Friends and Fans of the Kangaroo!
It is my great delight to announce my newest adventure in poetry, helping to edit Heron Tree, an online poetry journal, which will be the first publishing venture of Heron Tree Press. My dear friends Rebecca Resinski and Chris Campolo have made this all possible and I am thankful and excited beyond belief.
Here’s a glimpse at our announcement.
I hope you will all include us when you begin submitting your September poems!
And spread the word!
Next Tuesday, C. reports back to school, and next Thursday, I do as well. There are gathering forces all around the desk of the Kangaroo. We are trying to take care of our left-over to-do lists and trying to soak up these last few days of calm. I’ve already been back on campus several days in the past week or two so this isn’t a clean-cut transition.
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| from Wikimedia Commons |
I’ve always felt that this time is much like New Year’s Eve for others; it’s a time when I reflect on my goals for the upcoming year and time when I huddle in and sleep a little extra. I have to say that this year looks to be quite topsy-turvy with lots of changes on the horizon. There will be some major changes at school and some new adventures in poetry. I’ll be updating you on those poetry-related adventures just as soon as I can (nope, not book related at all). I bring these things up now to say that I will most likely have to re-evaluate what time I have for the blog. I’m thinking that my new goal will be to post twice a week. I’ll most likely have to give up posting my draft process notes as time for writing will shrink in the days to come. I’ve already whittled away at my blog feed and created a “favorites” folder to try and prioritize my time in the blogosphere as reader. All of this makes me sad, but until the world rewards poetry as it rewards corporate raiders (or until I win the lottery) something has to give.
But not quite yet…
Today, I’ve worked on submissions, but I confess that lately, I’ve felt like I’m slugging through slowly drying cement when trying to focus on the business side of poetry. I’d rather be writing or revising. (Which leads me to think of those bumper stickers that say something like “I’d rather be surfing” or some such. Imagine if there were one for writing. Some turned heads for sure!)
Today’s submissions were sparked by both a rejection and an acceptance this week. All of the work I’m currently sending out is from the fever series, so it’s been quite interesting to see what sticks where and what needs to go back to the drawing board. I have to say that the rejection was quite wonderful and praised the project as a whole, so that was nice. Still, I’m wondering if the narrative arc will prevent some of the individual poems from finding their own homes. Time will tell.
The acceptance was fantabulistic! It’s from a journal I’ve been submitting to for several years, a journal I read from cover to cover every time it comes out. I first sent in a set of five fever poems in June and the editors requested a larger sample in July, so I sent in five more. They just accepted two poems from the second batch I sent in. Wahoooooooo!
Both of these events were on my mind this morning as I revised two poems that had been among those rejected this past week and gathered together a new submission packet. I study and re-study the poems that “make it” and try to figure out how to shore up the ones that didn’t. I’m often surprised at the fact that there is more pruning to be done. I’m not drastically changing the poems, just clipping away a little extraneous language here and there.
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Many thanks to those of you who have offered support and friendship all summer long. I’m looking forward to seeing what this new year brings!
The happiness of the day? 1) A morning so cloudy and drizzly that I slept in b/c the sun did not provide the usual alarm and 2) I spent several good hours with the fever manuscript and drafted one last poem.
I began my poetry time today by re-reading the fever manuscript from start to finish. I’m happy to say that I only found one word to tweak within all of the poems that have been substantially revised. I have perhaps six remaining poems that need to be scrutinized more fully. It was a relief to get back to the sickly speaker and re-engage with her story.
As I got to the end and moved into what I had labeled as the appendix containing the five definition poems, I realized that I might want to provide some links from within the body of the book to the appendix. I’m thinking of those footnotes that refer to a specific page in the back of the book. Maybe? Right now the appendix section feels like it’s sort of floating at the end, and I know in many textbooks this is the case, so it might work as is.
After reading through the whole thing, I turned to drafting those last two poems I mentioned previously. It turned out that the image I dreamed up of what I thought would be the final poem had already been covered in what is the existing final sickly speaker poem, so all is well. That meant turning to the general orders poem for the mystics. As I drafted it, I had the two previous general order poems up as well. In the mix, I decided to change all of the titles so I have “11 General Orders of a Nurse,” “11 General Orders of a Whitecoat,” and “11 General Orders of a Mystic.” While I like the use of “Sentry” for the nurses, I thought it would be forced to use “11 General Orders of a Sentry,” “…of an Officer,” and “… of a Civilian Consultant.” Who knows, I may change my mind.
The mystic poem did not come easily, nor did I expect it to given the time away from the desk; however, I kept bringing myself back to religious words and images and re-reading some of the mystic poems to remind myself of their roles. The draft begins:
Make of your body a camouflaged shell.
Carry the sacred and the sacramental at all times hidden within.
The orders for the nurses and the whitecoats all begin with imperatives about tending the “fever body,” so I liked the parallel with starting this one with the body again, but this time it focuses on the mystics’ bodies. The poem also gets at the tension as the mystics all work slightly outside the whitecoat/nurse system and sometimes fulfill missions for the unseen mentor.
As I drafted this last poem, I also revised the two previous general order poems and printed out copies to add to my wall of manuscript (pictured above). I decided to create two appendices: Appendix A: General Orders and Appendix B: Glossary.
I’m absolutely thrilled with where the manuscript stands (53 pages…51 poems, 2 title pages – one for each appendix). This manuscript began almost a year ago exactly and this is the fastest I’ve ever written this many poems and felt this strongly about them all. My goal for the fall will be to fine tune and revise (especially those last few poems drafted in June that I haven’t had time to really work with). I’ll be sending out individual poems and seeing what happens there. I suppose I’ll shoot for the spring to begin sending the manuscript out as a book, unless some major crack exposes itself in the meantime.
So, it’s been a while Dear Reader. June was an amazing month for poetry at the desk of the Kangaroo, July not so much. C. and I took two trips with a week off in between.
We headed up home to visit family in Iowa, celebrating Xmas in July with the little nieces and nephews. Lots of kiddie pool and sprinkler fun time and a half peck of peaches we brought up from southern Missouri that made everybody smile. Then, it was off to the city, New York City to be exact. A week of playing tourist and seeing some amazing art and national treasures. Sadly, I returned from NYC with a terrible cold that resulted in, you guessed it, a fever!
(Perhaps the sickly speaker was tired of being ignored?)
For the past week this is how I’ve felt.
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| Science Photo Library |
I’m finally feeling back to rights healthwise and mindwise and it’s time to start up with school again. I’ve got meetings today (yes on a Sunday), Tuesday, and Wednesday. Then all day the following Monday. All un-paid service (official start date is Aug 16) to my department, my division, and my institution, because I believe in the vision of higher education for all and if I would choose to stay home I wouldn’t be hurting myself so much as failing to ensure that our students’ needs are met. So the next time you hear someone say that teachers of any level are underpaid, please give them my number. I’ll explain it to them like they are six years old. 🙂
In the meantime, I did hear from the sickly speaker the other night and think I have the nubbins of the final poem for her series. I still have one more “general orders” poem that I want to write as well. Hopefully, I can get back into a groove now, although that groove will be the modified one of the academic year rather than the luxury of June.
Darn it if I didn’t do it again. I drafted a new poem today based on yesterday’s military inspiration. Since I’ve closed out my June residency, I’ve been taking things at a more relaxed pace, and I thought that today I might just gather some research by reading more “General Orders” to get a sense of the military rhythm and syntax.
When one Googles “General Orders,” what one finds are numerous links to the “11 General Orders of a Sentry” for the Army, Navy, and Marines. At first I kept trying to dig deeper, wanting to find more language like the language from Confederate Army General Orders 17. I did find their General Orders 14 which called on slave owners to conscript a certain percentage of their male slaves into service for the Confederate Army. Wow. Of course I know of the Union Army’s offer of freedom to slaves who served, but I hadn’t heard about this effort on the part of the Confederacy to supplement their dwindling ranks. The layers of brutality there are so many it blows my mind.
But I digress. While I may go back to the language of General Orders 14, today I kept going back to those “11 General Orders of a Sentry.” I was bummed because the language is so plain and the series of imperative so boring. I looked at a couple of word banks to see if I could get a spark. And then, it dawned on me: a sentry is the equivalent of a nurse in the sickly speaker’s universe. Click!
Here’s the first line.
To take charge of this fevered body and all its possessions.
The rest of the poem (the list of the remaining 10 imperatives), tries to describe the nurse’s power and lack of power in relationship to the whitecoats. Hmmmm. That’s interesting. The poem from yesterday gives orders to the whitecoats; this one to the nurses. I suppose I could do one more that give orders to the mystics, the last group of folks with whom the sickly speaker interacts.
This turn toward the military feels quite natural. I’ve been describing the manuscript to other folks as an exploration of the “medical-industrial complex,” of course playing off Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” speech. I know the comparison there is not precise, but it’s getting clearer, and I think I need to re-read that speech. Perhaps that will spark the mystics’ orders?
Here’s a GI standing sentry in Iraq, thanks to Wikimedia Commons. Now, imagine that vigilance in the nurse standing over the sickly speaker.
93º ~ suddenly the forecast has lost it’s trip digits and rests at 99º for the next seven days ~ praise be?
I did not mean to draft a poem today. I swear it.
I’ve been using these last few days to work through the stack of loose papers on my desk. During the school year, I have a tendency to tear things out of magazines and journals, or print off an online article I think I won’t be able to find again. By the end of the spring semester, the stack is quite daunting. As I’ve been attempting to whittle down my “to-read” books, so have I been working away at this stack.
I came across a beautiful piece of creative non-fiction from the Sept/Oct 2011 (nearing the bottom of the pile!) issue of Orion, one of my all-time favorite magazines. It was Melissa Kwasny’s exploration “Rock Drawings of the Northern Plains,” part poetry, part descriptive essay, part history. The language was so intense, that I decided to form a word bank before I decided on whether to keep the torn-out pages to use at school or recycle them.
After I finished that, I happened to flip the page back in my journals and I saw that I’d filled a page with notes on “General Orders 17.” This reminded me that I’d heard a spot on the local NPR station about these orders, which were issued in 1862 and condoned the forming of militia groups to “harass the Union Army” within the state of Arkansas. The text is only available as audio, here, scroll down to “General Orders 17.” This reminded me that I’d heard this blurb on June 20th while driving to a follow up with the oral surgeon, and that I’d been so struck by the language of the blurb and the orders that I’d come home and looked up the audio archive and jotted out the lines that echoed the most for me, forming another word bank.
So, while I might first have been tempted to draft something based on Kwasny’s words, and will definitely use them in the future, I ended up drafting “General Orders 17” based on the NPR spot. It begins:
Approach the body by preying without distinction.
It is a set of 12 imperatives, each standing alone as a single-line stanza. Not sure that’s going to remain, or even if this draft will hold together as a poem. It is definitely not in the voice of the sickly speaker. Instead, I imagine it as a set of orders given to the whitecoats by the AMA or one of their professors of medicine or something.
I can see it fitting in the mss. as another aside, much like the definition poems, but I am uneasy about it. Wouldn’t I need more like it for it to fit? Without other “general orders” poems, wouldn’t this one stick out? Does it have to fit in the manuscript? Oh, what if the definition poems and a couple of general orders poems made it into an appendix?
Oh, no! What if the sickly speaker has really left me???
90º ~ yep, it’s 10:15 and we’re into the 90s ~ highs in the trip digits forecast for the next three days at least ~ not a wisp of a chance of rain on the horizon
Well, yesterday, I thought that my appearance at the Arkansas Governor’s School might be a good way to end my self-imposed homestead writing residency, and today my mind is whirling from national events (way to go SCOTUS!), so I’m thinking, yeah, “the end.”
In wrapping things up:
~~~First, a huge shout out to Wesley Beal and the other English Language Arts faculty members at the Arkansas Governor’s School for hosting me and James Katowich. I had a fabulous day being back on campus and interacting with the talented and inquisitive rising-seniors. The students (and faculty) were an excellent audience. I read some poems from Blood Almanac, some from the weather book, some fairy tales, and ended with two of the sickly speaker poems. Then, we did a Q & A, and I got asked the best question ever: “Does being a Cubs fan help you in your life as a writer?” (A little backstory, some of these students had C. for AP US History last year and know of our love of the Cubs; also, I had a Cubs coozy on my water bottle given how much everything sweats in the heat.) Now, I’m always telling my students that being a fan of the Cubs is essential to my ability to brush off rejection (there’s always another game, another series, and another year!), but here was someone asking before I got to say it! (And no, I didn’t plant that question!)
A giant thank you to the students who purchased a copy of Blood Almanac. Forever indebted! I hope the book brings you some enjoyment and teaches you something about the world along the way.
~~~Second, wow, many thanks to the editors at Linebreak for publishing “Fevers of a Minor Fire,” one of the first sickly speaker poems to be written, and huge thanks to Sandra Beasley for her amazing rendition of the poem. This is one of those cases of a quick, quick turnaround. I submitted the poem two weeks ago, and boom, there it is!
When I posted on Facebook about the publication, I decided to also post a link to my draft notes. I was stunned to see how much the opening had changed. Well, maybe it’s not that big of a change, but I swear I had no memory of beginning with “Feminine form of Lord.” Looking back at my hard copies (I save each major draft revision), I see that nine days after the initial draft, I cut that first bit, and I’m so glad I did!
Then, two months after the initial draft, I broke the initial set of three stanzas of eight lines each into quatrains.
On January 15, five months after the initial draft, I reworked the first stanza entirely, which included some of the shortest lines in the draft and lacked the musculature of the rest of the stanzas. I ended up rearranging line breaks and adding one line all together. At this time, I also extracted a few extra adjectives and a few conjunctions & prepositions.
One of the things I’ve seen as I’ve pruned and revised lately is that I often need to do the most work on the beginnings of the drafts. One of the first lessons I learned way back in undergrad was that I have a tendency to stumble into the piece, to write a lot of hesitation lines before I get to where I need to go. Must keep a vigilant eye on those cumbersome openings during revision!
It’s interesting that in the first draft I used an ampersand for every “and.” I’m sure this is due to the fact that I was reading Lucie Brock-Broido the day I drafted. Slowly, most of those ampersands were replaced with the word. Now I have to re-think the whole issue again, in terms of the book-length project!
~~~Third, I had another acceptance of one of the sickly speaker poems I sent out this past month, so I’m thrilled. (Will let you all know the who, what, where, when, as the poem becomes available, but it will be online!) So, I’ve had six of these poems accepted. The first four are in print journals, and these last two are online. Of the six, four of these are epistolary poems to the speaker’s mentor. Of course, it is wonderful to have this kind of affirmation of the poems; however, that joy is tempered by the fact the all but five of the weather book poems achieved publication in national journals, and that book languishes in terms of publication as a collection. I’m trying to ride the wave of happiness that the sickly speaker is getting out there in the world and not think to far into the future for the project.
~~~Fourth, THANK YOU to the Kangaroo readers for following my residency. I’ll be around the rest of the summer but probably not posting quite so often (whew!). May your reading and/or writing be plentiful!
85º ~ yesterday we set a record at 105º, today cooling down to 95º as the projected high, the humidity continues to remain low, which helps in the heat but means drought, drought, drought…over 90% of the state has entered “severe” drought conditions
These are the dwindling days of my self-imposed homestead writing residency. The residency is ending in the same way it began, as a niggle in the back of my brain rather than as a planned thing.
Tomorrow, I’ll be taking my one day-trip in June, heading over to Conway, AR to guest lecture and read at the Arkansas Governor’s School with my friend James Katowich, a fiction writer. We will do WITS exercises in the morning session and read our work in the afternoon. I’m psyched for this on so many levels. I taught at AGS for three summers after grad school, and it’s where I met C. Some of the poems in Blood Almanac were written while I was teaching at AGS. Also, the campus of Henrix College is beautiful even in the sweltering heat, and the students (all rising high school seniors of exceptional abilities) are eager to learn.
Today, I did some more major revisions on the poems I composed at the beginning of the month. I’m a bit disappointed that I didn’t draft 30 new poems, but I have been letting my gut guide me throughout this whole exercise and at a certain point, it said “it’s time to let things sit and then revise; it’s time to get some perspective on the project as a whole.” I have no idea if this is the “right” thing to do, but I do not feel like I’ve squandered any of this precious time I carved out. In the end, we all work to our own rhythms.
Oh, I also opened up the mss. document and did a “find/replace” for all of the ampersands, putting them back as ands. I don’t know why I’m fixated on this, but there you go.
Stay cool, friends and fans of the Kangaroo, stay cool.
This heat is nothing new and nearly everything here in central Arkansas is air conditioned; still there is an emotional exhaustion that ensues after so many days without rain and so many days to come without rain (the same is true in seasons of flood when we yearn for the sun).
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| A sod homestead, 1886, click for link |
If you follow me on FB, you know that I spent yesterday reading journals (especially Grist #5, about which I could not stop posting). I’ve followed up with more of that this morning. One of my goals for this residency was to read a book a day. I didn’t meet this goal quite as well as I met the drafting and putting together of the sickly speaker manuscript.
Having reached a lull in writing, and having spent several days focused on revision and submitting, I decided yesterday to begin to whittle my stack of “to-read” books and journals. I’m happy to report that I’ve “read” all of the loose copies of journals that were floating around the desk of the Kangaroo. I put “read” in quotation marks b/c I read journals very differently than I read whole books of poetry. For one, if the journal covers multiple-genres, I confess that I skip the prose. I do so not b/c I don’t enjoy prose but b/c I have such an overwhelming stack of books/journals to get through. (One exception is when I see the name of someone I know on a story or piece of nonfiction, then, I pause to read the piece.)
When I read the poetry in journals, I do not finish every poem, again often due to the sheer number of pages that hover around me. I have no problem stating this. One of the things I love about contemporary poetry is the diversity of craft & voice. If something doesn’t snag me up, that’s cool; it probably appeals to another subset of poetry readers. Also, by noting which journals provide an overwhelming number of poems that snag me up and keep me reading, I’m learning (always learning) which journals make my best audience. (The one difficulty here is journals that come from MFA/PhD programs where the editorial aesthetic shifts widely from year to year.)
As I read through the journals in my stack, I had the question of ampersands in the back of my mind. My report: 98% of the poems I read were ampersand free. I’m not sure if this means I’m going to change the way the sickly speaker uses them, but it adds more to my thought process about the whole situation.
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Some thoughts I’ve been having about this self-imposed homestead writing residency.
~ The other day I ran into another Little Rock poet and she was working on her latest book at Starbucks. I offered that I have a hard time concentrating on writing / revising at a coffee shop (esp. one as busy as my neighborhood’s Starbucks). She offered that she is too easily distracted at home by things like laundry, movies, spending time with her pets, etc.
This is to say that I see her point and I’ll admit that I’ve had to work at ignoring the house beyond the desk of the Kangaroo. Some days this has been harder than others (insert cats loudly asking for play time). Force of will is a crucial element.
~ I’m running out of steam. I am thrilled, absolutely thrilled, with what I’ve accomplished in the past three weeks but wondering if there is much left in the tank for this last week. I’m a huge advocate for rest periods to let things settle and ferment. I sense I need that now.
~ This whole process has been more instinct than plan.