68º ~ stormy skies, a brief respite from the storms, luckily no tornadoes
Just a brief pictorial of the work Mom and I accomplished on Sunday, with a few finishing touches today. Quite a few older, established plants with a few new annuals (purslane, angelonia, caladiums, wave petunias, henna coleus). The pansies are what we planted at Thanksgiving and have survived well into a second blooming, which makes them super tall and prone to fall over. Painting the old terra cotta pots was my idea!
73º ~ all muggy, heavy air still replete with yesterday’s dousing, the heat coming on
Friends, I shall be away from the desk of the kangaroo for a few days. Tomorrow is graduation in the afternoon and the arrival of my parents in the evening. That means today will be spent getting the house is some kind of order and doing some major grocery shopping.
Once the folks arrive, we will embark on our twice yearly front yard gardening (my mother loves to garden!). I shall return on Wednesday.
Until then…happy reading/happy writing!
65º ~ a soft, gentle, & constant rain, just above a drizzle
Today’s draft is in part a result of my frustration with our internet provider and a conflict entering its fifth day. We are waiting on a new modem, which should arrive tomorrow and will magically make everything better. (Excuse my skepticism.)
In any case, normally, I take care of email, check in on FB, and read the blogs before I move my mind to that more concentrated space required of reading or drafting. So far, I’ve been successful during those periods at ignoring said internet distractions, as long as I’ve cleared the path first. Well, today, my attempts to do so were stymied by dial-up speeds instead of my lightning fast wi-fi modem/router combination. In frustration, I turned to my journal.
Last night, a couple of lines came to me in the wake of reading Malinda Markham’s book earlier in the week. I thought I might return to those. Instead, four small, white sheets of paper fluttered out of the journal. Aha! Notes I’d taken during Christian Wiman’s reading at the Arkansas Literary Festival. (I’m not going to link back to previous entries for Markham and Wiman given the internet difficulties, but feel free to use the search feature to find them.)
As many of you know, Wiman has experienced a return to faith after many years away from it. He grew up in a household of religious fervor, spent time as an atheist, and has returned to explore his faith in the wake of a serious illness. I say all of this to set the stage; my notes are mostly religious words I captured during Wiman’s talk. On the first page of those is a fragment: “feeling through the sounds of words to the form of poetry,” something Wiman said about the difference between poetry and prose, since he was reading from both. Then, there are a half a dozen religious words, and then this, “The Angry Sisters Experience Their Conversion,” which I knew even then would be the title of a poem. This knowing the title first is incredibly rare for me. The rest of the pages of notes are mostly words, and then there is this: “Poetry = being @ the mercy of language ~ Prose which can always be written,” more on how Wiman sees the two genres.
Today’s poem grew from these notes and a memory from my childhood. The family across the street from us must have been evangelical, although I don’t remember that word being used at the time. In any case, for a brief time, my sisters and I went to the neighbor’s after school, probably on Wednesdays, with a ton of other neighborhood kids for what was essentially a Christian youth group. I only have fragments of memories from this time, but those fragments found their way into the poem, which begins:
In a neighbor’s basement, their ears
were at the mercy of language
The poem goes on to describe the way some children can get caught up in the fervor of religion; however, the angry sisters’ conversion is not at all what the neighbor thought it would be. In other words, that fervor becomes a match to the kindling they’ve laid in their quest for vengeance.
In today’s draft, I have two squat stanzas (one of 9 lines, one of 10). I’m not sure where my beloved couplets have gone, or where my sprawling, white-space-laced drafts are. Interesting.
79º ~ bright sun, slight breeze, birdsong, pretty much a perfect spring day
Some years ago, before I started posting my mini-personal responses to books here, I read Markham’s first book, Ninety-five Nights of Listening, which won the Bakeless Prize and was published by Mariner Books. I fell in love with Markham’s work, I fell hard. So, when I saw that she had a new book coming out in 2010 from New Issues, I was thrilled, and I put it on my list. Somehow, I never got around to ordering it. When I was at AWP 2012, I meant to get a copy and forgot, so this year at AWP, I made the New Issues table my first stop in the book fair and bought a copy of Having Cut the Sparrow’s Heart.
Markham’s book has been on the top of my to-read pile since I returned from Boston in March. Yesterday and today, I sank into this amazing collection.
Having Cut the Sparrow’s Heart, like Ninety-five Nights of Listening, is hugely influenced by Markham’s experiences living in Japan and her studying and translating of Japanese poetry. Sparrow’s Heart is a book of fairy tales of Markham’s own invention, weaving together strands and themes of Eastern traditional tales (that I know only slightly) with themes of the modern, fragile, global community. This is a book of danger and a search for comfort that isn’t always found. The speaker always remains separate, foreign, at odds with both the natural world and the people, flora, & fauna found in it.
Here is an example from the opening of “Having Overheard Talk of the Fates, the Clearest Answer is Silence.”
Low voices carry on wind. One of the children
will burst into luck, the other will curl
into ash. That year, the solstice-flower
unfolded red petals all at once,
over grass so sharp you could slice
fingers on it.
And here, another passage, this time from the middle of “The Outing.”
Night birds
Stitch the leaves shut with their cries.
Sing once, and the dolls go to sleep.
The teapot falls off a rock and bursts
Into stars. See, there is light now.
We tell all the stories we know.
This is an urgent book, but it is a quiet, tragic urgency. I had a feeling it would become a touchstone for me, and that feeling gathers strength, now, in the aftermath of the first reading.
62º ~ an “arctic” cool down for Mother’s Day, which makes me laugh ~ feeling sorry for my mom who really wants to get in the garden but Iowa is all cold & wet this year, even a frost advisory for this morning
Well, that was unexpected. I wasn’t even thinking about drafting this morning. I was thinking about reading, and I did start the day by finishing up a book of poetry that had been sitting on my desk for about a month. I’m not quite ready to comment on the book yet, so I’ll leave it at that. After closing the book, I started sorting through more of the endless papers that seem to breed on my desk. At the same time, I was on FB taking care of a Heron Tree posting.
In that space of time, I read three poems that all conspired to send me to my journal, setting off one singular voice from the angry sisters trio, in this case “Little One.”
Here are the three poems. First, I read Lisa Fay Coutley’s brutally honest poem “On Home.” While I’m not a mother, this poem sliced something open inside me. Then, among my papers, I found that I’d torn out the following two poems from their journals. Roger Reeves’ “The Sun Was Like a Gold Body” from The Cincinnati Review and Marcus Wicker’s “Shibboleth” from The Journal. (Neither appears to be available online.) Both of these last two poems are litanies, and maybe there is a better word for the form. Both poems use the repetition of the phrase “Say” or “Say it,” beseeching, prodding, goading the reader. I know exactly why I tore out these two poems, as I’ve long been a lover of this type of repetition/litany.
Well, I re-read “Shibboleth” in full and only made it through the first three lines of Reeves’ poem, when the youngest of the angry sisters started a full-on rant. Boom, I had to go to the journal and start writing. What arrived on the page is nearly exactly what made it onto the computer screen, which is a bit unusual for me. Usually, once I get to the computer with the kernel of the poem, things expand and contract and change shape to a great extent. Instead, what I wound up with is a highly combustible, 8-line nugget of anger that matches almost exactly what I scribbled in my journal, thus the title including the word “provocation.”
Without even really thinking about it, Little One’s litany is not directed at the reader. Instead, she implores her sisters, opening with “Say it, sisters.” And yes, there are a LOT of esses bouncing around in her angry poem.
Feeling a bit stunned by it all, I’m grateful to the three poets named above for the spark & shove.
70º ~ a blissfully perfect spring day if a bit cloudy, all the windows thrown open, both cats and humans basking in the sweet breezes
Helloooooooo?
Helooooooooo?
Is anyone still out there? I hope so. I confess it’s been a bit too long, but you all know the drill: end of the semester brouhaha. Plus, my end of the semester cold. I made it all the way to the last day of classes and then I lost it, coming down with a serious head cold. Luckily, when the cough sank into my chest and kept me from sleeping the last two nights, I discovered that I had two nights worth of codeine-laced cough syrup left. When I looked at the date on the pharmacy label, it turned out I had the same cold almost exactly one year ago. Hmmmmmm. Silly germs!
With great fanfare (or at least what serves as great fanfare here at the desk of the Kangaroo), I punched in my final set of grades this morning, and like magic, I felt like I lost 10 lbs. Happens every semester. Wahooooooooooo!
I spent the rest of the morning working through the piles of papers that had accumulated over the last couple of weeks. One priority task was to revise the poem I drafted way, way back at the end of February for The Book of Scented Things, an anthology of poems inspired by perfume samples. As the official deadline for poems is coming up rapidly, I am so, so thankful that I drafted what I did back then. I know I’d be panicking if I had to start from scratch today, as my poems really do need to sit for a bit. In fact, I re-read the draft yesterday and knew immediately that the ending didn’t work. I fumbled around and came up with an “idea” for how I wanted the ending to function, but I couldn’t find the words. Today, with some time and some silence, I worked it out.
I think the anthology is supposed to be out in fall of 2014, which seems an interminable wait. I am so curious to find out what the other poets came up with and what scents they got to use. Wouldn’t it be cool if the book had a scratch-n-sniff feature for each poem? (Probably cost prohibitive, but a girl can dream.)
So, what plans for the summer?
1. Deal with manuscript #2. Break it down into two chapbooks.
2. Give manuscript #3 (fever book) a thorough going over and keep sending out.
3. Read and read and read from the towering stack beside me.
4. Write and write and write and see if the angry sisters are still angry or if it is time to move on to other voices.
5. Submit some poems.
Let me just say it one more time: Wahooooooooooooooooo!
58º ~ thick white cloud cover after last night’s rain, storms a possibility though only the tiniest of tiny breezes for now
Last weekend, we had the Arkansas Literary Festival here in Little Rock, and it was fantastic. This was the 10th year for the festival, and I’m thrilled that so many folks continue to attend. There are always a few events, panels, or workshops on Thursday and Friday, but things really kick off with the author party on Friday night, at which I had a great time circulating with Martha Silano and Hope Coulter.
Saturday, I managed to attend two readings. The first featured Christi Shannon Kline and Steve Kistulentz. I was stunned to realize that Steve and I know tons of the same people and have published in several of the same journals, and yet, I’d neither read his two books nor befriended him on Facebook yet. Both Christi and Steve did a wonderful job reading; however, sadly, they were at the first time slot and the audience was sparse. I’m sad for the folks of central Arkansas who missed this one.
I had intended to move on to hear C.D. Wright, whom I’ve heard read several times before, but then fate intervened and Steve and I ended up having a cup of coffee. The weather had warmed just enough that we were able to sit outside and people watch as we exchanged poetry stories and talked teaching. I felt a bit like AWP had descended on Little Rock, as these are the kinds of chance encounters I long for and look forward to as AWP approaches each year. Needless to say, I’ve added Steve’s work to my towering stack, just begging for the end of the semester! (I have a hard time mustering the focus that a poetry collection requires during these last few weeks.)
You might spy, Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss there toward the top as well. Having learned many a lesson about pacing myself at AWP, I went home and took a rest mid afternoon before returning for Wiman’s session. I had the great fortune to be introduced to him prior to the reading and was charmed by his authenticity. Having known his name as the big cheese at Poetry for the last decade, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I confess, I was also a bit hesitant about his latest book, having been on the receiving end of one too many overly-evangelical people who have found their way back to Christianity after a health scare. In the end, all of my reservations were silly. The reading was fantastic as Wiman wove passages from My Bright Abyss, a memoir of his journey back to faith, and poems from Every Riven Thing. In the end, I bought both books, which should tell you how completely Wiman won me over.
Still, I left that reading with the VIDA count ringing in my ears. This is not an indictment of Wiman but of the larger institutionalized gender bias at play in the world of literature. To explain: Inevitably at these readings, when there is a Q & A, the question of influences and admiration for other writers comes up. As Wiman rattled off a list of poets, I watched someone in the row with me scribble down all the names, and all the names were male, and all the names were white.
Again, I do not mean to throw a judgment down on Wiman. His prose and his poetry thrilled me, infused as they were with a joy for language and a stunning craft. If these are his influences, these are his influences. Instead, I was saddened by the lack of women and people of color. Instead, I was reminded again of how fortunate I was to have the undergraduate instructors I had at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University who were intent on breaking the canon wide open. Yes, we studied Hopkins, Yeats, and Keats, Pound and Eliot, Heaney and Lowell; however, I was also exposed to Joy Harjo, Li-Young Lee, Lucille Clifton (these first three live and in person on campus), Quincey Troupe, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary Oliver, let alone Plath and Sexton and all hail Emily Dickinson!
The one resounding fact that remains with me is that when a poet has the good fortune to read in front of a captive audience made up of energetic readers of poetry and people aspiring to become poets, there is a power in the names we list. There are people out there writing down the names, and who knows, some of them may even go and check out the poetry of those we name. Isn’t this how institutionalized perceptions change, by the names we name, the books and lit mags we recommend, the ever-expanding web of writers we nurture?
*I spy a personal “project” for AWP 2014…keeping a list of the names discussed during readings and panel discussions.
53º ~ temps inching back toward “normal” ~ the one word that has not applied at all this spring, trees 75% leafed out, storms in the offing
Via the amazing & talented Al Maginnes, I’ve become acquainted with R.J. Looney, an Arkansas poet I hadn’t met before. All hail, Al Maginnes!
Through that connection, R.J. invited me to be part of the lineup for “No Place in Particular,” a poetry & music fest on Sunday (April 28), starting at 5:00 p.m. at White Water Tavern in Little Rock. Here’s a link to the event description on Facebook. According to that description, the poets will take the mic first from 5 – 7:30ish, and then the musicians will follow. Should be a stomping good time. If you’re in Central Arkansas, y’all come!
44º ~ cold, cold rain, cloudcover, etc, a lapse
Yes, I’m still here, holding on by fingertips. Rest assured, when the semester wraps up and I’ve had a chance to sleep a bit, I’ll return in full force.
Until then, I hope to make sporadic appearance. Until then, I’m dreaming of long uninterrupted mornings of reading and writing and blog sharing.
I do apologize to those of you who post regularly, as I’ve had to sacrifice most of my blog reading time to meetings on campus, spring chores, and grading/grading/grading.
Until then…
59º ~ beautiful spring weather, if a bit cloudy today, all the leaves are in the process of unfurling, the view is fairly neon with them, the Thanksgiving pansies continue to thrive as the temps have remained below normal
Life is scattered and fragmented, friends. And this, this is April. I offer you a view of my week in case I fail to appear here.
At the top of the priority list are my students and my grading of their third major essay of the semester. Given that we only have about three weeks of school left, and they have one more essay to write, they need me to stay on task so my comments on this paper can aid them in their last. We are finishing up workshop in creative writing and then I’ll spend a week having individual conferences with each of my 18 students in that class as they polish their portfolios. In the last class days after conferences, we’ll talk about the profession of writing and publishing. (The end is in sight!)
Monday, after teaching and office hours, we have a department meeting at one of our satellite campuses.
Tuesday, I head down to Hot Springs to visit a creative writing class at the Arkansas School for Math, Science, and the Arts (ASMSA). I love, love, love these visits and am really looking forward to it!
Wednesday & Thursday, teaching and see note above about grading. My goal is to have all essays returned by Thursday afternoon, because…
Friday – Sunday = the Arkansas Literary Festival
Friday, the Big Rock Reading Series, which I coordinate, will partner with the festival to host Martha Silano and Johnathon Williams, and I am super psyched about this reading. Having heard both Martha and Johnathon read, I know this is going to be fantastic. Our reading is during the day, and then, Friday night is the author party for the festival. Good times!
Saturday will be festival city from 10 a.m. until the cows come home. This year I’m delighted by the schedule as there will be poets in nearly every time slot. Here’s who I’m hoping to see/hear:
Steve Kistulentz & Christi Shannon Kline (both new to me)
C.D. Wright
Frank X. Walker (although his session is up against Richard Ford…hmmmm)
Christian Wiman
Then, Saturday night I’m participating in “Pub or Perish.” This began as a pub crawl with poetry readings at each bar. Now, it is in one location and features scheduled readers from 7 – 9 before an open mic.
Sunday will be a true day of rest so that I can hit the ground running the following Monday as we sprint to the finish line of the semester with the last two full weeks of classes and then the grading extravaganza that is finals week. The school calendar says that commencement commenceth on May 18. Wahooo!