MFA Residency: Day 5

Day 5 is just ending of the residency for my low-res MFA here at Spalding University in Louisville. A lot has happened so far, adn I'll cram as much as I can into this post before I feel the tug of poetry draw me back to my notebook.

I got in on Thursday night (after being completely raped by a Chattanooga cab company - $28 to take me one and a half miles to the airport! WHAT?! Mental note: call Beverly and beg a ride home from the airport on Sunday), and the Brown hotel is as beautiful as ever, and equipped with the same decadently absorbent towels. I love crossing back into Kentucky - even Louisville, though my heart is closer to Danville and Lexington. It always feels like coming home.

Residency started on Friday, and I amazed myself by remembering the map of Spalding's small downtown campus - I got myself turned around regularly in November, but now I'm pretty adept at getting around our little 4-block cube of the city, and its homeless folk. (Thanks for the catcalls, guys. Seriously. You have no idea how that makes the day of a big-bootied woman like myself. I heart the looeyville homeless!)

Coming here is really like coming home. As a writer, there's little better than finding an entire gaggle of people who understand your random frisking of yourself for a writing implement to jot down (on paper, or your bookbag strap, or your arm) a thought that you think might grow into a nifty little sapling of a poem or story. Folks who understand the devastation of those teensy little impersonal rejection slips that count as responses to your deepest secrets sent off to editors. Folks you don't feel guilty with when you press your latest pieces into their hands for workshopping, because you know they're really interested in your work, and you know you'll get honest and constructive feedback from. Smell that? That's beer mixed with artistic potential. Those stains? Ink. I love it.

So far, I have attended lectures on:

Pico Iyer's Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign, lyric essays on travel

Creative Non Fiction: Where the Public Meets the Private

The Life of the Place: Ko Un's Abiding Places

A Rhetorical Approach to the Sentence

There are No Zebras Among the Roses: Negation & the Imagination in 20th Century Poetry

The Art of Poetic Failure: Identification, Method & Practice

Metaphor as Analysis: Transparency, Translucence, Opacity in Language

the Shapely Poem

On Translation

Writing in Animal Time

The History of Every Country

Structural Screwity: A brief Guide to Reading & Writing Experimental Fiction

Sudden Physical Moments in Short Fiction

And we're not even done until Saturday night!

I've been workshopping daily with my small group and Greg Pape, who will also be my mentor for this upcoming semester. He's not only a hell of a poet with a real eye for the details in nature, he's also Montana's Poet Laureate and an all-around interesting guy with a really intense reading presence and a good sense of humor. (He's going to need it, with me as a student.)

Tomorrow I've got my small group discussion on syntactic doubling and line breaks, an expository writing workshop where we'll go over each other's critical essays (on a book we all hated, so that should be particularly painful), poetry workshop, a lecture on fiction for the book in common for this coming semester, and a play at the Bunbury Theater, Rabbit Hole.

All told, it's going pretty well, though not quite as gangbusters as last residency, when I seem to remember staying up until past 4am drinking beer (um, I do not even like beer), and there may have been an occasion or two where I raised my shirt above what was proper to show off some ink. So far it's been pretty tame, with folks quitting for bed before 10pm. I do hope that we end up hitting Fourth Street Live again sometime this residency, because the poetess desperately needs an excuse to shake her tucchus on the dance floor sometime in 2008. One more dance while I'm twenty-eight, before I turn the big two-nine next week.

Anyway, among the great workshopping and the notes I've made on lectures, I've also been hitting the student and faculty readings at night, which are really impressive. Last night I read "Love Letter from a White Woman," "Intercession" (a rewrite of the ail Mary prayer), "For my Unborn Son" and "Thorns," and they seemed to go over really well with the crowd. (It was getting on 9pm, so it is also altogether possible the crowd was simply pleased to be getting out, since I was the last reader.) Anyway, it was a good time, and I was re-impressed with the crop of talent in my classmates.

That's about it for now, and you likely won't hear from me for awhile, since I don't get home until June, and then I've got three book chapters and one poster session to complete before July hits. I also had a conference presentation pitch that I made with a gaggle of other librarians picked up as a half-day preconference at one of the big librarian conferences (Internet Librarian 2008, in Monterey) picked up, so the fun never stops! For now, I need to go back and make margin comments in this batch of critical essays, and try to crank out some of the poems - or at least flesh out some of the ideas for poems - that have been growing in my head. Much love from a poetess steeped in her element...

Of Publishing and Eye Candy

Happiness is:

an envelope in the mail at the end of the day saying that one of my favorite poems was accepted for publication. "For my Unborn Son" will appear this time next year in Main Street Rag.

an email the day after that envelope in the mail, informing me that another poem has been accepted in another lit mag. "Visiting Cary" will be published in the next issue of Free Verse.

knowing that I'm doing something that will ultimately be good for me, in the form of delicious beefcake. Ahem. What I mean to say is that I bought not just a gym membership, but 12 sessions with a personal trainer. At 2 trainer sessions a week, and 2 weeks that I'll be gone for the MFA residency and then travel for work, that nearly takes me through the summer. Let's set aside the fact that I am paying some nubile young sexyman to scream at me and watch me flap my armfat until I can reach some semblance of fitness. Let's set aside the fact that this boy (he sounded very young on the phone) told me to make certain I eat before the workout tomorrow. (I figure along with caliper-ing my fat rolls, he's also going to measure how fierce my projectile vomit skills are.) Let's also set aside the fact that I feel absolutely ridonkulous going to a gym where I don't know how any of the torturous-looking machines work, and that I obviously look out of place in a building simply teeming with young blonde fit things, and hunky no-neck manthings. We can even set aside how pathetic it is that I have to pay someone to tell me what to do, since I'm more likely to exercise if it's structured as homework (with the supervisory training sessions like pop-quizzes with the teacher over my shoulder).

Hm. While we were overlooking all of that stuff, I forgot what we were supposed ot be looking at.

Anyway, I have 2 pairs of jeans that I could wear when I was at my most seriously ill, when I had a fab bod. (Not skinny-skinny - I've never gotten to the point that you can see my ribs. But hot woman fabulous.) Before I go to bed tonight, I will be hanging those jeans - and the killer-neckline top - on my bedroom door. And maybe (since there are two pairs) over the fridge.

I have the willpower to do (and enjoy) my job. I have the willpower to grind away at poetry manuscripts until I can't see. I have the willpower to pursue graduate work until my eyeballs want to bleed before reading more literature, and my hands want to fall off from the typing. So why is it so goddamned hard for me to step away from the burgers/ice cream/whatever? I find that most annoying.

Anyway. Yes. Publishing. Yee-haw. And with any luck, feeling better about my bod in just 2 short months. And by short, I mean hellaciously long and painful. But with eyecandy. Who will be screaming at me and cleaning my barf from his shoes, but eyecandy nonetheless.

Random Thoughts from the Poetess

A collection of random thoughts for your perusal:

I painted my toes for the first time this season and am breaking in new sandals, which has resulted in blisters on the tops of my feet. This is likely caused by the fact that my feet are spoiled by Danskos. *sigh* At least my ruby-tipped toes are cute. The color, by OPI nail lacquers, is "I'm Not Really A Waitress." Heh.

On the non-creative writing front, I'm trying to bang out a chapter titled "The Haves and the Have-Nots: Class, Race, Gender, Access to Computers and Academic Success" for a forthcoming book edited by Vib Bowman and Robert Lackie of the library and education world. I am excited about this for a number of reasons - first, um, it's a book chapter. A book with an ISBN. W00T! Looks good for tenure, and the book, which the editors have titled The Myths, Realities, and Practicalities of Working with Gen M: A Handbook for Educators and Librarians, is actually something I'm interested in - education and media literacy issues for Gen M kids. It's integrally related to my day job as a reference and instruction librarian. Plus, the publishing credit is something I can use in my bid for tenure, whereas my creative writing, not so much.

I am also kicking around a few ideas for books. Not that I have the time to write a scholarly-type book in my current state of OMGWTFBBQDEADLINES!!1!!!1!!eleven!!, but it is something I want to do eventually, so I'm considering what sort of topics would capture my interest for long enough to write an entire book. So far, I've got:

The "G" Spot: How Academic Librarians Affect Graduation Rates and Student Retention

Hey, I'd read that. It also might not be a bad start for a dissertation topic, given that I'm eyeballing starting the EdD program once I complete my MFA (November 2009) and MA (expected 2010). Best to have an interesting and useful academic library related topic.

I came into the office today to work on this book chapter, and haven't been able to rein in my brain to buckle down and do it. I have a sketch of the abstract, which is due to the editors Wednesday, so I do believe I'll be back in tomorrow to tackle it.

What is on my brain is this Lilith collection. (My brain has been usefully parsed into two parts: dayjob librarian work brain, and night-time and weekend creative writing brain. Apparently weekend brain is jealous of its space and wants little to do with librarian writing.) While reading my articles to form this book chapter, I was struck by the sudden desire to write in negative space and see if it turned into something compelling. I like it, but am sending it over to my trusty experimental fiction dude Drew, who is quite the poet himself and has some serious sense when it comes to revision suggestions. He's getting MFA-ed in May, so if you're hiring, you should contact him. Anyway, back to topic, Lilith on the brain, trying to keep it interesting, working in negative space from the starting thought of "I was never tempted by an apple." (That's not how it appears in the poem, but that's where the idea-seed came from - is it possible to write about not-something, and keep readers fascinated by all of the possibilities it leaves open? I think so, if it's done well, but it's a hell of a challenge.)

Also: more from me on the multiple-personality split of creative vs. not-creative writing. I hate to call it "uncreative" (and even "not-creative" is sort of insulting), and I don't want to call it "professional" writing, since a paid poet is a professional. I'll let this one marinate a bit and post on it soon.

Random: does it freak anyone else out that Firefox's spell-check suggestion for my mis-typed version of "something" is "thigbone's"? I mean, I wasn't really that far off, and it didn't look anything like "thighbone's"...

A Series of Late Nights

It has been quite the interesting past few days. Oh, not from anyone else's viewpoint, I'm sure. For them, my life looks as dull as usual. Work, home, walking the dog, making dinner, turning on the tv and the laptop. All pretty ordinary. What is *not* ordinary is that I'm averaging 3 poems a day for the past, oh, eight days.

I'm not saying I'll keep them all. I think some of them are good, and some of them are ordinary and will have to be torn up and remade. The deluge is nice though - it's like trying to drink from a firehose, there's so much I want to write.

The result has been interesting. I compiled a full-length collection that had the theme of a daughter coming of age and dealing with her father, and I titled it Carving Your Name. Thrilled to have a complete book, I schlepped it off to about three competitions. Then, in a bit more than a weekend, I wrote a chapbook in Lilith's voice and titled it "I Will Not Lie Below," and sent that one out. I broke Carving Your Name into two chapbooks, one concentrating on seasonal themes called "Summers in Bay Shore," and one concentrating on the theme of coming to terms with grief titled "Carving Your Name." (I know, unoriginal of me to keep the same title as the full-length, but it tickled me and seemed right.)

That made me feel productive enough that I could forget my early-in-the-year dry spell. But that wasn't all. I decided that since there was such a heavy daughter/woman theme in Carving Your Name that I thought I might combine the more heavily femme-themed pieces with the Lilith chapbook, and I titled that full-length collection Disobedient Daughters. I farmed that one out to another four poetry book contests.

And then I decided there was too wide a gap between just the daughter pieces and the pieces that were overtly in Lilith's voice in Disobedient Daughters, and that Lilith really deserved her own book without my diluting it with poems that were really meant to go in a different direction. So I've been walking around in Lilith's crimson stiletto peep-toe pumps in my head at night (which is the footwear I imagine her enjoying), and her meager chapbook has grown to twenty-eight poems and counting, tentatively titled God in my Throat.. As I said before, not all of them are strong enough to stay, and they'll need revision and some slight reordering, but it's a project I'm enjoying.

Now I'm struggling to make sure the voice doesn't get stale. Trying for different angles, different approaches for the narrative, different images, trying not to let a vivid character fade to pale through too much retelling.

Finally, playing off an email I sent to a friend, I thought I'd put some of my more, um, interestingly-toned poems into a chapbook called "Muse Made Me Her Bitch." Struggling to fill it out, but in a good way, like stretching muscles I haven't used in too long. Sometimes I get dissatisfied when my tone becomes...not complacent, really, but not harsh and surprising enough to satisfy me. "Muse" gives me the outlet I need to experiment with some things.

And then there's "The House That Falls Down" (also occasionally titled "Warsongs"). It's a collection of poems on war broken into three sections - the war, the women, and the homecoming. I was going to write it off, but I have an affection for it - I wrote the bulk of it while my brother was a Marine deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he said he liked the collection, and that the guys he shared it with enjoyed it. It came in as a semi-finalist in competition (though that could be due to a dearth of entries, I'm sure). It hands together oddly, every single piece needs severe revision, and war is a tough thing to write about and get right. I should trash it. But I'm keeping it. Selfish and sentimental, but whatever. it'll be my fixer-upper project.

In good news, I looked at the packet mailing schedule for my MFA program for the Spring 2008 semester (which starts at the end of May), and noted that it called for volunteers for folks for the full-manuscript workshop for the Spring 2009 residency. A few emails later, and I'm in! I'll likely be the only poetess in the group, since it's apparently the folks with novels who take advantage of that workshop, but hey. I write in the hopes that regular folks will enjoy my poems, and receiving critique from non-poets (or, as writers, merely poets of a different stripe) may actually be more helpful, since I'm getting accustomed to getting most of my critique from poets. Anyway, it can't hurt, and I can at least sound off of some people to see if they find it as interesting as I do. I'm afraid the folks that have read the bits I've shared may be biased because we're pals, though they've shared some good critiques. Heh, okay, I admit it. I wonder a little bit if walking in as the only poetry manuscript is like coming in as an underdog where it's more than likely that folks with actual coherent fiction and CNF stories will think that I'm inherently inferior because I work in smaller clips, and don't have their sort of stamina.

Okay, so I have a teensy inferiority complex. But I'm good humored about it. *grin*

Anyway, it's been a series of very late nights (particularly since I'm accustomed to going to bed at 10pm. Half past midnight makes morning an absolutely shitty time to be me, but I think it's worth it. Hell, I *know* it's worth it - I'd burn out terribly fast if I did my scholarly stuff both at work *and* at home, and I'm trying desperately to keep home as my creative sphere for personal work. Now what I wish I had was a group - one where we exchange manuscripts, make candid comments, and slug it out good naturedly surrounded by Kinko's-bound nearly-finished masterpieces and beer. Until then, though, I'll continue writing. And if you want to volunteer to make some margin-notes, I will snail-mail you a copy of whichever manuscript you're interested in *grin*. For now, though, I am going to bed.

Right after I finish a piece called "Witness."

Submission Queen

In addition to submitting my chapbooks Carving Your Name and Summers in BayShore for the Black Lawrence Press chapbook competitions, I've also submitted Carving Your Name to Finishing Line Press. Feeling spunky, in a moment of pique, I put together my full manuscript and shipped it off to the Tupelo/CrazyHorse first book competition as well as to New Sins. This about blows my budget, so that'll have to do for now, competition-wise. I just built a humongous spreadsheet of full-length manuscript competitions...now I need to go back and start listing all of the chapbook competitions. It's a nice way to keep track of approaching deadlines, not to mention the fees. There's no possible way I can enter everything, and the name of the press as well as the fees dictate when and where I send my work. (For instance, I don't know much about New Sins, other than that it was free, and I liked the chapbook they put out last year. Good enough for me.)

Right now I've got submissions in at over 25 journals, and have been bitten by the writing bug, so I may not wait the entire two months before sending out more. I even gathered up my nerve and submitted some sonnets to a new sonnets-only journal. (I figure that rejection won't hurt as much as some of the others, since I do not consider myself a sonnetteer, by any means. My goal is to write sonnets that nobody notices the rhyme scheme in - I despise end rhyme, though I know a number of poets who have done it well.)

And tonight I'll be working on my newest project, which will be a collection in the voice of Lilith. You know Lilith - not the one from Frasier. Adam's first wife, who was also made of earth, and refused to submit to him? Actually, one of the legends (from The Alphabet of Ben Sira, which I cannot get an English copy of, sine apparently the only 3 copies are in Europe) states that Lilith was a complete badass who demanded equality, and wanted to be on top. When Adam told her she was lesser and that *she* should be in the inferior position, she had the chutzpah to say God's Name and fly away instead of being subjected to the feeble missionary-style sexing of the first misogynist. C'mon, y'all. Hers is a voice that deserves its own collection, don't you think?

Working the Manuscript

Instead of doing actual work this weekend, after a long week and fulfilling my semester requirements for both the MFA and the MA programs, I decided to put in a bit of time on my full-length manuscript, which is taking shape quite well. I'm having a tough time finding a thread that runs through the pieces - I rarely write on one theme exclusively (I'd bore myself to tears), though I have discovered that seasons and place (mostly Kentucky and Long Island) get mentioned quite often.

As of right now, I am tentatively titling the collection "A Stranger in Tornado Country." I don't know why, but I like the ring of it, and I like the poem it comes from, so for now, that's the winner. I hate sending things off half-cocked, and there's nothing worse than a collection with a lackluster title, especially with all the volumes of poetry being written. I don't want editors and judges bored before they get past the table of contents.

I've culled the collection to only polished pieces, and pieces I'm very fond of. Right now that puts me at fifty, with my new poem "Summer Sings," though there are about five or six I may take out because they're weak and/or obviously don't fit the rest of the tone of the collection. For instance, I happen to be in love with my new poem "Love Letter from a White Woman," but it's jarringly different in both tone and style, and relies more on rhythm than most of my other pieces do. I want it to be as strong as possible, but I also don't want to wait until the end of the MFA program (November 2009) to start submitting the manuscript.

My goal is to submit the full length manuscript to at least 4 competitions this year, as well as to some open reading periods at places like Tupelo Press, where the editor sends a handwritten note and critique for their open reading period. For poets, a full length manuscript is generally between 48 and 100 pages. Chapbook competitions are markedly shorter than that, requesting manuscripts of about 16 to 30 pages (and often shorter than that). There are tons of competitions, but it gets rather expensive after awhile, since most are about $20 a pop, with the full length competitions running closer to $25. Then again, I need to remember to ask if I can write those off...

My next daunting task, after writing a few more pieces that will round out the manuscript, will be to figure out what order they should be in. I haven't found a decent software program to do this (I've heard Scrivener is great, but I don't work on a Mac), so I'm seriously considering doing it with index cards and a giant corkboard. Any other ideas or suggestions are, as always, welcome and encouraged.

Does anyone have much experience putting together a successful poetry manuscript? What say ye?

Write the Poem that's Impossible to Write

This is the advice given by Earl Braggs in my workshop. "Write the poem that is impossible to write." It's good advice, since it tells us to stretch beyond the boundaries we have imposed on ourselves, and discover just how good we can be. It's good advice also because it gives us permission to fall short without feeling like utter failures. I know I've felt that way when I've failed to capture what I was after, and wanted to exchange my pen and paper for a hammer and nails and do something else, because I was obviously never going to be a good writer.

I have taken this challenge on, in spades. There is a poem I have always wanted to write, and have shied from, because it's too massive a subject. I will undoubtedly get it wrong. But it burns in me, it keeps me awake, and it niggles at the edges of my mind when I should be concentrating on other things, like how much detergent to put in the washing machine. I want to write an epic poem that captures the voices of women across time, imparts the pride, pain, joy and suffering of women of all colors and backgrounds, and would make each of us proud to stand and recite it. I even have the title: Womansong. probably not terribly original, that, but it encompasses what I want to capture.

I've made a first pass at it, this week. I like parts of it very much, other parts I'm not certain about. It moves through history, but I'm feeling rather shamed for having the hubris to say I can speak for all women. Others have, so I don't know why I'm so reluctant to do so. Should I call out places by name? Should I set it all in the present even though some of the happenstances have passed? Moving back and forth between tenses was annoying me when I re-read it, and I want each of the women that the poem evokes to be alive, so present tense feels more natural for that. Do I have too many biblical references in it? Does the poem lose potency when it's as long as this (currently four pages)? Most of all, who have I left out? I think that's the one I'm most afraid of. I can cull pieces if I must, but I don't want to leave something out that's essential.

I have the feeling this one is going to be a work-in-progress for a very long time. As well it should be, I suppose, for such subject matter. And despite all of my misgivings, I'm pleased to be writing it - writing an Impossible Poem means that it's an important poem. Maybe there is no 'right' way to write such a thing, but acknowledging that it needs to be written - and that yours might be the hand to set it down - is an important step.

Acceptances Galore: A Day of Hearts, Flowers, and Goodwill Towards Editors

Because we, as writers, generally spend our time moping over our mountains of rejections, which I will eventually fall into in this blog, I'm sure, I'd like to take this chance to celebrate a few weeks that have gone really well. My work is being picked up like hotcakes. Which I've never purchased or eaten, but I hear that if your stuff sells like them, it means you're doing well. So, hotcakes it is.

I've had two essays accepted for an anthology, Milestones for American Women: Our Defining Passages. Rumor has it that Knopf may pick it up to publish it, which would be a wonderful coup. That, and the former ALA president is slated to write the afterword. Librarians unite in your bookery! I don't think my prose is as well-formed as my poetry, but I am sincerely flattered that the editors were kind enough to offer some revisions and kind words.

I've been notified that though the Winter 2008 issue of the online journal kaleidowhirl has been slightly delayed, it will indeed be out sometime soon, and my piece "Disobedience" will be published shortly.

Ruminate Magazine will be publishing my poem "Refrigerator Borealis" in its next issue with the theme of 'addiction.'

Upon returning from work this afternoon, I checked my gmail account (which I do compulsively, for all those who care to toss em a line), and was thrilled to find that the editors of Quiddity literary journal want not one, but two of my poems for their inaugural issue for spring 2008. No contract or anything definitive beyond that email yet, so it's not set in stone, but goodness willing, "Flagrant" and "Wavewalk" will soon have a home in an honest-to-goodness university-published print literary journal. Since to date I've been accepted only in online journals and one faith-based print mag, this is a huge occurrence for me, book-snob librarian that I am. (Not that I don't appreciate the online works - I very much do, and appreciate the access they provide. But print is one step closer to my coveted ISBN!)

I'd like to send a warm thanks to all of those editors (who have also received my profuse thanks via email) for their kind words and support. We all know how down we get upon receipt of the form letter rejections in our hastily scrawled SASEs, and I've received a number of those back over the past few weeks as well. But the successes really do outshine the failures, and even one placement gives me the courage to send out a new batch of pieces I am very attached to, even in the face of overwhelming odds. Thank you to all of the kind editors out there - you make writing more fulfilling because you are willing to slog through the mountains of work you receive. Thank you to the subscribers that keep journals in the black (or close to it) so that we can continue to not only get published as writers, but also read our contemporaries' work. And thank you, Lovely Readers, without whom our work would float into the atmosphere, having never been discussed or appreciated.

Yep, I'm in a total Kumbaya mood. A total "let's kiss and hug and all vote for Obama" mood. (At least, I hear that's what happiness feels like.) If I was a supervisor, this would very much be the day that you wanted to ask for a raise. Alas, I hold no such pecuniary powers. You all will have to settle for knowing that I am sending general goodwill vibes into the ether, and wishing you much luck with your own writing.

A Note About Genre

Tonight, I'd like to say a little something about genre. I consider myself a poetess, albeit a poetess-in-progress. Today, though, I'm thinking about my forays into other genres.

I have tried to write fiction, and I have the start and outline of a nifty fantasy novel. The reason it's not finished? Oh, there are lots. I'm lazy and don't like to stick to one story for too long. the thought of a whole novel is completely daunting to me. I have bits and pieces of a story, but not anything I can say is finished in my head. I'd love to write my mother's memoirs, since she has led such a fascinating life. But these are neither here nor there. They don't have deadlines, and they live, happily splintered and half-alive, in my head.

On the other, deadline side, I volunteered to submit some pieces to Milestones for American Women: Our Defining Passages, an anthology scheduled to come out in late 2008 or early 2009. I figured, hey, I've got some important passages. Folks might be interested in reading about them. the editors sent me an enthusiastic "yea," and told me to get the articles in by January 30th.

And here I sit, on January 29th, wondering why I thought that writing was writing, and that if it was my own life, I could probably write it pretty well. Ernk. (That is a buzzer sound, right there.) I feel like it comes off as flat an unimaginative. Perhaps it's just that my life isn't as exciting as I think it is. Maybe I need a ghostwriter. or a few drinks - I hear that worked for Hemingway...

Anyway, my realization for the day is that a writer is not a writer is not a writer. This is probably patently obvious to everyone else, but I'm a little late. Now, I knew I didn't prefer to write fiction or non-fiction, but I figured if you write in one genre, certainly you could tackle the rest with ease. Mea culpa. A mistake I won't make again! Not that i won't attempt to write in another genre, but I'll be sure to have lots of lead time for rewriting, deleting, and revision.

The Writing of a Poem: Stumbling Blocks and Words

Have you ever had the most brilliant idea for a poem, or the most poignant image trapped in your head, and find that when you write it down it just doesn't live up to the grandeur you know you want to convey? You write the poem (or essay, or whatever you write), and it simply doesn't have the shine you know it should. It doesn't speak to you, or hit you in the gut the way it did before you had to wrap it into words. Most writers with lofty goals will know what I'm talking about here...if you don't, write some more. You'll get to this place eventually.

I have been in this place for the better part of two weeks. I catch snippets of images, and when I write them down, they seem stale and empty. I also find, the more I examine my own work from a semi-unbiased position, that I think I am trying to do too many things within a single poem. My better poems (according to both my own preferences and those of my current MFA mentor) are very succinct, focus on a few stark, striking images and wording, and have very short, powerful lines. On the other hand, most of my poetry uses a mid-page lines and have a veritable avalanche of imagery in them. And, much like I just threw in the word "veritable" in the last sentence, when I let the images run away with me and just write, I have a tendency to forget about standardizing my diction, and I just run with the flow of the words. Randomly throwing in elevated diction was one of the big critiques I received on my last packet of MFA work. It's a result of my casting about to find just the right word...and I do love words. I devour them. I savor the good ones. I have the very bad habit of occasionally being struck by a word that is seldom-used, considered high-diction, and tossing it whole into a poem that it likely doesn't sound right in. The problem, I find, is that to me, it does sound right, until someone points out that it probably doesn't belong.

My bad habit of tending to get too verbose is my poetry is one I can relatively easily go back and edit; grading essays and research papers has given me the skill to at least go back and identify where I got carried away, to go back and tauten where I left the poem loose and saggy. Words, on the other hand...I have a harder time with this. I'm going to have to make a conscious effort to beware of random elevated diction, and i often find it difficult to identify in my own work.

Which leads me to the lesson of the day: having outside readers, whether they be related to a writing program, a workshop, or even just a group of friends who are willing to read your work and provide thoughtful critique, is an invaluable resource. They will find meanings you didn't realize were in your work, they will identify weaknesses you are too close to see, and that will make you a better writer, painful as it may be.

In my case, I have decided to restrain myself by focusing on keeping my lines short and my poems tight. I am also consciously working on keeping the verbosity to a minimum, painful as it may be. Interestingly enough, the poems that have resulted are better, as first drafts, than my usual. Working this way also slows my brain, which is usually in a rather fricative state, much the way I imagine meditation does, allowing me to concentrate on minute details, and marinating in a thought until I can tease out exactly what I want to say. A few of my pieces, "Recovery," "Mistress," "A Walk at Dawn," and "A Visit with My Mother After the Divorce," are all poems that I've tried this with, have met with great approval from mentors and readers, and are the ones I hope to place in a well-respected print journal in the coming months.

Best of luck with your writing. If you do happen to be in a rut, I highly recommend setting some uncomfortable rules for yourself, to see how discipline affects your writing. You may not be pleased with the result, and you will have learned something from that, as well, but if it works for you, all the better.

Poetry Prompt: Two Starting Lines

I am currently enamored of prompts, since lately when i sit down, it is as through my brain is a dessicated lump of clay with nary a writerly thought in it. After the success I felt with that last prompt, "The Seventh," I decided to complete both of the prompts offered by my workshop professor, even though we only needed to finish one. (Truly, it's not that I'm an overachiever...it's just that I've also got work due to another program and a personal commitment to write a little every day, and a prompt is a good way to get my brain casting the line.) It was a good brain-jump exercise, since they weren't lines I would ever start a poem with, and had me working in different directions than my writing path has been this week (which is just as well, because I'm bored with the subjects that keep popping into my head.)

Now, if you're terribly successful, you will be able to either use the prompt as your first line or leave it out completely (for my purposes, I think leaving it out completely is the better bet. They seem a bit clunky, and I'm working on not starting my poetry with exposition, as I am wont to do. I know, surprise, surprise, right? See if you can write a poem that works both with and without the prompt as the first line.

Anyway, here they are. Go forth and write like the wind!

Prompt #1:There wasn’t anything else I could do

Prompt #2: More people came, but I didn't notice

A Prompt: The Seventh

Hello all, and merry Friday evening, for those of you who read this.

1)Make a list of seven places you've visited in the last seven years. Rank them, with #1 as your favorite, and #7 as your least favorite. (If you have to go back 8 years, that's fine, but no more than 8 or 9).

2) Take place #7 from the above list, and write down 7 things you remember about that place. (These will naturally come out in order of most vivid to least).

3) Pick something about that last to write about. If it can be broken down into multiple parts, pick the one that you think will be most difficult to write about.

4) Write a one-page exploratory essay on that topic.

Making certain that you are working with themes and images that don't pop straight into your head (the point of picking the 7th items on the list) means that you actually have to work at pulling themes, images and words from your head. Don't cheat on the listing just to make it easier, since that negates the power of the entire exercise. I found this experience very interesting and useful, as I returned to a place I barely visited the first time. This is an exercise that, if you let it, takes you places you hadn't expected to go, which is most productive for a writer. My essay is available for any interested; I may consider posting it later. I think it's pretty interesting. *grin*

On Immortality, and Submitting Work

We write for pleasure, despite the pain of it. We write as a hobby (some people grow gardens, we grow our words). Many of us write because we're simply hard-wired to do so, whether we're good at it or not. And some of us write for glory. I will admit, I decided at a very young age that I didn't want physical immortality. Even as a kid, I had been sick, seen enough health problems of the old, and had seen enough B-movies on the subject to understand that it's probably not all it's cracked up to be. Now, I'm talking about physical immortality, of course. I did, however, figure out the best way to live forever.

The people who stuffed my shelves with their pages pretty much lived forever, didn't they? I mean, I mightn't have liked Shakespeare at all as a person, but it doesn't much matter - I love his poetry, and it has lasted hundreds of years. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Donne, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Stephen King...it's pretty sad. Most of my favorite people, I've never even met but on the page. A lot of them happen to be dead, and it doesn't much matter. What a nifty trick! Yep. I'll admit it. The librarian in me and the poetess in me converge in complete agreement on at least this one point: I covet my own ISBN number. I want to be immortalized in (preferably acid-free) paper, safely nestled in various libraries with my contemporaries and forebears. I mean really - do you think that Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Marx would have ever gotten along at a dinner table? Likely not, but they sit peaceful as lambs together on the library shelf, and we can dig for their likely dinner conversations by placing their words side by side and examining them. What a legacy!

I am in no way comparing my talent to the folks above. I mean, I enjoy what I write, about more than half of the time, and I hope others do. But that's not the point. The point is that in addition to my impulse to write (a power under which I am powerless), I have a maddening urge to grab that immortality if I can. Which leads us, of course, to the subject of submitting work, and editors, and the various other nightmare beasties that plague the sleep of a writer.

Let me direct you to one of the best sites that lists writing markets in detail: Duotrope. Better than Writer's market, if only because it's easier and faster to use, and they update the markets and let you know who's closed regularly. What I like is that they also let you run a search so you can limit your results to only print or only electronic publications. Since I have been published only by the online folks so far, my goal is to break into the print journals. After all, who knows how long a website will last? And there are a lot of venerable, respected (well-read!) journals out there that I'd like to leave my dirty fingerprint on, in the hopes someone will stumble across me and enjoy my work. And (selfish, I know) remember my name.

In the pursuit of publication, I have entered a number of contests, but those get expensive in a hurry if you're a poetess on a budget. I'm also pretty good about sending actual mailed (the SASE kind) submissions, as well as the email submissions that are becoming more popular. Last night I sent submissions to fourteen print journals. That's right. FOURTEEN. I am a submitting rock star *grin* I figure if I can do that twice a month, I'll get a steady stream of rejections that will keep my head from getting too big and remind me to revise, with the occasional acceptance thrown in just to make me keep trying.

Take a look at Duotrope, if you've got the stomach for rejection (unless of course you don't get rejected, which is fabulous and rare). Best of luck with your submitting. Perhaps we'll meet in the slush pile!

Weekend in Review: Productivity check

It has been a pretty productive weekend, poetry-wise. (Let's not discuss how every football team I root for loses. Apparently, I have the bad juju. For a small fee, i will cheer for your enemy's team.) In all, I've managed to read Hugo's The Triggering Town twice, Sexton's All My Pretty Ones once through, and I've started Hugo's The Woman in Kicking Horse Reservoir.

Not bad for a single weekend. I've already posted on Hugo's book on craft, and there will be a post on Sexton shortly (if you haven't read her, you must). I'm still reeling from shock at the emotional response I had to her slim volume. It's crushing. I'm devastated. She is someone to read if you're interested to see how a poet can work with rhyme and not be hokey. Hugo's poetry is slower going for me at the moment.

I also managed to bang out a few pieces: "Alzheimers," "In Bed," "The Puertorriqueno," "The Courtesan," and "Lovely Desert" are all pieces I am mostly happy with, and there are a few fragments that will come in handy the longer I stare at them. Not bad for two days work - especially considering that there were 4 NFL playoff games that caught my attention for more than a few hours.

I've also been Twittering too much. As though people care what I'm up to from moment to moment. Ah, well. I'll be more productive this week. Packet 2 of 5 for my MFA semester is due on Wednesday, and there is a good deal of library-related work to be done at...well, at work. Here's to being busy, and birthing beauty from the chaos, when we can.

Required Reading: Richard Hugo's 'The Triggering Town'

In a timely side-reading, I have found a book that answers many of the questions I have about writing (and which may have prevented my previous posts, had I read it a week ago). The book addresses the importance of language for language's sake, how much you should think about whether the audience understands, and the relationship between the "triggering subject" you write on, and the words you write. (More about this in a moment.)

This little gem is Richard Hugo's slim volume The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. I happened to buy it used to save money; I can already tell that in a few months it will be dog-eared with copious notes scribbled in the margins. (Yes, a terrible habit for a librarian to have, but a useful one for a writer.) There are far too many pearls in the book for me to detail them all here, so let me bring just one or two into the blogosphere to discuss. The primary focus of the book, and what I found most interesting, most useful for my future writing, and most liberating was this:

"Somehow you must switch your allegiance from the triggering subject to the words." (p.12)

I have lately been working with poems that have very specific triggers, dealing with people, places and feelings, and have struggled with when to let go of that solid-ness, that comfortable space, and that damned same-ness that weighs me like an anchor after the first few lines. Have you ever been there? You are writing about your mother, and while the first few lines please your eye and ear, after line four if you write another thing that is actually related to your mother, you feel suffocated, robbed of your colorful vocabulary and a traitor to the shine on the water tower you want to include but don't, because though you feel it needs to be there, you are concerned. It belongs, you know it in your gut. But what would the reader think about this random throw-in? Will they understand why it needs to be there? Are you a traitor to your original subject if you drop it and keep writing?

Note: I will admit that I suffer from this because I dislike poetry that intentionally sets out to mystify and confuse the reader, leaving them in the dark as to the subject and emotion of a poem. When this is deliberate, I find this to be the utmost insult: snobbery wielded as a weapon against the very people you purport to 'communicate' with through your language. Snobby poetry makes me stabby. Then again, I tend to be bourgeois like that...

Hugo's wisdom, which may be obvious to some, is that the thing that triggered you to write may not be what you wanted to write about at all. It called to something deeper, that delicious author-part of you that you barely understand, and not following it is traitorous to your well-being as a writer. Will the reader understand? Perhaps (and probably) not. But if it belongs, they will understand the feel of the poem and your need to place it there, which is enough. And if they don't, what of it? Hugo admits later in the book that occasionally he goes back to an old poem he wrote years ago and doesn't understand it himself, but that he felt that overwhelming need and rightness at the time. It is this 'rightness' that counts and enlivens the poem.

This actually comes back to the subject that begins the book: should truth conform to music, or music to truth? Hugo argues for the former, both to justify creative writing, and because he notes that if truth conforms to music, "those of us who find life bewildering and who don't know what things mean, but love the sound of words enough to fight through draft after draft of a poem, can go on writing..." (p.4)

The importance of this for my own writing? It gives me the permission I needed to bend my truth to the music of my words, rather than forcing my words to conform to some set, preconceived notion of Truth. I feel a bit freer, as though my shackles have been loosened (though admittedly I placed them on myself). As a writer, we impose limits on ourselves - it is inevitable. What we want to do is often too large, and overwhelming, and so we assign ourselves small bites to survive that need to write. It would be a good idea for us all to make a note of what restraints we use, though. Since they are often unconscious, we will only find them when we find ourselves dissatisfied with a piece of writing, or staring at a blank page and demanding something specific of ourselves.

The entire book is worth reading, is full of dos and don'ts (along with Hugo's admission that everything he purports to teach is likely wrong for anyone but himself). But having these recommendations is quite the gift: we can shed light on how we've already been doing it, which is our unconscious construct. Constructs, by definition, are limiting, and his defining what HE uses allows us to say, "Ah, yes! I actually do X instead of Y, though..." The value? You learn your process, and there may be things you can change about it that will improve your writing.

Strive for improvement, though never perfection. Perfection is boring. Learn what your 'triggering towns' are...use them as a touchstone of comfort and to ground you. And then leave them.

Haunted by Rhyme

Have you ever had a line worm its way into your brain, and refuse to leave? It sets up residence, like a sing-song piece of hell lodged between your ears just begging to be birthed onto paper. "Type me and I'll leave you alone," it pleads, even though you know you'd be tempted to write something around it to lock it down, to give it somewhere to belong. "I know I'm no good - write me and get me out of your head," it beckons, enticing you with the promise of sweet abandonment once you've labored it into actual physical being.

This is my topic today, because I have a hell of a singsong line in my head. Right now. It's been following me around since Saturday, though I've done everything in my power to avoid it. I could type it into my hugely unwieldy poetry document in Word, and let it languish with my other fragments. But it irks me. It irks me because it rhymes. I am haunted by the small book of poetry I wrote when I was young, and have been forever scarred by my juvenile ABCB-DEFE-GHIH rhyming. I know very few poets who can pull off rhyme well. Most of them are dead, and nearly all did it well only within a formal structure like the sonnet (which which I have an ongoing love/hate relationship).

So, what's the problem? you might ask. Well, the problem is I like the sentiment behind this annoying snippet. Here, let me share:

forging something out of nothing when there's nothing to be had

as much the realm of poets as it is that of the mad.

*Sigh* I love it a little bit. It's even got a good beat to it. I bet Dido could pick it up and toss it whole-made into one of her melancholy songs on what would have been a B-side, if CDs or mp3s had 'sides.' A better poet than I would simply write it into something beautiful and haunting, an ars poetica for the ages. And all I can do is stare at it, and listen to it running in circles in my head, and wish it didn't rhyme. Rhyme undoes me, and leaves me on shaky, newborn foal-legs, afraid to stumble around and land on my ass. I will admit that I am poor at prosidy. I've never counted feet, I know what the definition of iambic pentameter is but likely wouldn't be able to identify it. And while I realize that rhyming well is a matter of skill and practice, and that I will simply have to work with it, I find myself recalcitrant. (Note: recalcitrant, adj. - Marked by stubborn resistance to and defiance of authority or guidance.)

Why? Because I have been inculcated up to this point that rhyme is predictable and hokey. Rhyme is a child's game, and not worthy of a poet(ess) who actually wants to write something good that will eventually be published, according to some. Mostly, I know that I personally find it hard to create surprising, refreshing, and meaningful rhyme, and the thought of it wearies me (am feeling a tad lazy and grumpy today).

Perhaps it's also a little bit because of the sentiment. Forging something out of nothing, indeed! Likening a poet's need to create to madness! Not at all an original sentiment of course, others have said it, and just as well or better (and within entirely finished poems instead of fragments, natch). Byron, Shelley, Poe, Dickinson, Plath...if I do go mad, at least I will be in good company, though likely less remembered. I rarely ask myself "What's the point in writing?" The point is obvious, to me. I write to improve myself and my way of communicating and my dexterity with language. I write in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will read something of mine and find a piece of themselves they hadn't been able to articulate in quite that way. I write to capture and cage my demons, as it were, to a page, where I can lay them out and conduct autopsies on my fears and passions. I could list infinite reasons, and so I am unable to simply dismiss my desire to write as 'worthless.' So why does it upset me so?! Mostly because I want others to see it as a fruitful endeavor as much as I do, and not think me loony for spending hours cramped over a legal pad or laptop; I want someone to nod wisely and attach some worth to what I do. There. I said it. I want to be valued as a writer. I want to be vindicated of this obsession!

That is unfair, of course. I have some wonderful writerly friends who not only pore over my work and offer critique, which is a depth of commitment from a friend few can claim, I also have a great mentor within my writing program, the opportunity to workshop with talented writers, and some editors have been kind enough to pick up some of my children and present them to the world - or at least, those who cared to see them. I am just occasionally overwhelmed and want to whine that it shouldn't be this difficult, why can't things just fly, golden-right and perfect, straight from my pen/keyboard/mouth? I am overwhelmed by the angles I could take on this! I could write something funny about we crazy-ass drunken poets, or I could craft some type of mournful elegy around it, and make it a dirge that self-sacrificing poets could quote to prove their outsider status. Whining, I know. And the process is what improves us as writers, after all; our work matters little if we haven't found ways to improve upon it.

Is it possible to be overwhelmed with responsibility? The responsibility that you know something could be crafted into something gorgeous and sleek, but you also know that your clumsy hands will most likely crack it, or bludgeon it into something not nearly resembling the sublime thing you had envisioned? I'll admit, this is the sort of thought that keeps those blank canvases staring at me in my kitchen, with the lids tight on my paint, and my sketchbook closed on the clumsy drawings that hold the miscarriages of what I can see so clearly in my head, but can't get onto paper. This sort of thing rarely rears its head in my writing, though. I believe in the power of revision, after all, and a mighty fix is just a keystroke or a cross-out away, isn't it?

Isn't it? Or does making a faulty stroke in the beginning leave that marring to bleed up to the surface, eventually? I believe that people do not change, but I always thought I knew that ideas were fungible and flexible, and if we are writing our own, we have all the space we need to make the sort of fundamental changes we can't effect in the physical world.

Perhaps I am mad. Of course, the admission is the first step to the nut-house, so I'll have to keep it between myself and the internet. I could always hold it as proof of my poet-hood, I suppose.

What a rambly post this has been! All of this from a snippet of a rhyme that was birthed full-formed in my head on a walk with the dog. I haven't yet decided whether I'll hide these lines in the body of a poem somewhere or actually tackle it within a form. Feel free to use it as your own prompt, as you please, and let me know how you like your product.

Craft: Writing the Body. Or, Let's Talk About Sex.

Now, for some juicy craft conversation. Let's talk about Sex. You know you want talk about it, and write about it. The good, the bad, the ugly. The slow, the fast, the languorous and the frantic. You know, deep down, you've had some experiences that you could write to bring a knowing/wry/sad/pleased smile to someone's face as they dredge up their own memory. So, what's stopping you?

I'll tell you what's stopping me, or at least frustrating me. It's the idea that when it comes to sex, there's nothing new under the sun. Despite Cosmo's monthly announcements of "Hot New Sex Positions," the Kama Sutra is an ancient text. People have been doing it for centuries. How do you make it refreshing and interesting in your writing?

Someone (I think I'll attribute this one to Jeanie Thompson, my current MFA semester mentor and executive director of the Alabama Writers' Forum) told me there are only three great subjects to write on anyway: love, death (and I have forgotten the other), so it's of little use to worry about coming up with a new topic. The key is to find a refreshing way to address the subject.

Writing a good poem capturing the essence of an intimate moment, that forceful pre-hurricane lull of foreplay, the full-on bodystorm of sex, the lazy, lolling aftersex feeling...that is a decent goal to have. And then there are those in-between moments to capture, when we wonder if, as our lover ran his hand down our side to our hip, if he noticed the bulge of our spare tire, or the fact that, when on our backs, our breasts make a beeline to our armpits...of course, these are all tinged with personal (female) experience, but I have had enough intimate conversations with good girlfriends to know that these things are pretty universal.

Now, if they're universal, can't we be sure folks will know what we're getting at? I mean, nearly everyone knows what we mean if we say "throes of passion." But how do we evoke this sort of universal experience while maintaining the unique moment we have locked in our own mind, without the crutch of the 'expected?' I tell you: make up your own words. Language is organic, it evolves and grows. I used the word "bodystorm" above, because I couldn't think of another word from the dictionary I preferred at the moment. Did you understand what I was getting at? Are you upset with me because I didn't follow what's available in the Oxford English Dictionary? Let yourself run wild. Use your energy to create, not just to re-state. If you end up running too rampant with yourself, well, that's what revision is for.

This doesn't make it much easier, I'll admit. I am still working on quite a few pieces where I am trying to recapture that one delicious moment I relive over and over with my eyes closed...and getting onto paper is a pain in the hind end. But the attempt in itself is useful: I can see what cliches come to mind, I can cast and recast my mental line looking for new ways to describe age-old things. And sometimes, surprisingly, I find that there really is no way to recast certain things in a way I like, and I find that a phrase like "belly to belly" is exactly what I was looking for in the first place, and it was everything around it I needed to change.

Now, because of certain publisher rules (such as sending only unpublished material as submissions, and anything posted on the 'net, including a blog, is considered 'published' for their purposes), I won't be posting any of my current sex-works-in-progress here. But hey - extra eyes and critique are always useful, so feel free to email. I'll show you mine if you show me yours! *grin*