70º ~ a brief return to the 80s for the weekend with a bit of rain here and there, all in all pleasant days, windows are open

Of my mighty list of literary events in the area that I mentioned last weekend, I only made it to one.  The energies spread quite thin at this point in the semester, and by Friday I came down with a fever/cold, meaning I missed the launch of UALR’s latest issue of their lit mag, Equinox.  Next time, y’all!

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On Thursday night, I did get to attend the reception for two major Arkansas literary awards: The Booker Worthen Literary Prize and the Porter Fund Literary Prize.  For those U of A grads out there, the Porter Fund was established in 1984 to honor Dr. Ben Kimpel; however, he specified that the prize be named for his mother, Gladys Crane Kimpel Porter.  The Porter Prize goes to an Arkansas writer who has accomplished a substantial and impressive body of work.  The Booker Worthen is a prize established in 1999 to honor William Booker Worthen, who was a longtime supporter of the Central Arkansas Library System.  That prize goes to the best book published by an author residing in the CALS service area at the time of publication.  A book is eligible for selection for up to three years after its release.

On Thursday, David Welky received the 14th annual Booker Worthen Prize for his book The Thousand-Year Flood: The Ohio-Mississippi Disaster of 1937 and Margaret Jones Bolsterli received the 28th annual Porter Prize for her body of nonfiction work, including her most recent book During Wind and Rain: The Jones Family Farm in the Arkansas Delta 1848 – 2006. 

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Shout out to Ms. Jobe, who was working at the event Thursday night and representing the first class of grad students in the UCA Arkansas Writers Workshop.  I met Jobe in August at my reading and was delighted to see her again.  She let me know that she and her peers have been reading the blog, so a huge THANK YOU to y’all!  Along with this shout out comes a request.  If you have any questions or curiosities about the writing world that you’d like me to address on the blog, please leave a comment or send me an email!

(Jobe: apologies if this isn’t how you spell your name!) 

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This week, fellow poet-friend Justin Hamm and his posse of amazing editors launched the museum of Americana, a new online journal of prose, poetry, and art.  According to its mission statement, the editors hope the journal “revives or repurposes the old, the dying, the forgotten, or the almost
entirely unknown aspects of Americana. It is published purely out of
fascination with the big, weird, wildly contradictory collage that is
our nation’s cultural history.”

There is some seriously great poetry there, including poems by poet-friends Kathleen Kirk and Karen Weyant, and some awesome art.  I haven’t had a chance to dig into the prose yet, but I’m sure it will rise to the same level. 

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Finally, we come to the book I read this week: Johnathon Williams’ The Road to Happiness, recently published by Antilever Press.  On top of the poems, the reader gets an amazing introduction written by stellar poet and fellow U of A MFAer, Katrina Vendenberg.  Readers from last week will know that I attended a reading in Fayetteville recently and got to hear Johnathon knock a few of these poems out of the park.  I’m thrilled that he will be reading for the Big Rock Reading Series in April!

To understand my reaction to this book, you must know something about me personally.  I am addicted to true country music.  Let me be clear.  I do not mean that fluff that plays on the standard radio stations.  I mean the dark, soul-exposing music written by the great singer/songwriters stretching back to Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash and reaching up to Lucinda William, Gillian Welch, and Marie Gauthier.  Johnathon’s book left me feeling wrung out and laid bare in the way of those musicians and their songs.

This is a book that tells the truth about the speaker’s life growing up a country boy near Mena, AR, always on the edge of poverty and never far from the reach of religion.  These are poems so firmly rooted in place that there is no question about their authenticity.  We follow the speaker as he reaches adulthood, marries as is expected, and buries his father, all the while questioning his life and yearning for something more, something bigger.

If you like your poems laced through with the dust and grit picked up and hurled by the wind, or brazenly honest about the real work of marriage and parenthood, or packed full of the debris accumulated on a family farm as the speaker tries to educate himself up out of a life on the edge of prosperity, then this is the book for you.  Here are a few titles to tempt you.

“Trespassing in My Childhood Home”
“Soliloquy to the Peephole of Apartment 9”
“White Trash Ghazal”
“Head of Household”
“Pentecostal Girls”
“Notes on the Zombie Apocalypse”
“The Christian Motorcycle Association Arrives for Its Annual Rally Outside Mena, AR”

I’ll leave you with a little bit from “Camping in the Ouachita National Forest.”

Midnight, and my father’s God can’t see
in the dark.  Coyotes do unto others
by the tinctures of blood, their panting

like the whispered chansons of saints.
Nightcrawlers know a kind of scripture
driven to air on the ballasting dew.

50º ~ light grayish skies, a small breeze knocking about in the branches, precursors to fall

Another intense week under the belt of the semester, nearing the snug fit of midterms before we let loose and move to the next notch as we fatten toward finals.

This week, I fulfilled my goal again and read one book, this time a book of poetry.  I will be forever indebted to Traci Brimhall for sending me a copy of Natalie Diaz’ When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon, 2012).  This is a stout book, weighing in at 102 pages of solid poems, many of them at least a solid page in length, but more often two or three pages.  This is Diaz’ first collection and it knocked me out.  She writes of the modern day Native American experience in the southwest, and the book brought out echoes of Sherman Alexie, Joy Harjo, Wendy Rose, Simon Ortiz, and so many others. 

In the collection, the speaker traverses the dangerous territory of not only being a minority but also being a minority on the rez.  Her brother has succumbed to a meth addiction, after serving in Iraq, and his addiction tears the family apart. And while the brother haunts the entire book, Diaz does not allow that to become the sole focus.  Her speaker lives a full life as sister, daughter, woman, and lover.  Woven throughout the poems are both tribal traditions and references to Western figures. 

This may end up being my favorite book from 2012, as I’ve dog-eared so many pages, the top corner of the book bulges. Here’s just a taste of what Diaz has to offer from “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation.”

Angels don’t come to the reservation.
Bats, maybe, or owls, boxy mottled things.
Coyotes, too.  They all mean the same thing–
death.  And death
eats angels, I guess, because I haven’t seen an angel
fly through this valley ever.
Gabriel?  Never heard of him.  Know a guy named Gabe though–

As anyone who has ever tried to write one knows, pulling off an abecedarian with lines that flow smoothly the one into the other without calling undue attention to the form is hard to do.  Diaz knocks it out of the park.  The rest of the collection is expertly crafted and the lines sing, all the time drilling straight down into the heart, the meat of the matter.

~~~~~

In more poetry news, last night I drove up to Fayetteville to attend one of Matt Henriksen’s Burning Chair Readings.  This one featured Johnathon Williams, Jessica Baran, Keith Newton, and Adam Clay.  Adam and I were at the U of A together, and it was wonderful to be able to hear him read in that magical city again.  I loved Adam’s first book, The Wash, and have been eagerly waiting for his second book, The Hotel Lobby at the Edge of the World, out this year from Milkweed.  Also, Johnathon is slated to come down to PTC in April for the Big Rock Reading Series to read from his book, The Road to Happiness, so the trip doubled as a chance to get a preview of what’s to come.  Can’t wait to hear him read again. 

~~~~~

This coming week is going to be slammed, and I’ve got three night time literary events on the calendar!  Oh me, oh my, oh!  Tuesday night is the launch party for Escape Velocity, a collection of Charles Portis writings edited by Little Rock’s own Jay Jennings, and Thursday night is the awards ceremony for Arkansas’ two major literary awards the Porter Prize and the Booker Worthen Prize.  Finally, on Friday night UALR’s literary magazine, Equinox, holds their launch party.  Whew.  I’m going to try to make as many of these as I can, but make no promises, given the burgeoning to-do list at PTC. 

~~~~~

In the meantime, the work of reading submissions has begun at Heron Tree, adding a whole new texture to my poetry life.  These are busy days, but I couldn’t be happier!

72º ~ an overcast fall day, bird calls sounding through the open window drowned out by a plane, chances of rain & storms hovering to the north & west

This week, I redoubled my effort to find some time for poetry, which for me means, turning off the TV in the evening and refocusing, if I’m able.  Case in point, on Thursday night I fell asleep at 6:15 and nearly missed the first episode of the new season of The Big Bang Theory.  For this show, I will sacrifice my poetry time, but for few others.  The falling asleep should prove that the week had caught me by the heels.  Friday was a bit of a slug fest, but I did cut off the work day early and recharge.

This doubling down on my writing life resulted in two things.

1.  I read a book, yep, that’s right, an entire book.  I picked up Justin Torres’ We the Animals at the Arkansas Literary Festival back in April.  Having heard him read, I knew that this book would ignite in my hands when I opened the covers.  The novel follows the coming of age of an unnamed protagonist, a biracial boy discovering his sexuality in a rural town in New York.  He is the son of a Puerto Rican father and a white mother, and he understands very early that his homosexual desires will not be met with acceptance within his family, a family in which domestic violence and poverty rule.  The novel progresses from the time the boy is six until he enters his teens and is told in loosely connected, short, lyric chapters.  Still, the character developed is full and rich, the setting expertly used to support the larger themes.  It’s a quick read, but one I know I will return to soon, to more fully understand just how Justin Torres pulls it all off.

2. I tried to catch up on my po-biz reading, which means reading the Sept/Oct issue of Poets & Writers.  I had started it a few weeks ago and then set it aside.  Like most people, I think, I might not read every article in P&W, but the ones that grab me tend to hold on and offer up something valuable.  In this case, the articles on VIDA, plans to create the American Writers Museum, 20th-Century American Poetry, and the in depth look at Natash Trethewey all offered up worthwhile efforts; however, it was the personal essay by Brenda Shaughnessy and Craig Morgan Teicher that kept me reading last night even as I was flagging & tired.  What a powerful account of a two-poet marriage and life as a writer with a child with special needs. 

As I read farther into the issue, I was actually happy to be able to by-pass the MFA section entirely.  While I think the idea of rankings and articles about whether or not writing can be taught are interesting, I’ve simply moved past them for now.  I know where I stand.  1) MFA/PhD/MA with creative emphasis…all worthy pursuits IF the students are made completely aware that those coveted wood-paneled offices & tweed jacket teaching jobs are few and far between.  2) Yes, most beginning writers can benefit from mentors. 3) No, a degree is not necessary to become a fabulous writer; it’s just one way of buying time to write and perhaps gets some guidance along the way.

This led me to the DEADLINES section, and for the first time in my life, the P&W calendar saved me from missing a deadline.  I keep a rather extensive spreadsheet of book contests and reading periods; however, I nearly missed submitting The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths to a contest this year.  This contest alternates every other year and the deadline is tomorrow.  I missed it b/c I hadn’t submitted last year.

Luckily, the book contest allows electronic submission, so I spent this morning creating my submission file and loading up a new fee on my credit card.  Here’s a hearty bon voyage to the poems and a hoping that in the coming week I find more time for the writing life.

70º ~ fall graces us, even days of brief heat are enjoyed, recent rains revived the trees and lawns, praise be

Remember this, dear readers?

This was the status of the sickly speaker’s manuscript when last I posted about it.  In early August, I had spent much of the summer living with the poems in this state and finagling the order of pages, finally striking on the idea of using two appendices: one for the general order poems and one for the definition poems.  When I had tried to intersperse these with the voice of the sickly speaker, she refused, although I had originally conceived those poems as “breaks” for the reader.  Once I got them set up in the appendices, I struck on the idea of annotating the manuscript.  Alas, the school days began and the sickly speaker grew quiet, perhaps also because she had made her escape.

Today, after having several great conversations about the mss. with Traci Brimhall, who was in town Thursday – Friday, I woke once more with the sickly speaker’s voice in my head.  This time she was poking at me to re-read the collection straight through to check the order again, and then to try out this annotation idea.

While the pages are no longer taped up on the bookshelves as shown above, I was able to see that one poem needed to be moved up a slot.  I also went back to the vexing question of the ampersand. I found myself putting the ampersands back in at the insistence of the sickly speaker.  However, there is a method to my madness.  She uses the ampersands when joining two nouns, two verbs, or two adjectives.  In a compound sentence or longer description, not so much. 

When I had the poems in place and the tweaking done, I printed things out, eager to see if the annotation would work.  I laid out the appendices and quickly figured out that I wouldn’t want to footnote “whitecoat” every time I’d used it in the sickly speaker poems, just to point to “11 General Orders of a Whitecoat” in Appendix A.  So, I decided I would find the first usage of the word and annotate that.  (This all came about because I was worried the readers would arrive at the end of the sickly speaker’s story and skip the appendices or find them cumbersome.  This way, the reader is directed to the appendices throughout the collection, hopefully making it more organic but without disrupting the sickly speaker’s story.)

Now, I have the manuscript all prettified, with title pages, an acknowledgments page, and a table of contents, plus the dreaded page numbers.  I think I’ve finally ingrained in my memory the process for getting the page numbers to show up for the body of the book, but not the front matter.  In Microsoft Word, it’s all about creating a section break at the end of the front matter and before the text begins.  Then, when formatting the footer/header, be sure the cursor is in the footer/header for the body of the text and open the formatting palette.  Then, insert the page numbers and click off (empty) the box for “Link to Previous” so that the two sections aren’t connected. Also, click on the “format page numbers” icon and tell it to start at page 1.  Voila!

All praises to Word that the footnote feature is much easier to use!

I’m still mostly focused on the weather book, now called The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, but I also don’t feel like the sickly speaker has anything else to say.  Oh my, I’m once again a poet without a subject.  Wonder what will pop to the surface next?

71º ~ the rains began Friday afternoon around 5:00 p.m. and doused us all night long and on/off Saturday, today remains gray, cool, and wet without the showers ~ we rejoice the return of more sensible temperatures, even if the rain is too late to save the farmer’s from the drought

Classes are well underway, and this past week I felt like I might have my semester sea legs back beneath me. Why, on Wednesday afternoon, I wasn’t even exhausted yet! 

This coming week is going to be poets, poets, poets!  I’m so excited.

First, we have Marck L. Beggs, an Arkansas poet and singer/songwriter who will be appearing at the Big Rock Reading Series (curated by yours truly).  I heard Marck read seven or eight years ago, but I haven’t heard him perform any of his music, so I’m doubly thrilled for Tuesday night.  If you are in Central Arkansas, we hope you’ll stop by! (6:00 p.m. Tuesday, PTC’s Main Campus, Campus Center, 2nd floor)

Then, the wonderful & amazing Traci Brimhall will be in town for a reading at UALR Thursday evening (6:00 in the Donaghey Student Center, Room D).  On Friday, Traci is going to make an appearance in my creative writing class at PTC before heading over to Hendrix College to do a reading and shop talk with the students there.  I’ll be her chauffeur on Friday, which means I get to hear her read THREE times.  Wahooooooooooo!

Traci Brimhall

In the meantime, I’ve been learning the ropes of co-editing a journal and reading the first sets of submissions to Heron Tree.  Remember, we take submissions through December 1, so if you haven’t sent anything our way yet, you know what to do!  Check out our guidelines here.

Finally, a bit of good news.  Two more of the sickly speaker poems have found a home.  Endless thanks to Patty Paine and the good folks at diode for their support.  I’m super excited about this acceptance because the first of the dictionary definition poems has found a home.  I’ll keep you posted for when they hit the web.

Sadly, no time for submissions today, since I need to hit the school work to prepare for the big week of poetry, which will take me away from some of my other duties.  Still, I’m feeling pretty good about the new work load (school, poetry, house/spouse/pets), except for the fact that I have so little time to be on the blogs!

80º ~ sweet relief on the back side of a storm, wicked & wild, on Friday night ~ 4 limbs down in the backyard, nothing damaged

The prediction held true for the past week.  No time for poetry Monday – Friday, or at least no time for poetry outside the classroom.  I confess that I assign Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” every semester just so I can read/perform it.  Reason #492 that I love my job.

Still, I’ve found time for peace and poetry this weekend. 

Saturday was devoted to The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, that new title for the weather manuscript, which now includes the prairie fairy tales.  I spent the morning reading the entire book once again, probing for weaknesses and tweaking where needed, and then preparing submissions for three publishers.  It’s wonderful to be able to have renewed energy for this group of poems, but I’m slimming down the number of places I’ll submit.  In part this is a time concern; in part this is a financial concern.  I can see that I’ll be ready to submit the fever book in the spring, and, sadly, most poetry manuscript submissions require a reading fee.

I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again, as long as a press is on the up and up and uses my fee to publish books I enjoy, I’ll submit to them.  However, I will not go into debt to do so.  If that means it takes longer for my manuscript to find the right home, so be it.  Even with a full-time job, the money only goes so far.

Today (Sunday) has been given over to the sickly speaker and her fever poems.  I’m glad I’m not rushing to send the manuscript out, given the fact that as I’ve been working hard at getting more of the individual poems out there, I continue to find mushy spots in the poems that need to be addressed.

This morning, I sent one group of poems out to a non-simultaneous submission journal.  As I stated last week, this is a bit of a new focus for me.  I have a poet-friend who once said “well, I never simultaneously submit,” and I remember being stunned by this and confused.  If one doesn’t SS, then one must wait and wait and wait for the response from each individual journal before moving on.  Now, I’m beginning to see that this can be a good thing when the calendar is filled to the brim with other responsibilities.  It is much less daunting to sit down and prepare one group of poems for one journal than it is to have to sort through five – ten journals and re-read all of their guidelines.

That being said, I also tackled a packet for a SS-accepting journal this morning.  This journal just sent me a rejection on Sept. 1; however, the poetry editor included a wonderful note about the poems.  Because he did so, I replied with a “thank you for taking the time” email and we had a brief exchange.  I asked about submitting again, and he encouraged me to do so.  Not wanting to let the folks on the staff at the journal forget me, I had their folder on the top of my pile this weekend.

The pile: In the past, I would make a stack of my poem folders (those able to be submitted) and a stack of my journal folders (those accepting submissions).  Then, I would create groups of poems and journals and spend roughly two days sending things out into the world.  If I didn’t finish and the pile remained on my desk, it would bother me and bother me until I finished.  Now, the pile seems to be ever-present, growing and shrinking as I have time to do the work.

This crazy life continues to remind me that we are all works-in-progress.  So be it.

99º ~ feels like 110º with the heat index included = dew point at 74º ~ grab your oxygen tanks friends & neighbors

Happy Labor Day to all.  Summer here in central Arkansas refuses to let go its fierce grip, at least through the next five days. 

It looks like this blog will now become a weekly.  The build up of responsibilities at school, while not anything majorly different than in the past, have tipped the needle from the balancing point I’d established last year.  One of the benefits of being at an institution for seven years is gaining responsibilities within the department that require just a bit more time and effort.  I’m happy to serve as I believe, adamantly, in our mission.  (Who would have thought I’d find such a home in a community college when I was full of dreams of teaching in a small, liberal arts undergraduate college?)

My classes are off to great starts.  I’ve got Comp I, Creative Writing I, and Intro to Poetry on the books this semester, and I’m impressed with the energy showing in all the classes so far.  My creative writing class did the human knot exercise on Friday, which is always a blast.  If you don’t know this ice breaker, here’s a great link to explain more.  Basically, the students stand in a circle, shoulder to shoulder and reach out and clasp hands with strangers (different folks for each hand).  Then, working as a team, shifting under and over and around each other, they have to undo the knot and return to the circle WITHOUT BREAKING THEIR GRIPS.  Yep, they have to get up close and sweaty with each other.  This forces them to know each others’ names (we had done name ice breakers both Wednesday and before the knot on Friday), and they get to laugh quite a bit with each other.  It’s also a great indicator of how different personalities will play in workshop.

This is an exercise I highly recommend for any and all workshop type classes.  It’s hard to feel shy once you’ve had your face in someone else’s armpit!

~~~~~

While most of the work week is taken up by classes & departmental duties, and the first part of the weekend was spent with family, I had some time this morning to turn to my own poems.  On the top of my list lately has been submissions.  I’m woefully behind in getting my work out there.  In the past, I’ve had a more steady flow of writing, revising, submitting, writing, revising, submitting, &etc.  Since I devoted so much time this past summer to the sickly speaker, I find myself with an unusual amount of material that needs to get out into the world. 

This turns out to be a good thing, as I’m not sure how much drafting time I’ll have during the school year. 

In the past six months, I’ve broken from an old pattern regarding submissions.  I used to focus solely on simultaneous submission journals.  I still believe in these wholeheartedly, especially for emerging writers.  In the way back time, I would submit one packet of five poems to ten different SS-accepting journals.  In more recent years, as I discovered more success, I’d whittled that down to five poems to five different journals, to save time on withdrawal notifications.  This is not to say I had a 100% success rate anywhere, only my acceptances did get better, resulting in more WD emails & letters. 

Now, I’m focusing more on those “no simultaneous submission” journals.  These tend to be the higher tier places, although some of the highest still take SS subs. 

In any case, I managed to get two submissions “out the door” this morning.  That’s the electronic door now, thank the stars!  If not accepting SS subs, at least I can save time and postage by submitting electronically. 

Still, I’ve got a huge stack of sickly speaker poems lined up for those wonderful SS-accepting journals.  Hopefully, I’ll have enough steam some evenings this week to shepherd them out into the world as well.

~~~~~

In between getting poems ready to submit (and yes, still finding tiny areas to nip & tuck / revise), I’ve been exchanging emails with my co-editors at Heron Tree.  We are now officially open for business!  Wahoooooooo!

I know some of you have already submitted, and thank you for that!  If you are a poet, please send us some of your best work anytime between now and 1 Dec.  Our guidelines are here.  We do accept simultaneous submissions, given swift notification if poems are accepted elsewhere.

I know that reading submissions and discussing those poems with my co-editors will eat up some of my poetry time.  I’m fine with that.  I’ve long wanted to become involved in putting out a journal, so this is a bit of a dream come true.  Still, it will be another contributing factor in fewer blog posts.  When weighing the priorities of my writing time, it’s clear that writing, revising, and submitting comes first.  Then, all the rest.

Even though I’ll be here less frequently, I am ever thankful to those of you who read!  You help keep me motivated, and you keep me honest about the life of a working poet.

90º ~ bright sun, high humidity, small breezes ~ while no one wants a hurricane, I’m crossing my fingers that Isaac’s rains reach this far inland and west ~ we have gone beyond dry into dessication

Those busy days I told of in the week before school have come true and been complicated by a terrible cold.  I swear the sickly speaker haunts me.  Honestly, I eat vegetables.  I eat fruit.  I drink water by the gallons each day.  Ok, I could maybe exercise a bit more.  Still, my immune system seems bent on failing me.  Sigh.

Here are some events unfolding during the days of classes and of sniffles:

Cold and all, I was honored to be the guest speaker at last Thursday night’s reception launching the University of Central Arkansas’ new Arkansas Writers MFA Program.  Stephanie Vanderslice, the director of the program, kindly invited me to give a short poetry reading at the end of the night’s program.  It was a delight to meet some of the faculty members I hadn’t yet met, to reconnect with those I know, and to meet the students in the inaugural class.  The festivities made me nostalgic for the Fall of 1999 when I entered the MFA program at the University of Arkansas Fayetteville. 

At the reading, I just did a few poems from Blood Almanac, then some saints and tales from The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, and finally four sickly speaker poems.  It was awesome to have the chance to hear her voice out in the world for the third time.  I read a few of her poems in March at the University of Northern Iowa and a few at AGS in June, but I hadn’t completed the sequence then and so was unsure of her outcome.  It felt much better reading her poems last week now that I know what happens to her.

~~~~~

Heron Tree, the online journal I’m helping to edit, will begin accepting submissions on Saturday!  We will read from Sept 1 through December 1, so please polish up the best you’ve got and send them our way.  At this time, we accept all forms of poetry but do not read for fiction, non-fiction, or drama.

As editors, we created a list of poems that inspire us and make us say, “Yes!”  Hopefully that will help you get a sense of our aesthetic before we accept our first poems.  Poems will begin being published online in January 2013, with a new poet published weekly.  In the fall, we will offer a print annual as a print-on-demand publication.

I’m super excited to see what comes over the transom and to try out my new role as a co-editor.

~~~~~

The Big Rock Reading Series is underway at Pulaski Tech.  Our first event will be Tuesday, Sept. 18, with poet and singer/songwriter Marck L. Beggs.  Like us on Facebook or check out our blog for more information.

If you live in central Arkansas, I hope you can make it out on the 18th!

73º ~ rain, cloud cover, cooler temps, relief, actually got out and put on my favorite old sweatshirt

Today’s title references Li-Young Lee’s poem “Furious Versions,” which appears in The City in Which I Love You.  Section 6 begins:

It goes on and it goes on,
the ceaseless invention, incessant
constructions and deconstructions
of shadows over black grass,
while, overhead, poplars
rock and nod,
wrestle No and Yes, contend
moon, no moon.

The poem is an ars poetica but also covers the way we are constantly revising our own realities.  I love it as a metaphor for living and for working on individual poems and larger manuscripts.

This morning, I’ve spent a good chunk of time making line edits in the former weather book and tweaking the order I mentioned here.  Once I felt like I had the order down, I re-built the Table of Contents.  I know some folks like to code their titles so that MS Word or another program will build the ToC for them.  Truthfully, that’s more than I can keep track of as I input the poems in the file, so I end up retyping it.  After all these years, I have a template with the right tabs to help me along.  In the end, I’m fond of this retyping as I get a different angle on how the sections & order are working. 

Today, this retyping also helped me name the sections and eventually helped me come up with my new title.  There are still weather poems and elegies in this new “furious version” but there are now fairy/haunting/cautionary tales, saints, and cartography poems.  The good friend who helped me reorganize, also helped me search for a new title.  Combining some of my own ideas and hers, I’ve come up with The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths.  I don’t know yet if this will stick, but it is clear that In a World Made of Such Weather as This will no longer serve. 

Thanks to Wikimedia Commons, here’s a page from a Russian children’s book that suits the mood of the work done on the mss. today.

Click for link

75º ~ had to do a double-take before typing that temperature, highs topping out at 90/92, blessings

Longtime readers of the Kangaroo know that before I started on my fever journey, I had finished manuscript #2, the weather book.  The weather book has been a long, rambling journey without the direct focus of the narrative sequence of the fever.  The weather poems/elegies began in the long shadow of the publication of Blood Almanac and cover six or seven years.  The manuscript was once titled Glacial Elegies and then In a World Made of Such Weather as This.  Several great poet friends read the book in different incarnations and offered wise suggestions for strengthening, and the manuscript received several semi-finalist nods and a few finalist placements.  Still, no publication.

In the meantime, I also wrote a dozen prairie fairy tale poems, as well as a few autobiography/mapping poems.  These were just gathering dust on the desk once the sickly speaker took over and the fever poems became my focus.

So, yet another good poet-friend volunteered to take a look at the mss. and the tales/mapping poems and see if they belonged together.  I had a strong suspicion that they did, but since I was so focused on the sickly speaker, I hadn’t sat down and reassessed.  Thanks to this poet-friend, the mss. has a new iteration and now includes the strongest of the tales/mapping poems and cut out just a few of the weaker weather poems. 

For the moment, I’m feeling positive about the changes.  Still, I need to sit with things for a bit and see what shakes out. I’ve also realized that with the new version, the weather title no longer really works, so I spent the morning brainstorming new possible titles.  One of the techniques I love to use for this is Wordle.net.  On Wordle, you can input a text and the program creates a graphic based on frequency of word use.  Here is how the current version of the mss. looks.

Based on this, I was able to add four or five options to the title list I’d created by simply reading through the entire mss. and looking for lines that jumped out as titles.  I’ll keep you all posted.

In the meantime, the fever book is “resting” until the weekend, when I hope to revise a few last poems and then give it a thorough going over, testing for weak spots.

This whole journey would not be possible without the strength & support I get from you all.  Ever thanks for reading! My poetry cup certainly does runneth over!