48º ~ a cold rain, a day of gray & mourning, wet, plastered down

Just exactly how much is the world supposed to bear?  Libya, pirates off the coast of Somalia, protesters shot or jailed in numerous countries, baby dolphins dying in scores in the aftermath of the BP oil spill, Afghanistan’s “traditional fighting season,” an endless war in the Congo, Oklahoma burning and no word on the news, the Northeast flooding in icy snow melt & rain, and now Sendai and Fukushima.  I’m sure I’ve missed something here. 

I confess, Dear Reader, this post may be grim and disjointed.

I turned on the news today, oh my (to paraphrase the Beatles). On one channel, coverage of Japan and the imminent threat of nuclear meltdown.  On the other major news channel, talk of the NFL breakdown in contract negotiations.  On the one channel, news of 1,000 bodies washing ashore.  On the other channel, news of how a group of men should divide $9,000,000,000 for throwing a ball and hitting each other.  Yes, NINE BILLION DOLLARS.  Obscene.

I confess, Dear Reader, I am a Cubs fan and love MLB.  I do not love the amount of money we devote to our hobbies, our enjoyments, not when teachers are getting the shaft everywhere, and the top 2% continue to outstrip the remaining 98% of us.

There is a heaviness in the air and in my body.  So much pressure at large.  And yet, I am determined not to sink into despair.  I am determined to justify my life on this planet by attempting to leave it a better place than it was when I was born.  When I was an undergrad, I was obsessed with Native American literature, and yet, I suffered from a severe case of white guilt.  Once, we had a visit from a Chippewa man who was a writer, an environmentalist, and a philosopher.  He addressed the audience’s white guilt (for we were an ocean of white in front of him).  He said, “we don’t want your guilt.  We don’t need it.”  In essence he said, we have to move past that binary system and come together to heal the world, to do better for our children.  I’m not sure why, but I’m reminded of his statement today, as I struggle with the guilt of living a good & safe life while others around the world, both far & near, suffer.  I struggle with leading the life of a writer, when the world seems to need so much more than poems.

I confess, Dear Reader, in times like these I do turn to poetry, and that may seem a contradiction.  I almost always turn to the closing of Mary Oliver’s poem “In Blackwater Woods” from her book American Primitive (Little, Brown 1983).

40º ~ bright sun, a return to the shiny, hopeful side of spring

Well, Dear Readers, it was bound to happen sooner or later.  C. brought home a massive head cold on Wednesday, a gift from his high school students, I’m sure.  Yesterday, I felt the first twinges in an earache and cough.  This morning, I thought I might have beaten it back, but, alas, no.  So, I’m sick and he’s sicker (it hurts me just listening to him try to breathe normally).

I did manage a title: Fairy Tale for Girls Fooled by the Sun.  I also scribbled out the first few lines and some ideas for the draft. Then, I had to head out for supplies from the grocery store.

At the moment, I have to reserve my energy to deal with some school work that can’t wait.  Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be in better shape to work on the poem.

Just one question: how is it fair to be sick when we are scheduled to have two glorious spring days in a row?

47º ~ bleak skies, cold wind, everything gray and sodden

Dear Reader, I do not understand how time speeds up so much when I’m excited about my life and the things I’m doing.  This post is about six hours later than normal for happy reasons, but still, I’m wishing I had one of those wizarding gizmos that Hermione uses in Harry Potter so that she can be in two places at once.  A colleague tells me it is the “Time Turner.”  Yeah, get me one those, STAT!

So, the game of numbers.

Yesterday, I had two more happy emails from the acceptance fairy.  This time I heard from Diane Lockward, who is guest editing the inaugural issue of Adanna.  She accepted two poems, one from the middle of last year and one newer.  Then, not more than an hour later, I had an email from Elizabeth Guest, a member of the staff of roger, an art & literary magazine, and they wanted to take two older poems.

I spent some of my poetry time this morning taking care of the business of those happy emails.  As many of you know, Dear Readers, I like to simultaneously submit poems.  That means detailed records.  I have to update my spreadsheet and then notify any journals considering the accepted poem that it is no longer available.  I am militant about this because I appreciate those journals that do accept simultaneous submission, and I would never want to fail to notify and then have to tell them a poem that they want isn’t available.  I hope that makes sense.  

So, that’s three acceptances in two days, with each journal taking two poems.  The magic number here is, apparently, six.  I’m thrilled of course, but this only makes me more desperate to write as I begin to run out of poems to send out.  And as January points out in a recent post, it seems the busier we are the more we want that writing time.  Sadly, January has also been visited by the rejection fairy recently. And she isn’t the only poet friend to be going through the doldrums.  So, I’m performing all manner of spells to send the rejection fairy packing for everyone!

This all reminds me that several months ago, I was sad and pitiful because a bunch of poet friends were hearing good news and I wasn’t.  Oh, November and December, you cruel months!  I am hoping that I will remember that these things come in waves and we aren’t all on the same schedule.  “This too shall pass” isn’t so often quoted because it is wrong!  I just need to remember that it applies to the good times as well as the bad.

More on the numbers:
One of the poems accepted was pretty darned new, begun in the first week of January.  One of the poems was pretty darned old, begun in the beginning of 2010.  That new poem had only gone out to the one journal, mostly because I’m so backlogged here at the desk of the Kangaroo that while I’d intended to simultaneously submit it, I only had time to send it out once.  The older poem had been around the block more than a few times.  Even after a serious overhaul in the revision garage, it suffered from the wallflower syndrome.  The fact is that there is no formula for figuring this submission magic out.  Sometimes the poems go out and stick right away; sometimes they come home and go out and come home and go out, until I despair, until finally someone sees in the poem what I see, or until I shelve the thing out of the direct sunlight.

In thinking about the numbers, I was also wondering what the current status is for poems in my currently-circulating manuscript: In a World Made of Such Weather as This.  As many of you know, I’m really happy with the state of this manuscript, and I’m really sad that it hasn’t found a home yet.  Still, there is hope.  In any case, I counted things up this morning.  Of the 50 poems that make up the book, 45 have appeared or are forthcoming in national journals, both online and in print.  Incidentally, the oldest poem in the book was written at the end of 2005, just as Blood Almanac was in production.  It’s harder to pinpoint the youngest poem in the book, but I think it was probably written in May of 2010.  (By written I mean, the first draft on the computer.)

Does any of this counting matter?  Probably not.  However, for some reason, it comforts me.

I’ll leave you with one more thing that comforts me.  A live webcam of a pair of nesting eagles in Decorah, IA.  These birds are completely wild, meaning they’ve never been banded or interacted with humans in any way.  There are three eggs under there, and the eaglets are expected anytime between 3/31/11 and 4/4/11.

62º ~ the air liquid, heavy with the threat of storms, consistent gray skies, a good breeze churning the wiry branches, all the lights turned on inside in an attempt to push back the gloom

Today’s draft owes a debt to two particular poets, Josh Robbins and A. Van Jordan.

First, to Josh: while on the flight to AWP, I’d read Josh’s long poem “A Patterning of Fire, A Patterning of Ash” in Copper Nickel 15 and was blown away.  As many of you know, while I can meander on and on in the prose of these blog posts, I’m hard pressed to write a poem longer than 20 lines on most days.  That first night in DC, Josh and I had the chance to talk and I brought up the poem.  I think he told me that he wrote it either because another poet friend had inspired him or challenged him, can’t quite remember.  In any case, I said, okay, I’ll go home and write a long poem now, and Josh cheered my promise.  Confession: I forgot my promise until a recent email exchange with Josh in which I was reminded.  So, yesterday, as I repeated my “tomorrow = drafting day” mantra, I actually wrote these words on the notepad on my desk, “Write a LONG poem, 2 pages.” 

Now, to A. Van Jordan: last night I had the great good fortune to attend A. Van Jordan’s poetry reading at Hendrix College in Conway, AR (watch for a longer post about that later).  I was familiar with Jordan’s work from journals but hadn’t yet read a full-length book of his.  After last night, when I bought two of Jordan’s books, I’ll be remedying that ASAP.  The reading was fantastic, and of course, I had my notebook with me.  I was caught up by the reading and hadn’t even written anything yet, when Jordan was either reading a poem or introducing one and he mentioned the speaker “being held captive.”  ZING!  I wrote down “Fairy Tale – Captivity: What keeps Girls there?”  For regular readers, I hope you see the beginnings of today’s draft, another tale of my Midwestern girl, but this time, something was going to keep her captive.  As Jordan read “Nemesis Blues,” I also jotted down, “FT G who Fall for the Gospel Choir/the Blues.”  That one will have to keep for a future drafting session.

Finally, you might be wondering how Daphne fits in, given today’s title.  Well, as I toyed with the idea of what would keep a girl captive to the Midwest (this was either last night going to sleep or early this morning), I didn’t want her to be held captive by a man or by the pastoral beauty of the land.  Instead, I realized that this time the girl would be wanting to get the hell out of there, but her parents would want her to stay, so the poem begins,

Once there was a girl who longed to leave
the small acres of her family farm, the dirt
beneath her nails, the smell of manure

the wind picked up and hurled.

Later in the poem, she does try to flee and her parents chase her into an alfalfa field where they curse her, in the oldest tradition of that word.  She is struck by dry lightning and transformed into a bur oak (the state tree of Iowa) and thus held captive there.  I recognized immediately, of course, that this echoes the Daphne myth, but I hope it complicates the traditional pursued/pursuer paradigm.

Also, bur oaks are not known for their lithesome beauty.  Nobody’s making crowns of oak leaves for Olympians.  This is the tree that survived everything the prairie had to throw at it (fire, flood, drought, pestilence) because of its “gnarly” tough bark and tenacious roots.  Not the most romantic of trees, but still beautiful to me.

So, at the end of the session, I have “Haunting Tale for Girls Held Captive” and I’m thrilled to say that it contains 13 tercets for 39 lines and does indeed stretch onto the second page, if only by two stanzas.  Who knows what might happen during the revision process!

39º ~ sun with a high thin layer of white

Dear Reader, I hope you’ll indulge me as I continue Monday’s conversation about my doubt in ‘earning’ my recent acceptances.  A few additional thoughts occurred to me yesterday after I processed the comments.

~ I never made clear my question about gender.  Here it is: do men worry about what others might say when a friend or associate publishes their work?  In other words, are men more natural at establishing professional networks and relying on them without second guessing their own value?

~ After Kathleen chimed in, it dawned on me that I hadn’t even considered the situation from her point of view or that my doubt was an insult to her.  (I’m so sorry, Kathleen.)  As she rightly points out, I had succumbed to the doubt monster.  She also points out that part of the reason we even know each other is from reading each others’ work and then forming a connection.  So why would I doubt?  Again, many apologies!  I’m so thankful to you has a poetry friend and as an editor who has given my work a home.

~ I’m thankful to Kristin for following up with a longer post about this, and I’m so happy to be a member of her virtual Lake District.

~ Finally, something clicked Tuesday morning in the shower and I commented briefly about it in Monday’s post.  Several years ago now Foetry.com (now defunct) made a huge attempt to uncover biases in poetry contests, and for the most part I appreciated their efforts.  I even cheered them on when they uncovered the most blatant examples of cronyism.  No, I don’t think that someone should get a book deal and an award check b/c of who they know, and I don’t think a judge can be unbiased about someone with whom they’ve worked closely.  So, I champion the efforts of presses to limit that bias.

The other part of the ‘click’ was remembering a panel I attended at a past AWP.  Can’t remember which year, but as the moderator did the introductions, it became clear that all of the people on the panel were editors of journals and almost all of them had published each other.  The moderator said: “I guess it’s true that editors only publish other editors. Ha ha.”  Dead silence from the audience.  The moderator waited a beat and I felt a shift in the room, then she said, “a joke, people, a joke.”  Her attempt at humor was, obviously, not well received, because it pointed out something many beginning writers believe: it’s not what you know (or write), it’s who you know.  (Of course, beneath that glaring assumption would be the fact that the panel was about being a poet from a particular region and so it shouldn’t be that unusual that the speakers had appeared in those regional journals.) 

~ Now, to my conclusions.  Isn’t doing the work of writing and submitting a form of networking all on its own.  I’ve worked my ass off for 10 years to establish a reputation as a poet worth an editor’s time.  I’ve striven to remain professional on all levels.  I have few connections with the major players in the game.  So, now that all of that work is paying off, I should embrace the success, pat myself on the shoulder, and shout out in jubilee.  And that is what I shall hope for when the next acceptance comes from a friend or acquaintance in the poetry world, and it is a small world, so I’m sure it will happen again. (Or at least I hope it will!)

Some may think me foolish for working through my own poetry drama online; however, when I started this blog, I wanted it to be a place where I could be honest with myself, and any readers I might attract, about what it means to be a poet today, especially a poet not attached to a prestigious MFA/PhD program or journal.  Thank you all for listening and helping me learn and grow along the way.  I am indebted to you, Dear Readers.