42º ~ our lows are dipping down into the low 30’s, the rain has gone, the world looks the brighter for the cold, but no less green, brisk winds, the little heater put to use

Dear Reader, I cannot believe we’ve reached another Friday so quickly.  Time speeds up this time of year as the semester spins nearly out of control with less than a month to go before finals.  I’ve got 80 or so papers to grade; nonetheless, I went to bed last night reciting this: “tomorrow I will write a new draft, tomorrow I will write a new draft.”  While I wasn’t as lucky as last week, I did get something new on the page.

First, I went back to an older draft, “Requiem for the Girl with Sparrow Wings for a Heart.”  This was a poem I drafted back in June.  I love the title, but the poem wasn’t holding up with age.  It was too stark, too literal-minded.  As I sat down to write this morning, I glanced at that old draft and saw that I could keep the first stanza and the last, but the stuff in the middle had to go.  Yup, I deleted four and a half stanzas and rewrote the guts of the poem.  For now, it seems to be singing a smoother song with a bit more magic, a bit more lyricism.  Time will tell if this revision will stand.

Next, I was ready for something new.  I started by jotting down a few lines from Big Tent Poetry’s weekly prompt.  I shared this on Monday.  Participants left a single line in the comment field for someone else to use in a poem or story.  I found three or four lines that seemed to spark and copied them into my journal.  Alas, Dear Reader, nothing doing.  I tried a few on for size.  I mixed and matched and eked out some new additions.  Nothing coalesced.

Then, I went for my folder of inspiration cards.  This one grabbed hold of me, and the lines on the card worked their magic, with a few of the images thrown in.

This image is in reverse b/c I used my computer’s camera to take the picture.  The words say, “Shrines dedicated to…the glancing flash of moonlight…illuminating…splintered ruins.”  The fishing lures and the statue’s umbrella made their way into the poem as well.    The lines on the card do not begin the poem, and I amended them a bit for rhythm and line length.  Still, the lines were the spark and I built a speaker around them.  For some reason, I’m fixated on romantic relationships again this week, and the draft is titled, “The Wife Who Wanders Explains Her Actions.”  While I don’t often draw directly from my life with C., there’s a bit of it in this poem.  The wife in the poem is a worrier and so am I.  I had to explain to C. that worrying about him was my right, and the wife in the poem does some of this same explaining. 

Who knows if she and this draft will survive, but for now, I can begin my grading marathon of the weekend feeling good that I persevered and drafted!

51º ~ the gentle rain does rain down, all gray and gloomy light, November

Dear Reader, I confess, I am humbled by the notice I received lately at Eduardo C. Corral’s blog, Lorcaloca.  On, Sunday, Eduardo praised the Kangaroo and then Jeannine Hall Gailey and Matthew Thorburn joined in with comments of support as well.

I confess as well, that I’ve had Matthew’s book, Subject to Change, on my desk for months, after he graciously offered an exchange last May.  My lack of responding to this wonderful book and others is more proof that my summer was derailed by illness.  However, after dipping into the book here and there in the past, I’ve been making my way through Subject to Change as a whole since Sunday, and I have to say that I am delighted to return Matthew’s compliment.  (At the moment, I don’t own any of Jeannine’s books, but I’ll remedy that soon!)

Let me pause to say that I don’t believe in promoting someone else’s work just for the sake of networking or gaining favor.  I long ago made a pact with myself about this blog that I wouldn’t write about any books I didn’t like and I wouldn’t inflate my responses.  I do, however, love this growing sense of community that I’ve found online, and for the most part, I’ve not been let down by the poetry I’ve come to know via this medium.  I hope you’ll trust in my earnestness, Dear Reader.

Now, to Matthew’s book.  Subject to Change is a fluid collection, each poem flowing into the next with ease and yet each poem offering something new.  It is a winding river through changing landscapes of a book.  As some of you may know, I do not read the blurbs until after I’m finished with a book, preferring to come to the poems with fresh eyes.  Here are the notes I made on the empty page at the back of the book (my favorite note-taking page) as I read through the poems: 
nostalgia at war with modernity and the future
speakers in need of love? of acceptance? of comfort? of familiarity?
the use of voices, especially ” “
art, painters, musicians,
Modernist tendencies in embedded quotes and allusions
struggling with Romantic ancestry
refrain and coda

I wreak havoc on the books I enjoy.  Bent-over pages, underlines, marginalia, notes in blank pages, and so, one might tell just from glancing at my bookshelves which are the most beloved books by their battered nature.  Matthew’s book has been battered and then some.

I have to say that I wasn’t sure these poems would resonate with me because of their clear relationship to the Modernists, a group I can admire if not enjoy.  However, the tension between those Modernist influences and the Romantic history of English poetry intrigued me and led me on through the book, and I am glad of it. 

Often, the sense of the poems is one of conversations transcribed, the reader overhears, listens in.  For example, the poem “For Friends Who are Married and Expecting More Babies,” begins with advice for making cucumber soup.  Then, in line two, a second voice joins that of the speaker, this second voice set off in quotation marks, a refrain, a questioner, a commenter.  The poem ends this way:

What is it with me and this small stuff

I love how the poem begins with the taste of cucumber soup and ends with it, but so much transpires in between (Matthew’s poems tend to wander onto a second page and to benefit from the wandering.)  This poem, as with others, features a questioning speaker searching for some security, something that will last in this ever-changing, chaotic world.  Sometimes there is comfort; sometimes there is a void.

Let me also give praise to the use of formal structures that add to the tension reverberating just beneath the surface of this book.  There are wonderfully crafted sonnets and one spectacular sestina, “Just You, Just Me,” that features the word ‘justice’ as one of the repeated end words.  Amazingly, Matthew tweaks that into ‘Donald Justice’ in stanza four as the speaker’s mother says, “Donald Justice / wouldn’t write a poem like this.”  Kudos for the humor and the deft weaving of this poem.  There are allusions to other great writers, artists, and musicians throughout the book, but these are not heavy-handed and seem always to contribute to the poems rather than distract.

I’ll end with a bit from an industrial, Midwestern poem, because I feel akin to it.  While too long to quote in its entirety, here is the beginning of “In Lansing.”

the salt off the Buick.

Support a Poet/Poetry
Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today
Subject to Change
Matthew Thorburn
New Issues Press, 2004

50º ~ bright sun, gentle breezes barely moving the remaining leaves, a heat up today, then storms on the horizon to cool us down

This morning, I was struck by two online prompts:

1) Big Tent Poetry: If you haven’t checked out this great online resource, I hope you will.  This week, the prompt is for people to leave a line in the comments and then choose a line from someone else to prompt a draft.  Sounds great to me.  Free lines of poetry!

2) Her Circle Ezine: A new favorite of mine, provides a character-driven prompt for this week.  Reminds me of one I use with my creative writing students.

Dead Letter from Hawaii http://www.hawaiianstamps.com/upudl.html

Also, if you recall, Dear Reader, last Monday, I decided to try and send out a poetry submission or two on Mondays.  Woo Hoo!  I completed two packets and sent them off via online submission forms.  Let me just say again how much I love online submissions.  They save me money & time, especially b/c I have no need to make a detour to the post office on my way to work.

52º ~ gorgeous light this morning, small, cool breezes rustling the half-leafed branches, crisp

A short note today to send out big thanks to Glass: A Journal of Poetry.  The fine editors, Holly Burnside and Anthony Frame have seen fit to nominate my poem “Flood Plain” for the 2011 Best of the Web Anthology from Dzanc Books. 

current cover at Glass

Thanks for the honor!

41º ~ a low last night of 37, the little heater working in the office this morning, brilliant, late October light through a less dense scrim of leaves, there’s raking to be done this weekend

Yes, Yes, Dear Reader, today was a blissful drafting day.  I feel in the zone more than I’ve been in a month and a half ~ able to relax and let the morning unfold on its own terms.  Perhaps this is because I’m in a momentary lull at work.  No new papers to grade until Monday!  ~ Just a few hours of work on the horizon for the weekend.  After I finished this morning’s draft, I was overcome by a feeling I can only describe as “groovy.”  I confess, I used to watch Ally McBeal, and I loved the idea that her therapist suggested she come up with her own theme song.  Being the multi-tasker that I am, I have many theme songs, but the one I call to the front when life gets overwhelming is Simon & Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song.”  It’s the one that begins: “Slow down, you move too fast. / You got to make the morning last.”  And here’s another confession, I often rush too quickly through life in my attempt to cross yet another item off my to-do list.  This song reminds me that isn’t the goal.  Also, that rushing is detrimental to drafting a poem.

a view from my southern window

Today, before I started drafting I needed to back up the computer (an item on my to-do list), and as I was setting up the external hard drive, I knocked a book off my poetry shelves.  It was Elegy by Larry Levis. I had been reminding myself that this morning was drafting time ever since I’d gotten up.  My mind tends to wander and try to solve problems/ prep for tasks from school and other areas of my life and I actually have to forcibly remind it to wander in the direction of poetry when I get tangled up in other issues.  This is all part of my practice of putting poetry as high on my priority list as my paying job.  In any case, when Elegy came loose from the shelf, I thought, “ah, I’ll start today by looking at someone else’s poems that I love.”  I love Larry Levis, but another voice called more strongly:  Quan Barry. 

In 2002, I took a trip out to Colorado to visit some friends.  This would have been the summer between my third and fourth year of my MFA program.  There is an amazing bookstore in Denver, The Tattered Cover, that has a delicious poetry section.  While I was there, I spent several hours, slowly browsing the contemporary poetry.  Quan Barry’s book, Asylum, leapt out at me from the start, in part because of the gorgeous cover.  Once I read the first poem, I knew it was going home with me.  It turned out to be a touchstone book for me in my last year of my program and has continued to hold up each time I return to it.  This book is filled with poems that explore the dual experience of Barry’s heritage: Vietnamese-American.  The poems have that tensile strength that I strive for in my own work and the images, oh my, the images.  I only dream of reaching such heights. 

So I began again at the beginning of the book and started reading.  I was immediately sucked back in and for a brief moment, I worried I might have made a bad choice b/c her work is so intimidatingly good.  But then, after reading for a half hour or so, I reached one of my favorite poems, “Lullaby.”  This is an epistolary prose poem that is annotated and contains footnotes, so there are multi-layered speakers on the page.  I’ve always loved the intricacy of this.  Barry also manages to weave a nineteenth century influenced style with a twenty-first century style, creating a spark to her syntax.  Something else I’ve long-admired in her work. 

As several lines began to form in my journal (“Once, we forged in fallen oaks and a field of sunflowers gone wild…”), I suddenly saw how I might adapt Barry’s form from “Lullaby” into my own work.  It’s true, I must confess, that some of the emotional weight seeped into my poem as well.  “Lullaby” is a letter from the speaker to some dangerous lover, and my draft “Love Letter with the Stamp Not Cancelled” contains the same basic situation…a forbidden lover; however, my letter is annotated by the speaker’s father after her death.  Also, I haven’t used the prose poem form.  And while Barry’s poem is steeped in her own mythology, mine is controlled by the forces of the prairie.  I hope that it is an homage and that it also stands on its own.  Time shall tell.

For now, there are revisions to be done on older drafts and another look in store for the current manuscript as the next round of contest deadlines looms.

Enjoy the late October light.

57º ~ and a high of only 67º is what the casters of fore predict…whoopee, officially fall-like weather has arrived,  dawn seems to be slowing down these days, still gray-green-blue mixes, aquatic light even without the rain ~ the trees lost nearly half their leaves in our last bout of tornadic winds

Two days ago, I received my tenth rejection from a journal that I dearly love, Hayden’s Ferry Review.  I can state their name because I love them.  I simply want to say that sometimes even persistence doesn’t win in this carousel game of poetry submissions.  Nonetheless, I shall persist.  Granted, I may only submit once a year now.  I first submitted to HFR in 2000 when I was a wee second-year student in my four-year MFA program and really had no right to be sending out my fledglings.  After that rejection, I took a few years off and resumed submitting in 2003, when I was about to graduate.  I’ve been known to submit to them twice a year, as they read all year but have two specific dates when they stop and make decisions about the next issue.  HFR is an outstanding journal, but one that has a rotating staff, so this string of rejections is less of a sting.  In fact, if I had been rejected ten times from a journal with a standing editorial staff, I’d probably be wasting my time and money to continue.  So, Dear Reader, here’s one valuable lesson I’ve learned in the last decade: to know if the journal has a revolving staff (usually associated with a degree program) or an unshifting group of readers and a standing editor.  These things matter in the game of persistence when submitting.

Now on to the ups.  My August submissions have gone out and found themselves some homes.  Whoo Hoo.  I’ve had three acceptances this month.  For those keeping score at home, I’m proud to say that I’ve had at least one poem accepted every month of 2010, except July; after all, even editorial staffs need a break sometimes.  🙂

My own photo of the carousel at the LR Zoo

Giant shout outs of appreciation to the following journals:

The Dirty Napkin for taking “When the Weather Forms a Holding Pattern.”  You can read about the drafting of this poem here.  I’ve appeared in The Dirty Napkin once before, and it is always a boost of confidence to be granted that second acceptance.  My records show two rejections in between these acceptances, healthy reminders that sometimes the poems just don’t fit and sometimes I send out before the final coat of paint on the poems has dried and they arrive still smudgy.  The Dirty Napkin was one of the early adapters of using audio files for their online journal, and I’m happy that I’ll get a chance next week to record this new poem.

Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts for taking “Stumbling Away from the Oracle.”  Here’s the story with this one.  I knew the founding editors of this great journal out of the University of Missouri Columbia; I knew them way back in the days of the late 90’s.  When they had the journal up and running, I sent them some poems, again at the beginning of my time as an MFA student.  Needless to say, the poems did not pass muster, but the sting of that rejection really sang because I knew the editors personally.  I don’t mean to imply that I thought by knowing them I’d immediately get in the journal; I only mean that I was embarrassed that these writers I admired had seen my less than worthy work.  (I hung my head in shame for days.)  After that, I didn’t submit to the journal again until the current poetry editor (and my friend) Stephanie Kartalopoulos encouraged me to do so.  Again, just knowing Steph was no sure thing.  I can attest to her scrupulous eye as an editor and I know that “Stumbling Away from the Oracle” earned its own place in the next issue of Center.

Redivider for taking “Pantoum for the Landlocked Girl.”  As with The Dirty Napkin, this will be my second appearance in Redivider, and I had two rejections in between.  However, this acceptance is especially sweet because, as you know Dear Reader, I am not a formalist poet.  To know that this pantoum has found a home is doubly cheering.  You can read about the drafting of the poem here.  I also have to give a huge shout out to Big Tent Poetry for having a weekly pantoum prompt going at the time that set me on this course.

Now, I must confess, that even as I’ve established a tiny bit of a name for myself in poetry journals, it is still a thrill to receive the acceptances and a bitter pill to receive the rejections.  Sometimes I worry about submitting too much and placing too many poems, lest I become a name that is bantered about at parties as the “loose” poet.  However, I really do believe in each and every poem that I send out, and I believe that they each deserve to be read by a wider audience.  So, until someone tells me to stop, I shall continue on my path of persistence and riding this crazy carousel over and over and over.

46º ~ bright sun today, one more day in the 80’s according to those in the know, then down in the low 70’s where we belong, exhale

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending Shin Yu Pai’s reading at Hendrix College.  Shin Yu is a new poet to central Arkansas, and I’m glad we are growing in numbers.  (N.B. As regular readers know, when I’ve become friends with a poet, as I have with Shin Yu, I dispense with the academic, last name only moniker, and use first names in my reviews.)

 While the reading was a bit short due to another event on campus, it was packed densely with poems of skill and agility.  Shin Yu began by reading from one of her books that I don’t own yet, Equivalence, her first major collection.  With a background in both writing and art, many of these poems were either straight up ekphrastic poems or highly influenced by pieces of art, in particular photographs by Stieglitz along with other works by major artists of the 20th century.  After hearing the poems, I’ve added this book to my list of future purchases.

Shin Yu then read briefly from Sightings: Selected Works (2000 – 2005), a book she graciously exchanged with me when we met for dinner in August.  I’ve been working my way through these poems. Although they are a bit outside my comfort zone in style, I’ve enjoyed their energy and references to artworks and current events.  It was great to hear Shin Yu read from “Nutritional Feed,” the fourth section of the book and based on her time working in advertising and PR.

Finally, the last half of the reading was devoted to the new star, Adamantine.  As I struggle with the title of my own manuscript, I have to admire this title for its ability to represent the book as a whole.  As many of you may know, adamantine is a a stone that is hard and indestructible, much like diamond.  Shin Yu illuminated this even more at the reading by mentioning the connection to Buddhism’s “adamantine path.”  The poems in this book beautifully showcase Shin Yu’s global perspective, with much influence from Eastern beliefs and experiences.  While they are meditative, they are also poems of hidden hard edges that expose the pain of living in this world of chaos.  As Shin Yu said last night, her goal with the book is to “narrow the distance between the I and the other.”  She does that exceptionally well.

In the opening poem, “This Is Not My Story,” the speaker tells of a mouse discovered in the kitchen of two lovers.  After the appearance of the mouse, Shin Yu writes, “her lover says / it has a very tiny heart, // you need only chase / it until it tires… .”  This image of chasing follows through to the end of the poem with this meditation: “… the human heart is / a wholly different animal, / we must sense when to give in // before the other gives up.”  This poem seems a perfect choice to open the collection as it introduces that theme of the distance between each of us, even in our most intimate relationships, and it contains a hint of a threat about the destructive as well as constructive elements of those relationships.

One thing I admire about Shin Yu’s work, among many, is her ability to write about current events as they unfold around us.  While I am often caught up in the dramas of our world (the BP oil spill, the wars at home and abroad, violence against women and children, etc.), I’ve not yet been able to write directly about them.  In the poem “Search & Recovery,” Shin Yu writes about the search for James Kim, who in 2006 became lost in a blizzard with his family in Oregon.  While his wife and children were rescued, James Kim perished of hypothermia when he left the car to search for help.  Shin Yu’s poem manages to honor his bravery and his love for his family while also broadening the moment for all of us and saying something new about how we search in vain for what we’ve lost.  Here’s the second half of the poem, the part that moves me the most:

It’s a delight to welcome Shin Yu to our local literary world and it was a particular delight to be able to hear the poems in the flesh last night, as I believe all poems live best in the voice and breath of the poet.

Support a Poet/Poetry
Buy or Borrow this Book Today
Adamantine
Shin Yu Pai
White Pine Press, 2010

63º ~ wild storms last evening, the threat of a tornado, this morning, cloudy, breezes cool & damp

Dear Reader, I confess, I’m a list maker.  It clears my mind and calms my nerves to list out those tasks before me, and then I am addicted to the joy of firmly marking out the job when finished.  This weekend, my list included grading and averaging overall grades and sending out poems.  I only made it through the grading portions of the list before my body and my brain insisted on some down time.

Today’s list, my journal spreadsheet

Therefore, this morning, I was happy to send out two batches of poems.  Long-time readers will know that I usually spend a weekend doing submissions and end up sending out twenty-something batches of poems.  I’m learning that working in this smaller time frame has its benefits as well.  I spent a bit more time with each poem, fine-tooth-combing each and making small tweaks.  I also bless those journals that have adopted online submissions, as there is less time spent fumbling for SASE’s and new ink cartridges.

Perhaps I’ll try to do a packet or two on Mondays for a bit and see how that works out.  I hope you’ll join me in wishing these two packets well as they sail out into the electronic world of poetry editors and staff readers.

~~~~~

On another happy note, tomorrow night I get to enjoy a live poetry reading!  Woo Hoo.  New friend and new-to-Arkansas poet, Shin Yu Pai will be reading from her latest book, Adamantine, at the Hendrix College Bailey Library at 6:30 tomorrow night.  Watch for my mini-review, as I already have the book and am reading it in preparation for tomorrow night’s event.  It seems that central Arkansas is hosting more and more readings, and this makes me such a happy poet here.

53º ~ the trend for above average high temps continues, am trying to embrace the lasting heat in case the winter turns longer, colder, and wetter than normal again this year, while we crave more rain, the light is lovely as it slants all autumn-wise through thinning tree branches

Woo Hoo, Dear Reader, I’m riding the high of having drafted today after several weeks on an upset schedule.  As I’ve said before, those scheduling upsets weren’t necessarily bad, but I still feel off kilter when I haven’t drafted in a while.

This morning, I decided to dive into my “In Progress” folder and see if any energy from those drafts would spark something new.  In fact, at first I got diverted into revising a draft that was “nearly there.”  I spent some time tweaking the last couple of stanzas of what is now “Ancestral Incantation,” but what began as “The Old Ancestral Homestead” (ugh, I cringe at that title).  I blogged about the drafting of this poem here.   Letting it sit for 3-4 weeks seems to have done the trick as I saw how I’d pushed the ending in my first version.  A key turned in a lock in my brain and I saw the door open to how the poem needed to end.  Voila!

After that tinkering and tweaking, I opened my journal and wrote “Too long away again.”  This is a repeated phrase that I use just to make the pen move on the page.  It worked again, and it appears I’m still obsessed with creating fairy tales of the Midwest.  (I confess that last night before going to bed I reminded myself that I should go immediately to drafting this morning with no pit stops on blogs or Facebook.  And so I went to sleep thinking about the poems I’d most recently drafted, challenging myself to remember them if I could.  One sign of a good line being its memorability.)

http://www.freefoto.com/preview/33-15-15?ffid=33-15-15

Today, I came up with “Fairy Tale for Girls in Love with Fire.”  It begins as the others do with the word “Once,” but I changed up the opening this time.  The phrase “who refuses to mind” comes up in this poem, as it does in the others; however, in this new draft, it appears in the closing stanza rather than the first line.  That all happened naturally, and I think it was important to have some time pass between the drafting of these poems so that they don’t all start to sound alike. 

I have no idea how many of these fairy tales I have in me, and they make me uneasy, I must confess.  They are so narrative, and that is not my strong suit.  I know it’s good to work outside my comfort zone, to bend and stretch, but the hard part is that I have no idea if these are any good at all.  Sigh.  Just when I’d developed some sense of confidence about my more lyric poems. 

As always time and editors will tell, Dear Reader.  Thanks for reading these blog posts in the meantime.

57º ~ a damp chill this morning, lovely

A short note today, as I’m off to school early to help with an advising project. Registration for the spring semester begins next week and we’re all aflutter with it.

Today, I’m the guest blogger at Her Circle Ezine’s The Writer’s Life feature. Check out my post, “Having Abandoned the Muse, I Write Alone,” and then explore this wonderful resource for women artists of many genres.

I leave you with another photo from my recent trip to St. Louis with my mom.

That’s not a muse, that’s a SE Asian moth.