73º ~ the casters of fore predict a heating up toward the 90º mark, but still, a beautiful blanket of green surrounds my windows and the sunlight filters through

As predicted, Friends and Fans of the Kangaroo, I returned to the drafting desk this morning primed and already working based on the scribbles I’d made in the last few weeks in my journal.  A few days ago, the sickly speaker made an appearance (although my other scribblings are not from her and predict two new PROSE projects…ack…PROSE!).

The speaker gave me words of being “weaned from the machines” and went on to tell me about how she would sneak around in the wee hours of the morning while the night nurse dozed.  The sickly speaker takes great pleasure in entering the whitecoats’ offices and messing around.  I think there will be several poems that follow this line.  For now, I had to rearrange a bit from what I scribbled, as she had some extra background to give me before we got to the breaking and entering.

The draft begins:

In the days of my healing, they sent a mystic in,
and I was weaned from the machines one needle

at a time. …

image from Wikimedia Commons, click for link

It came out as eleven couplets of roughly this line length.  That opening phrase surfaced as I remembered that I’d lost writing time in March/April and needed to backfill to the days of her healing after the transfusion/transplant procedure.  The mystics have solidified into any personnel who are not regular nurses or whitecoats that she sees regularly.  As a group, they treat her with indifference, as she is just one more patient in their normal work routine, but to her, they are a chance at connection with the outside world.  Another interesting dynamic in the health care industrial complex I’m exploring. 

For the title, I popped open the latest issue of Orion magazine, one of my all-time favorites.  I opened to “Sand County, the Sequel” by Sandra Steingraber and my eyes fell instantly on this line: “To narrate the message… .”  In the second half of the poem, after the sickly speaker is free of the machines 24/7, she begins her creeping about at night and she leaves “offerings” of herself in the “nearest whitecoat’s den.”  These are bits of skin and hair or something torn from her gown.  This is the room in which she prays about her future health (a new twist in the series).  I hooked on “narrate the message” as a way of saying prayer and added more to the phrase to fall in line with the heavy titles most of the other poems have.  Thus, “The Body Itself Becomes the Narrator of the Message” as the speaker leaves bits of herself in offering of prayer for health.

71º ~ another blissful spring day lingering past its time here in central Arkansas, the cats and I enjoy open windows and gentle breezes filled with birdsong

To cross-pollinate, here’s my status update from Facebook this morning:  I feel like there should some kind of dramatic opening ceremony for The
Summer of Sandy, like the Olympics. Hey, Universe, where’s my
military-precise marching band, my thousand dancing children, my parade
of poets & writers? Where’s my flaming arrow being shot over the
heads of the audience and into a ball of flammable liquid that suddenly
lights up the night sky?

From my last post, y’all know that I sent the book out on Thursday.  I spent Friday continuing to whittle down the stacks of papers that had amassed on my desk in the last two months, some that simply needed filing, some rejections to record and file, and some articles I’d set aside to read later.  Once I got down to the folders of poems I’d set out to submit in March…March!…I got busy and prepared a few submissions.  Saturday/Sunday were spent celebrating my niece’s graduation in Fayetteville, AR, and today, I returned to the submission process.

As a reminder, this is not as easy as picking up the poems and deciding where to send them.  Inevitably, as I read over the poems and make decisions about which 3 – 5 poems I should group together, I come across minor revisions.  Usually, I decide to snip a few more “flabby” words, often conjunctions, articles, or prepositions that aren’t completely necessary.  Here is where poetry stands out from prose.  It’s all about compression, at least for me.  Then, when I start writing prose, things get all wordy again.  In any case, this minor tweaking takes time.  Also, now that I’m working on a series with a narrative arc, the grouping of the poems lets me see if I’ve been inconsistent with the narrative or, even if I haven’t been, if this group presents too much confusion when taken out of context.  All new things for me to cipher through.

Still, I’m making headway and I’m happy to know that the poems are circulating again.  That two month downtime really leaves a gap in my communication with the poetry world and reminds me that I need to rededicate my efforts at a more balanced life when school rolls around again.

In the meantime, I’ve finished up one journal and opened up another in my 3 – 4 a.m. scribblings.  This is exciting because when I get ready to draft (tomorrow I think), I’ll have all this new material waiting for me.  (WAHOO!)  Here’s a shot of the cover.  As many of you know, I can’t stand drafting on lined paper, so I bought eight of these soft cover, unlined pages journals when I found them at my local independent bookstore a few years ago.  This one is the 7th of the eight.  I must begin a new hunt!

80º ~ near perfection in the late afternoon, this our high for the day with a small breeze moving through the open windows and sun, sun, sun that doesn’t burn

Dear Fans of the Kangaroo, I have returned with a renewed sense of optimism.  The last few days have involved the wrapping up of the semester and tonight will be the tying of the bow that is graduation.  I’ll have continued work over the summer for the reading series and for the academic journal that I edit, but all of this is manageable.  What I’m looking at now is six weeks of what should be fairly steady writing time.  I resolve to make the most of it as July will bring two brief excursions out of state with family and friends and August the return to school. 

Today, I felt a settling into that summer pace, that realization that there is no need to rush, that much may be accomplished in the day that stretches out before me.  So, I spent a good chunk of today with the book I’m still set on seeing published, In a World Made of Such Weather as This.  Yep, I’m back to that long-winded title.  It’s what sticks to my heart.  I spent a good bit of time yesterday reading it through and attempting to be critical of the order and presentation of the poems.  I actually added back in four poems that I’d taken out a year ago, but the rest held together well.  For what it’s worth, this is the book as I see it. 

Coming to the desk today, I did another read through and then began the task of reading submission guidelines and following them for five presses that are either in the midst of contests or reading periods.  Of the five, three allowed me to submit online (wahoo!), one required the mailing of the complete manuscript, and one a query with a ten page sample.  The last is the hardest of all, as it requires being able to capture the book in one or two sentences and to pick the ten poems that might stand out the most and also represent the arc of the book.  While it is the hardest, it is also quite rewarding and helpful.

So, I send you off, beleaguered manuscript, into the fray once more.  May you find your way to the top of the pile somewhere, somehow.

how today feels, weather-wise (click for link)

70º ~ conditions the same, sky darkening

As promised, here’s the second new draft for the day.  This one began just a few days ago and was much more skeletal in the journal and required a lot more work to pull it into a complete draft.  However, it was clearly an epistolary poem, another letter to Dear Madame, the speaker’s unnamed mentor. 

In this case, the speaker is still trying to resolve why her mentor doesn’t visit her (and we may wonder if the mentor is a figment or a real woman by this time).  In this poem, the speaker has come to terms with this lack of visiting and comments on the people the mentor sends in her stead. 

It begins:

Dear Madame—

Finally, I comprehend the distance kept
and recognize each mystic sent as envoy.

The rest of the poem (8 couplets = 16 lines), describes three of these “mystics” and the connection the speaker sees between each of the three and the mentor.  In these poems, the speaker waffles between neediness and trying to reassure the mentor that she is strong and can take it (whatever the current “it” is in each poem).  And so I begin to wonder about how our mentors can become crutches and how painful it is when we must separate from them. 

I’m much less sure of this draft, not sure if I’m covering ground already covered, nagged by the feeling of less powerful language but unsure how to punch it up, certain that the whole thing reeks of cliche.  Still, it’s there and time will show where it means to go from here.

For the title, I fished and fished in a few journals and books and came up empty.  Finally, I just thought hard and came up with my own, “What Rides on that Swift Currency of Air.”  In the poem, all of the communication between the speaker and the mystics is non-verbal and transmitted on the air: a smell, a whistled tune, a look.  I also like the current/currency play because there is value for the speaker in the air as a transmitting device.  Who knows?

Cirrus and cirrostratus clouds, click for link

66º ~ a muggy weight to the air, stiff breezes shuffle the leaves, storms in the offing, rising to more “normal” temps, mid-80s

Dear Reader, have you forgotten me?  I hope you are still there.  Despite the onslaught of end-of-the-semester grading, reports, and miscellaneous whatnot, along with the Arkansas Literary Festival, and during the most brutal bronchitis I’ve suffered in years, the sickly speaker would not remain silent.  She kept pushing through between 3 and 4 a.m., and lucky me, that means when I finally had the time today to write, thank the stars, I already had drafts in the earliest stages waiting for me. (Scribbled in the dark, lines run amuck on the page and in atrocious handwriting, but there still the same.)

The first one began about 10 days ago, with lines about the forced sedation of the speaker.  We’ve seen her restrained before and we’ve see her eyes bandaged against the light.  This time she is being sedated to speed her healing after the transfusion.  I suppose this leaked in because of “medically induced comas” that one hears about either on TV or god-forbid when it happens to someone we know.  The speaker informed me that while the body may be at rest, the brain is not, and the poem grew from there.

It begins:

They say that they sedate me
to tap the mother lode of sleep.
They claim a smooth, mineral rest.

Little do they know, the brain refuses.

Veins of Copper, click for link

The poem ended up switching between tercets and couplets and weighs in at a healthy 20 lines total.  At one point, I was sure I’d run out of steam at line 10, but that was just the lack of steady practice and I powered through. There was definitely more that needed to be said.  The speaker taps into a subversive power throughout the poems and I needed to get more of that in there.  Also, she is still working on dealing with having the donor cells in her own body, which has not been an easy fit, mentally.  What weakness (she thinks) to have to rely on some other body to heal her own.

As for the title, I’ve been reading a back issue of Sugar House Review that I picked up at AWP (#5, Fall/Winter 2011) and I am going to see Traci Brimhall read in Fayetteville this weekend, so I opened it back to her poems.  In “You Said the Lions Disappeared,” I found the lines “I don’t know how my darker nature entered me // or when, but I am vain and bruised….”  This set off a storm in my mind b/c the speaker has always had a “darker nature” but she also has this new life that has “entered [her].”  A little tweaking and I settled on “Bruised, My Darker Nature Enters Me.”

And guess what???  There’s another draft waiting to be transcribed and fleshed out.  Wahooooooo!

64º ~ overcast but not depressingly so, very little wind, pleasant temps extending our spring in a lovely way

Finally, a chance to catch up with you all about my adventures in poetry and fiction this past weekend.  The offerings of the Arkansas Literary Festival this year were outstanding, and on Saturday, I felt like it was AWP with multiple offerings at each time, forcing me to make painful choices. The majority of the events were on Saturday, with a few on Thursday and Friday.  The festival folks have played with the schedule a lot.  They tried to make it longer, extending events through Sunday, but saw a major decline in attendance on Sunday.  No schedule will every be perfect, and I did enjoy the buzz in the air on Saturday as folks milled about the River Market.  (I didn’t make it across the river to the NLR events.)

So, here’s my rundown.

Thursday:
I was super excited to have our final Big Rock Reading Series event of the semester kick off the Arkansas Literary Festival.  I think we made great partners, as we had new visitors to campus and our students each received a lit festival program so they could plan their escapades for the rest of the weekend.  Many kudos to the lit fest organizers and volunteers, chief among them Brad Mooy who takes on the daunting task of planning and setting into motion this massive event.

Our event, Placed/Displaced, was in two parts, featuring John Bensko, Hope Coulter, Tyrone Jaeger, and Stephanie Vanderslice.  The first part was a reading by the authors, and the second part was a panel discussion on the importance (or lack thereof) of place in 21st century literature.  The readings knocked my socks off, as we had our first focused group of fiction writers (I confess, I’m heavy on the poets).  Then, the discussion of place was spectacular.  The panel talked about the way a transitory population adds a layer of complexity to place but doesn’t necessarily take away from its importance.  The authors also discussed the way certain places “imprint” on us, and those are the places that writers tend to obsess about and use the most in their works.  Quite a few of my creative writing students remarked on Friday about how helpful the session was.

This was our first day time event for the series and I was nervous because at the end of the semester, instructors are reluctant to give up a class period for attendance.  Luckily, my colleagues came through with shining colors in offering extra credit, so we had a great showing of students who weren’t in class at that time.  On our anonymous exit survey, I had to laugh when I came across a comment from a student who confessed he came for the extra credit only, “but was surprised how much [he] enjoyed the event.”  (Another convert to literature?)  In addition to the folks from campus, I was delighted to meet a dozen folks from the community who had seen the announcement of the event in the lit festival program and made it a point to take some time out of a busy Thursday to attend.

Friday:
I’m lucky to teach in the morning, so I was able to attend Good Fellows: Arkansas Arts Council fellowship winning poets Mary Angelino, J. Camp Brown, and Cynthia King.  The Arkansas Arts Council is fabulous, and their individual artist awards in writing rotate genres each year.  I believe this is the first year that the fellows read at the festival, and I hope they continue this partnership.  As a previous winner of a fellowship, I was delighted to celebrate this year’s crop and indulge in an hour of poetry on a Friday afternoon.

Frequent readers of the Kangaroo may recognize Angelino’s name.  She read at PTC, along with my colleague Angie Macri, and I posted video from that event.  Again, she did not disappoint.  Reading along with her were two other U of Arkansas poets.  J. Camp Brown electrified the room with his mandolin poems and poems exploring race in the south.  Then, Cindy King gave us a bit of placed/displaced by reading several Arkansas poems and then threw in a Jersey poem (land of her upbringing), along with a true Jersey accent.  Wonderful all around.

Friday night I was supposed to attend the big party for the festival: Author! Author! but I was coming down with something and had to cancel to try and rest up for Saturday.  I knew I was in trouble when I slept past 10 a.m. on Saturday.  So bummed about all I missed Friday night and Saturday morning/noon.  Next year, I will take better care!

Saturday:
The first panel I made it to was Ferocious Grace, featuring Greg Brownderville’s poetry and Justin Torres’ fiction.  I vote this the BEST of SHOW!  (Yes, it even topped the BRRS/ALF event.)  While I’d seen Brownderville’s poetry in journals, I had no exposure to Torres’ work before this panel.  These two writers are at the beginning of their careers (GB = two books, Deep Down in the Delta and Gust and JT = first book, We the Animals), and I predict they will both go on to huge success.  The event began with Torres’ reading from his incredibly poetic/lyrical novel, set in New York and featuring a trio of brothers growing up in a tumultuous, loving family with hints of darkness and danger interwined.  Then, Brownderville read from Gust, his debut book of poetry.  These are poems of Arkansas, poems of tornadoes and Holy Rollers, poems that sometimes had us laughing and sometimes had us sighing with insight.  Brownderville’s other book, Down in the Delta, is a beautiful collection of folktales and prose poems.  The folktales come from three years of collecting on Brownderville’s part as he scoured the Arkansas delta (the flat, cotton-growing, Eastern part of the state that borders the Mississippi for those of you unawares).  On top of the writing, the book contains incredible paintings by Billy Moore, and not just one or two.  This book is art object and literature at once. 

After the reading, the authors talked with the audience and we wound up talking about place again, with Brownderville firmly rooted in Arkansas and the south, while Torres is the 21st century wanderer, taking in each place as he moves, holding on to what sticks, and letting go of the rest. 

The second panel on Saturday that I attended was Queer for You, featuring Nickole Brown, Bryan Borland, and Ed Madden, all three poets from the south, all three involved in publishing in some way.  This was a mixed panel that involved each of the writers talking about his/her work in publishing, along with reading from their own books.  I liked the mix a lot, as the writers talked about building a leadership for LGBT work and we were able to celebrate their accomplishments.  Then, their poems just knocked me out.  I highly recommend the following:  Sister by Nickole Brown, My Life as Adam by Bryan Borland, and Prodigal: Variations by Ed Madden.

Luckily, the festival organizers scheduled 30 minutes between events (much more forgiving than AWP’s scant 15 minutes).  I made it to my third event, Magazine, a panel hosted at the Oxford American and featuring editors Marc Smirnoff (OA), Heidi Julavits (The Believer), and Marco Roth (n+1).  This was a lively discussion of starting a journal to fill a void, to respond to some current cultural stance not being countered or discussed.  There was a lot of banter back and forth between the editors and one thing was clear, how much each of them believes in and cares about the current state of the literary arts, including literary criticism and global reporting. 

Finally, I made it for one hour of Pub or Perish, the crowning glory of the lit festival, organized by the untiring David Koon.  This is a tradition with the festival and a semi-open mic.  A group of local, published authors are asked to participate and then, a week or so before the festival begins, Koon accepts other writers who want to read on a first-come, first-served basis.  I do like this approach as each author knows how much time he/she has and the event keeps chugging forward without getting bogged down in some of the chaos that can ensue during an regular open mic.  I have to tell you all, there was some remarkable talent there that night.  I was sad when my body gave out and I had to head home before the last hour’s line up. 

Long story short: Way to Go, Arkansas Literary Festival!  Can’t wait for next year.

63º ~ proper cloud cover and cool breezes for an Easter morning, after weeks of highs near 90, we’ve settled back down to some spring weather with a forecast that doesn’t make it out of the 70s for a bit, whew

Let me be frank, Dear Reader, I do not intend this post to be one of complaint or whinery or fishing for a pat on the back.  It should serve merely as a record of my absence from these pages and my lack of draft notes.  While you may not know it, you serve, my readers, as a partial conscience, keeping me honest about my process and my meager progress. 

April has always been the busiest month for me, as it means research projects for composition and lit students and revisions for workshop students, on top of National Poetry Month and the Arkansas Literary Festival.  However, this semester has conspired to make February and March both into Aprils as well, with a funeral and AWP in the same month, some hooplala committee work for new and exciting happenings on our campus, oh and editing the campus wide academic journal (the new issue of which arrived on campus last week!), plus running the reading series which puts on three readings per semester.  Okay, I’ll say it: my cup runneth over. 

After many years of teaching, I’ve homed in on which activities fit with my personality and my strengths.  I’ve found my place on campus and I believe in each of the events listed above as service to my students, my community, and myself.  What I haven’t figured out is how to keep the balance.  I did very well in the fall and when I had my on-campus teaching days as Tuesday/Thursday.  The switch to live classes (as opposed to online) on Monday/Wednesday/Friday has not been as smooth a transition or as successful as I would have liked.  This is definitely something I will need to work on as it doesn’t seem like that schedule will be changing anytime soon. 

Next week, will be a huge week, so I will most likely be silent on the blog for another stretch.  On Tuesday I’ll participate in our advising fair, trying to help students learn more about their choices for classes in the fine arts and humanities. On Thursday, I will need every ounce of strength and grace I can muster as we will wrap up the Big Rock Reading Series with a double-feature in partnership with the Arkansas Literary Festival.  This will also be our first daytime reading.  That evening, I’ll be on campus for our Celebrating Student Milestones event, where we will launch the new issue of the journal I mentioned above, Milestones.  Friday and Saturday, I will attend back to back to back events at the lit festival.  I’m super excited about this year’s offerings, and for the first time, I have the AWP dilemma of wanting to go to two readings/panels at the same time.  I’m so thankful this festival exists in my hometown!  No travel worries, no hotel prices, and I get my husband to play taxi, dropping me off and picking me up so I don’t have to find a bleepity-bleep parking spot.  Wahoo!

So, Dear Readers, it may be the month of May before I return to smooth sailing on the blogosphere, but I shall return, never fear.  The sickly speaker is itching for me to finish her story; there is an urgency I’ve never felt before in working on a book.  In the meantime, I must redouble my efforts with my weather book and find it a home in the world as well.

Until then, be happy & be well!