56º ~ spring has sprung, all the pollen abounds, all the leaves are greening

54º ~ bright sunshine, spring breezes, trees bursting into leaf-time

AWP 2016 Los Angeles is upon us. This year, a lot of my time will be spent in the bookfair or attending panels meant to help me prepare for fall classes. I don’t have any readings, panels, or offsites, and for that, I’m actually grateful this year.

If you’ll be at the conference and want to catch up, here’s where you’ll find me.

The University of Central Arkansas table is #955. I don’t have scheduled time there but will most likely be there on and off when not occupied elsewhere.

The Alchemy of My Mortal Form will be available at table #1204
Blood Almanac a few copies will be available at table #625
The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths available from me directly

Thursday, 3/31
9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. staffing the Trio House Press table #1204

11:00 a.m. LUNCH on-site

12:00 noon attending a panel

3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. signing miniatures and all 3 books at the Gazing Grain Press (George Mason) table #708

Friday, 4/1
9 a.m.  – 11:00 a.m. staffing the Trio House Press table #1204

11:00 a.m. LUNCH on-site

12:00 noon – 2:00 p.m. staffing the Trio House Press table #1204

3:00 p.m. attending a panel

4:30 p.m. attending a panel

Saturday, 4/2
9:00 a.m. – 12:00 noon: bookfair

12:00 noon – 6:00 p.m. attending panels (an ambitious undertaking, but there are four consecutive panels in which I’m interested…y’all know the odds of me making it to them all)

I hope to see as many of you as possible in LA and will send back reports for those skipping the crazy this year.

45º ~ more bright sun, temps on their way up to “spring-like” for the rest of the week, no “winter precipitation” in sight ~ apologies to my eastern US friends currently under the blanket of ice & snow

I’ve learned a lot in my life by reading prose: novels, short stories, essays, memoirs, book-length CNF (especially memorable: The Hot Zone, which taught me all about Ebola back in the 90s). In these works, I immerse myself in new ideas and experiences I will never have myself but can expand my empathy (oh giant heart getting bigger every day). So, props to prose allowing depth.

But, there is poetry for breadth, empathy again, yes, but also breadth. In particular, I mean reading the individual poem in a lit mag, anthology, or as a teacher working with a student. When reading a bunch of individual poems by individual poets, I’m given one small window (concision) into an idea, emotion, or topic. The immersion might happen on many re-readings of the poem, but given how many poems there are to read and how short this life is, I’m more apt to keep moving through the anthology or journal at hand, gathering many, many experiences in a short time-frame. Also, when I’m reading poetry, I am much more likely to stop and turn to the dictionary, perhaps because in prose I’ll allow the context to suggest meaning, and I’ll move on to stick with the pace of reading full pages (depth). In poetry, the context often isn’t enough, and because each word carries much more weight in a poem (compression), I find myself needing the full definition. So, I expand my vocabulary, and often my knowledge of some topic new to me.

Yet, in reading poems for students, poems that are still in the messy middle of their making, I must gather huge swaths of information I might not have at the ready. This week, I’m working with students on poems about: Jorge Luis Borges, the spotlight effect, a handmaiden attending Cleopatra at her death, Blind Willie Johnson, the Norse myth of Ragnarok, colonialism in Jamaica, basic human anatomy, cleaning out the gutters, and more, more, more. For each of these, to be the best help to my students, I have to have some basic understanding of their subjects in order to provide feedback on where the poems are working and where they are not. I confess, Wikipedia is becoming a familiar page in my Chrome history.

I confess, too, that I love my job, even as I find myself fighting for every minute to read and respond, even as my own writing time suffers. I know that all of this vast knowledge will pay off in the quiet days of summer when I have that time to come back to the blank page, filled up with images and words that have tossed & turned together for months and are only then ready to tumble out onto the page.

40º ~ bright, clear sunshine, the kind of clear that only seems to happen in the coldest months

I’ve spent the day with my B-I-C (butt in chair), thanks in part to a helpful spouse who brought me lunch, and now my energy wanes and my stomach grumbles. Still, I have been too absent from this space, so I’ll push through (and know that a smoothie will be my reward!).

The first two hours of my chair-time today were spent reading, contemplating, and critiquing student poems for my graduate poetry workshop. Their work fairly sparkles on the page and today it inspired me to stay in the chair and continue on with my own work of revising and submitting. Happily, I drafted two new poems in the last three weeks via writing with my students in several classes.

While I knew I wanted to work on submissions again today (I sent out two non-simultaneous submission packets earlier in the week), I also knew that I needed some time to re-familiarize myself with the poems that are floating around in various stages of dress and undress.

I began by flipping through my “ready to go, but not out there” stack. Lo and behold, I found more tinkering revisions. These are not sweeping, but with distance comes clarity, clarity regarding where the lines might be muddied or bogged down. After a few nips and tucks, I felt confident again in the stack as a whole. Therefore, I turned to my “drafts” stack and began reading out loud, slowly. I listened for which drafts felt the most whole, the most “ready,” and those I set to one side. Knowing my goal of submissions, I put the other more unfinished drafts away for another day. That kind of revision takes its own session. Again, I proceeded through the stack, making slight tweaks or significant whacks, adding in a line or two, as well. Eventually, I found two more poems that needed more work than I had space for today and set those aside as well.

Finally, I flipped through my “ready to go” stack, now a bit heftier, and found four poems that “worked” as a mini-manuscript. I know not everyone does this, but I find more confidence in submitting when my little bundles hold together either thematically or in form. Having my list of targeted magazines that I compiled earlier in the week, I went to work, this time sending one packet out to simultaneous journals.

In essence, my process has not changed significantly over the years, although now I do much more record keeping online, and I no longer have a separate manilla folder for each poem, as I no longer need to print out so many furious versions. Still, submitting takes time and quiet, just as writing does, and it takes a willingness to root out the weak spots, the wonky lines, the cliches slinking through the middle stanzas. I’m fortunate to have had such time and such quiet today.

67º ~ Gray-clouded skies, a wind that gusts and cuts, a yard full of sweet gum balls knocked loose & waiting for the rake

Last August, I posted about my transition into a tenure-track teaching gig at a 4-year university after teaching at the community college-level for a decade. I made analogies to being called up to the Bigs (the Major League of baseball) and to leveling up in video games. Now, a few weeks into my second semester at the University of Central Arkansas and now teaching for its Arkansas Writer’s MFA Program for the first time, I’m experiencing another moment of transition.

This leap is all about poetry, almost all the time. For the first time in my teaching career, all of my classes are in creative writing, which means for the first time in my teaching career, I am not teaching composition. I do miss the first-year students and working with them to find their voices, but I confess, my heart is definitely most invested in & most nourished by teaching creative writing.

Synapses are firing at all hours and my brain is about to leap out of my skull with energy for words, poetry, and engaging my students. Most startling, I’m reading poetry with a new sense of urgency, a renewed pleasure and delight. This is a direct result of having a community of people at my disposal (luckiest person on earth!), a community that shares my interests and concerns. This is not to dismiss my community of poetry on the internet, but there is something more concentrated about a group of people coming together face-to-face at scheduled intervals, having read the same material, to muck about with words in an attempt to create art. Along the way, we get to read fabulous poets and writers who engage us, enlighten us, frustrate us, delight us, and toss us into a state of questioning. We learn! We grow! We fill ourselves up to overflowing!

*I do mean “we,” as I mentioned earlier that the classes are much more interesting when I get to pose my questions alongside my students’ questions, and we all set about figuring things out together.

The downside, if there is one, is that I have two courses that are nearly “new preps” for me. While I have bits and pieces of useful teaching materials for both classes, they tend to be scattered, and I have to sit down prior to each class and spend hours getting organized. While it might not look like it to my students, I do try to think about the overall semester goals and how each class day might get us closer to those goals. I try to be as organized as possible about it; however, teaching is organic not programatic. As each class period unfolds, there must be room for the previously unknown question, the unanticipated tangent, the unplanned spontaneity of a discussion spinning off into new territory, and the first semester of teaching a class means there’s going to be a bit more chaos than in a class I’ve taught time and time again (i.e. Intro to Creative Writing, where the issue can be re-invigorating a syllabus perhaps grown too stiff over the semesters).

All of this is to say that I am basking in the sun of the next level and hoping that I’m doing my students and my colleagues justice. I have dropped the ball a bit on writing, revising, and submitting, so that is going into my calendar for next week at a higher priority, and I’m hopeful that we’ve now established a bit of rhythm in the semester that will allow for a new “to-do” item.

Until then, “I have promises to keep” and poems to read before I sleep and poems to read before I sleep.

66º ~ and all the sun

This semester, I’m teaching a topics class on the persona poem, and as I mentioned in a previous post I’m approaching the semester by offering my big-picture questions about persona poetry to the class and gathering theirs as well. In a minute, I’ll share that list, as we’ve now completed three class periods and are moving into the deeper waters of working toward answers. I’ll also share the first set of writing prompts I created based on today’s reading, which centered on historical personae. But first, I thought I’d share a clip from the syllabus.

**HUGE Shout-out to the students in this class, who are rocking it so far!

44º ~ brilliant slanting sun, some cloud cover moving in, the hours of light are lengthening, campus is crawling with all manner of folks

Tonight, dear readers, I will teach my first “live” graduate workshop in poetry. I write “live” to distinguish this from my teaching online for the University of Arkansas Monticello for several semesters. While that job offered me a great chance to get my feet wet with teaching at the graduate level, I confess, I’m thrilled to be now engaging with grad students face to face.

As I crossed campus earlier, taking a mid-afternoon break from my prepping for tonight’s class, I turned all golden with nostalgia as I remembered my first workshop as a grad student. I was, then, wired with a combination of excitement and trepidation, and what I remember most is that very little of what I thought might happen in that room actually happened. Some of what happened was great; some of it horrendous, and in preparing for tonight’s class, I’ve thought a lot about what worked best for me as a student and what I would have liked to have seen done differently. I’ve thought about different learning styles and different personality types and how the leader of the workshop might attempt to offer something to everyone. I’ve thought a lot about balancing the excitement and the trepidation that I seem to be feeling all over again.

True story: At some point near the library, I stopped mid-step as I realized that it was another century when I was a graduate student. Ok, just barely, as I entered grad school in the fall of 1999, but still.

Returning to 2016, here’s a glimpse at the agenda for tonight.

**Introductions:
The UCA Arkansas Writer’s MFA Program is a small (18 students total at the moment, I think) 3-year program that is only in its 4th year. As such, most all of the grad students know each other on some level, and many of the 2nd- and 3rd- years have had overlapping classes. I’m the new kid, since I only started at UCA this past fall, and I didn’t teach any grad classes last semester.

With this being said, we are going to do the typical introductions and exchange our set of writers who take the tops of our heads off. There’s really no better way to get to know a writer than to talk about who they read (and idolize).

**The Syllabus:
Chaucer writes, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.”

Perhaps my biggest point here will be that the class is one of exploration and that I am more interested in the students’ questions and poetry obsessions than in my own. We will read as well as write/workshop, and we are using Cate Marvin and Michael Dumanis’ Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande) and Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness (Graywolf) to kickstart the semester. (Hat tip to Molly Spencer for recommending the anthology and who might, through her own reading/posting, have introduced me to the Graywolf series as well.)

My second biggest point here will be that I believe in careful attention to craft and that revision likely plays a big part in that. In other words, I’m going to push back against the rush to publish, even as we talk about current issues in the publishing world.

**What is Poetry?
This question might seem basic and simple, but it really isn’t.

One thing I lacked as a grad student was a good picture of the history of Western poetry, so I’m going to start with a brief, very brief timeline from Aristotle to today. Most likely, this will be old hat to my students and they will probably yawn. So be it.

Then, I’ve designed a little worksheet (egads!) and will ask students to rank which poetic elements (e.g. sense, diction, sound, form, lines, &etc.) rise to the top for them as readers (i.e. which of these elements seem to make a poem STICK with them after reading a poem). From this, I hope we will have a freewheeling discussion about the craft elements that make up “poetry” today.

**Assignments:
We are heavy with reading assignments at the beginning, and I’ll give my spiel about “reading like a writer” (annotating to excavate craft lessons) and the value of sticking with readings that don’t particularly set one’s hair on fire.

We will also create a class anthology next time, so each student will be bringing 3 poems published by others that do set their hair on fire. Students will bring enough copies for the class and we’ll go old school with a stapler to create our own supplemental textbook.

And, I’ll send them off to write, write, write.

~~~~~~~

That’s the plan. However, anyone who has taught even one class, be it in academic, at the local community center, or in church/temple/mosque, knows that plans have a funny way of morphing in the moment. I’ll keep y’all posted.

Also to look forward to, I’m hoping to post after this week’s Persona classes with an update on our class’ big-picture questions on the topic.

And, I’ll be starting to polish up poems to send out for submission this week, so there’s another possible update to come, time allowing. (I’ve posted a lot in the past about sending out work, so feel free to use the search tool at the top to find out my process if interested. The technology may change, but the method stays mostly the same.)

36º ~ winter settling in to the mid-south, still much remains green and the sun is vibrant, electric heater on my toes, dusk seeping in

As promised, following my last post, I’m here to give folks a glimpse of what’s ahead this semester. By all accounts, Spring 2016 is shaping up to be a good degree calmer than Fall 2015 (knock wood).

To begin, I have no readings scheduled for the spring semester, and I’m okay with that. My only travel looks to be attending AWP in LA at the end of March – early April. While I will miss having the chance to read my work and meet new people at individual readings, AWP packs a big enough wallop to cover all of that.

My teaching schedule is stellar! I will be teaching one section each of Intro to Creative Writing (mixed-genre, 20 undergrads), Special Topics: Persona Poetry (combined lecture, discussion, workshop; mixed undergrads and graduate students), and Advanced Poetry Workshop (graduate students). I’ll have one night class and one class each on MWF and TR. This magic is made possible due to a one-semester, one-course reduction for pre-tenure publication efforts. Submitting work really suffered in the chaos of Fall 2015, so I’m super excited to get back to focusing on getting my poems out there. I’m also looking forward to more concentrated writing time and hope to continue the buddy system with my colleague and friend, Jennie Case.

As I prepare for classes to begin on Thursday, I’m fine-tuning my approach to Intro and setting some new goals for how I’d like the class to unfold. After 10 years teaching at the first- and second-year level, I’m heading into the topics class and the workshop with equal parts excitement and uncertainty. Uncertainty is not necessarily a bad thing; it’s simply been a long, long time since I’ve built a new-to-me, on-campus course from scratch. I’m thankful for my few semesters teaching in the online MFA program at the University of Arkansas Monticello, as I’m going back to those files to help me frame how I’ll approach my new courses at UCA. As always, regarding assignments and readings, I fear that my eyeballs will be bigger than my stomach (or my students’ stomachs), as my mom often said of me at family gatherings where I heaped far too much food on my plate.

I’m also headed into this semester thinking, again, of the instructors who taught me the most. Frankly, aside from one professor in graduate school, the ones I think of most often taught me in my undergraduate days at the College of St. Benedict / St. John’s University. These standouts all had one thing in common: a sense of shared wonder & curiosity about the subject matter at hand, rather than a need to be “right.” Yes, I want to be seen as knowledgable and as a resource for my students, but I’m not in academia to proclaim resolutions and chisel theory in stone. I’m in academia because I was born a life-long learner & maker and I don’t see that quest diminishing anytime soon. I also know that the best classes I experienced as a student at any level provided a balance of structure and room for student-driven inquiry. Preparing for new classes allows me to rethink my pedagogy on many levels, and that’s another reason to be thankful.

Outside of the classroom, I’m feeling optimistic as well. For the moment, my TMJ seems to be on the way to healing, and I’m off muscle relaxers entirely. It’s been quite jarring to realize exactly how foggy I’d become. Also, not having to spend so many hours in doctors’s offices is going to be a delight (again, knock wood).

I’ll continue co-editing Heron Tree, reading for One and Trio House, all of which allows me front-row interaction with my fellow contemporary poets. My biggest goal is to make Monday my blogging day. Sure, I always hope to blog more than once per week, but I’ll be thrilled if I can make weekly reports a pattern.

As ever, the entrance to a new semester fills me with much the same elation as New Year’s Eve, which evokes Samuel Beckett from Worstward Ho: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

38º ~ bright sun, the first “chilly” weather of the winter, sweet gum and hackberry leaves all fallen, gathered on the grass and waiting for the rake

Fall 2015, my first semester on the tenure track at the University of Central Arkansas is in the books, and it was a doozy. In no particular order, I list below some of what has occupied me.

* Two sections of Intro to College Writing (Comp I): This was my standard course at PTC for ten years and for the most part my materials transferred well. While my heart really belongs to creative writing, and I probably won’t be teaching composition again, it was wonderful to transition to UCA with these bright and energetic students following along to a plan I knew by heart.

* Two sections of Intro to Creative Writing (three genres): Again, I’d taught this course many times at PTC, but with only two genres. I also switched from a Tuesday/Thursday plan to teaching on Monday/Wednesday/Friday. My students were engaged and engaging and quite resilient as I fumbled a bit at the beginning of the semester to get my UCA legs under me. I’ll be teaching this course nearly every semester at UCA and I’m looking forward to having the time to really fine-tune my approach.

* Two visiting writers (Dinty W. Moore and Cristina Garcia), both of whom held three events (one public reading, one craft talk, one interview or workshop).

* 24 meetings (one hour minimum) with my colleagues in the Writing Department, the undergraduate Creative Writing Program, and the MFA Program. To be fair to UCA, there’s a lot going on and some major changes coming our way that include strategic re-alignment of departments, accreditation reports/visits, and growing the nascent MFA program.

* Three all-day training sessions in August.

* Five mini-training sessions throughout the semester to get up to speed on the UCA systems.

* A half a dozen dinners / receptions / parties involving many colleagues / grad students or just a few.

* Seven readings to support The Alchemy of My Mortal Form (four out of town: Tennessee on two occasions and Illinois on the other two) and one conference presentation (Missouri).

* At least 90 minutes each week (minus the last couple) sharing writing time with one of my also-new colleagues, Jennie Case, who works in both poetry and creative non-fiction. If I publish anything in the next six months, it’s because she helped keep my BIC (butt in chair).

* 10 new drafts of poems, of which I think maybe five will survive into full poemhood.

* Five journals accepted poems, most of which were written in 2014 or early 2015.

* Continued editorial work for Heron Tree, One, and Trio House Press.

* Nowhere near enough reading of journals and books of poetry.

* Too many hours to count in physical therapy and doctors’ offices as my TMJ progressed to the point of living with daily pain from the beginning of September until Dec. 15th when I got my new precision dental appliances that are working to sort out my joints and muscles. I talk funny, and I drool when doing so, but the bulk of the healing should happen over the break, and then the doc can adjust the daytime appliance so I can talk straight.

* The new 40-minute commute each way (just over double what my drive to PTC was) has also carved a bit more of my time away. But it is an easy drive on the newly expanded I-40.

Lest anyone think this is a list of complaints, let me say that this may have been a challenging semester time wise, mostly due to my out-of-state travel and my medical issues, but it was also an invigorating semester. I feel like I’ve settled into the UCA culture and am getting a handle on all the nuances and procedures. It will take a few years to gain the institutional knowledge on the level I had at PTC, but I’ve made a start.

Overall, I’m happy with the way the semester turned out, and I’m beyond satisfied with the work of my students. I’ve got a list of areas I want to change for next semester, and have lounged around for a few days and gotten my energy back to a level playing field. Sometime between now and the new year, watch for the next blog post, A Semester in Preview, to find out what’s in store for Spring 2016 (hint: the blog will be back on a more timely schedule).