Writing on the Side

Farewell for Now

2009-03-28T02:29:00.007-04:00

I've been negligent lately on all of my blogs, and I may sign off on two more of them shortly, but this is the one that's probably the most redundant at the moment, in that I have another "writerly" blog that I plan to start updating more frequently.
It won't be quite the same as it is over here, where I have a greater degree of anonymity (kind of nice) but a girl only needs so many blogs (I have more blogs than shoes, although that's not saying an awful lot. Still...)
So, to sum up, it's been real; it's been fun; it's been real fun, even, but, yes, regardless, at least for now, fare thee well.

Brodsky, from "A Part of Speech."

2009-02-13T18:31:00.002-05:00

... and when “the future” is uttered, swarms of mice
rush out of the Russian language and gnaw a piece
of ripened memory which is twice
as hole-ridden as real cheese.
After all these years it hardly matters who
or what stands in the corner, hidden by heavy drapes,
and your mind resounds not with a seraphic “doh,”
only their rustle. Life, that no one dares
to appraise, like that gift horse’s mouth,
bares its teeth in a grin at each
encounter. What gets left of a man amounts
to a part. To his spoken part. To a part of speech.

--Joseph Brodsky, from “A Part of Speech”

from John Ashbery

2009-01-09T17:44:00.002-05:00

The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.

from "And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name"

What to Take and What to Leave

2008-11-17T10:09:00.005-05:00

After having poems rejected from a journal that apparently prefers to publish more experimental work, I've started to ponder the progression of my style, now that I'm essentially finished with the M.A. program and about to turn in the final draft of my thesis.
Is my style "traditional" now? Well, not really. It's certainly not formalist, but then it's certainly not experimental, either.

I don't feel that my content was ever compromised in the program, but in a way my style has been molded as a sort of compromise between adherence to forms that don't feel natural to me and a more freewheeling style that is usually frowned on in the program.
So what I tend to write now are free verse poems in couplets, slightly musical, with lines that end on strong words, with regular punctuation. The musicality is something intrinsic to my style, I think; it's the "meter" I hear in my head, and I can't seem to shake it, and I guess that's okay. I love couplets, and they'll probably always be my favorite stanza pattern, but I think I have come to overuse them as a fallback pattern, an old stand-by. The program has taught me never to use irregular stanza lengths, although many published poets do this, sometimes to decent effect. This is something I may start to reconsider.
Dashes are strongly discouraged, and I've reluctantly dropped them for commas, semi-colons, and periods. Sure, too many dashes can be distracting and annoying, but once in a while they're just the thing. So I'm going to probably bring them back, too, little by little.
Ending lines on only strong words (never an article, rarely a pronoun, and reluctantly an unevocative word) is something I hadn't given much thought to before the program, and it's really helped my poems, I think. However, doing it without exception may not always be the best thing for a particular poem.

In the end, though, if I had to go back and choose between a program that was geared toward formalism and one geared toward experimentalism, I'd choose the former. It's easier to teach oneself to break the rules than to follow them. If I wasn't dragged kicking and screaming to sit down, scan a line, and count the feet, I doubt I ever would have. No regrets. It's been a good education. But I think the time's coming to let myself off the leash again, maybe double-indent a couple lines. Nothing too crazy.

Why Revise

2008-10-23T09:54:00.006-04:00

Just found this line scribbled last March, and it seems apropos for thesis season:

The better the poems are, the more they will feel like art rather than raw grief, which is no doubt what they are, dressed up and taught to talk nice.
Nobody wants to see raw grief, but if it can hold a fork right, tell a few jokes, possibly...

The Forest for the Trees

2008-10-03T17:35:00.019-04:00

Writing. Why do I do it?

This semester, for the thesis course, we've been discussing something I'd already assumed but was nevertheless discouraged to hear confirmed: the world of "serious" literature these days, especially poetry, is all about who you know. "Incestuous" was the word used.

It's about where you get your degree, what writer's conferences you frequent, who you schmooze with, who takes a liking to you. In short, an introvert's nightmare.

Sure, when it was all theoretical, the idea of doing readings and interviews and meeting a few people seemed par for the course, but is that really all it's about?

Can you truly not get published without knowing the right people and pulling the right strings? That notion is intolerable to me. It's just not who I am. My thoughts stray to Emily Dickinson, until I remember, She was never published in her lifetime. I want to be published in my lifetime. (There's still debate in some circles as to whether an online venue "counts," even if it involves wider readership.) But, that question aside, I'm no Emily Dickinson, either, and don't hope to be.

I read something this week that certainly did nothing to boost my confidence as a fledgling in the poetry world. A former instructor from the program I'm finishing this semester (very former, and very eager to kiss-and-tell, so to speak) wrote a piece in a respected literary journal about her experience in our program, and spoke very unflatteringly of what I pieced together was almost certainly the class I had taken with her.

It was a sardonic piece in which the author took the ax she had to grind and used it to bludgeon, in my opinion, the trust and confidence of her former students. I would say it verges closely on libel, with the program in question thinly veiled and easily Google-researched. She referred to the program as "ghetto" because it happens to be part-time and classes (in one of the two locations) are not held on the main campus. Sure, I've used the term jokingly myself, but here there was a mean-spirited, derisive air that discredited the whole existence of part-time programs, as if people who can't quit their jobs and take a teacher's assistant salary for a year just shouldn't bother, that we did it merely for vanity and were only trying to add another line to our pedestrian resumes in search of a teaching job, and that the other instructors in the program (people I profoundly respect) are simply humoring us and wasting their/our time.

I was not amused. In fact, I was pissed. Reading that article, after beginning with a genuine smile to see a familiar name on the byline, I felt slapped in the face, almost as if someone who might have lent a hand into the club (if that's the way it must be done) -- the tight little circle of the contemporary poetry scene -- was instead slamming a door in my face, saying I wasn't worthy. It felt a bit like being told, in the second grade, that I wasn't allowed on the jungle gym. Funny, since my precious feelings survived the course in question fairly well, and I even counted it a good class, all in all. I can take constructive criticism, and I'm sure it improved my poetry. But this was different. This was personal, and petty. I just hope, if I am ever in the position that the author finds herself in, (where she's quickly made herself cozy, as if she was never one of us) I will have a bit more grace.

So, back to that question: Why do I do it?
To be part of some scene? Hell, no.
To win the best prizes? Ditto.

For a while the other day, I was thinking, well, why, then, other than some delusion of grandeur or dislike for honest work?

Fortunately, I remembered why. It's that girl who wasn't welcome on the jungle gym at seven, now struggling through puberty, leafing through her eighth-grade lit textbook and, for an hour or so, forgetting herself, meeting people from other times and places and feeling that sort of human sympathy and kinship with them that neither death nor schoolyard disgrace can diminish.
Sitting at my desk then, in gratitude to those people I would never meet, I decided that one day I wanted to be the one extending a hand forward through the years and the continents, and I still want that.

So fuck the rest of it. I'll write, and if it all ends up in a desk drawer, and even if the house burns down, desk and all, it's been its own reward to me.
Because that's the other thing. It's just fun.

One Thing at a Time

2008-08-17T17:50:00.003-04:00

Well, I've finally accepted the fact that it won't be possible to submit a manuscript this fall contest season at the same time as I'm completing my thesis collection. I'd wanted to do both simultaneously, just because of the fact that so many good contests do have fall deadlines and I didn't want to wait another year to submit the manuscript, but I'm just not enough of a multi-tasker to work on two different collections, one with 32 poems and one with the required 45-50 pages, and with different poems chosen for different reasons (I need to dig up every formal poem I have for the thesis, even if they're not my best or as fitting with the theme, and with the would-be book, I have to keep in mind that it will -- hopefully -- be "out there" in the world, to some small extent, and that at least my mom will be probably reading it :)
So I'll just focus on the thesis now, celebrate the completion of three decades of education, and then get the collection together for the few winter and spring deadlines. And then, barring happy news from one of them, get it ready again next fall...

Prose Break

2008-07-25T22:54:00.006-04:00

First it was rhyme; now my recurrent funks are inspiring fiction!
Today, climbing out of a funk, although I was relatively cheerful and well-caffeinated, if a bit sleepy from early rising for a car repair errand, I wrote a page or two as a downpayment on my long-planned novel.
Now, the actual writing of this novel has to be mostly on hold until I finish my degree in December and get the poetry book together, and even then can't start in full force until I've put out the debut issue of the lit mag I'm working on a few months after that, but it's okay to start in bits and pieces, now that those goals are well under a year from completion.
What I wrote was the opening piece of the kernel of my story. It's not a central part of the plot, in terms of what I'd include in a synopsis, but it's the kernel of the story because it's the kernel of my character's psyche, if not her "character," so to speak.
I was surprised as well as thrilled that it flowed pretty well. And encouraged.
There's something really satisfying about fiction that is lacking in poetry. Things can be said outright rather than hinted at because there's more space to develop thoughts... they're stretched out, so there's less need for strict economy.
It's true that things can be said outright in a poem now and then, but only a very few things per poem, and then the rest of the poem must work around those things and shroud them with a bit of mystery. With fiction, one can use style to create some mystery, yet things can also be said outright much more often, which is both more cathartic and also just plain easier than the restraint that poetry demands.
I have to say I'm kind of looking forward to my fiction-centric sabbatical from poetry next year. I've had this novel brewing for a long, long time.

On a happier note...

2008-05-30T16:52:00.005-04:00

It must be that time of year when poets get confused as to whether they should be skipping through the fields like Wordsworth or sticking their heads in the oven.
Even so-called moderate ones.

But here's a much Spring-ier poem from my old friend Rumi, via Coleman Barks:
What Was Told, That

Now I know how Keats must have felt.

2008-05-30T06:10:00.005-04:00

I was having such a rotten day, I just wrote a poem that rhymed. It didn't start out rhyming, but by the time I woke up in the middle of the night and tweaked a few lines, I realized it was well nigh a sonnet. If I can just manage to sustain this mood all weekend, I could have a terza rima. And if not, well, it's a win-win situation.

But I think I really needed this for my thesis, having chosen (what I'm coming to realize) is probably the only poetry program in the country that favors form over free verse. But it was a good program; and I probably needed that rhythm in my head. Who wants to learn stuff they already know? That's depressing enough to inspire a sonnet.

Wouldn't it be funny if I wound up a formalist, after all?
Nah, 'twas a passing fancy, I think.

Mark Strand

2008-05-28T01:36:00.007-04:00

I saw him read at Politics & Prose last month, a tall man with a presence to match his voice, on the page and off. He signed my copy of Man and Camel.

Many of the poems he read displayed his dry, at times black, sense of humor. The following isn't one of those, though I still think it's lovely, if stark, like the landscape it describes.

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

Plath-o-Rama

2008-05-17T15:24:00.003-04:00

From Bookslut on Girlhood Plathophilia: Rereading Sylvia

By the way, I just realized that SP was born on the same exact day, month, and year as my father. One of those not-improbable yet nevertheless odd-seeming coincidences. But, no, my dad doesn't write poetry (that I know of.)

Quote: Katrina Vandenberg...

2008-05-02T18:32:00.006-04:00

... the author of Atlas writes in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, in a great article about putting together a book of poems, this prosaic yet perfectly succinct summary of what a poem is:

A poem is an accumulation of different kinds of repetition. When you repeat a pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, you get meter; when you repeat sounds you get alliteration, rhyme, assonance; when you repeat images, you get a motif; when you repeat an idea, a theme. A poem's natural compression heightens these sensations of repetition.

Poetry Humor

2008-04-19T16:12:00.001-04:00

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

Spring poem

2008-04-17T12:37:00.001-04:00

A.R. Ammons: Eyesight

Reading List: Jane Mead, Dorianne Laux, Michael Dumanis

2008-04-11T16:20:00.004-04:00

As thesis time gets closer, I've been reading more poetry, as well as writing more.

See my post below for highly understated fawning over Dorianne Laux. Her newer one is Facts about the Moon, but I'm reading What We Carry.

Also reading Michael Dumanis, My Soviet Union -- really original; good stuff.

And Jane Mead, The Lord and the General Din of the World. Some of it's really amazing. I don't think her more recent stuff is as powerful, although she's honed her craft to perfection. But I like poetry with urgency and "teeth."

Antilamentation

2008-04-06T20:46:00.006-04:00

It's been a while since I posted a poem (or a link to someone else's, that is) on here. We read this one in class last week.
Don't know what else to say about it, except that I just ordered one of her books.
By Dorianne Laux.

Even Poets Have to Grow Up Sometime

2008-04-05T01:26:00.005-04:00

When I was younger I used to write poems that used the word "fuck," just to prove that I knew what it meant.
And write about drugs I had never used (and never likely will) as well as ones I had, and about Lacanian psychology and esoteric critical paradigms.
Now that I've been writing for a while, and reading for a while, I've learned to relax and write (not always, but often) with everyday words, on everyday things.
With much better results, too, but that's in part due to age and practice, as much as the subject matter. I'm sure I'll find a home in some poem for the "F" word again, some day, some way, as well as a stray paradigm or two.
Like everything else in life, writing doesn't get simpler; it just gets a little easier.

Poetry and Ghosts

2008-03-31T18:32:00.009-04:00

I was just thinking about ghosts and how they can only communicate through sound, and not through any of the other senses. Poetry, likewise, was originally exclusively oral, and only recently has become a visual phenomenon. The ancient sort of chanting verse was closer to music in giving off vibrations that approach the tactile. (The deaf can dance to music, even though they can't hear it, because they can feel it.)
Does this mean hearing is our crudest sense, since it's permitted to ghosts, who are, according to most conceptions of earthbound, once-mortal spirits, damned? And hence no doubt stripped of their most valued privileges?
Such musing doesn't discourage me from poetry, since, after all, I don't literally believe in ghosts, of course. It just makes me want to work harder at making my poems seen, felt, smelled, tasted.
That was always the most evocative realm of the Tibetan Wheel of Life to me, the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts. Since they have no stomachs, what are they hungry for? Expression, of course. Connection. An audience. Even hunger itself. Poets all, perhaps.

Reading List: Kim Addonizio and Cate Marvin

2008-02-22T23:37:00.002-05:00

It's taken me awhile to find poets who are kind of doing the same thing that I'm trying to do, only doing it better (and selling books :)

Successful hometown poet Kim Addonizio, in her latest volume What Is This Thing Called Love, and Cate Marvin, another hometown poet with a critically acclaimed sophomore effort, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, are such ladies. I will sit at their feet and take notes (not literally, of course, lest I unwittingly lift something ;)

Even Atheists Write Poetry

2008-02-02T18:32:00.000-05:00

... and some of it is pretty good.
I'm thinking of submitting something myself.

The Eloquent Atheist

Reading List - Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times

2008-01-26T23:44:00.000-05:00

I found this book at Barnes & Noble tonight. As a customer mentions in his Amazon review, the title and cover art may turn some people off, and he does have a point; the suicidal-looking high school girl on the black and white cover does make it seem, in combination with the title, like a narrative of a psychiatric disorder -- something poetry has had enough difficulty in distinguishing itself from...
And other reviews accused the editor of selecting poetry for "the lowest common denominator" -- i.e. that the average person would be touched by (oh, the horror! ;) And we wonder why the average person doesn't read poetry anymore, with these kinds of attitudes abounding.
The book is actually a British import, which explains, I guess, both the somber look and feel and the bravado of the publisher to actually try to market poetry to the masses... and with success, it appears... The book is a bestseller over there. Good for it.
I've been reading through it and I find the selection quite meaty... maybe not in an academic sense but in a visceral sense, which is really closer to the point of it all, at least, in my opinion.

More fun with grammar curmudgeonry

2007-12-15T14:56:00.000-05:00

This peeve is the one that's probably dearest to my heart because it's* so pervasive.

Bob the Angry Flower on "its" vs. "it's"

* correct usage :-P

My new favorite pastime

2007-12-03T01:25:00.000-05:00

(Poetry aside, of course.)

FreeRice.com

I posted this on my other blog, but it bears repeating. A fun little word game that boosts your vocabulary while contributing to U.N. food donations to help end world hunger.

Don't you just love the English language?

2007-11-17T16:51:00.001-05:00

Well, in fact, I do, despite (or perhaps, in some perverse way, because) of its vagaries of pronunciation.

And speaking of English, there's a bunch of these out there, but I thought this amateur (very amateur :) production of Beowulf was cute, but perhaps not as high in production values as the new film with Angelina Jolie as Grendel's avenging mama.

Quote: Arundhati Roy

2007-11-09T19:03:00.000-05:00

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

-- Arundhati Roy

Uneasy Rhymes

2007-10-20T15:26:00.000-04:00

"Hellish" and "relish."
Will keep in mind for my next sonnet (although it seems to call for a limerick.)

OK, so, yeah, I was having a really bad week. But now that the weekend's here, I feel quite un-hellish. Quite good, actually.

Last night I started the first phase of planning for an online lit journal, something I've been mulling over for about a year (and thinking about in a "someday" way for much longer.) Will take a while to get it off the ground... generating interest for quality submissions will probably be the hardest/most expensive part -- how much is a classified in Poet's and Writers? -- but it's fun to think about.

Poet's Mantra

2007-10-01T18:39:00.001-04:00

It's probably no accident that, among recent Western adherents of Buddhism, a large number are writers or artists. The bare-bones psychology of Buddhism is a lot like the artist's (ideal) way of being. Mindfulness might be translated as very rigorous observation.

My artist's mantra would be that, wherever I am at the moment, I would aim to be perfectly there, perfectly hot or cold, but keeping what some Buddhists call the Buddha in the Center. An artist might just call this the observer, taking notes, equally serving art itself and the sanity of the artist.

And in the Western tradition, Socrates, in probably his most famous line, had high praise for the value of observation as well.

I think it was the personal credo of the poet Anthony Hecht, whom I've been reading for class, regarding the crucial role of faithful observation in the life and work of a poet, who inspired these musings.

I met Hecht when he was a guest in the first course I took in the writing program. He signed my book (well, everyone's book.) I was feeling callow and nervous, aside from my usual shyness, and hadn't been able to come up with a perfect question to ask him, as the instructor had requested (well, he hadn't said "perfect," but I had hoped to impose that requirement on myself and failed miserably.) I think it was after he read from a poem of his about Flannery O'Connor, watching the trees through the window as she was lying in bed dying of lupus, that I scrapped whatever I had come up with and managed instead an off-the-cuff but heartfelt question that included the word "rigor." His eyes sort of flashed for a moment and he said, emphatically, "Yes."

It was a moment of hope for me, even though thus far I had produced nothing satisfactory at the level I was aspiring to, that I might have an inkling of what it was all about, and therefore something to guide me and to hold onto. And it was indeed a rocky road from the first couple workshops until these last two, so that hope was a valuable gift. He died later that same year, and I felt so lucky to have had that opportunity, even though I hadn't been ready for it.

P.S. And some belated good news: That habit of submission which I mentioned earlier (of poems to lit journals... what did you think I meant? ;) has paid off with some actual publications. Some rejections, too, but, so far, in fairly equal measure, so it's definitely been worth the effort... sending some more stuff out today.)

What is Poetry? P.2

2007-09-14T00:20:00.001-04:00

Here are the rest of my definitions from the summer workshop's recurring assignment (including a few alternates I didn't submit):

Poetry is the jargon of the subconscious.

Poetry is nothing but if's, and's and but's.

Poetry is an oasis made of sand.

Poetry is reality's halfway house.

Sometimes poetry has to be mined deep in an underground shaft; sometimes it flows over like lava at your feet.

Poetry is the alchemy of language from experience.

This semester I'm taking a course on Poetics, so I'll probably have to come up with some more.

Don't you "hate it" when people use "quotation marks" just for "emphasis?"

2007-08-15T11:40:00.001-04:00

These bloggers certainly do.

Hee hee.
I guess this trend has bugged me so much that I've refused to analyze what motivates well-meaning souls to do this. Now, thinking about it, I guess it's the idea of appealing to a higher authority, e.g. very important people want you to know that these items are "on sale," see? It's not just me, the poor schmuck writing this crappy sign by hand who says they're on sale, but very important people. That is my best guess.

Thanks to Mr. X for the link.

And in a similar vein:
Apostrophe abuse

Writing too many lines of blank verse...

2007-07-29T03:42:00.000-04:00

... in a row can make one go a little bonkers. After 42 straight lines of it, tinkered with until the wee hours of the morning, one might start scanning one's own name (iambic tetrameter, ended with a trochaic substitution?) and wondering if the caesura was intentional on one's parents' part.
My next poem will be a haiku.

What is Poetry?

2007-07-13T15:55:00.001-04:00

A weekly assignment for the workshop has been to come up with new definitions for poetry. It's one of those things for which there are seemingly infinite answers (although I might not think so by the last week of the semester :)

Here's what I've come up with so far:

Poetry is the by-product of narrative, exposition, and rhetoric.

Poetry is what still matters at the end of the world.

A poem is a discrete body of compressed language that would lose rather than gain meaning and impact if clarifying or additional information were added.

Poetry, like magic, is the intentional hallowing of objects.

Lyric poetry is more like dream logic in its confusion of the tenses of past, present and future, whereas narrative prose is linear like the conscious mind.

Much of a poem's music comes from the patterns and harmonies one hears but doesn't recognize.

OT: Poetry in a Bottle P.2

2007-06-16T20:48:00.000-04:00

My new second favorite beer: Orange Blossom Cream Ale by Buffalo Bill's Brewery
It's one of their seasonals (actually, their pumpkin one sounds kind of intriguing, too.)

New workshop

2007-06-09T21:57:00.000-04:00

Much to my surprise, it's going well, at least so far.
Since this was the same instructor I'd had two years ago, who had been less than impressed with my style, even giving me an A- because it was "less polished than some of the others" (I think this was her polite way of saying it pretty much sucked) I'd had very low expectations for what she'd think of my new stuff, just hoping I'd learn some things about meter and form that would be useful, and of course, that I'd get that last workshop credit I need.
I guess she appreciated that my first submission was a ghazal (although not in the strict back-to-the-Arabic style that is the new model for ghazals in English) and in general, she seemed to dig it. I was shocked and relieved. I know that she's very accomplished with that particular form, and I trust her judgment in all technical matters; she's very meticulous and thoughtful; so it was a nice way to begin the semester.
And I was inspired to try to work the ghazal into a "true ghazal" for one of my revisions, since I guess, when it comes to poetry, I respond more to positive reinforcement than negative... playing right into the formalists' hands, aren't I? ;) Nah, to be fair, I think I really have improved since that first workshop and the one I took the following year (owing partly to taking a break from workshops, reading a lot of poetry, writing a lot of to-heck-with-it free verse stuff, and getting some of my confidence back) and maybe she's become more open, too, over the last two years. I think we'll get along swell... which is good, because I need to choose an adviser for my thesis soon.
And since any possible defensiveness I might have been harboring has dissipated, I'll be more open to "constructive criticism" on the next submissions. Like I said in the previous post, I've developed a pretty thick skin, anyway, based on the last workshop I took with an instructor who was less polite than this one (although also more of a character and more open to experimentation, which kept things interesting at least... I liked her better than most of my classmates did.)
But I guess it's nice to feel that there's not anything to prove now and it can just be about the work itself, which is the point, after all (and what I'm paying the big bucks for, not my precious little ego :)

Lines that knock my socks off: A. R. Ammons

2007-05-25T22:46:00.000-04:00

from Corsons Inlet (Thanks to my workshop instructor for choosing this as one of the first two discussion poems for the class... The other one is this, equally amazing in an entirely different way, although both are perfect unions of form and function... bodes well for the course.)

the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness

and later in the poem...

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:

A little madness in my method

2007-05-19T17:19:00.001-04:00

I've found lately that my poems have been originating in two distinct ways: from free-associative/stream of consciousness writing (I got this from Julia Cameron's Morning Pages idea, although being more of an afternoon/evening/middle of the night person, I just call them "rambling rites" and do them whenever I have a free 15 minutes and something to write about it. And of course, I use the computer. This is the 21st century, after all. So yeah, basically, it's nothing like Julia Cameron's Morning Pages, but that was the genesis of it, anyway.)

After the free-writing, the next step in this method is to highlight the better parts and then delete the parts between; then start moving lines around, coupling, quatraining, or otherwise stanzafying them and seeing what fits where, before finally trimming around the edges; letting the finished piece sit for a day or two and then re-reading to see if it resembles an actual poem.

And the other method is just writing down two or three lines that come to me and then expanding and building a poem around it. This is the way I wrote for my entire life (well, ever since I started writing poetry regularly, about age 14, I guess) up until I first tried the rambling rites about three years ago. But it was still my primary method up until this year. Now, I'm leaning toward the other.

I think the reason I'm leaning this way is that the free-associative method tends to yield a more dreamlike, lyrical product, whereas the latter produces more narrative stuff. And since the writing program I'm in strongly favors more formalist work (neither too narrative nor too lyrical) I've naturally rebelled and wanted to run in an even more informal direction than I was already headed. We'll see how well that goes over with this summer workshop (I'm guessing not that well. But this is my last year and my skin's grown pretty thick. Nobody's going to beat the free verse out of me and turn me into a meter-head.)

And a little poetry humor...

2007-04-23T00:16:00.000-04:00

I didn't expect to see Robert Pinsky hosting Stephen Colbert's metaphor match with Sean Penn on Thursday's Colbert Report. It was pretty funny.

A Good Day

2007-04-22T19:27:00.000-04:00

I woke up with a hangover this morning, but the sunshine lured me out of bed. It was 81 degrees today! This after it being like the middle of February for most of the last few weeks.
I wrote a poem, one that doesn't particularly suck (it seems odd that, on the past two occasions of having hangovers, I've written poems that I'm happy with. What's up with that? Did I kill off the brain cells that were getting in the way of my poetic process?)
Anyway, then I went outside and tilled the soil for the garden, and D. and I planted the tomato and basil seedlings, and sowed the seeds for the cucumbers, lettuce and dill. Also, he put up a fence so the dog can be outside unsupervised now, without getting into mischief. And right now, he's making us boiled red potatoes with olive oil, sea salt and dill (I loves the dill), and my head will soon be aching less.
A good day.

The last word on Spring?

2007-04-18T18:37:00.000-04:00

I came across this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay on another poet's blog, but here's a link to a copy on Poetry Archive:

"Spring" by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I guess the answer to my question is no, because The Waste Land wasn't published until the year after Millay's collection Second April, available online in its entirety, appeared, and as unfashionable as it is to admit, I love The Waste Land. But notice the congruence of themes between this short and sweet number and that tortuous epic: a zeitgest of the cynical times, I guess, a time in which "signification" was everything, because it was still expected that there just might be something hiding around some corner, hope against hope, waiting to be signified. I guess it would be a relief to find out that there was nothing after all.

In any case, Millay's poem just seems to sum up the season so well in a 20th-century nutshell that it makes it that much harder for those who come after to say anything original about it.

What would a 21-century poem about Spring sound like? Many have been written and published. I've tried a bunch myself (none so far published.) But with any success? I dunno.

So yeah -- a daunting task, the April poem, but not one poets will give up very easily.

My kind of people, poets are

2007-03-22T21:20:00.000-04:00

The NewsHour just aired a series of profiles, "Poetry of the Middle East," over the past two days, featuring Israeli and Palestinian poets, respectively. It made me interested in reading more of their work, each of them.
It also reminded me why I'm glad I chose this profession (or rather, this way of life, since I guess "profession" implies a livelihood.) But these are the people I want to be counted among, or with whom, I guess, I feel most kinship, far beyond tribe and creed.

Some quotes:

GHASSAN ZAQTAN (through translator): I am not the kind of person who will walk in front of the demonstration. I feel that's not my place. I walk behind the demonstration in order to collect the small things that may fall, whether it's the handkerchief or a child's backpack or a purse. That's my attitude.

AHARON SHABTAI: The world is big, and there are many big things, and poetry is tiny. But this tiny thing, it's like a small knife that you have in your pocket. But this is something that can say very important things.

TAHA MUHAMMAD ALI: In my poetry, there is no Palestine, no Israel. But, in my poetry, suffering, sadness, longing, fear, and this is, together, make the results: Palestine and Israel. The art is to take from life something real, then to build it anew with your imagination.

(And that last is profoundly good advice, summing up the crucial trick that I'd been trying to find words for recently.)

Reading List: Last Thoughts on "Green Squall"

2007-03-11T18:55:00.000-04:00

I just read the last six poems in Jay Hopler's Green Squall and all but maybe one of these ended the collection on a strong note. In fact, everything I liked about this book (and very little of what I thought made it overall uneven) is here in these last poems.
My favorite poem in the book is the next-to-last, which, if I were a proper poet, I would refer to as the "penultimate" poem, since, if one is a proper poet, everything that is next to last in any group of things is referred to by this term, which, though admittedly useful, I find somewhat irksome and therefore refuse to use just now.
So, anyway, the next-to-last poem :)
It's called "A Book of Common Days" and is grouped in seven parts, spanning three pages. I think this poem also suits my stirrings of early Spring Fever state of mind. (See my other blog for a happy rant on this year's early start to Daylight Savings Time.)

These are my favorite lines, from parts four and five:

When the good and the violent are sleeping
When the city moon looks out on the streets

When the soul lies down in that grass
When spring comes back

When Judas writes the history of solitude
When I was young and miserable and pretty

When the green field comes off like a lid
When it prays --

I keep a blue bottle.
It convinces me I have seen my soul.

P.S. The new Yale Series book is coming out next month, but I'm wondering if I should run out and buy it the minute it hits the stores, having been exploring the world of DIY and small-small press poets in the blogosphere lately, and struggling to re-think my all-or-nothing attitude toward publishing. Struggling.

A habit of submission

2007-03-04T17:13:00.000-05:00

No, I'm not talking about my personality (that would be another blog, which currently does not exist, thankfully :)
But on the digital front, I've found Google's calendar to be a wonderful, magical thing. If I add an event to it, out there in the analog world, the thing in question generally gets done. So it is written...
So if, for instance, I research journals to submit to, in Poets & Writers, which has a great classifieds section (not available in their online edition, it doesn't seem, unfortunately), or from an online resource, and I type something like "Submit to Such-and-Such Journal on Sun., March 3, then, most amazing of all, I will send stuff out on that very same date, electronically, of course (we'll see if this holds up for next month's planned submission, which actually involves a stamp and envelope.)
After years of hopeless slack with respect to trying to publish, it seems incredible how easy it is. Getting accepted, by comparison, seems less than half the battle, especially since it's out of my hands. Once I have something polished to the point where it seems worth the effort, the important thing is to give it an honest try -- am I right, self-help gurus? (This should be a commercial. I could dress like a winsome slacker poet chick and talk about how Google changed my life. Fortunately, I don't think Google makes commercials like that... last time I checked.)

Reading List Update

2007-02-27T00:44:00.000-05:00

I've been reading Crush and Green Squall simultaneously... along with other stuff, so it's been slow-going on the poetry front, which isn't a bad thing. Poetry is sipping material, and not really made to be consumed by the truckload. (Or maybe that attitude is just what's wrong with the state of poetry today -- or, more likely, what's wrong with the state of me as a reader...)
In any case, Crush is the stronger of the two, more even in tone (the tone being devastated, but in a frantic, urgent way that never sinks into melodrama.) Beauty and violence seem comfortable together in Siken's poems. I read in an interview with him that he's gotten some of that violence out of his system with this one, so it will be interesting to see where he goes next time.
I can't say quite the same for Green Squall on the narrowly-avoiding-melodrama front (there are several instances of head-on collision), although Hopler doesn't aspire to the same sort of urgency in tone; in fact, his subject is largely entropy, so maybe I'm talking apples and oranges. His strength is in language and wordplay, and there are a handful of near-perfect poems, including the title one and the central long poem, where you can understand exactly why Gluck chose him. I'll definitely look for his next book as well.
What I'm really excited about now is that I just got a collection of Paul Celan with English and German versions side by side (not that I read German, but do have enough vague sense of it for purposes of comparison, or to get a feel for the translator's style of translation.) I stumbled onto some mention of him on a literary blog and have wanted this for several weeks and now that I've been scratching the surface (it's a nice big volume), I'm even more excited. This is stuff to sink your teeth into.
Yay. Because I need inspiration. Less than a year now until the first draft of my thesis is due, and I want to throw everything out and start from scratch. Except a few things I grudgingly still think are probably decent, if only they were written in a different style :) And I kind of like what I've written in the last two months, only since I've started getting freaked out about the deadline. I hope I can just stay freaked out about it all year.

OT: Poetry in a Bottle

2007-02-19T22:12:00.000-05:00

My new favorite beer: Éphémère by Unibroue in Quebec

Yes, it's light and refreshing. I like it that way. Probably, my tastes in beer are not analogous to my tastes in poetry.

Text Message Novel...

2007-02-18T13:09:00.000-05:00

... published in Finland, according to this news bulletin in Poet & Writers online.

I don't know if this will catch on, but it's an interesting idea -- especially in the Finnish language, which isn't known for its simplicity.

You Write What You Read

2007-02-10T19:22:00.000-05:00

So Alexander Chee, in this BookSense article, quotes his former professor, Annie Dillard, as saying.

So right now, I'm reading two of the latest Yale Series of Younger Poets winners. Well, they just happen to have been chosen for an award which some of us still under 40 would not decline if offered (to say the least) but Louise Gluck, the current series editor, has my kinda taste in poetry, the kind that she finds living up to Emily Dickinson's definition of poetry a bit more than does some of today's pretty, well-behaved verse:

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that it is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?"

Speaking of milestones/ deadlines, I just read this quote from Virginia Woolf, from a letter or journal:

"There's no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice."

At 33, I'm not sure if I should take heart from that or despair, but I guess if I could write like Virginia Woolf, I'd be willing to wait another seven years, at least.

The titles I'm reading now are Jay Hopler's Green Squall and Richard Siken's Crush.