is to split the manuscript into two chapbooks.  This morning was my first pass.  I approached it with this attitude:  I'm not going to labor over this.  I'm going on pure instinct.  With that in mind, I flipped through the pages and pulled (yes, I have to use hard copy for this!) all the poems that fit the fairy tale & saints profile.  Then, I did one more pass, asking myself if any others felt like they belonged with the tales.  Now, I have two stacks of 20 and 30 poems each.  Next, I'll re-read and re-order before creating new computer files.  Luckily, I've already done a lot of research into chapbook publishers, so I should be ready to send soon.

As for the fever book (book #3), it's out there.  I've sent it to a dozen publishers.  Now, we wait.  And wait.  And wait.

And the angry sisters lurk, scuttle, and plot on the sidelines.