50º ~ bright, clean sun after a squall line of thunderstorms ushered in a cold front last evening, a bit of wind leftover yet

Last night was our third and final event in the Big Rock Reading Series for the semester.  We had a smallish crowd, but a wonderful event.  I’ll spend the next few weeks mulling over some of the information gathered and lessons learned, but I wanted to share a bit that’s surfaced already.

It’s all about the audience.  Of course, I want to hear the readers no matter how many people are in the audience, but now that I’m in charge of planning the events, I feel an extra pressure to be sure there are others there to share the joy.

In particular, since we are a community college, we are trying to reach a group of students who often don’t even know what a reading is before we bring it up in class.  We do an audience survey at each event, and the participants identify whether they are students, faculty, staff, from another college/university, or from the community at large.  In this way, we can zero in on responses from our students.  Overwhelmingly, the students who do attend have wonderful things to say, often including a comment about this being their first time at such an event and their desire to hear more.

When I began planning the series, I scheduled each of the events for this fall on a Tuesday night, the second Tuesday of each month to be exact.  I was following the footsteps of a lot of other monthly activities in the area, thinking to build a sort of muscle memory.  However, this backfired a bit last night.  You see, we have had classes come and attend the two previous readings, and that was great.  However, it is hard for any instructor to give up three evening classes (or parts of them) over the course of one semester.  I’m pretty sure using a Tuesday and a Thursday next spring will serve us better.  We are also considering doing one daytime event, which will draw in participation from those daytime classes. This kind of shifting of the schedule goes against my experience with other reading series, but it is important to be flexible and adaptable, as is the case with most things in life.

Of course, we are also striving to build a relationship with our community, central Arkansas, and the lovers of literature living here.  I know they are out there.  Here is where our location hurts us a bit, I think.  We are not hard to find, but we are a bit isolated perhaps, surrounded almost entirely by homes and apartments.  It is not like going to a reading at a bookstore or at one of the other colleges in the area, where there are restaurants, shops, and bars in abundance within a stone’s throw.  One suggestion has already been made to form a partnership with either the local library, which is more centrally located, or another business and do one of the readings per semester off campus.  That is something to think about as a way to bridge the gap.

Overall, while the series requires time, sweat, and a lot of help from a lot of other people, I’m so happy that we have launched ours to such success, and I hope we can grow and improve in the coming months.

Finally, here is a shot from last night.  The reading featured two current MFA candidates from the U of Arkansas MFA program.  We are hoping to do one reading per year with the program as a way of offering a reading experience to the writers and to educate our students about the ways they can make writing a part of their lives.  Corrie Williamson read some amazing poems that left the crowd breathless.  Then, Kaj Anderson-Bauer kept us enthralled with a story about an imagined afterlife set in a place a lot like North Dakota.  Ben Nickol, a recent fiction graduate from the U of A came along to cheer on Corrie & Kaj.  I love my people!

L to R: Ben Nickol, Corrie Williamson, & Kaj Anderson-Bauer

57º ~ 75º highs in the forecast for today and tomorrow, then a cold front brings us back in line

I understand all of the arguments for daylight savings time and moving clocks back and forth.  What I know is that it was easier to wake up at the right time today because the sky was lightening again when the alarm went off, after weeks of darkness.  It does make me wonder how much exhaustion occurs from forcing the body to live outside of the sun’s own time. 

It’s that time of the semester (week 12 begins today) when we are all just putting one foot in front of the other, clinging to every holiday advertisement, not for the joy of gift-giving and mouth-stuffing, but because once the holidays hit, we know it will all be over.  We are at that point in the marathon when the body is all machine and the brain something we drag along behind us.

Yes, there are papers waiting to be graded.  Yes, I took the day off yesterday.  It was necessary.

On a bright note (hello daylight!), tomorrow night we cap off the Big Rock Reading Series for the semester.  Wahoooo!

50º ~ the autumnal blusters are upon us, complete with gray hovering skies

The story of today’s draft is convoluted.  Wednesday night, I fought the insomnia beast at 2 a.m. and my mind went wandering to my sickly speaker.  Caught in the lethargy of exhaustion, I failed to get out of bed and write down what was happening, but I remembered it well enough Thursday and had it at the back of my mind this morning.

What happened in the night was this.  The speaker started talking about how “the woman [she] called mother by mistake” came to visit her.  The poem spun out from there.  As I was getting ready to write this morning, I started with that, but something about the situation kept bugging me.  Finally, I pulled out the draft from last week and took a look.  Sure enough, there was a kind of separation in that draft and a sense that this woman would not be visiting, even though she is the person who admitted the speaker to this hospital/asylum.  There is also a sense that the doctors (whitecoats in the speaker’s language) want to get blood from the woman in the mistaken sense that she and the speaker are related.  The speaker feels a need to protect her, this pseudo-mother. 

So, I scratched that beginning and started over with the idea of the pseudo-mother, for lack of a better title, sending anonymous gifts to the sickly speaker, anonymous to remain hidden from the whitecoats.  What struck me about all of this is that writing a series of linked poems like this means I have to take some elements of fiction into account in terms of plot and character if I want them to hold together as a whole, and I think I do. 

More and more, the speaker wants an audience, and some of the earlier poems take the epistolary form to solve this.  Today, I needed for her to be able to tell someone about these gifts, so she writes a letter to “Dear Madame,” her mentor, which is where the whole series began back in August.  Today’s draft begins:

Dear Madame—

Be on your guard.  There are secrets here
which I will seal with glue & string.

The woman I called mother by mistake
sends me gifts addressed by an anonymous hand.

For clarity, the mentor-figure and the mother-figure are two separate women, and while I first thought that only the mentor-figure was of great importance to the speaker, I now see that the mother-figure is, perhaps, equally important. 

As for the process of the draft, after I scratched out the false start, I did turn back to Lucie Brock-Broido for some word gathering.  However, I’ve switched to Trouble in Mind.  I didn’t need to gather as many words this time, but I did still go through and look for a title. The phrase “We live in black & white” comes from her poem “Physicism.”  This worked for the draft given the correspondence by letters and the fact that one of the gifts the speaker receives is a series of photos, and while they aren’t mentioned to be black & white photos in the poem, they could be. 

46º~ gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous: repeat until tired of sweet sun that doesn’t broil and blue skies that go all the way up

Today, I have some poetry I’ve fallen in love with to share with you.  Say what you will about online journals, I love them.  I love the ease with which I can share the work I love, and yes, I’m always careful to include attribution; I am, if nothing else, a teacher of composition and research skills through and through.

~~~~~

First, the most excellent poet Carolyn Guinzio (a friend of mine) and Stephenie Foster (new to me) have started a journal for women poets and artists: Yew: A Journal of Innovative Writing and Images by Women.  While my style remains a bit more mainstream, I have been inspired by the first issue (3 pieces per month, 12 months a year…cool!).  Check out work by Laynie Browne, Andrea Baker, and Doro Boehme.  To top things off, I LOVE their logo.

~~~~~

Next, another Browne poet, this time Susan Browne, whose poem “Too Poetic” is up this week at Linebreak, another favorite online journal.  Check out this gorgeous poem that includes this nugget:

“I won’t say a thing about the V of geese rising
above the chain-link fence, their calls

sounding exactly like nuns keening….”

~~~~~

Last, here’s a poem from Heidi Lynn Staples, “Things Between Themselves,” distributed by Poets.org in their email daily dose of poetry.  I can’t quote from this one because the lines I want to quote are the closing couplet and you really need to read your way down to them to get the full THWACK as they knock you backwards off your chair.

42º ~ near perfect weather predicted all week, highs around 70º, a little rain perhaps midweek, ahhhh autumn in Arkansas, what we wait for during the broiling months

This morning I have a little poetry news to report and then an explanation, of sorts, about my apathy for Halloween.

First, I spent my writing time this weekend polishing off the fellowship application I wrote about a week and a half ago.  Wow, time slips by so quickly.  I’m glad I started early.  The deadline for this opportunity is November 15th, but I try to practice what I preach with my students and avoid the procrastination blues.  I’m glad I did, since letting the draft sit for 10 days and then overnight after revisions on Friday, showed me two typos on Saturday morning, both missing words.  It really is true that when you read over something you’ve written, your brain fills in the blanks.  For me, I have to read out loud and sssslllllloooooooowwwwwwllllly to discover my errors.  My students can attest that I sometimes don’t take this kind of time with assignment details!  So, on Saturday morning, I did the final touch-ups and then hit ‘send.’  I LOVE being able to apply and submit online, saving me time for the real work of the writer, reading, writing, and revising.

Second, I have a new poem out today in Waccamaw, Dan Albergotti’s fabulous journal.  You can read “Cautionary Tale of Girls and Birds of Prey” along with many other fine poems and some great fiction, essays, and interviews as well. Check it out!

And third, a brief explanation of why I don’t like Halloween.  The costumes.  It’s all about the costumes.  When you are a creative type, people expect great things from you on Halloween.  If you doubt me, just cruise through the blogosphere or over to Facebook and check out the pictures posted from Halloween parties that occurred this weekend.  The costumes are amazing and witty and intricate and unique.  I just don’t have it in me.  I think this may also be linked to my avoidance of performing in any type of theater production.  My creativity just doesn’t extend to ‘becoming someone / something else’ in the flesh and I always feel heaps of self-judgment when I try.  No, I’m more comfortable staying at home and dishing out the candy to the munchkins.  That’s where you’ll find me tonight. 

by Joe Lercio, via creativecommons.org

Boo!

46º ~ some grayness to the beginning of this day, leftover clouds from yesterday’s rain should clear shortly, the intensity of autumn is upon us, wearing new thick flanneled pants and a sweatshirt, the electric heater kicks on and off

Wow!  I’m thrilled with today’s draft process, Dear Reader.  (I confess, a crowing opening like this scares the humble Midwesterner within.)  Still, it was a breakthrough kind of day.

As I puttered through my morning routine and saw C. out the door, I was thinking of drafting and thinking of my sickly speaker, wondering if she had more to say.  Yes, indeed.  As I waited for the coffee to brew I started wondering how the speaker wound up in the hospital/asylum where she now lives.  Hmmmmmmm.  Then, shazam.  I had a line:  “My mother brought me here.”

I ran into the office to jot it down in the journal, and as I wrote, I realized that the speaker doesn’t have a mother.  (Just that instant knowledge about the character rang true.)  And I remembered a poem I wrote a while back, “Body Sewn Together with Twine and a Dull Needle,” which appears in The Collagist.  In that poem the speaker talks about “a woman [she] called mother by mistake,” and I knew I had my answer.

The opening of the draft now looks like this:

A woman I called mother by mistake
brought me here when the fever

made me shiver even in a scalding bath.
The water lapped the edges, spilled …

Slowly, it has been dawning on me that while this series about the sickly speaker began in August, I have, in fact, written several precursor poems pointing in this direction.  The above mentioned poem in The Collagist is one.  Another is “Lament at the End of a Long Convalescence” recently published by Connotation Press.  This makes me wonder if there are others.  I will have to review some older material and see.

Now, I arrived at the “whole draft” pretty quickly today, and the breakthrough was that I didn’t rely on a word bank or reading to get inspiration.  Once I had that spark while standing in front of the coffee maker, I was on my way.  It was interesting, though, I did keep reminding myself to use the dense, rich, intricate language of Lucie Brock-Broido, and to keep reaching for the truth about the speaker.  The poem took a few wrong turns, but I think I was able to identify them fairly well.  Time will tell, of course.

When it came time for a title, I tried to come up with one on my own to no avail.  Since I’ve made the practice of using bits of lines from others (mostly L B-B), the titles all have a similar feel.  I tried on several of my own making and was not happy.  Going back through my notes, I realized that I had used Rilke’s Poems from the Book of Hours once and I returned to it.  After much searching, I finally seized on a line from “Put out my eyes, and I can see you still,” “and tongueless, I can conjure you at will.”  Rilke’s book is a meditation in conversation with God, which actually works fairly well with my speaker, even though she is not concerned with God.  She is, however, in conversation with people who are not with her, so the meditative quality and the lack of response parallels Rilke.  In any case, I changed the line a bit and came up with this:  “Tongueless, I Conjure Her at Will.”

I do have one worry about the draft.  As many readers know, there are previous drafts in which the speaker communicates with her mentor, who is a woman.  Right now, I see that mentor as distinctly different from this new woman who has entered the narrative.  Given that I’m not naming anyone, if this “pseudo-mother” remains, I may have to work to distinguish the two.  This is also problematic because they aren’t with the speaker, so their own voices aren’t present and distinct.  Hmmmmmm.

Oh, and there are chrysanthemums in the poem, so I thought I’d show you all a picture of the mums I planted a few weeks ago.  Here is a moment when my life helped with my art.  After I planted the mums and the blooms all opened beautifully, I couldn’t resist running my hand over the flowers.  When I brought my hand away, I smelled the scent of the mums on my fingers and was amazed at the intensity.  I had either forgotten their smell or never taken the time to notice it before.  In a totally organic way, the flowers and their scent fit perfectly into today’s draft, and if I hadn’t taken that moment in the sun with those blooms, it might not have happened.  Wow!

Until the next time, be happy, be well.

55º ~ the high today only 57º, always struck by those days when the temperature begins near its high and sinks, rain in the offing, ‘spooky’ weather

Yesterday, I was not at the desk of the Kangaroo because I was ‘pounding the pavement for poetry’ as I told my boss.  One of my goals at school for this year has been to increase our creative writing program. 

These are not my feet.  Courtesy of creativecommons.org

 Program may not be the best word here, since we are a community college and do not have an official program in creative writing per se.  However, our school has grown in leaps and bounds in terms of numbers enrolled and we have about a 70% base of students who plan to transfer to one of our state’s four-year institutions.  Creative writing fits into their plan as a humanities elective that will help them in that transfer.  However, many of our students have had little experience with creative writing and are unaware of what an introductory workshop class entails.  I really believe that a lack of knowledge leads many of them to choose Intro to Music, Intro to Theatre, Intro to Visual Arts, etc. instead of Creative Writing I.  Notice that even the title of the class is “different.”  (Caveat:  I love all of those other intro classes and mean no disrespect!)

Our entire division (fine arts & humanities) set out on a quest to increase our visibility on campus last year (2010 – 2011) and to increase the knowledge among students about the electives we offer.  With the transient population of a community college what this means is an on-going information blitz.

In doing my part yesterday, I went to the different ENGL classes (Comp I, Comp II, and World Lit) being offered on MWF between 9 and noon to spread the word about my offerings for spring 2012.  I’m on the schedule to teach Intro to Poetry and Creative Writing I on MWF, and I want those classes to make.  If history is any indicator, the creative writing class should be fine; however, we need to get some buzz going about the Intro to Poetry course.  I taught it online last spring and had a great time but want to see if we can make it work as an on campus class as well.  Technically, this is an ‘academic’ course involving the study of poetics and including a research paper; however, I also allow students to workshop their own work if they would like.

It was fun to get to pitch the classes, and I am thankful my boss groups all the ENGL classes on the same floor of the same building so I wasn’t running up and down the stairs/hills of campus.  As one might expect from gen-ed classes, the majority of the students were underwhelmed by my presentation.  Yet…yet, in each group there were those two or three people whose eyes lit up, whose body language changed, whose hands reached up for the offered fliers I brought.  All this makes me eager to see what waits for me in the spring!

And tomorrow, I have a blissfully clear calendar for drafting day!  Wahoo!

54º ~ amazing fog cover out there this morning, shrouded leaves and gray light

I had an amazing time in Fayetteville Saturday night at the Improved Lighting Reading Series, held at Nightbird Books on Dickson Street.  I was fortunate to read with three other lovely & amazing writers:  Tony Presley, Amanda Auchter, and Mark Spitzer. 

Matt & Kaveh, co-founders of the series

Amanda

surprise visit from beautiful niece Katie!

Tony not only writes, he sings & plays, too!

Matt puts a hex on the crowd

Matt introduces me

me (thanks Laura!)

Mark

45º ~ beautiful slanting light, harder to get out of bed in the mornings as the sun rises later and later, a gentle teasing of the leaves all there is to show for wind

This morning as I puttered through my habits, I kept the idea of drafting a poem at the forefront of my mind.  I mulled over my sickly speaker, trying to find out if she had more to say.  As I mulled I realized that to continue working with the same speaker, there would need to be some new development in her situation.  I also realized that, eventually, she would have to get better or die, I suppose. 

This brought up the fact of Lou-Lou’s death a few week’s ago.  Some of you may remember that these poems began in response to all of our trips to the vet these past few months, translating from veterinary medicine into human medicine as a way of working through. 

So, I was wondering about death and my speaker, and it dawned on me that someone could die in the same institution and she could comment on it.

Having done all of this pre-thinking, meant that my normal word gathering business was skewed a bit.  I did read some Lucie Brock-Broido, but this time, just the notes section from The Master Letters, and I did collect some words.  However, since I knew what direction I wanted the poem to go, the words suggested lines much earlier in the process, so I gathered fewer words than usual.  Given this shift in process, the poem came out much more sporadically and involved much more crossing out of lines.

I find this interesting and am trying not to judge which is the ‘better’ process.

As I drafted, I began with the death of a woman down the hall from the speaker.  This morphed into the woman in the next room, and finally, came to rest with the death of the woman housed in the speaker’s room before her, her “pretty predecessor” as she says int he draft.  The poem, in couplets again, begins:

Another woman kept this room before me,
I am sure.  There is a husk of her temper yet

that rides the air.  When I breathe in the burnt
remains, a strengthening returns.  Rest assured,

A glass-making furnace in lieu of a crematorium, click for link

With this draft, I did not have a title pre-selected from a line from a L. B-B. poem.  Instead, the poem took several twists and turns (a few of them wrong and needing correction) as the relationship between the speaker and her predecessor developed.  Here, I had to struggle against “The Yellow Wallpaper” again, as I didn’t want to repeat Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s amazing work.  Still, that story is embedded in my DNA (a result of repetitive teaching), so it bubbles up into my work. 

Once I had the draft in some form with what I felt had an opening, middle, and closing, I turned back to L. B-B. in search of a title.  Since I’ve titled the first dozen poems in this way, I felt compelled to do so again.  In “Rampion” (mentioned last week), I found the line “One day I will be buried with the ashes of my familiars.”  I cut that down to “The Ashes of My Familiar,” and hopefully the poem will show that the familiar is not of the animal variety but the human one.  Still, I think I may have zeroed in on that line as a result of Lou-Lou’s death and cremation.  That is how my life finds its way into my art.  So be it.

45º ~ our highs won’t get out of the 50s today ~ heat on briefly this morning, A/C on two days ago ~ bright sun today after the day and a half of rain & clouds ~ the world cleansed

What I’ve been doing this morning is probably my least favorite activity of being a poet, even beneath recording rejections.  Today, I’ve been working on a fellowship application; in other words, I’m about to ask the world for money to help support my art. 

This particular fellowship is open to writers of any genre and it has caused me to really think about the position of poets in practical terms.  For one thing, the application asks about advances received.  Ahem, Billy Collins, Rita Dove, etc., …  probably not applying for this fellowship.  Still, the question applies for the prose writers out there applying.  For this question, I crafted an answer about why such a thing doesn’t exist for most poets. 

In crafting that answer, I realized that in my day-to-day poetry life I am doing the work of both the artist and the agent.  “Well, duh!” you might say.  Of course, I’ve known this forever; however, today, I had to quantify what I do with my time.  Do you know how long it takes to submit one’s work to publishers?  I spent four hours going through submission guidelines and preparing my manuscript/letter/check/SASE/etc. on Sunday.  On Monday, I spent 20 minutes at the Post Office getting the packets mailed out (including wait time in line).  Add to this the time spent sending out individual poems.  It adds up quickly. 

While I know that an agent isn’t the ‘magic bullet,’ and I do acknowledge that prose writers have to court editors and research the market as well, not to mention going through the torturous process of landing an agent in the first place, I do think the poets are at a disadvantage here. 

Granted, no agent will work for free, and the whole system is based on advances and royalties, neither of which I know much about, unless you count the nominal prize attached with Blood Almanac‘s publication.  So, I’m not advocating to change the system, just to acknowledge it.

In the meantime, the application also asks for the normal stuff: bio, details of the work, financial situation & use of funds, reviews of past work, sample of current work, CV, etc. 

I’ve just spent a good half hour updating my CV.  Luckily, I do a pretty good job of keeping the list of publications up to date, as I’ve developed a habit of including updating my CV when I record acceptances and when the work is published; however, there are lots of things that have happened in the last six months that I hadn’t included:  creating the Big Rock Reading Series, taking over managing editor duties for a student magazine on campus, reading here & there, etc.  Whew. 

Finally, there is the general sense of discomfort of blowing one’s own horn that follows the whole process.  The application requires one to jump up and down, shouting “HERE I AM! HERE I AM! I AM WORTHY OF YOUR PATRONAGE! PLEASE, SIR, I WANT SOME MORE!” (Money that is, not porridge.) 

Mark Lester as Oliver Twist

This, my friends, is hard and perhaps harder for having to claim that what I do is worthy of financial support, which is not a message poets receive from the world that often.