Myself the Only Kangaroo among the Beauty - Page 4 of 107 - Sandy Longhorn: Myself, the Only Kangaroo among the Beauty

Apr

2019

Triage

46º and sunny all the way around ~ heading up to a perfect 68º and sending a hurry-up signal to spring for all of my friends in the upper Midwest who have been dealing with snow!

Collage excerpt: curtains and window with light coming through, puzzle piece of a map, orange butterfly, river, text "just the beginning" — Excerpt from “The Beginning”

When life hands you many great opportunities all at once — no — when you’ve worked hard and created many great opportunities for yourself all at once, life itself can become a bit overwhelming. Burnout may occur. (For me, this was not a “may” but a “did.”) With multiple projects to juggle, alongside home/family/friend responsibilities, recreation & downtime, I’ve started thinking about my daily work in terms of triage.

At first, this sounds dire. It calls to mind mass casualties and the need to put worst cases first. It seems to buy into a life of running around putting out fires, and I confess, that’s how I tried to live my life once all the great opportunities arrived. However, I’ve recently recast the idea of triaging things that need my attention into a more positive light. Instead of prioritizing the most difficult, pressing, or complex task, I am now prioritizing (or trying to) those tasks that match my goals and values.

This change in approach is largely due to working with my therapist post-burnout. She uses, and I recommend, the Values Cards by Marie McNamara and John Veeken as a way to examine your core values and to reset your goals around those values. In fact, I ended up buying my own pack of these cards. I don’t use them often, but I can see revisiting them every year to double check where I am and where I want to go.

Based on my use of the pack, CREATIVITY arose as one of my top 3 values, and stayed there when I revisited the cards 3 months later. Through therapy, I came to see how failing to prioritize time for creative acts was one cause for my burnout. My life was out of balance and, eventually, my mind and body rebelled against it. Re-committing to this blog is one way I plan to reconnect with creative acts on a regular basis. In the past, posting draft notes of new poems kept me accountable to a goal of writing my third book, and I plan to use posting about creative acts in the same way.

Today’s creative act: In the midst of a very busy time in terms of teaching duties, I paused this morning to read for pleasure. The book: The Memory of Now by Geet Chaturvedi, translated by Anita Gopalan, and publised in a beautiful art book edition by Anomalous Press. I picked this up at AWP last month; it doesn’t look like it is available for distribution/purchase yet, but you might want to bookmark it.

Apr

2019

At Long Last

72º ~ some sun, some clouds ~ Spring 2019 = below normal temperatures and above normal rainfall, today appears to be an exception

collage of a bed, US dollar bills, a man's feed, a swan's head, and the text: "this Ritual"

Excerpt from “This Ritual”

I’ve re-committed to this blog after a year-and-a-half lapse. It turns out that building a conference from scratch (with a lot of help from a great team) and teaching 9 new courses over 3.5 years can wear a person out. I’m happy to have come out clean on the other side, and I’m proud of the conference and the courses. I continue to be enamored of my job at UCA and all of the opportunities it affords me. I am, however, looking forward to a return to a more balanced writing life.

Speaking of which…
I did manage to eke out revisions to about a dozen new poems since 2017, and I’m sending them around. In late 2018 and early this year, I was determined to secure an acceptance from a “top tier” magazine (mostly because I’m stubborn and want to prove that I can). I know my chances with The New Yorker or the Paris Review are slim to none, but I thought I’d at least have a chance with some of those august journals housed at universities, or those independents that publish poetry only.

Not so much. Nothing but the resounding “no” of polite rejections. Still, these are poems I believe in, poems that are necessary to me, and from responses when I’ve had a chance to read them, they seem necessary to others as well. So, I will re-double my efforts at the revision and submission process, and I will take it with a grain of salt that the “biggies” haven’t been receptive.

In the meantime, there are poems to read and cats to adore.

Jan

2018

Is There Room for Poems like this Today?

14º feels like 7º ~ deep Arctic freeze, lows in the lower teens for the entire week, the sparrows still flit around the gray yardscape

~~~~~

I subscribe to several poem-of-the day email listservs, and today the Poetry Foundation presented Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “I am Offering this Poem.” It begins

I am offering this poem to you,
since I have nothing else to give.
Keep it like a warm coat
when winter comes to cover you,
or like a pair of thick socks
the cold cannot bite through,

As I read, I was struck by the similarity in the language and feeling to Pablo Neruda’s odes, particularly “Ode to My Socks,” of course. Like Neruda’s odes, Baca’s poem is straightforward and openly emotional. By this, I mean, Baca doesn’t shy away from this simple declaration of love. He doesn’t use elevated diction, excessively innovative tropes, or blatant political statements. Yet, this poem doesn’t feel quaint to me; it doesn’t feel as if Baca has over-sentimentalized the moment or kept it too simple. The emotion of the speaker for the other radiates outward, and it is just what I needed to read today.

Still, I am left with a question. Do poems like this get published today? I read lit mags on the regular, or as much as “regular” can be in an academic semester, and I don’t recall seeing this simplicity of language and emotion with much frequency. Have we gone in such fear of sentimentality and in such love of “make it new” that we have left behind something valuable?

Sep

2017

September 2017: An Accounting

68º ~ finally a cool-down after highs in the 90s, dry dry dry, no rain since Irma brushed by

∞

My hopes of returning to my blogging days remain unfulfilled. Still, I’m here, and I want to celebrate a major accomplishment. At the beginning of the semester (8/21), I committed to carving out writing time on Friday mornings. I spent the first few getting my drafts organized and sending out work after a long hiatus. Staring September 1, I focused on writing new drafts. There were 5 Fridays for this month, and I have 6 new drafts! Stunning. Unprecedented success in all my years of teaching. Wahooooooooza.

Given that I also started sending work out, I’ve also started receiving results. Since June, I’ve sent out poems to over 15 journals. In late August and September, I recorded 5 rejections and 1 acceptance. I also had 2 journals solicit work from my self-ekphrastic project, which I submitted as a book to 1 press over the summer.

In the meantime, I’m teaching, working on pulling all the loose ends together for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, and coordinating our undergraduate creative writing programs. My days are filled from rising time to falling down exhausted time, and I love it all.

I hope each of you find your own way to preserve your writing time and that you receive many happy moments of success.

Sep

2017

Drafting, Submitting, Keeping Up with Journals

75º ~ an unusually cool & rainy summer, lovely but darkened by the knowledge that this is climate change in action

∞

I can’t believe it’s been a full three weeks since I’ve posted. Those three weeks were consumed with the ramp-up of a new semester. However, I did protect my writing time, although I used it for getting drafts in order, some minor revising, and sending out work. I did not protect my blog time, it seems.

Today, I can report a new draft! Wahoooooooza. This is a draft that began by walking. You may remember a post not long ago with practical advice on how to draft while walking. Today’s draft followed much of this; however, it began on Monday’s walk, which wasn’t a conscious drafting walk. Instead, I was using my walk to begin my memorization of “The Colonel” by Carolyn Forché. Each semester, I require my students to memorize and recite, and I play along. “The Colonel” has been interesting because it is a prose poem, so I don’t have line breaks to help me remember. Instead, I’m linking images, sentence by sentence to keep me going. Anyway, on Monday, I was reciting as I walked (with the printed poem in my hand), but I also wanted to be present on the walk, so once I’d added a few sentences to my memorization, I stopped working it and let myself walk and observe. In a very short time, my own lines began emerging. I scooped my phone from my pocket, opened an email draft to myself, and used the voice dictation function to capture the lines. Autocorrect produced some fickle interpretations, but it was close enough that when I returned to the email this morning during my drafting time, I had something with which to begin. This new poem is “Rhytidome.” I credit its presence with having taught ecopoetics last year at this time and with my current teaching of political poetry. I can’t say enough how thrilled I am to have this job that inspires my creative work while I’m actually doing the job I get paid to do. I know there are many people out there still searching for this combination. I’m proof that patience and persistence sometimes work.

So, I have this new draft, and as of this morning, it is the only poem in my “new drafts” folder. I spent some of the last three weeks going through all the lingering drafts, those that were in my “ready to submit” folder and those that had lingered in the “new drafts” folder for several years. The good news is that many of them had been sitting, untouched, for 6 months to 2 years. With this distance, I had a much clearer sense of which were viable and which I needed to set aside. I also found that many of the poems in the “ready to submit” folder no longer held my interest. I could see that they were poetically sound, but I no longer had the energy, the spark to keep submitting them. I moved all of the poems I was no longer interested in over to my “out of commission” folder. They still exist, and in the future, I may return there and see what’s germinated.

With that done, I shifted to all the drafts I have that hold my interest. I grouped all of the unpublished, interest-holding drafts and sat down to revise. It turns out that I had 32 poems, plus 9 hybrid poem-collage pieces in that stack. The numbers stunned me. I worked through each poem, making mostly minor revisions (even if they were out for consideration), but sometimes more major changes. In some cases, changing the title did wonders. With the poems tidied up, I started sending out to those journals that read year-round and those that were open in August. As I learned of some journals shifting their submission period opening into September, I made notes on my Google calendar and updated my spreadsheet. In fact, when I finish this post, I’ll go through and make my 9/1 list so I can work through it when I have small chunks of time to spare.

Writing Journal, Joy Harjo Book, Pampas Grass

All of this is a vast improvement over last year when I let my priorities get out of balance, to the detriment of my writing life and my mental health! In celebration, here is a picture of how I set the stage for success this morning with my journal, a book by Joy Harjo, and a strand of pampas grass that I picked on my walk. Then, there’s a picture of George destroying my little cairn by trying to eat the pampas grass. Ah, my muse!

George Eats Pampas Grass

Aug

2017

The Hardest Part is Letting Go … of Unpublished Poems

86º feels like 95º ~ after a solid week of below-normal temps and delightful air, we return to the bayou-esque weight, bright sun in between giant white cloud-islands, building toward storms over the weekend

∞

While I’ve been away from the blog re-focusing on the upcoming semester, I have not abandoned all poetic endeavors. I have not drafted anything new, but I’ve been busy submitting work, recording rejections, making small revisions, and sending out work again. This year, I’ve noticed that more and more of the journals that used to open on August 1 have pushed back to the 15th or even September 1. I also ran across one journal that only accepts the first 300 submissions per genre each month of their reading period, citing the volume of submissions and not charging a reading fee. I love this. It means that my submission will get a good look rather than the cursory ones that sometimes happen when editors and screeners are overburdened.

As I’ve been in “po-biz” mode, I’ve been confronted with a rather large pile of poems that have accumulated since 2014. These are things that began as drafts and made their way into the “ready to submit” folder. In other words, once upon a time, I had faith in these poems. They’ve now been out into the world and have been rejected a few times. I confess, over the past two years I have not been as diligent at keeping them circulating, so they’ve only been rejected a few times instead of my usual 20+ times. Now, however, I find that I have moved well past these poems. I’ve worked on the collage-poetry hybrid project and moved on to writing about my dad and am now sussing out some political poems. Here I am today facing that question that all poets get to eventually.

Is it okay to abandon previously written poems that haven’t found a home in a lit mag?

Yes, of course it is, but it is hard. I feel responsible for these poems, yet I no longer have the kind of faith in them I once did. This is in part because they were written during a foundering time and in part because my own writing has evolved in the meantime. This afternoon, I will move these poems from the “ready to submit” folder and place them in the “out of commission” folder, and their future will become even more uncertain. Perhaps there will come a time when I’m asked to curate a “selected & new” book and I’ll go back and revise them again; perhaps decades hence some grad student will unearth them and they will go viral, stronger than I knew they were; perhaps they will simply fade away in the ether and in the paper recycler.

I find this emotional connection to the work fascinating. It is a separate feeling than the one that goes with getting an acceptance or being able to share a link to a published piece. I don’t subscribe to the parental metaphor of the the writer and her “babies,” but I do know that I feel this weight of having created these poems and consciously removing them from the possibility of an audience. However, the other option doesn’t work for me. It seems I have only so much poetry energy to spare, and I can only manage the “po-biz” of a certain set of poems at a time.

This has me wondering: how do you all make these decisions, or do you continue to submit poems that have begun to feel quite distant?

Aug

2017

How to Write a Poem While Walking

81º ~ this air a comfort, showers hovering just a few miles to the north, taunting us, a pattern repeated all summer, the birds, chipmunks, & squirrels go about their business as usual

∞

How to Write a Poem While Walking (for those able)

This is not about speed, not about exercise, not about burning calories (the last two are side benefits, of course).
Choose a safe path, free from obstacles, threats, dangers*.
A treadmill may work, if free from distractions.
Leave your earbuds at home.
Walk at an even and steady pace, one set by your body rather than by music or an attempt to reach your target heart rate (attempts to regulate your pace are a distraction to the mind).
Carry a smart phone (on silent) or a small notepad and pen.
Divest yourself of the notion that anyone is watching.
Walk and observe. Breathe. Be open to wonder.
Let your mind wander.
Be patient and alert.

Eventually, the words will come, perhaps first as a phrase. Repeat the phrase. Speak out loud, letting the words unfurl (see #5). Do not force yourself to compose; instead, keep walking, mulling over this phrase or idea. There are better than even odds that with your body in motion under its own power (and your inability to be distracted by other looming tasks), lines will begin to suggest themselves. Again, say them out loud and feel the rhythm of the language in the motion of your body.

When several lines have strung themselves together, you have some choices.

The old school method would be to keep memorizing lines as they come, repeating the whole draft out loud as you walk. Most of us, however, no longer have the memorization skills that our writer predecessors possessed. Luckily, technology fills that gap.

One way of recording your lines is to pull out that notepad and pen and jot them down. Since the purpose of this walking is not to exercise (see #1), there is no harm in stopping mid-stride to capture your thoughts.

Another choice at this moment is to use a smart phone to help capture the lines. I’m a fan of this method because I use the voice dictation function, reinforcing my speaking of the lines out loud, and I can continue to walk as I do this, keeping the natural rhythm alive. Voice dictation can be used in almost any text function on a smart phone and is usually indicated by an icon of a microphone within a program. You could text yourself, compose and send an email to yourself, or create a note. Of course, you could also use the voice memo function. I stay away from this because I don’t like to listen to the sound of my own voice.

Once done with the walk, you can sit down to compose the draft in your habitual way. While it would be easy to copy and paste if you’ve used a smart phone to record your lines in text, I do advocate for re-typing (while speaking the lines aloud), as another way of revisiting and revising as you go.

*Sometimes, you will need to walk a path on several occasions before any words will come. Sometimes, your body needs to learn the route so that your brain doesn’t have to make decisions.

Jul

2017

Process Notes: The Dolorist Confesses

83º at almost noon ~ no heat index! window open, cicadas doing their thing, home construction noises in the background, the sun delightful & no threat

∞

With lots of busy work under my belt, work for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference mostly, but also some recording of rejections from recent poem submissions, followed by sending out the poems anew, I have turned back to a focus on writing new poems. Lately, I’ve gotten back into the habit of walking, perhaps the writer’s best physical support system. All through history, in both the West and the East, great writers have recorded the connection between walking and writing, and I’ve seen that connection at work in my own past many times. It’s great to be returning to an activity that sparks new poems. (I should note that the spark only works for me if I’m walking without listening to any kind of music, NPR, or audio books. It works when I simply walk and observe, listening to the world around me.)

Because of this recent return to walking, I’ve had several lines rattling around in my head. I knew these lines were the beginning of a political poem, one that, again, records just how exhausting it is to be woke. However, once I put the lines down in my journal and then in the computer, I knew the poem wasn’t finished. It hadn’t accrued that critical mass necessary for survival. This time, I turned to a trusted friend and sent the “wee draft” for a diagnosis. Said friend hit the nail on the head and gave me awesome advice for coming back to the poem in the future. Thanks, friend!

In the meantime, with those lines out of my head and off in the world, I started re-reading (Laynie Browne’s The Scented Fox) and word-gathering. Normally, this sparks lines to form. Instead, it sparked me to remember a thought I’d had while walking this morning. I was thinking about a letter that I needed to write and about how I went into a minor depression at the beginning of the summer, a depression I’m working myself out of thanks, in part, to walking. So, I set down the lines I’d imagined including in the letter.

It wasn’t a lack of funds that kept me
but a lack of fortitude, of fiber.

The poem evolved in couplets today (my native form), and at first the poem was titled after a phrase from Browne’s book. After the poem showed me where it needed to go, that title no longer fit. I cast about. I scrambled. I came up with “The Dolorist Confesses,” but I’m not super happy with it.

Also, I had the poem laid out in three parts with subheadings. However, with only three couplets per section, the headings quickly proved to be too heavy. Then, when I got to the last “section,” I realized that the real ending would need four couplets instead of three. The three sections announced the onset of the depression, described what happened to my body because of it, and then detailed how I started pulling myself up out of it. Now, they are simply one poem made up of ten couplets, still covering the same content. I did use several of the words I’d gathered from Browne’s book, but much of the energy of the poem came from the initial phrase I’d constructed while walking.

Here’s to breathable air and the time to stretch my legs (and mind) in it.

Jul

2017

Braided Calculations: An Update on the 20 x 20 Project

92º feels like 102º ~ the sun will not quit, neither will the cicadas, no rain in over a week, heat advisory in place until the weekend, have been out walking in the evenings, body adapting

∞

Just now, I met one of my major summer goals, and I am chair-dancing & singing Wahooooooooozas! Those familiar with this blog will know that I spent last summer working on a collage / poetry hybrid collection, which I called 20 x 20: A Self-Ekphrasis. In February, I reported that the project was complete. Over the past year, I sent out a handful of pieces to a few journals I thought would be receptive and able to handle the art-text duo. However, for this summer my goal was to organize the pieces into a manuscript and to send a complete book out. I was delighted to learn that Pleiades Press now has a Visual Poetry Series, and their reading period is in the summer. While I would have eventually completed the process of getting the manuscript together regardless, the extra motivation of having a target press in the middle of its reading period gave me the last boost of energy I needed to succeed right now.

Over the last few days, I returned to the work; I spent several days reading (and by reading, I include the “reading” of the collages alongside the text of the poems). Then, I had to struggle with ordering the collection. I was so lucky with Alchemy, with its built in narrative. With this collection, I was back to the mix-tape method. This required sitting with the pieces and listening to how they spoke to each other, then creating a first stab at the order to try and suss out what overall story it would tell. After letting that sit for a couple of days, I went back, listened some more and made some radical changes. I read again and this time, a better idea formed in my mind. The collection held together based on three threads: family debt, the delicacy and strength of specific parts of the body, and women’s issues (coming of age esp.).

With the order in hand, I created a single Word file and created the table of contents; however, I was stymied by that one major necessity, a title. All year I’ve been calling the project 20 x 20: A Self-Exphrasis; however, once I gathered all the pieces together I realized that this title did not do justice to the major themes of the book. It makes sense that I used this title in the past because I was searching for new themes and new obsessions. Finding a title for the whole collection will be the end of that search. I shifted to future tense because for the sake of sending in the manuscript, I settled on the title Braided Calculations, which is a title from one of the poems in the book. I’m not 100% sold on this as a title, but it is close enough for putting the work in front of an editor. After all, many publishers ask for title changes along the way.

Finally, I had to learn some more about technology. The finished PDF was a huge file, and Pleiades had addressed this in their guidelines, asking submitters to use smaller files, even sacrificing quality of images, knowing that high resolution files would be requested for any accepted books. Seeing as I’m a learn-as-you-go kind of person, I had to figure out how to compress a PDF (without using a .zip file, which the submission program wouldn’t accept). Luckily, I have good friends with better skills than mine. Writer-colleague-friend, Jennie Case, came to the rescue to teach me about smallpdf.com, et voilà. Thanks, Jennie!

Moments before starting this post, I uploaded all the necessities and clicked “submit.” Wahoooooooooooooza!

Jul

2017

On the Importance of Being Vulnerable

87º feels like 96º ~ removed from the excessive heat advisory b/c index won’t go over 100º, perhaps I’ll need my sweater

∞

I’m thinking today about vulnerability and how I’ve been conditioned not to show it. When confronted with a problem, or a task at work, I’ve always put my shoulder to the boulder and persevered without question, without too much complaint, and definitely without asking for help. This behavior has been reinforced because I’m often praised for my results, which are largely based on sweat, stress, and unwavering persistence. I’ve been heard to say, “Failure is not an option,” a commonly heralded, proto-American trait. And, yes, it is good to succeed, but over and over, I’m learning that I need not bear all the weight in completing every project for work or home.

In fact, in my attempt to appear “practically perfect in every way,” à la Mary Poppins, I’m actually failing myself. Because I have feared being seen as weak and vulnerable, when a project has stymied me or has required more time than I actually have, I have refused to ask for help. I have, instead, sweated it out and found a way to solve the problem at hand, often doing work that would more easily be done by others. For example, I have been known to try to learn a whole new design program overnight rather than admit my flyer-making skills are, well, fledgling at best. Dare I claim that my gender contributes to this fear? I dare. Coming of age in the 80s, I was acutely aware that women who wanted to have it all must never admit vulnerability. (And who would not want to have it all?) I understood early that my job was to prove I could do everything a man could do, but, à la Ginger Rogers, “backwards and in high heels.”

What does this have to do with poetry? Time. Energy. A quiet mind. Writing takes all three; attempting to conquer every other task set before me by my job and my household consumes all three. Because I was determined to be seen as a success at work, this past academic year I gave nearly all of my being to completing work goals. I wrote only a few new drafts, sent out very few poems, and read very little poetry outside of course texts. By May, I knew this behavior was unsustainable, and I’ve spent much of the summer working on positive steps forward.

Recently, I woke up to the fact that I don’t have to do it all alone. I began asking for help. I began exposing what I saw as my own vulnerabilities, and no one blinked an eye. Instead, they answered, and they helped. I recovered some time, some energy, and glimpses of a quieter mind.

I learn, but slowly, that I will always be a student, even as I stand in the classroom as the professor. In the classroom, I ask my students to be vulnerable over and over; I remind them that there are no silly questions, that all rough drafts are messy, that I am there to help. I offer them handouts on campus resources for the problems they experience beyond creative writing. I encourage them to form support networks among themselves. I ask them to fail on the page over and over. Yet, I have refused to admit my own vulnerability so often in all the realms outside of my writing practice (there, I fail spectacularly and accept it). Let’s face it, I have been scared of being exposed as a fraud because the models of success held up by our society rarely admit to their own vulnerabilities.

All of this is to say that I feel a bit of a breakthrough, and I hope to continue to practice asking for help, to continue sharing the workload when appropriate, and to continue experiencing these benefits.

Triage

At Long Last

Is There Room for Poems like this Today?

September 2017: An Accounting

Drafting, Submitting, Keeping Up with Journals

The Hardest Part is Letting Go … of Unpublished Poems

How to Write a Poem While Walking

Process Notes: The Dolorist Confesses

Braided Calculations: An Update on the 20 x 20 Project

On the Importance of Being Vulnerable

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