84º ~ good fortune weather continues today, all hail summer in the South, everything green and thriving, clear skies and sun shining down for miles and miles

When I wrote my recent post about the state of poetry book publishing, I clicked on the “publish” button with great hesitation.  Was I shooting myself in the foot with publishers? Was I creating bad karma for my own manuscripts?  Would I get a mangled and heated argument like the one that cropped up on HTMLGiant at about the same time? Or would I get a level-headed discussion?

I am so happy to thank all of you who helped make it the latter.  The comments on both the Facebook thread and on the blog post have been helpful and insightful.  We might not have solved anything directly, but I truly believe that open and honest dialogue is the only way toward a solution.

Given that spirit, I thought it might be helpful to recap and regroup here.  (I present the following information simply as information.  If I’ve mis-stated something, then please, feel free to correct the mis-information.)

The traditional way of publishing works like this for almost every other genre (literary novels, mass market fiction, self-help, academic textbooks, general interest nonfiction, etc.).  The writer writes; the writer submits either a full manuscript or a synopsis to either an agent or editor at no cost; if agents are the norm, once the mss. is picked up, the agent then works to sell the book to a publishing house and the agent takes a percentage of the author’s advance and/or royalties; if no agent, the mss. gets picked up by a publishing house and the writer gets either an advance and royalties or just royalties.

The current state of poetry (and some short fiction) publishing relies heavily on the contest model or reading periods with submission fees.  More and more rarely, poetry publishers will host truly open reading periods in which they consider mss. for no fee.  Very few poetry publishers are willing to read mss. all year round and without a fee.  Here, things go like this.  The writer writes a complete book and attempts to get individual pieces published in lit mags; the writer then pays $15 – $30 for each contest or reading period to submit the mss., along with 100 – 800 other writers.  (There is no such thing as an agent, unless a poet has worked in another genre previously.)  If the writer’s manuscript wins, the writer receives a cash prize of $500 – $3,000 (with most being in the $1,000 range).  Sometimes the writer receives a certain number of author copies and/or the chance to purchase at 50% cover price, and the writer might earn royalties after the publisher recoups that prize or sells the first press run, which can be over 1,000 copies, depending on how the contract is written.  Note: Some publishers do award royalties on top of cash prizes.  If a mss. is chosen during an open reading period, perhaps there is a royalty awarded; this information is not included in the reading period guidelines (or in contest guidelines for that matter) in most cases.

When questioned about these fees, publishers often state that poetry doesn’t sell well enough to be self-supporting.  Fees are used to pay overhead and production costs.  (**Reminder:  I’m pretty much okay with the contest model, as I know there is a cash prize at the end; however, I struggle with the fee-based reading period when the terms of publication are not spelled out for the author on the front-end.)

**There do seem to be more books of poetry than ever being published, perhaps as a result of this system and poets being willing to spread the cost among themselves.

**Publishers work for the love of poetry, and I don’t dispute that.

Let me say that I know I’m speaking in generalities and we can all think of exceptions to the above; however, in general, many poets end up spending hundreds of dollars on fees with very little in return.  The low chances of being that 1 in 500 whose work is chosen does lead to feelings of frustration. The comments on my previous post and on the FB thread have helped me see more clearly what is happening.  I apologize for not naming each contributor to the conversation.  What follows are some questions and some calls to action, sometimes listed specifically by a commenter to the previous post and sometimes something I’m already thinking about our doing.

Questions:
What is the responsibility of the publisher?  What is the responsibility of the poet? How does money, (i.e. financial profit for both the publisher and the author) fit in? What is the goal?

If we accept as true that publishers cannot sell enough books of poetry to pay their overhead, are publishers accepting and printing too many books of poetry? (I know, sacrilege!)  If publishers aren’t selling enough poetry, why aren’t people buying?  Who is our market and how do we reach it? (Anecdotally, we hear that poets don’t buy contemporary poetry, but when I poll my friends, it turns out we are buying lots.  Are we the minority?)

Most folks agree that each individual poet needs to decide how he/she feels about all of these issues, and I agree with that.  However, I do think there are things we can all be doing to get more poetry into the hands of more readers, increasing the number of book sales along the way.

Calls to Action, in no particular order, after the first:

1. Contribute to the American poetry community in any way you can.  While a person may be able to write in a vacuum, if that person expects others to read and buy his/her work, then that person is obligated to do so in kind.

~ Subscribe to literary magazines and journals.
~ Buy books of poetry
These two do require us to commit dollars to our beliefs; however, I argue that these dollars hold the real power.  If we do not invest in the product, then publishers truly do have no other way than charging reading fees.
I recognize that grad students and others with family obligations may not have much loose change.  One action item here would be to lobby the local libraries (both academic and public) to subscribe or buy.  Another action item is to spend a month tracking your money, dollar by dollar.  At the end, you may be surprised at what you spent on coffees, eating out, movies, popular magazines, etc.  Of course, we all enjoy relaxing in these ways, but could you cut out one or two and buy a book that month instead?

~ Read poetry being published today
Again, if money is the issue, there are some fine librarians out there just waiting for you to inter-library loan request some books of poetry.
With the advent of online journals and even books of poetry being offered online for free, there really is no excuse for not reading, unless you lack internet access and access to a public library that offers such.

~ Talk about poetry
If you participate in social media, blog, tweet, or FB about a book or poem written by someone else that excites you.  If you’ve found something online, send out the link.  If a poet is willing, do an online interview about that poet’s work.
If you’d rather kick it old school, volunteer to write formal reviews for your favorite lit mag.
If you teach, hand out reading lists (or email them to save on trees).  Take that reading list with you to readings and conferences and refer to it often.
For that matter, carry around the book you are currently reading, and if friends or strangers asks about it, tell them, gently so as to lure them in rather than scare them away.

~ Give books or lit mags as gifts
If you spend some time thinking of the recipient deeply, I bet you can think of a book that person might like.  Remember, it might not be the exact kind of poetry you write.  Still, I’ve given or sold my own book to countless numbers of people who are not poets but who expressed an interest.  I’ve done it simply by being myself and talking about poetry, by being a poet without apology.
If you run a reading series, consider giving books of poetry (or copies of lit mags) as door prizes.
If you teach, do the same in the classroom, or just select a particular book that seems to match a particular student and pass it on.
If you’ve finished with an issue of a lit mag and don’t know anyone else who wants to read it, leave it on a table at the local coffee shop, on a seat on the bus, or in any other public area.

~ Form a poetry book club
This can be done locally at a bookstore or library, or it can be done globally using Google chat and other social media.

~ At readings, read a poem by someone else
If you are giving a reading, open by reading a poem by a poet you admire.
If at an open mic, do the same and encourage others to join you in the practice

~ Encourage publishers to offer a book from their backlist in exchange for a reading fee
This serves the double purpose of getting more books into more hands and helping the publisher with warehouse costs (did you know part of the overhead is housing all those copies, paying for the (climate-controlled) space and paying insurance on the stock)?  *Another reason I’m an advocate for small print runs, which are much more affordable now that publishers can print from digital files.

~ Consider presses that read for no fee and support the books they’ve already published
Some are listed here and here (with those requiring fees marked as such).

~ If money is not the goal, and simply finding readers is, consider publishing online for free
You can read more about this option here.

~ Be generous to one another
Exchange poem drafts for workshop comments with a fellow poet.
Exchange manuscripts for revision comments.
Say “yes” when asked to blurb or otherwise support someone whose work you admire.  If you don’t know that person’s work, ask for a sample before you say no.

Viva la poesie! 

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

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

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

86º ~ conditions much the same as earlier posting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the description of the course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vive la poesie! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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