Life is cluttered right now, but I try to keep my poet brain engaged by observing the world. These images may become fodder for later work. Here are two from yesterday. Sorry about the size, no time to download and adjust.
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| surprise lilies are my favorite |
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| this bee wanted to read from The Lorax at our Banned Books Week reading |
I was eager to return to the desk today, to set aside all the clutter and muck of day-to-day life and just be in a world of words and my imagination. Of course, I’m not good at completely divorcing myself from my life (thus there is a bit of autobiography in nearly everything I write, but just a bit, don’t be saying the speaker of my poems is me, please). Therefore, today’s draft continues with the sickly speaker and is informed both by my recent battle with sinus infection / head cold and Lou-Lou’s seeming relapse that is puzzling the vets. (Yes, that is plural. There are three doctors on her case. We are lucky!)
Here is how I prepared to clear my mind, to make a path for poetry.
With the desk clear and Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid on the iTunes, I sat down with Camille Dungy’s books. I bought her two most recent volumes at the reading I attended: Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press) and Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press).
I’ve really fallen in love with my current draft process. Read and collect words haphazardly in the journal. Read and collect lines that hint at titles that might work for my sickly speaker. Let the title and the word bank coalesce into the beginning of a draft. Knock on wood, it hasn’t let me down yet. Today, I added a new twist. As I collected the words I started adding arrows and circling two words together that jumped out at me. My journal page is a lovely mess.
I started with Dungy’s Suck on the Marrow but put it aside as the subject matter is the terrible history of slavery and much of the language is so charged with that history that I was having trouble divorcing individual words of that charge. This is not a slight on the book at all, and I look forward to reading it for its own sake very soon. Smith Blue, while still quite political, is a book of conservation, recording what is being lost in our world due to climate change, war, and the other devastations we visit upon ourselves.
In fact, that word “devastation” is part of the line that led to the title of the poem. I read the first few poems and gathered words at a furious pace. Then, in the poem “Daisy Cutter,” I found this line “You taught me devastation / … .” Dungy’s sentence continues, but I was caught by just those four words and I made them the title of the draft: “You Taught Me Devastation.” It begins:
Madam, it is your skill set to which I cling.
Most ingloriously, I confess.
Again, the poem is drafted in couplets. They seem to fit this speaker’s voice so perfectly. I hope I’m not missing an opportunity by sticking with them so much, but time will tell. This speaker is a bit disjointed and abrupt. She makes associative leaps, and the brevity of couplets works for that.
So, this is what the desk looks like after the process is over and the draft as a whole has been printed. Yes, Lou-Lou insisted on “helping” me from start to finish today, although now that the process is over, she has disappeared. Muse anyone?
As always, thanks for reading. Knowing someone is out there, wondering if I drafted on Friday, helps.
Life has been fast and furious and a bit stressful these days. Lots and lots going on with school and I received papers from all of my students on Monday. In the meantime, Lou-Lou’s blood work is not good and we continue to go through testing to find a better approach to her treatment. My own health is nearly back to normal after a three-week stint of sinus infection / serious head & chest cold. All of this is not to whine but to set the scene.
There were three or four literary events in central Arkansas last night. I’m not sure why this happens but it seems to happen at least once a semester when people at different institutions all decide one day is the perfect day for their reading/performance. I had narrowed my choices to Kevin Brockmeier reading just down the street at UALR or Camille Dungy reading downtown. Then, all of this other stuff seemed to get in the way and I was ready to say ‘uncle’ and just sit on the couch. Somehow, I rallied in the afternoon and made my decision. I am soooooooo glad I did, as the night uplifted me and energized me in a way that only literature can.
I chose to attend Camille Dungy’s reading in part because I’ve seen Kevin read several times and I know I’ll have other chances to hear him because he lives here in Little Rock. If he ever comes to a town near you, do yourself a favor and go hear him. He’s an amazing fiction writer and a great reader.
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| Wish my author photo was this glam! |
I had heard Dungy read at AWP as part of a panel in the past, so I knew I was in for a great night. Dungy came to Little Rock as part of the Poets House “Language of Conservation” program. We were so lucky to have our zoo chosen as one of five across the country to be funded for poetry installations (Joseph Bruchac was our curator for the project and each poet-curator traveled to the other cities to give readings at the various libraries). While Dungy is the author of three books of her own poetry, she is also the editor of Black Nature, an anthology of poetry that explores nature writing by African-American poets.
I loved Dungy’s set list. She began with a poem from her first book What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (which just may be the best damn title ever). Then she read a few poems from the anthology: Lucille Clifton (may she rest in peace), Ishmael Reed, Marylin Nelson. Then, a few poems from Dungy’s most recent collection Smith Blue, an amazing book from Southern Illinois University Press, one of my all-time favorite poetry publishers: “The Blue,” “On the Rocks,” and “On Ice.” Then back to the anthology: George Marion McClellan and Arna Bontemps, two poets new to me whom I plan to find out more about, especially Bontemps. On to Dungy’s own Suck on the Marrow (she is awesome at book titles!) for “Aspire” and “Survival.” Then the anthology for Robert Haydn (favorite!!!), Gerald Barrax, Sr. and Anne Spencer, another I really need to find out more about. Dungy concluded with two of her own poems “What a Snakehead Discovered in a Maryland Pond and a Poet in Corporate American Have in Common” and “How She Keeps Faith.”
Yes, I was scribbling furiously to get this all down, but I was able to stop and absorb the poetry, too. Dungy is an AMAZING reader. She gives each word its due. No rush, no fuss. Pure love of language embodied at the podium.
I found myself intrigued by her comments regarding black nature poetry. She pointed out that for African Americans, a relationship with nature is not one of the Romantic ideal. It involves a tie to having once been considered property and a part of nature itself. It involves a tie to toil. That was the word she used, ‘toil.’ And this set me to thinking about my own relationship to nature in my work. As a lot of my poetry is based in the landscape of the rural Midwest and the agriculture that includes, I realized that the word ‘toil’ rang true for me as well, although certainly not to the extent of an African-American history with slavery. Still, when you grow up around working farmers, there is a love of the land and a respect for the natural world, at the same time one is fighting against the elements as well.
I also loved what Dungy had to say about being a nature writer. She said that to do so one has to observe closely, that it is a matter of what we look at and how we look. So, when she was on a cruise in the Antarctic to mark her father’s retirement, Dungy watched and watched and wrote observations of everything. She was able to see that this land of ice of “millennia on millennia of cold” was melting. She was able to see that the penguins in Antarctica were being plagued by ticks that should have died off due to cold but were now thriving in warmer temperatures. Then, she was able to take all of the political and emotional importance of those observations and weave it into her poems.
I’m still stunned.
Here is the beginning of “Survival” from Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010)
If you don’t own one of Dungy’s books, then go out and remedy that as soon as you have enough change in the cookie jar to do so!
Finally, I was so happy to see two former students in the audience, both of whom attended the Big Rock Reading Series last week. Talk about growing a community! Jessica Otto was once a student of mine at the Arkansas Governor’s School back in the day. Toby Daughtery was a more recent student of mine at PTC and I’ve written about his inspirational story before. I was so happy to see them both in the room! (Sorry y’all, the pics we took didn’t work out. Next time!)
Many, many thanks to Camille Dungy for coming to Little Rock and sharing her work. Her reading was just what this weary soul needed.
65º ~ massive thunderstorm last night, beautiful dangerous lightning and house-rattling thunder, everything sopping wet as the sun begins to rise through cloudy skies
This post is in response to Kristin‘s request on last Thursday’s post.
As most of you know, through the help and support of many of my friends and colleagues, we launched the Big Rock Reading Series at Pulaski Tech last week. Here’s the story of how it all came together, in a perhaps disjointed tale.
Backstory
Pulaski Tech, where I teach, is a growing community college. In fact, we just moved up one notch to become the fourth largest institution of higher education in Arkansas, with 11,900 and some students. For my first five years on campus, I served on the library committee, and through that committee, we were able to host several readings. I mention these events because they helped teach me all that goes into putting on a great event, which, for me, involves an incredible amount of planning and coordinating with other offices on campus. I also mention these events because the data on attendance and the written feedback we received from each was key to floating an organized reading series by the administration. We were able to demonstrate a need and we knew what would be needed in terms of resources.
Speaking of resources, I also learned a lot about how to do this on a shoestring by attending a panel discussion at AWP in DC. That panel featured writer-instructors from a variety of community colleges who hosted reading series and other literary events with almost no budgets. The key component I learned about: setting up a foundation fund and running the series on donations. While we can’t pay our readers a huge honorarium and we can’t offer travel expenses, I would not ask someone to come and read for free. With a couple of anchor donations and then many smaller ones, we are able to pay our writers a very modest honorarium and in the case of Alison Pelegrin who will be driving up to read for us, we will take care of her hotel stay. By creating the reading series at PTC, we are able to use resources like the PR/Marketing office to create promotion and get out press releases. This has been INVALUABLE!
So, how does one create a reading series?
Preparation, preparation, preparation.
Secure a venue & date and get the details in writing. Think about all the details: size, seating, accessibility, lighting, mic/speakers, parking, if there will be a cover charge, etc.
Contact writers well in advance and let them know upfront the details in terms of location, pay, expected audience size, and if books will be sold how and by whom. Get the details in writing and be sure to get good contact information in case of emergencies. One new twist we weren’t expecting was video rights. We taped the event for students who couldn’t attend and to have as an archive, but our authors alerted us to the fact that some publishers require permission for publishing videos (especially on YouTube). For future events, we will be getting written permission in advance for video postings.
If you will be setting up a donation fund, start asking for donations as early as possible. Again, we used our Foundation office on campus, so I don’t know the legal details of this if you plan an independent series.
Promotion, promotion, promotion.
With the date/time/location/author(s) secured the time for promotion begins. We had a three-pronged system. One: flyers & posters to promote the reading on our campuses and at local libraries/bookstores. Two: email blasts (collected the email list at previous readings and by going online and collecting addresses for English faculty from institutions in the area). Three: press release to the local media (we were fortunate and the story got picked up by the state-wide newspaper).
Facebook. I suppose this is a fourth prong of our PR system, but it’s so big, it’s kind of it’s own thing. I created a page for the Big Rock Reading Series and sent out an invite to “like” it to my regional friends. As with social media, the page grew from there. We use the page to promote future readings and to post photos and feedback from previous readings. It’s also a good place to post links to campus maps and directions if you are targeting a community-wide audience as we are.
Word of mouth. Yep. I never stop talking about the series with colleagues and friends.
Prepare an event program. For us, this is a simple 8.5 X 11 sheet folded in half. I used Microsoft Publisher to put it together and it was quite easy. Our PR office had created a logo for the series, which is awesome. The program features the author bios and websites, a list of upcoming events, and our donor list (THANK YOU!). We also included two half sheets stuffed inside (many thanks to the student workers who copied, folded, and stuffed). One half sheet was a survey and one was a donation form. The survey was awesome and has given us even more data to use for future fundraising.
Reading. Reading. Reading.
Be in touch with the writer in the days leading up to the reading and on the day of. Be sure you have water and a place for the writer’s book(s) to be sold if that is part of the deal. If the books are not being sold by a bookstore at the event, designate someone you trust to handle the sales and get a bit of cash change before the event. We sell books for cash or check and I volunteer to cover any bounced checks (although that hasn’t happened yet). I’m looking into getting Four Square for my iPhone so we can also do credit card sales.
Arrive at the location well in advance. I arrived an hour early to start setting up (we display our division’s course offerings and our student journals). Believe it or not, we had audience members arriving 45 minutes before start time. Check the lighting, the mic/speakers, seating, and whatever else you’ve arranged.
ASK FOR HELP! We use student ambassadors to greet arrivals, hand out programs, and provide directions within the building. A few of my English faculty colleagues jumped in to help with details I overlooked. For example, as the coordinator of the series, people wanted to talk to me. I hadn’t figured on that. I was hauling tables around and setting up displays and fielding questions/discussions from audience members in the meantime. It was chaotic. I will search out volunteers and do a better job of delegating next month!
Coddle the writer(s). Be sure the writer is comfortable with the mic and set up. Be sure he/she has anything he/she needs to be comfortable (including water). The writer is the whole reason for the event. For that hour, he/she is a STAR! Treat him/her as such. Depending on your situation, you might offer to take the writer(s) out for a meal before or after the event. I’m fond of going out afterward as we were all amped up and used the meal as a way to unwind and bask in the joy.
The Day After.
Collapse from exhaustion on the inside but keep putting one foot in front of the other for the day job or family obligations or what have you.
If you did a survey, crunch the data. If you didn’t, take the time to write out a narrative of how the evening went and what you might do differently in the future. We learned that it would be good to have a calculator at the book sale table. We learned that the moderator needed to repeat audience questions during the Q & A. Small things add up. The data and/or narrative will be important if you are seeking funds for the series or applying for grants in the future.
Begin promoting the next event, depending on length of time between readings. For us, there is a month between readings for the three months of the semester, then breaks for holidays and summer. Promote early and often, but not so often that you become a pest. 🙂
I’m sure I’ve forgotten a bit, so chime in with questions if you have any!
Good luck!
Dear Reader, it seems I have become the sickly speaker of my recent poems. As many of you know, since the beginning of August, all of my drafts have featured the same speaker, a woman who is hospitalized for some strange and unknown illness. No, I’m not in the hospital or even close to it. My nagging sinus infection has been confounded by a head cold. I’m whiny.
Still, after a knock down week of launching the reading series, I told myself last night to be prepared to write a draft today. I made a note to myself, “Draft a Poem” and left it on my keyboard so I would see it first thing.
It worked again.
At the reading, we talked about B-I-C (butt-in-chair), and you know what? It’s rarely failed me. Not never failed me, but rarely.
It worked again.
I sat down at the desk with cold medicine taken, a cup of coffee, and an aching arm. On the night of the reading, I fell up the stairs. Yes, ‘up’ the stairs. My right arm bore the brunt of the fall and I have a wicked purple bruise in the rectangular shape of a stair edge. The bruise is almost exactly half way between my elbow and my shoulder. My arm hurts! I’m sort of surprised by how much it hurts as I didn’t feel like I fell that hard.
Back to the draft: I began by reading some of the poems in Sarah J. Sloat’s new chapbook Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair (dancing girl press, 2011) and collecting some nouns and verbs. While I love Sloat’s poems, nothing was jumping up for a title. So, when I had a page full of words, I went back to Lucie Brock-Broido’s The Master Letters in search of a title. I found one in the poem “Housekeeping,” which includes this line, “You have been outside / The body now.”
Today’s draft is “Having Been Outside the Body” and is another epistolary poem to the speaker’s female mentor. It begins:
Dear Madam–
The progress of August is past.
The chart reads relapse.
In terms of form, the poem contains both couplets and single-line stanzas. The bruise makes an appearance in stanza two. I first searched for images of bruises, but they were too ugly to share. Instead, here’s an image of a the rhinovirus, cause of the common cold, damn it!
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| from Science Photo Library, click for link |
While I wanted to post this yesterday, it turns out that I was flattened by exhaustion and a busy day at school. Still, the glow of a wonderful event lingers.
I’m thrilled to say that our first reading in the Big Rock Reading Series was a definitive success!
Nickole’s poems and Dave’s short fiction balanced each other well. The images from both linger in my brain as I return to my senses.
During the reading, I made a big point of the fact that these two writers live among us right here in Central Arkansas. I made this comment for the sake of our PTC students, many of whom encounter literature for the first time when they enroll in an ENGL class with us. For many of those students who attended the reading, it was their first chance to hear writers at work. We had the audience fill out a survey so we could collect data for more fundraising. Their comments blew me away.
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| Nickole Brown & David Jauss |
Based on the data we collected, we could identify those in the audience who were PTC students. Here’s what a few of them had to say (anonymously) for the question, “What did you most appreciate about tonight’s event?”
“The way the readers seemed to open up from a sacred place with there [sic] work.”
“This is my first time attending a reading. I enjoyed it a great deal.
It is inspiring to hear people share themselves in a setting like
this.”
“It is just wonderful to have local writers present their works in person.”
“True honesty in there [sic] stories. So real!”
Ok, so we still need to work on the there/their/they’re error, but the sentiment here is what counts. Wow. This is why we do what we do.
Many thanks to Nickole and Dave for helping us launch this series! Next up will be Alison Pelegrin, a poet from southern Louisiana and a good friend of mine. I can’t wait to grow the literary community even more on October 11th!
Dear Readers, it’s hard to convey exactly how
excited I am for tomorrow to get here. Tomorrow night at 6:30 p.m., we
launch the Big Rock Reading Series with readings by Nickole Brown and
David Jauss. While, I’m the chief cook and bottle washer of the
operation, I’ve had tons of help and support from colleagues, friends,
and family, for which I am thankful. (It’s amazing how many tiny
details there are to getting a reading series up and running, especially
one that is run on donations only so as not to infringe on anyone’s
line-item in the school’s budget!)
I couldn’t be
happier that Nickole and Dave are reading for us. They both teach
creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. As the
two-year college across the river, we send a lot of students over to
UALR, so it will be a great collaboration, and I’ll get to see many
former students in the audience. Wahoo!
Rest assured,
I’ll have my trusty Flip camera there and will try to post some clips in
the days after (if I can pick myself up off the bed of exhaustion!).
Until then, let this amazing poster whet your appetite (designed by Amy
Green of Pulaski Technical College’s Department of PR/ Marketing).
Find us on Facebook, too!
A day late, but there’s a draft on the table. Not sure if it will “live” to become a poem, but it’s there.
There’s a lot of chaos in my world right now. Still not 100% health-wise, re: sinus infection. Lou-Lou got some disappointing results in her most recent blood work. Some difficult issues both at work and with my family. Nothing dire, but those normal life moments that require a lot of mental & emotional energy to sift through and decide how to move forward.
Again, those could be excuses not to write. I wasn’t sure I would today. Instead, I began by revising all of the drafts from the past month and a half. (Thus the title of the post today.)
Here’s the process. I keep a folder with printed copies of each draft. This is where a piece stays until I feel like it is a poem strong enough to be submitted to journals. I start with the draft on top, which would be the most recent. I read each poem out loud, often many times. I listen for extra words that could be trimmed. My biggest issue is over-writing; I’m especially fond of unnecessary adjectives. I cut and trim, usually a word here or there, sometimes a whole clause or sentence. I try to be objective about how the poem works. Sometimes, I need to add a stanza or more likely cut one and rewrite it from scratch. As you might guess, the most recent poems need the most revision. The older ones have been through the process once or twice and usually move out of the folder to be readied for submission.
In doing this today, I realized that I’ve written some really strong poems and I’m feeling good about sending a lot of them out into the world. This surprised me since I wasn’t exactly feeling all aglow with positive vibes as I began. However, the positive energy that I had when I reached the end of the folder translated into trying to draft a poem.
Continuing on my recent process, I picked up the new issue of The Journal that arrived a few days ago.
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| Cover art by Krista Drummond |
Wow. This issue is chock full of good stuff. I started to read and jot down nouns and verbs that jumped off the page. As I filled up the page in my drafting journal, I started looking for lines that might make a good title. (That sickly speaker continues to haunt me.) As I was reading Jeannine Hall Gailey’s “[Experiment in Sleep Deprivation]” from her series The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, I came across this line: “They try to tamper and tame her piece by piece.” Voila!
I drafted “To Tamper and Tame Me Piece by Piece” and my sickly, yet rebellious, speaker had more to say again today. I’ll keep listening to her until she’s done. The draft begins this way.
They try. They plot behind charts burgeoning
with multi-colored papers. Etched results
of specimens removed from the rubble
of my body.
As I said, I’m less sure of this one than I’ve been of others in the past, but I have hope it will become a poem through some serious revision. It’s written as 6 tercets for now, although a lot of the poems from this speaker have been coming out as couplets. When I look at the larger project, I may have to think about the form in the bigger picture.
For now, I’m just glad to have some new poems to send out into the world as the September floodgates of new reading periods open.
80º ~ so gorgeous outside I’m doubly angry that I’m not feeling 100% health-wise
Well, no draft today, friends and fans of the Kangaroo. I had to take C. to work this morning as he has some plans with a colleague after work for which they will carpool. Then, Lou-Lou had to have her two-week blood work done. (We check blood every two weeks while we slowly decrease her meds, ever mindful of the chance of relapse.) Once I got home it was after 10 and that meant having to check in with my online classes. Oh, and I’m still fending off that sinus infection, but feeling like things are moving in the favor of health.
Yes, this is a long list of excuses. Today, I had to admit defeat, but I’m not deterred. The first thing on my list for tomorrow morning is “draft a poem.” Then, I get to organize my September submissions. Woo hoo! Look out editors, here I come.
I’ll also spend the weekend putting the finishing touches on our first event for the Big Rock Reading Series. I’m fortunate to have the support of folks at PTC, so I’m able to launch this series on campus. Tuesday night is the big night. I am super excited about this, but I forget every semester how many tiny details there are to nail down. We are doing three events per semester. Amy I crazy? Time will tell.
Finally, go read what Laura Davis, editor of Weave magazine has to add to the poetry community discussion. (Read my rant here.) My favorite new thing from Laura’s post:
This is a big one. Next time you head to a reading, bring along you BFF
from college or that friend from work you’ve been meaning to hang out
with. You never know how people will be affected by a reading. This will
help open the poetry doors to a wider audience and strengthen the
community.
If you live in Central Arkansas, I hope you’ll come out Tuesday night to hear Nickole Brown and Dave Jauss read for the Big Rock Reading Series. And, I hope that you’ll bring a non-writer friend along!