I don’t normally write about my family much here at the Kangaroo, but given my silence the last week or so, I figured an explanation might be in order.  So, this is where I’ve been:  meeting my great-nephew for the first time.  Let me tell you, Joseph Matthew (aka Joey, aka Peanut) is one happy kid.  The back injury delayed my trip by a week, but we still managed to fit in some quality aunt-nephew bonding time.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t really tote him around and swing him about as much as I wanted to given that I’m still on restricted lifting and exercising.  That will have to wait until our next visit later this summer.

Iowa was its normal, stunning spring/summer self, although some of the fields have had to be replanted due to a late freeze.  I got my fill of staring at the neatly combed rows of corns just starting to get a good grip in the dirt.  Now, I’m homesafe, the back is on the mend, and I’m planning a poem-a-day write-a-thon starting on Monday, I think.

As for the time of this post, I’ve been struck by a cruel blast of insomnia, reminiscent of my bout with it in Denver at AWP.  However, this time, I’m home in my own bed after days away, I haven’t had any caffeine since 6 a.m., and there isn’t much to stress about, so I’m not sure who I’ve offended to deserve such treatment, but I’ll gladly perform my penance to get back to sleep!

Well, the good news is that I had my first physical therapy appt yesterday and I’m on the mend.  Most of my back pain is gone or nearly gone.  The bad news is that I’m completely out of alignment.  I’m torqued to the left from my ankle to my knee to my hip to my shoulder (all the weight bearing joints).  So, this injury was going to happen one day or another.  Last night I re-learned how to sleep in a better posture.  It was difficult, but I have to say, I woke up feeling the best I’ve felt in a long time.  Tomorrow, I learn how to sit (obedience training anyone?)

Through the injury, I was on some pretty heavy muscle relaxers and couldn’t really read until the last day or so, which I devoted to poetry.  However, I still have David Shields’ Reality Hunger on my desk, and since it’s a new book, it’s due back at the library pretty soon.  Here’s a link to my route to Shields’ book.  Last night, I sat down and took a closer look at the book, particularly curious about what Shields had to say about permissions, given that the entire book is a collection of numbered sections, almost entirely authored by others and without acknowledgments within the text.  Here is a small example from chapter “d: trials by google.”

So, the whole book is composed of these numbered sections, divided into 26 chapters given a letter and a title.  The whole of the book calls into question the idea of “reality” and the possession of ideas, as I explained in my earlier post.  When I learned that Shields had in fact written very little of these words, but had collected them, I grew confused and concerned.  Everything that I’ve been taught about scholarship necessitates the correct attribution of ideas to their original thinker.  Of course there are universal ideas, but certainly #85 and #86 above have unique voices, and they are not the same. 

So, I looked to the front matter of the book for any issues with permissions or acknowledgments.  I found only a gratitude list to the Guggenheim Foundation, Artist Trust, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.  Now, I was really intrigued.  Someone funded Shields to collect these words and arrange them.

Flipping to the back matter, I found the appendix and much of the explanation that Shields provided in the earlier piece I referenced, but it goes on.  After admitting that the quotations are not acknowledged, Shields says, “I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs took for granted and that we have lost.  Your uncertainty abot whose words you’ve just read is not a bug but a feature.”  He then claims that he can’t engage in the terms “appropriation and plagiarism” unless he actually does them.  And then there is this, what I’d been waiting for:  “However, Random House lawyers determined that it was necessary for me to provide a complete list of citations; the list follows (except, of course, for any sources I couldn’t find or forgot along the way).”  That’s one heck of a parenthetical.  The students I teach certainly aren’t allowed to “forget” a source in scholarly research.

Shields goes on to point out that there are dotted lines along the margin of the entire index and to restore it to its original form, we should cut out the index.  He ends with: “Who owns the words?  Who owns the music and the rest of our culture?  We do–all of us–though not all of us know it yet.  Reality cannot be copyrighted.  // Stop; don’t read any farther.”

Of course I did read farther, and will report the proper acknowledgments to the above sections.
#84:  Slater, quoted in David D. Kirkpatrick, “Questionable Letter for a Liar’s Memoir,” New York Times
#85: James Frey
#86: Dorothy Gallagher, “Recognizing the Book That Needs to be Written,” New York Times

While I tried to keep an open mind about Shields’ thesis, I simply can’t agree.  Even when I keep quotes in my journal, I’m always careful to take down the writer’s name and where the quote appeared.  Often, this is simply useful when I want to revisit the entire article, poem, book, etc.  Obviously, when I’m writing for scholarly reasons or simply professional ones, I’m aware of proper citations and acknowledgment.  However, it is as a writer that I’m most stricken by Shields’ ideas.  Sure, I love for people to share my work, but I’d prefer to be acknowledged as the author; after all, as I tell my students the word author is the root of authority, and I am the authority of my own mind and creations, am I not?  I certainly wouldn’t want someone to pick up a book like Shields’ and think that the person whose name was on the cover was the writer of my words.  Yes, I’m greedy that way.  No, I don’t think my words belong to everyone, not in the way that Shields implies.

This conversation has actually been going on with several of my friends of late, especially fellow poets who discover one of their poems has made an appearance on someone else’s blog or listserv or whathaveyou in the electronic realm.  Again, I’m all for that sharing, with proper credit being given.  Another couple of friends and I got into a great long discussion about if there is a line in the sand beyond which an artist should not lie (a la James Frey and JT Leroy…both of whom make frequent appearances in Shields’ book) and whether there is really a line between fiction and memoir as art forms.  Finally, I was struck by this notice at the front of a poetry book I recently reviewed here at the Kangaroo:  “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.”  I have to admit that I’ve never really worried about that before in terms of reviewing material here.  I’m always careful to give credit and links to the original work, and I promote the purchase or library borrowing of the book.  I also have to admit that I stumbled on that disclaimer by accident and it may appear in more books that I’ve reviewed without me noticing it.  Having Shields’ book on my desk, I did my due diligence and emailed the author who gave me the go-ahead and sent her permission on to the publisher to cover all the bases.  I’m happy to do that.  After all, I want to celebrate the mind that created this particular combination of words.  Someone copying them down is not the same thing at all. 

Final thoughts:  Even if Shields’ point is to put his collection of quotes into conversation with one another, isn’t that conversation deepened if we know with whom the words originated?  I’m all for juxtaposing Nirvana and Virginia Woolf, but knowing the context of their realities is what intrigues me about what they have to say.

73º ~ partly cloudy, summer sinking in

Last year, I wrote about Rachel Contreni Flynn’s first book, Ice, Mouth, Song here, and I’m so glad to be able to write about her new book, Tongue, today. Rachel is another poet I was able to connect with at AWP. Her shining eyes and bubbly personality still give me happy memories of meeting her.

When Rachel handed me my signed copy of Tongue, she also gave me a kind of warning, although I can’t remember her exact words. She alluded to the book being a difficult one. In content, she was exactly correct; however, the poems are so beautiful, that their beauty offsets the difficult subject matter. That subject matter is largely composed of a young, Midwestern girl as speaker and her relationship with her perhaps anorexic or mentally disturbed sister and her dying grandmother. It is interesting that I just finished Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait with Crayon, because Rachel’s book also deals with a separation and an absence.

As was true with her first book, Rachel’s poems are scissor-sharp, penetrating, yet highly musical and with a touch of whimsy that sets off the feeling of the fairy tale as told by the original brothers Grimm. As an example, here is the shortest poem in the book, all of three lines long.

Deep

There’s a blade
in the hay mow

and we’re jumping.

Poems as short as this rarely work for me; however, this one follows a longer more rambling narrative of the girls and their father. Perhaps its brevity against that longer backdrop provides some of the shiver.

There is narrative in most of these poems, and the book is divided into three sections. The first, “Gnaw,” from which “Deep” comes, is mainly about the girls in their Midwestern home, as the one sister spirals out of control and the other tries to cope, tries to give voice to the chaos. The middle section, “Tongue,” is a series of linked narratives telling the story of the speaker-sister sent away to Maine to care for the dying grandmother. There’s a haunting cat, an axe, and a human tongue washed mysteriously ashore. All the while, in the background, is the knowledge that the other sister has been institutionalized or hospitalized. The last section, “Hollow,” is the girl speaker growing up or grown up and trying to mend the frayed threads of her family.

As one last example, here is “Awake,” which was just up on Verse Daily recently. This poem shows Rachel’s strengths in blending narrative and lyric in a magical way. This poem also gets at the speaker’s desire to give voice to what is happening to her family and being silenced in that solid, Midwestern way. We do not speak of these tragedies; we simply go on in the best way we can. Here, the speaker rebels against all that.

Awake

Of course it turns out
the tongue was just

a slice of sea cucumber.

That it took so long
for the experts to discern this

is ridiculous, and the girl

is suspicious. She believes
it’s a lie so the island

may now be over-run
with placated vacationers.

She believes in the tongue.

That someone is coming
to take hers. But now she will

not allow it. She has constructed
all her barricades:

words, smoke, silence. Her safety.
The girl returns to Indiana awake.

Vigilant. Tough as a stump.

Support a Poet/Poetry! Buy or Borrow a Copy of This Book Today
Tongue
Rachel Contreni Flynn
Red Hen Press, 2010

78º ~ on the way to being a scorching weekend

If you follow me on Facebook, you may know by now that sometime Tuesday I injured my lower back while either cleaning or painting a door. Of course, I thought it was just a sore muscle and I could take care of it with some ibuprofen. Woke up Friday morning in the kind of pain that told me I need professional help. The official word is lower lumbar strain or some such thing, which means I had to postpone a trip to Iowa to see the family. Bummer. Now, I’m all drugged up and forced to be still, so I’ll be haunting the internets.

Whilst I was haunting this morning, I realized that I’ve had some poems and an interview up at Connotation Press for a few weeks. I missed the publication because of end of the semester craziness, I’m sure. In any case, I love this online press for their thoroughness and their variety. I hope you’ll check out not just my poems but all the other offerings as well. Many thanks to Kaite Hillenbrand for her excellent interview questions.

PS: Should my posts contain a typo here or there in the next few days, I hope you’ll excuse me, Dear Readers, and blame the painkillers.

Late, late, late to the party once again, I’ve just finished Allison Benis White’s Self-Portrait with Crayon.  It has been on my to read list ever since it came out and the first reviews appeared.  It seemed like everyone was blogging about it.  If a book appeals to me after a few sentences of a review, I tend not to read the rest of the review so that I can approach the book from a neutral place.  Not sure that’s the point of a review, but it’s what works for me.

Knowing I had long wanted to read this book, imagine my delight when Allison Benis White was on the line-up of one of the readings in Denver for AWP.  I had read a few of the prose poems that make up the book when they’d appeared online or in blog postings, and I had the pleasure of hearing Allison read several more of them that night in Denver.  I was hooked and bought the book after the reading.  As luck would have it, Stacey Lynn Brown introduced me to Allison at the reception and we had a great time talking about poetry and later sharing a rickshaw/pedi-bike back to the hotel.  Both Allison and Stacey were poets I met in Denver, and they are both amazing women.

All this is a long preamble to set up my reading of the book.  In most cases, I read someone’s book without knowing them or having heard them read, as there are few poetry readings here in Little Rock.  I’ve almost always read a poem or two online or in the journals and then gone out and gotten the book.  AWP in Denver changed that a bit.  In some cases, I’ve now met and become friendly, if not friends with yet, the poet before I’ve read the entire collection.  I have their voices in my head as I read, and it is wonderful.

Now, to the book.  This is a collection of prose poems which take their titles from Degas paintings and their subject matter from both the paintings and the life of a speaker abandoned by her mother when she was a child.  The speaker’s voice is fragmented, sometimes that of a motherless child, sometimes that of a motherless adult, and sometimes a more objective observer of the paintings.  For me, the choice of the prose poem as a form holds the fragments together.  I’ve tried my hand at only a few prose poems and am not sure I’ve quite captured the strengths of the form as yet.  Allison is a master at manipulating the form to serve the poem in the best way possible.  I’m a bit in awe of it.

Also, in Denver Allison spoke of the content of the book.  While it’s been a month and more since I heard her speak about this, I think I’ve remembered correctly.  She talked about wanting to write about her own experience as a child when her mother abandoned the family but not really knowing how to craft that content into poems until she started studying the Degas paintings.  In some way, the paintings became a way for her to explore the content of her life and to create poems out of it without the book being a straight-up group of autobiography/memoir poems.  Here’s just one example from the opening of “The Bellelli Family (detail)”

The threads that run throughout this book are many: the desire to name things and emotions, loneliness & abandonment, mirrors (sometimes broken), fragments, fire, memory, and under them all the painful attempt to reckon with a difficult past.

Here’s another excerpt that I marked as particularly beautiful and indicative of the whole.  It’s from the middle of “La Savoisienne”

……………………………………………………………………There are at

being born remembering.

Finally, here’s a complete poem that shows the blend of the speaker and the paintings.

While the story of the speaker’s abandonment could have been sensationalized, it is not.  It is the undercurrent tugging at each poem.  It is the sadness, the loneliness that permeates each poem without being trumpeted.  Instead of placing blame or providing melodramatic scenes, Allison creates art that questions and explores a painful subject in a reverent way.  I’m glad to say I know her, and I’m so glad I finally read this book.

Support a Poet/Poetry Today: Buy or Borrow this Book
Self-Portrait with Crayon
Allison Benis White
Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009

67º ~ cloudy skies, slept late with little sun to wake me

Thanks to Kelli for first posting about Wordcounter. I’m about to leave to visit a friend for lunch, but thought I’d throw up these page shots before I left. This first one is from my current manuscript, In a World Made of Such Weather as This. Given the number of “dead” poems included, I pretty much knew that word would top the list. “Down” is probably #2 because it’s contained in a repeated line in one poem and down is where we find the dead, sometimes. “Body” is #3 b/c the last year or so has seen a slew of body poems, and when I write about the dead, I often embody them. I love that “girl,” “prairie,” and “grass” all made the list. “Mother” and “father” are there as well and show that one section of the book revolves around family ties, binding and breaking.

Just because I was curious to see how much variety there was between book #2 and book #1, I also ran Blood Almanac through the counter. Here’s its top 25. I am truly puzzled by “way” as the #1 word. I will be going back to read the book to see how that happened. “Body” shows up again, perhaps illuminating one obsession; “down” repeats as well…hmmmm. “Water,” “night,” “sky,” and “horizon” seem just right to me.

All this is fun to play with, but I do need to have a serious sit down with In a World Made of Such Weather as This and see where the whole book stands. I’m about ready to move on to book #3 and want to get book #2 as finalized as possible for the next go-round on the merry-go-round of contests and reading periods.

81 sticky º ~ humidity blanket thick

A quick post today because I really do intend to set my mind to drafting time. Normally, I’d put everything aside and start with the drafting; however, this morning, I needed to record the poem that will be up at The Collagist very soon. In the past, I’d just open up Audacity and use my built-in mic; however, after my last recording for Linebreak, I knew I wanted to upgrade my mic. I sounded so tinny. Many thanks to Johnathon Williams from Linebreak who recommended the Zoom H2 recorder. Also, many thanks to Matt Bell at The Collagist who provided very clear instructions for how to use Garageband, something I’d been struggling with for a while, having fallen back on Audacity as a substitute. So glad to finally know how to record a podcast!

Here’s a picture of the recorder (cute as a bug) and a picture of my desk while I was trying to figure out all the setup steps. While I lost about a half an hour to figuring things out, I’m glad I invested in the new equipment. The sound quality of the recording is much better, at least to my ear, and the recorder is portable, which means I can take it to readings and panels in the future! I’m hoping to record some of my older work and post it here from time to time.

Sometimes I look at the photos of other writers’ work spaces and I’m so jealous of their beauty. I’ve always been much more of a mess, and all of my furniture is cobbled together, but it suits me and my process. I need a lot of surface area when I work, and office desks just don’t cut it, unless I’m willing to spend, spend, spend. So, I use a kitchen table that my parents bought for me back in 1997. Recently, we took off the legs and it is now resting on two file cabinets. Turns out, I was hurting my back b/c the height wasn’t right for me. It might not look like much, but it fits perfectly now!

73º ~ trees listless in the slightest of breezes, humidity & heat rising, much squawking and carrying on from the stupid usurper starling’s nest…ugly noise

When I travel by plane, which is quite rarely, I like to take a stack of lit mag back issues to read and then to leave in random places in the airport or in my seat pocket on the plane, hoping someone who might not regularly encounter such things might pick up the issue and flip through it. I’ll never know if it happens our not, but I love the possibility.

On the trip to AWP, I happened to read several poems that I felt I might want to re-read. Knowing that I’d be acquiring more books in Denver, I decided to keep my load light by ripping out the poems I wanted to keep and passing on the journals as always. This morning I went back through that unruly collection of loose leaves and reread. I ended up keeping about half and recycling the rest. However, I also found 10 pages from PEN America #11 that contained “Mimesis” by David Shields. I remember being intrigued by this essay in numbered sections but not having the concentration to give it its due. (One reason poems are great to read on planes is I can concentrate deeply during the reading of the poem and then allow for the interruptions of air travel…beverage carts, seatmates who need to use the restroom, the loud-voiced woman two rows back complaining about her seat not reclining…etc.)

In any case, I just spent a lovely bit of the morning with Shields’ “Mimesis.” As I said, it is an essay in numbered sections. Some of the sections are one sentence, such as #1: “Writing began around 3200 BC.” Some of the sections are long paragraphs, although no section is more than one paragraph in length. One of the reasons I tore this out is because my colleague and traveling buddy on the trip to AWP, Antoinette Brim, and I had just had a conversation about the question of using other people’s lines in one’s own work. Section #3 in Shields’ piece is this: ” In 450 BC Bacchylides wrote, ‘One author pilfers the best of another and calls it tradition.'”

“Mimesis” is a loosely linked exploration of the history of writing, its evolution into poetry, fiction, & the essay form, and an exploration of how advancements in technology have altered literature. One of particular interest to me is a section on the history of copyright. Along the way there are side trips into history and religion. Throughout the entire piece, the theme of reality becomes the connective tissue that holds the whole thing together. Shields examines the slippery slope of language as a signifier for reality (I think I’m using that term correctly, but if I’m not, someone who knows better, please correct me). He attempts to uncover both the intent of the author to either depict reality or fantasy and the expectation of the audience to either absorb reality or revel in fantasy. While he mostly focuses on the essay and novel as literary forms and doesn’t much mention poetry, I’m still fascinated.

Section 38, the penultimate section, says this: “Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.” This struck me for several reasons. One, there is a run of longer sections leading up to it, so its brevity stands out. Two, many of the other sections are speculative; this one is declarative. Perhaps this should have clued me in to what I’d been reading, but it did not. I turned to the last page of the piece, a page entirely made up of the author’s note. It begins, “This book contains many unacknowledged quotations; it contains little else. I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs had but that we have lost. The uncertainty about whose words you are reading is not a bug, but a feature. Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Reality cannot be copyrighted.” What follows is a series of notes that provide source information for the different sections.

Now, I’m hooked. This question of authority seems to have existed almost since the first development of the written word. I’ve just requested the book from which this piece is excerpted, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, from my local branch of the library. If this also piques your interest, Dear Reader, there’s more info from PEN America’s blog here.

Of course, I’m usually about three steps behind the rest of the world on these things…always trying to catch up…so you all may have read, digested, and discussed already. Such is the life at the desk of the Kangaroo.