Because Sometimes Counting Helps

I haven’t written a draft in two full weeks, mostly because of the conference and then the hectic catching up on grading and prep work after said conference. My goal for the semester was a draft a week, and I have been beating myself up a bit for the lapse. So, I decided to count the poems I’ve drafted during the semester. (In the past, I have not written well during the teaching semester and have relied on the summer…this year everything got turned upside down and I rearranged my teaching schedule to find more balance with my writing schedule).

Drumroll please…After 12 weeks of school, I have 8 new poems. Here are the titles, in no particular order:
Late Aubade
The Penitent Boy Standing in the Family Plot
The Winged Saint
The Stone Saint
Crouching in the Body’s Dusty Ruins
Our Hands Filling Up with All There is Left to Rescue
Naming the Storm
Stumbling Away from the Oracle

Even though I’m technically short 4 poems on my goal, this list pleases me. I’m starting today by patting myself on the back for finding at least some better balance.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
What I’m Reading:  Hunger All Inside

What I’m Reading: Hunger All Inside

I did go ahead and start with Marie Gauthier’s chapbook today: Hunger All Inside. Only recently have I grown to see how wonderful chapbooks can be. In a short sitting, I can fully immerse myself in one poet’s work. The risk of interruption lessens and the ability to pause and re-read increases because of the limited number of poems.

Hunger All Inside is a poignant, yet unsentimental, collection of mother and lover poems. Many of the poems feature the speaker’s interaction with her young son; others with her lover. Set in Massachusetts, the inclusion of the New England landscape provides a subtle subplot that comments on the main focus of human interactions.

One poem in particular stands out as more focused on the landscape than the humans in it: “Spring Pleiades.” It is written in seven sections, of course. My favorite section is the second. Here it is in its entirety:

Mudbath

Manacles of ice broken,
mice nose about the clotted
meltwater, fields of early
meadow-rue and matted grass
moored by the bog. They dream a
memory of apples, wheat,
mulled heat of the late day sun.

Several of the poems deal with the fears that are born of mothering, the fears of what could happen to the child should the mother lose focus. “Gravity” is one of my favorites of these. It contains the following lines to describe the way a mother grabs on to her toddler’s shirt, lest he fall: “Looping two fingers / around the collar of his shirt, / tether of tendon and bone… .” I love the image here of the extension of the body connection that is lost at birth.

Finally, I’ll leave you with the ending of the last poem in the book “Summer, the air,” which describes the toddler’s blue popsicle-stained mouth as:

blue as the larkspur
flowering in long spikes

blue as the bucket
collecting rainwater

and rocks blue
as the sky leaching light

blue ice to salute
the end of winter’s

long death to hail
the hot stalled days of summer.

(Apologies to Gauthier here. I couldn’t get the lines to indent correctly. If anyone knows how to do that in HTML, please let me know. In essence, I need some tabs.)

Support Poetry! Buy or Borrow a Book Today
Hunger All Inside
Marie Gauthier
Finishing Line Press, 2009

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Another Bucketful of Stuff

It seems fitting in the time of the harvest moon to find so much plenty in the world of poetry. If you’ll hang with me through one more reaping from the blogs on my list, I think I’ll be back to reading and writing new drafts next week. For today’s trip to the grain elevator, I have three links about others and one horn-tooting for myself.

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I’ve written about Rachel Contreni Flynn’s work in the past, and linked most recently to her new work at The Collagist. The same journal posted an interview with RCF on Nov. 2nd. I was just able to read it today. If you have the time, I suggest following the link to the poems first. They are the kind of poems that feel like a punch in the solar plexus. All the air goes right out of me. I was surprised and humbled to find Blood Almanac listed in the last question. Thanks to Rachel for that!

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I’ve been a huge fan of Mary Biddinger’s blog The Word Cage for over a year. This week she has two “how to” posts about writing poems that are seriously wonderful in the highly imaginative way. I appreciate being able to look at the process in a new way. Check out How to defibrillate a poem (before it’s too late) and How to kill a poem (before it even starts).

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Thanks to the Hayden’s Ferry Review blog for mention of PoetrySpeaks. I hadn’t heard of this website before, a new addition to audio resources for poets and poetry. I plan to spend some time checking it out this weekend. I plan on using several of audio blogs/websites in my creative writing class in the spring.

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Finally, to toot my own horn. (If you are averse to poet’s spreading good news about themselves, please stop reading here.) I woke up today with emails from Jake Adam York, an editor at Copper Nickel, and Josh Robbins in my inbox alerting me to the fact that one of my poems from the most recent Copper Nickel is on Verse Daily today. Check out “The Interior Weather of Tree-Clinging Birds” and then consider subscribing to Copper Nickel if you like it. They are in the midst of a Great Internet Sale. (By the way, I couldn’t toot my own horn without the journals, editors, and publishers that make sharing poetry possible. THANKS!)

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Now, finally, I get to read a few of those books I mentioned buying a few posts ago. How will I decide where to start? Lou-Lou, cat #2, is currently chewing on the ribbon on Marie Gauthier’s Hunger All Inside, so maybe she’s trying to tell me something. (I love Finishing Line’s production of their chapbooks, but the ribbons are irresistible to the cats! They use the ribbons to pull the books from my shelves. Chapbook and cat toy all in one!)

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Why Is it

that when I have the most schoolwork to do (catching up on grading post-conference) there are amazing things going on in the poetry world, great books arriving in the mail, and drafts that need writing? Sigh.

So, today another brief run around the blogs and a few more comments before I’m off to teacherland.

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The gracious and talented Kevin Brockmeier was our keynote speaker on Saturday at our conference. I must say Kevin, who is a Little Rock native and current resident, has always been quite generous with his time whenever I’ve invited him to a local event. I’m thankful for that. After his reading, Kevin handed out his list of top 50 books, which sparked a conversation between us about my top 10 books of fiction. I happened to mention that I’d recently placed Kevin’s own The Brief History of the Dead up there in the top 10. So, here’s my top 10 list for books of fiction:
1. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
2. The Things They Carried Tim O’Brien
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
4. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
5. The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood
6. The Brief History of the Dead Kevin Brockmeier
7. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Sherman Alexie
8. The Way that Water Enters Stone John Dufresne
9. The Interpreter of Maladies Jhumpa Lahiri
10. Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie

A couple of things I notice: Everything listed here is from the later half of the 20th century or from the 21st. I woke up worrying this fact around in my head. What does that say about me? Am I neglecting the classics? I admit I haven’t read extensively in the classics for fiction, but I think I’ve read a considerable amount. Is it a bad thing if I don’t list a 19th century novel in my top 10? Worry….worry….worry.

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It seems that there’s more “where are the women writers?” news going on. This time it is regarding Publisher Weekly’s Best Books of 2009 list, its top 10 lacking any women at all. There are women in the genre specific categories. Here’s the post from Victoria Chang with a press release from WILLA.

(By the way, why list 20 “best” fiction books and only 5 “best” poetry? I might be more disturbed by that than I am about the lack of women writers in the top 10! Booksellers and libraries use PW to determine what books they carry or buy for their shelves. No wonder people think no one reads poetry anymore!)

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Two great poems to check out NOW! Linebreak has “Training” by Sarah J. Sloat, and Verse Daily has “Love is When a Boat is Built from All the Eyelashes in the Ocean” by Zachary Schomburg. Enjoy!

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Finally, Kevin Brockmeier also talked about collecting quotes about writing and using them when he has taught creative writing in the past. His most recent addition is a quote by Antoine de Saint Exupery (of The Little Prince) that I used to have posted over my computer long ago. I’m glad Kevin reminded me of it. I found several translations on line, all of them unattributed. Will do more research here, but let me leave you with the essence of the quote:

“If you want to build a ship, don´t drum up people to collect wood and don´t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

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I’m off to grade and prep and hopefully will return to longing for the sea of poetry drafts on Friday.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

A Mouthful

Belly up to the table friends. This post will be a mouthful. I’ve just been trying to catch up with my blog reading, and I missed four days, which means my google reader account was in the triple digits. So, gobble gobble, here are some highlights that jumped out at me.

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First, two posts about the Whiting Awards and the demographic breakdown. Very interesting in a numbers kind of way. I haven’t had time to sit and think on this, but I will. First, Victoria Chang offers her breakdown and thoughts. One thing I thought was particularly interesting was when she wrote: “My intuitition is that minorities will try to help other minorities and non-minorities gravitate towards each other in general, as people and their work. But this sounds so archaic to me. I hope I am wrong, but I do wonder how much of our world at large and our poetry world at large have really erased the glass ceiling towards women and minorities?” I have to say that I read widely and without borders. I hope that my own experience is a look toward the future of poetry and not an anomaly. Maybe after I’ve caught up with my post-conference work, I’ll look at the numbers on my poetry shelf and see where I fall. Second, Steve Fellner offers his thoughts on the numbers. Here’s a bit from his opening: “There’s more curious news. Look at the history of the award. In 2008, 3 out of 10 were women. In 2007, 3 out of 10 were women. In 2006, 4 out of ten were women. In 2004 and 2005, 5 out of ten were women. According to the anonymous panel, women’s writing must be declining in quality, and fairly quickly.” Honestly, I don’t think I would have thought to look at the history of prizes like this. I tend to try to insulate myself from these things in an attempt to ward off both jealousy and jinxing myself. Both of these writers have given me food for thought. I’ll try to let you know how the digesting goes.

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I’ve been reading Kelli Russell Agodon’s posts about her recent winning of the White Pine Press award. She’s been honest and open and offers great insight to all of us sending out manuscripts. Check out her latest answers to reader questions. If you haven’t been following along, I highly recommend looking at the last several weeks of posts.

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Charlotte Pence has a post about memorizing one poem from her lineup at a recent reading. This is something I’ve been meaning to do and meaning to do but never got around to it. Actually, since I read so much from Blood Almanac in the last three years, many of those poems are as familiar as well-worn jeans, but none of them are formally memorized. Ah…something new to aspire to. Love Charlotte’s comments about how the one memorized poem changed the other poems as well.

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How a Poem Happens features Anna Journey this week. I love this blog because I get to see just a tiny view inside a poet’s creative process. Fascinating. Here’s my favorite bit because she talks about couplets in a way that resonates with me: “I often choose to write in couplets; perhaps that’s because they’re about as far away as you can get from prose. There’s a cool restraint to couplets, a formal clarity, and a kind of—I don’t know—buoyancy that helps give my speedy, image-packed, lush language room to breathe. So, it’s about balance; it’s my recipe for staving off some sort of baroque implosion.”

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Finally, dessert. I went back through the daily poetry sites that I’d missed during the conference and found this stand out on Poetry Daily: How to Make Armor by Jennifer K. Sweeney. I love a good “how to” poem, but too often they go awry in their prescriptiveness. This one rocks it.

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Urp. (Consider that my delicate, lady-poet burp.)

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Post-TYCA-SW

A giant shout out to all of my TYCA-SW colleagues and friends who made the journey to Little Rock for this year’s conference. It was great to see you all! While I’m glad the conference is over and that it appears to have been a success, I’m sad that we only have two days together each year. Looking forward to Laredo in ’10.

Thanks especially to everyone who attended the literary reading session late on Friday afternoon. Thanks also to my fellow readers Nancy Herschap, David Charlson, and my PTC colleague, Antoinette Brim. You all were spectacular! And a double thanks to those who were able to buy my book. On this blog I advocate for supporting writers by attending readings and buying books/journals, and I was so fortunate to have such a great audience and such great support.

If you are a new reader of the blog, I usually post on MWF in the morning and sometimes on the weekend. My posts are almost exclusively about my poetry life rather than my teaching life. I hope you will find them useful.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Finally, Just a Few Links to Think About

No drafting this week, since as soon as I post this, I’m off to school for conference duties. The conference ends on Saturday afternoon, and I plan to sleep all day Sunday. Will be back to drafting next week.

Until then, here are just a few links to continue the conversation:

Joshua Corey contemplates the differences between writing poetry and writing a novel. Here’s what hooked me: “The pleasures of poetry are the pleasures of simultaneity. I read a line of verse, and it’s like a chain reaction of little detonations: the sound play, the layers of reference (in the line’s structure, diction, proper names, etc.), the manifestation of images, and the instantaneous revisions of the preceding lines created by the double-jointed syntax made possible by line breaks.”

The blog from 32 Poems has a great interview with Ann Fisher-Wirth. I attended a reading last year at the Arkansas Literary Festival where Fisher-Wirth read from Carta Marina. Fantastic. Her answer to a question on accessibility and the poet’s responsibility contains this: “However, as a professor I take very seriously my opportunity to open poetry to students, and open students to poetry. All infants and children love poetry; it is bred in the bone. It is a great wrong that so many aspects of our culture stifle children’s appreciation of poetry as they get older. So I look upon my teaching as excavation. The love of poetry, the understanding of poetry—they’re down there, somewhere. The evidence is that even people who never read poems turn to poems to help them affirm and commemorate life’s great passages: birth, marriage, a society’s great tragedies, death.”

Time to put on my other hat and tip it toward those strategic duties.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
Bookaholics Anonymous

Bookaholics Anonymous

Hello, my name is Sandy and I’m a bookaholic.

You know those women who talk about shoes and how they can’t stop buying them? You know those men who talk about techno-gadgets and how they can’t stop buying them? I used to think I had nothing in common with these people. Until today…when I finally had to admit to myself that I am a bookaholic/journalaholic.

Over the past few months, I kept getting “surprised” by my credit card bill, somehow erasing from my memory all of the book and journal purchases I’d made that month. In some ways, I blame the internet, although I know that blame is not part of the 12-step process. It’s so easy to click and buy, and I’m doing it for a “worthy cause”…supporting my fellow poets…so it must be okay. Well, I decided to keep a list on a scrap sheet of paper that sits under my computer screen. I record each transaction as I make it. Last month, I did great. Only subscribed to one journal as part of a contest entry fee. Four weeks went by without a charge and then WHAMMMO! I suddenly have four charges of about $20 a piece, give or take. Someone cut me off!

So, what did I buy? Here’s the list:

Going Blind
Mara Faulkner, OSB
excelsior editions, SUNY Press, 2009

(My first collegiate writing instructor. I am indebted to this amazing writer in more ways that she will ever know.)

Hunger All Inside
Marie Gauthier
Finishing Line Press, 2009

(A new blogging acquaintance. Can’t wait to read!)

Oxford American
Journal Subscription renewal
(Well, if we don’t support local journals, who will?)

Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World
Joshua Poteat
University of Georgia Press, 2009

(Joshua Poteat won the Anhinga Prize the year before me, and his first book Ornithologies is a must-read. I am thrilled for him about this new book!)

The good news is that I can just make my monthly budget with these purchases. Watch for postings about these new reads in the coming weeks.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

A Couple of Quick Links

Conference planning is in full swing, with the conference itself one week away. My appearances here may be hit or miss until Nov. 1, but I will try to pop in from time to time. Before I submerge myself in generating receipts, tallying lunch counts, putting together name badges, and so on, I wanted to post these two things.

One. Josh Robbins has some great poems up over at Still: Literature of the Mountain South. I was unfamiliar with this journal until I read about it on Josh’s blog. It’s always great to find a new journal of place, even if it isn’t my place exactly. Josh also shares the great news of being in Best New Poets 2009. Check out his work for a fine time on the web.

Two. Charlotte Pence has a post up that extends the conversation about the poet’s relationship to the reader. She breaks down M.H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, a book that is now on my list to read. I also like her opening, which discusses returning to her book manuscript and “tak[ing] a bomb to” it in order to see “where the pieces fall.” Lovely.

Oddly, and without me thinking about the connection until just now, both Charlotte and Josh are doctoral students at the University of Tennessee, and they both work as editors for GRIST, another great journal that once saw fit to publish a poem of mine. (Everyone should now break into “It’s a small world after all.”)

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Poetry and the Other

Also of interest to me this morning is Ren Powell’s post up over at ReadWritePoem. In the post she talks about her experience using an Arabic form of poetry while writing in English and some of the criticism she’s received for using it. Interestingly, she brings up the fact that the haiku is used in English poetry all the time without comment (along with many other forms borrowed from other cultures). I hadn’t consciously thought about the “borrowing” of this Japanese form before.

Her questions about the intercultural dialogue in poetry have long intrigued me. In fact, when I was a beginning poet as an undergraduate, I was heavily influenced by Native American writers like Wendy Rose, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Paula Gunn Allen. I have poems from that time period, highly confessional, that explore my connection to their work but also my unease at being a white woman of the privileged class. I left that work behind as I came into my own voice in my own time, but I also wonder if I left it behind because I wasn’t comfortable “borrowing” certain rhythms and themes.

Here’s the opening of Powell’s post:
I have always found it difficult to locate a comfortable place to position myself between respect and reverence when it comes to the “other.”

And here’s the closing:
Do we seek out the influence of poets from other cultures? Allow ourselves to be influenced? Allow it and admit it and risk being accused of cultural stereotyping or colonialist tendencies? Allow it but keep it a secret and risk being accused of trying to pass off the ideas of another culture as one’s own? Sometimes I feel the bigger my world gets, the more difficult it is to negotiate comfortably within it.The conversation continues in the comments of Powell’s post.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn