81 deg ~ on the way to 90 in a few short hours, strong breeze dismantling the last of the flowers on our scrubby trees of indeterminate variety

Big plans to actually start drafting new poems today were derailed by a surprise happy email last night.  Jacque Day, the Assistant Managing Editor of New Madrid, emailed to let me know that they would like to publish all four poems I submitted back in March.  Wow.  I would have been happy to have one poem in this great journal; however, with all four set to appear in the next issue, I’m thrilled!  

So this was a happy derailment.  I spent the morning sending out a few withdrawal notices and cleaning up some records for submissions, which led me to having to clean up my manuscript b/c I hadn’t kept up with the acknowledgments. 

For those of you wondering about my drafting process, the whole one-a-week draft got knocked off course by the semester’s end.  It usually takes me a few days to transition to a new schedule.  However, rest assured, Dear Reader, I’m filled with energy, words, and hope. 

Now, to a question that has begun to plague me.  I’ve asked others about this on their blogs or in emails, but I’m hoping to get some more answers. 

Can one publish too many of the poems in a manuscript that is currently looking for a publisher?  Can one be over-exposed in the lit mags? 

Yes, the question seems a bit hilarious to me, but someone, somewhere mentioned to me that publishers might turn down a book where too many individual poems had already appeared and now I’m a bit freaked out.  At the U of Arkansas, we were simply told to get the poems out there and into the lit mags and that this would help us build a reputation and may help us land a book with a publisher.  Whoever started me thinking about this mentioned the figure of 70%…that a poet should stop publishing individual poems when 70% of the book was out there.  If you’ve followed this blog for long, you know I have a bit of the accountant in me (thanks, Mom!), so I actually love to crunch the numbers.  This can be dangerous, as my current freak out displays. 

It seems to me that the book as a collection is something entirely other than just a string of poems, that there needs to be some kind of connective tissue holding it all together and that a reader can’t get that from randomly reading individual poems in journals. 

Help!

By the way, I am in no way looking the gift horse of this acceptance in the mouth.  I’m doing my happy dance all the way to the grocery store!

75 deg ~ temperatures rising back to normal, windy, humid, chances of rain all week

I am falling back into my summer writing life and it feels glorious. Having spent the last two hours on the deck reading and tracking bird drama, I feel like I’m back in my right mind for the first time in a long time. As to the bird drama, the red-bellied woodpecker made a return visit this morning. I thought I heard him yesterday, and today I was sure of it. So sure, I looked up from the book I was reading and stared right at him, clinging among the ivy that covers the dying tree’s trunk. The drama was the squawking starling that didn’t take to the woodpecker’s return. Stupid starling of the short memory…it wasn’t that long ago that the starling’s nest belonged to the woodpecker. Grrrrrrrrr.

But, back to poetry. I have this stack of AWP books, now increased by the National Poetry Writing Month book giveaway books…a plethora of riches, so many that I couldn’t decide where to start. Finally, I left it to chance and picked up the top book: Michele Battiste’s Ink for an Odd Cartography. I bought this book on the last day of AWP when wandering the book fair for the $5 and $10 book deals. I recognized Michele’s name b/c I have one of her chapbooks on my to-read list. As I picked up the book, the person at the Black Lawrence table said “oh, the author is right there and she’s reading tonight.” That clinched it. I bought the book and had Michele sign it. Later, I heard her spectacular reading as part of the Colorado readers line up at the Denver Press Club, and I knew I’d been right to buy the book. With our brief meeting at the book fair and a quick conversation at the reading, Michele has now become someone with whom I will keep in touch.

I started this book on the plane, after I finished Brent Goodman’s book, but I ran out of energy and gave in to post-AWP sleep. I’m sorry for that. This morning, reading these poems, was pure delight. As many of the reviewers state, Battiste is a poet of extreme energy; the poems are steeped in pent up emotion bursting through language so precise that it cuts straight to the center. And the center for this book is intimate relationships and what makes them work or fail. What kept startling me was the honesty in the poems, the honesty about both the speaker’s struggles and the loved one’s struggles. No holds barred.

Another thread that pulls me into these poems is the Midwest connection. Battiste is from New York (now living in Colorado) but earned her MFA at Wichita State, and her time in Kansas clearly seeped into this work. For example, here is an excerpt from “Committment,” which rocked my world, as we used to say.

…my sorrow like milk-
weed forced from its pod.

The plane plummets, the car
crashes, the millet rusts
across the road. This side,
windrows are thinning
and wait to be baled
and the babies are impatient
underground, smacking
their fists at roots. Soil
shrivels in the autumn drought.

Oh my! The sounds she manipulates: “plummets” echoed by “millet,” “baled” and “babies,” the harshness of “smacking” softened by “soil” instead of “dirt.” And the images: sorrow like milkweed (oh how I wish I’d written that line), plane and car crashes linked to a crop in the field, and then those babies. That great twist makes me sit up straighter each time I read the poem.

Some favorite lines from other longish poems, too long to copy here:
“The gypsies passed and cast a tarantella to our bones.” (“Your Bed”)
“The DJ more blacksmith than artist, smelting a frenzy in 4/4 beat, / relentless and hammering.” (“Ruby Skye”)
about cliffs and promontories “…their language / is a privileged one, coded and closer / to God.” (“Gravel Language”)
“Begin at hinge, not lipped. Lidded. Outer canthus.” (“Strategy of a Kiss”)

The last section of the book, save for a Coda of one poem, is a narrative, a book of days, detailing the separation of two lovers (one going to a conference overseas, the other left behind) who may or may not make it as a couple. Here’s the first day:

Saturday, March 6
Wichita, KS

After the airport, I walked
……the perimeter of the park, thinking
……life to be just this: some place else
and going, I drove toward a moon we thought
……was full the night before
Tonight it proved our underestimation of things completed
and I then watched clowns in white-face mocking
……human drive for conquest, reproduction
Once I did not love you
I don’t know when I did but estimate phases
Today you left at 4 pm and beginning absence
……is the hardest — no memory of coping, no progress

Support a Poet/Poetry: Buy or Borrow a Copy of this Book Today!
Ink for an Odd Cartography
Michele Battiste
Black Lawrence Press, 2009

59º ~ lots of sun filtering through the leaves…have very limited view of the sky these days due to our beautiful old shade-making trees

This is just a quick post to show you all my first internet auction purchase: a kangaroo brooch. If you’ve met me in the flesh, you may know that I don’t wear jewelry or makeup or the latest fashions. However, when I was circling the AWP book fair and telling folks about the book giveaway going on here at the Kangaroo blog, I decided I wanted a piece of “antique” jewelry of a kangaroo that I could wear to readings and AWP and other poetry places. I wanted something that was one-of-a-kind and on first searching the internets, I was dismayed by a sea of tourist pieces from Australia. I gave it a rest and tried again this week (this time searching for estate sale sites rather than just “kangaroo jewelry” and voila! While this is a brooch, the little space between the kangaroo’s ears looks perfect for a chain, so I’ll probably wear it as a long necklace. I guess I’m giving in a bit to the idea of “branding,” but hopefully on my own terms.

Now, back to the real work at hand…drafting, drafting, drafting.

71 deg ~ gusting winds, clouds gathering, storms predicted at 70% likely

It seems fitting that the forecast calls for storms and rain over the next five days, fitting because yesterday was the last day of instruction at PTC and I’ve collected all my papers and portfolios, and now the grading is set to begin. 

So, I came home from school yesterday and began to clean up all the loose ends before tackling the big papers.  I had the Cubs game on.  We were getting slaughtered by the D-backs (final score 13 – 5), and after the 3rd inning, I’d started to feel a bit blue (Cubbie blue blues!).  I happened to check my email in between recording a few last minute journal grades and swearing at the TV.  Lo and behold, there was a Woo Hoo! news email sitting there staring me in the face.

Matthew Olzmann, Poetry Editor for The Collagist, had emailed to tell me that they had accepted “Body Sewn Together with Twine and a Dull Needle.”  Woo Hoo!  I’ve blogged before about The Collagist, and I’m thrilled to have placed a poem at such a great online journal.  Like several other online journals, I’ll have the opportunity to submit a recording of the poem, and the editors will conduct an interview with me as well. 

Given that I knew going into this week that I wouldn’t be drafting a poem today, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about the drafting process of “Body Sewn Together with Twine and a Dull Needle.”  I knew the poem had begun almost a year ago, but to be sure, I went back and flipped through my file.  Each poem gets its own manila folder once it’s graduated from the “In Progress” folder.  I keep each significantly new draft in the poem’s folder with a date on each draft (I’m a bit OCD that way).  Sure enough, the opening of the poem had been drafted June 3rd of 2009.

Without tantalizing too much, the poem is a bit spooky and dreamlike at the beginning, and I just couldn’t for the life of me remember if the actual image I began with came from a dream/nightmare or not.  I don’t usually write directly from my dreams/nightmares, but I had a niggling suspicion that this was an exception.  I went to my journals and looked back over the one from that time period.  Sure enough, there’s the beginning of the poem, but no notes on what sparked the image.  I can tell you that I was reading Ada Limon (accent absent due to Blogger formatting troubles) and Lisa Russ Spaar.

In any case, the poem began in my journal, and then I went to the computer and printed out about six lines.  Apparently, nothing was really going on at the time and those lines sat around in my “In Progress” folder for quite a bit.  Later, in November 2009, I combined those lines with a set of lines also drafted in June, but which I hadn’t seen fit to join at the time.  Thus, the poem I have now grew into its body with many additions, deletions, and general revisions along the way.  The format of the poem changed from a somewhat staid left-aligned, bulky, single stanza to several stanzas with various indention and line break experiments along the way.  There’s more white space now because the subject matter called for it.  I’ll let you know when the poem is available online and you can judge, Dear Reader, whether I made the right call on the formal elements.

I began submitting the poem in January to meet with several quick rejections.  I worked with it a bit more and sent it out again, now in its current form, in mid-March.  A six week turn-around on the acceptance is awesome! 

For now, I’ll be keeping a weather eye on the horizon and a teaching eye on the papers before me.

53º ~ seriously? Spring has been in some kind of regression the past three days ~ forecast calls for warming to normal temps by this afternoon

Some days I approach this blog and know exactly what I want to say, and the writing then is an attempt to say it well. On other days like today, I desire to reach out to you all, Dear Readers, but I have no particular subject at hand. The writing then becomes an act of faith, a slightly scary step into the abyss.

The first thing on my mind is that there are two days left to the official National Poetry Writing Month Giveaway, so amazingly conceived of and supported by Kelli Russell Agodon. Click here for a list of all 55 participating bloggers. Click here to leave a comment for my own giveaway of Mistaken for Song by Tara Bray and Blood Almanac by yours truly. I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winners and announce them Saturday morning. 64 comments so far (excluding two of my own), so your odds of winning a book are much better than your odds of winning the Powerball lottery!

Another wafting thought that I’ve been meaning to set in time is this: My hat is off to all the poets who endeavored to tackle the 30/30 of National Poetry Writing Month. I’ve been watching your progress on your blogs, and I’m in awe. Even if you fell behind, I’m in awe and slightly jealous of all the new material you’ve been generating.

As a rule, I’m a compartmentalizer. I like routine. I like schedules that run on time because this is the only way I’ve been successful as a teacher and a writer. I have carved out this time and labeled it “writing time,” and this allows me to push aside the knowledge of the emails from students that are waiting and the papers that need grading and the administrative tasks that need completing. In order to attempt the 30/30, a new compartment would be required, and when any new compartment is added to the routine, something has to give. Perhaps next year I’ll figure out what feels flexible enough to remove for the month.

Big congrats to Susan Rich on the successful launch of her third book, The Alchemist’s Kitchen. For details about the reading and pictures, click here and here. Also, Susan is the featured poet for this week’s installment at Linebreak. Yay, Susan!

Finally, I miss my companion these last three weeks, the red-bellied woodpecker who was, on Monday morning, usurped by a squawky starling. As my friend, Anne, says, “Meh!”