50º and overcast/murky

In what may be record turn-around time, Juked posted my poem “The Wisdom of the Dead” today, after accepting it on Saturday (see below). Hope you’ll give this journal (and my poem) a read.

Also in the mail today, my contributor copies of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics Issue 12. I’m excited to read this issue not only because of the other great poets (including Angie Macri, my colleague at PTC, and Eva Hooker, my first official poetry instructor), but also because of the exploration of the current state of the lyric. Along the turn-around time theme, my poem in Redactions, “Voice Box” was accepted by this journal right out of the gate, within days of submission.

My thanks to the editors and staff members at both journals for their support of my work and of poetry at large. (Please help support the literary arts by subscribing to a journal or requesting your library subscribe.)

32º and sunny

Okay, I know I’m way behind the curve here. I saw the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies make a splash on the blog world several months ago and ignored it…zombies not really being my thing. However, when my husband heard that Natalie Portman is making the movie, he rushed to tell me about it…Natalie Portman being his thing in a major way. To his credit, he also knows I love Austen’s work, so he figured this was a home run…a movie we would both love.

I really hadn’t planned on reading the book, but yesterday we were out picking up a few things at a big box store and they had the book on sale. Last night I cracked it open and began to read. Now remember, I hadn’t really read anything about the book, so I had no idea what was really going on. In other words, I was expecting an adaptation. Then, I began to read. After three chapters, I realized that most of this was very close to the original. The geek in me insisted on pulling the original off the shelf and checking to see just how close it was. I’m pretty sure the emotion that I felt was shock when I saw that it was indeed nearly 90% original text…word-for-word…with Seth Grahame-Smith adding the occasional zombie fight scene here and there and weirdly excising a few sentences here and there. (I still am dumbfounded by this excising…it appears rather random to me.)

Ok, so finally figuring out what was going on, I read the book description and sure enough it is described by the publisher as “an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.” Several other blurbs make it clear that it is the original with scenes added, and some blogs/sites go on to say that this is only kosher because the book is out of copyright and in the public domain.

I get all that, but as I read along, I was still bothered by this “mash-up” and bothered with myself for being bothered. After reading seven chapters, I couldn’t continue because of all the thinking going on inside my head.

Here’s one voice in my head, the voice of the college-level English instructor: I want some way to tell the difference at a glance between Austen’s sentences and Grahame-Smith’s. Perhaps different color print? I want to know who authored what. Of course, after several chapters, I could pretty much figure this out, but I worried about those readers who weren’t as familiar with Austen’s voice. Do they understand what is happening at the author level? How does all of this contribute to our students and their lack of recognition that plagiarism is a serious issue? I know this is fiction and copyright is not at issue, but if I’m standing up in front of my classes insisting that they put quotation marks around exact phrases and include signal phrases to identify the source…what does this type of mash-up say to them?

Here’s another voice in my head, the voice of the educated-at-a-liberal arts college person: People have been mashing up bodies of work for as nearly as long as art has existed. It happens in music quite often…although there have been law suits about “sampling” when copyrights are involved. Then, there’s parody and adaptations…happens all the time too. What am I getting so worked up about?

Here’s another voice in my head, the voice of the writer: I am angry on Jane Austen’s behalf. She is the one who worked and reworked that novel into existence (and didn’t even get to put her name on it when it was first published…harrumph!). Now, Grahame-Smith is reaping quite a financial benefit: my copy is marked as the 20th printing (# of books / printing??? = ? royalties) and the sale of movie rights. This doesn’t seem fair. But then, since the original is out of copyright, and they put her name on the cover along with Grahame-Smith’s then all is okey-dokey, no?

The voice of the writer, again: Would I want someone doing this to my work two hundred years from now…okay, okay, I’ll be dead and won’t know, presumably, and I write poetry of all things…, but still. I get adaptation and taking characters and reshaping them into something new, Tennyson’s “Ulysses” for example. But, this just isn’t that.

Finally, I really don’t want to be a downer. I want to be able to see the fun in it all. I don’t believe Grahame-Smith is claiming to be a writer of literary fiction, so what’s the harm? Isn’t the exposure of Austen’s work to a new audience a good thing?

Help!

49º and sunny

Had a “good news” email yesterday from J.W. Wang, the editor of Juked. He and the rest of the journal’s staff have accepted one of my poems for publication. Woo hoo! If you haven’t checked out this journal, you should. It exists both online and in print.

In the vein of keeping it real, the poem that was accepted is one tough cookie. It survived 30 rejections and lived to earn this acceptance. In all honesty, I was just about ready to retire this one, so I’m doubly grateful to the folks at Juked for giving it a home.

44º and mostly sunny

After a shaky start to the day, I’ve had a great revision session this morning. I had a poem swap this past week that yielded wonderfully helpful comments, which is always exciting. However, today, I remembered the real work of revision. Decisions, decisions, decisions. Lots and lots of reading aloud. (The cats are no help here. They think I’m talking to them and that I actually want them to congregate on my desk. ~~ Printers are expensive cat toys!)

Several thoughts that occurred in the process:

1. I really, really wanted to “finish” these four poems. My friend provided such great insights into their strengths and weaknesses, surely I could figure out the “right” changes to make. No matter how much I believe that writing is a process, sometimes the idea of “product” takes over.

2. After tinkering and toying with each poem until it had been spun into something new (a true re-seeing of what I wanted each poem to be), I hit a wall. That’s four walls this morning. I realized that at a certain point with each poem I couldn’t go any farther. I had to put the poems down and let them rest/breathe/rise/age/whatever metaphor works for you. I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep pushing each one, and yet, instinctively, I knew that to continue to mess with the poem would mean its downfall. (I am not a patient person…this pause in the process is hard for me.)

3. I did learn from the past (this last fall, when I ignored a good friend’s comments and sent some ugly duckling poems out into the world), and I really opened myself to the criticism I wanted to resist.

4. There are no good synonyms for “blood,” when you mean the bodily fluid that circulates in our veins.

Non-poetry related, but thanks to The Rumpus, I found this link to an elementary school in Norway with an outdoor fireplace for the kids.

~~~~~

Back to Brendan Constantine’s discussion on the definition of art over at Red Hen Press’ blog, here’s a quote from today’s installment:
If anything is certain it is this principal: behind every great work of art, there is an artist ignorant of much art, a person who cannot possibly have studied every ‘good’ or useful expression before. All art can be legitimately argued or improved. It is ‘up for grabs,’ or, as Paul Valery is often quoted, “A [work of art] is never finished, only abandoned.”

And this is perhaps the one that resonates with me the most:
Perhaps it is because there doesn’t seem to be a line or rule for determining when art occurs.

~~~~~

Finally, Dave Bonta over a Via Negativa has a post up about blogging and writers and the instantaneous publishing that can occur online. Bonta touches on many topics that have been floating around in my brain lately, particularly about the practice of placing drafts on blogs and some of the journals now including that as “previously published” in their guidelines.

Here’s Bonta:
Many print and online magazines will not consider previously blogged material for publication, causing the more ambitious writers to avoid posting drafts of their work, except possibly in password-protected posts. The irony is that in many cases a poem posted to the author’s blog can reach more readers than it would receive in all but the most widely circulated magazines — even online magazines, which are all too often poorly designed, practically invisible to search engines, and lack any kind of feed.

Check out this new journal, Misfit, which will publish poems of 60-plus lines and poems of 7-minus lines. The very short next to the very long. I love it. I’m not sure I have anything that works for their requirements, but I plan on keeping up with what they publish in the spring.

Also, thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk for her recent post at Work-in-Progress about finding a writing buddy to help keep yourself honest about your goals.

I did draft some lines yesterday that may or may not make it into poem form. Feeling a bit like the Tin Man as far as writing poetry is concerned these days. Perhaps better things await today.

The blog over at Red Hen Press has an interesting post today from Brendan Constantine: Your Cheatin’ Art. Sparked by a comment from a review of the movie The Road, Constantine examines how we form our ideas of what is art and what isn’t.

Here’s the excerpt that interests me the most:

Rather, if you are like many who believe that art is a field of study like medicine in which all efforts represent a movement toward a heightened understanding, toward a cause or cure for consciousness, then it may be necessary to assign values of legitimacy. Perhaps only in my opinion, art doesn’t ‘evolve’ in a single direction, its movements are not only progressive, but regressive and sometimes it doesn’t move at all, thus it perpetuates itself.

Constantine goes on to discuss the idea of an artist being “credentialed,” a word that causes a shiver of unease to run up my spine, even thought I went the MFA route. The beginning of the blog promises more to come in the next few days, and I plan to follow the conversation down whatever winding path it leads.

I have a Blogspot question for any other users. How do you get the option for someone who leaves a comment to be alerted to follow-ups?

I have the comment moderator option switched on and email notification to me when someone posts, so I’m not worried about me. However, on some other people’s blogs, when I leave a comment I have the chance to click a button to be notified of follow-up comments. How do I set this option for someone commenting on my blog?

Any help appreciated.