Today was a day of “busy work,” preparing the new manuscript, In a World Made of Such Weather as This, for submission to four different presses. Like submitting to journals, this is a bit time consuming, as I pause to re-read submission guidelines and re-think whether my work fits with the publisher.

On a positive note, the first hour or so was taken up with reviewing the complete manuscript one more time, and I made a few changes with the order of four poems that I think really strengthen the core of the book. Also, as I was taking a last look at any poems that I’d marked with a ? for deletion, I felt that snap-click in my brain as I saw the revision that would save one particular poem. It was a drastic surgery. I excised the entire first half of the poem and then exploded the lines of the second half. As the whole thing settled back into place during the aftermath, I felt my gut calm into a feeling of surety. Very satisfying.

So, off you go, oh binder-clipped manuscripts of mine. Behave yourselves and make a good first impression.

Wow. I have poetry friends up at both Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. What are the odds?

Here’s the link to Rhett Iseman Trull’s poem “Cosmonauts Have Nine Lives, Too” on Verse Daily.

Here’s the link to Andrea Hollander Budy’s poem “Ice Storm” on Poetry Daily.

Enjoy!

I’m a few days behind the hoopla, but I saved Joel Brouwer’s post on Harriet for this morning because I knew it was going to take some time to read and digest both the post and the comments. The post asks questions about how poets perceive the process of creating a book of poetry. Is it a project with a predetermined theme (and therefore with poems written directly for that theme), or is it a collection of what you’ve written recently and then an attempt to develop an arc by ordering? (Brouwer says it better than this.)

The post is definitely worth reading; however, it was this comment posted by Lydia that jumped out at me the most:
This question haunts my work. Or rather it aggravates and instigates it into feeling inadequate because it is not conceived of “as book” in the process. I am not someone who tends toward thematics. In fact, I deeply distrust them. When I’m writing my attention is singular and dedicated to what’s at hand. This feels to me like an honest reaction to the world. To force myself to consider a larger project feels false, distracting, and misguiding. The only time it occurs me to do this is when I consider the publication of my manuscript and notice that a vast majority of work coming out today is explicitly thematicized. Others have written of this, but the first book as miscellani is dead which is to suggest that our singular perspectives and voices are not enough connective tissue to hold together a book, that it is necessary to wrap it in further “projecthood”. Brouwer’s question and Lydia’s reply certainly resonate with me, especially as I examine the new manuscript with a reader’s eye.

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Before I allowed myself to read the various and sundry blogs I follow, I did dig into some really good revision work on current drafts. I’m now feeling like three new drafts are almost ready to go out into the world. Also, after re-reading Malinda Markham’s Ninety-Five Nights of Listening (one of my favorite books), I realized that one of the things I like about her work is that she doesn’t overuse her adjectives (a fault of which I’m sorely guilty). With that insight in mind, I went back to an older poem that has troubled me and I found oh-so-many adjectives. After a serious paring down, I’m MUCH happier with the poem. (If only I could convince my creative writing students that this is just one of the benefits of reading!)

Some reading: Loose Sugar, Brenda Hillman and Forth a Raven, Christina Davis

Some drafting: a handful of tangled lines that may (or may not) become something

Some revising: lots of work on the poem I started a week ago today, tinkering with a few older drafts from August — like working out, even for a short time, revision makes me feel good

So, no real drafts accomplished this weekend. I’m struggling to be okay with that. I know that for me, I need a clear schedule of writing time; however, with the long weekend and a visit to my in-laws (which was a good time, btw), my schedule got tilted a bit. I’ve done lots of piddling work for my writing world: blogging, reading blogs, finishing up my library at goodreads, etc, but that’s not the real work. On a happy note, the outlook for the rest of the week and next weekend looks good for quiet time, so I’m looking forward to what comes next.

Last week I read this on Victoria Chang’s blog:
If a poet publishes a book every 3 years, how many poetry books are out there and who will buy these books, especially if even we aren’t buying each other’s books?

It’s a really interesting post about why poets don’t want to talk about sales numbers. Prior to this statement, I was feeling pretty good about myself because I had learned last month that Anhinga had effectively sold out of my first 500 books. They had 7 left in the warehouse. My first print run is 1,200, and I never imagined I’d get close to that. (Anhinga now wisely prints in batches, so that they don’t have to store large quantities of books.) That’s cool with me. I was proud of my number.

Then, I read that “3 years” statement above. I found out that Blood Almanac had won the Anhinga Prize in October of 2005, and the book appeared in summer 2006. Here it is 3+ years later no matter how you count it, and I’m slugging through the submission/rejection process of book 2. Apparently, I’m slower than average!

I was glad to read the post, but these are exactly the kind of things that I have to consciously strip from my mind when I’m trying to work. Once this is posted, I shall try to stave off any more thoughts on the subject.

Happy Labor Day…may yours be laborless.

From Oliver de la Paz’ blog:

Currently in the throes of putting together small manuscript packets to send out to journals. What I’m finding is I’m running out of stuff that holds my confidence. I suppose this is natural–a lot of the stuff that has my confidence is either picked up, out, or in limbo somewhere.

I’m feeling something along the same lines, and it’s reassuring to know that someone I admire so much goes through the same process. If you have a minute, the rest of the post is very interesting, as de la Paz goes on to discuss how he views his individual poems in terms of book-length works and how that affects his submission process.

Reading Justin Evan’s blog, I learned of a new journal, a very new journal, starting up this fall: Sugar House Review. (Congrats to Justin on the acceptance!) As I’m always interested in collecting new journals, I’ll definitely check this one out; however, it was something in their submission guidelines that interested me the most. After the usual information, they included this:

Send only original work. If you quote another poet or source, we expect that source to receive credit. We value the original creative endeavors of other writers and hope you do too. If we suspect your work to be plagiarized from another source, we will be mightily peeved and won’t hesitate to contact the appropriate authorities.

The composition instructor in me cheers their integrity, as this reinforces what I teach on an everyday basis. The writer in me finds it interesting because from time to time I have used lines from other poets either as inspiration or as actual lines in my work. If you have read my poems in the most recent diode, you noticed a note on “Triolet with a Line by Jean Sénac.” This seems a clear cut case to me of needing to acknowledge my source, as I copied word for word. However, I know that many poets find it acceptable to use lines from others within their work without acknowledging it, sometimes without even setting it off in italics or quotes.

To me, there seems to be a less-than-defined line between literary allusion and the necessity to acknowledge another’s work. Blurring things further, I have a recent poem in which I used the phrase “So this must be a kind of __________” and its repetition from a poem by Doug Ramspeck, “Wooing,” that I read in The Pinch. On my initial drafts, I included a note about the source, mostly for my own reference. Am I obligated to include the note when I submit the poem? Do I worry too much about this? Maybe, but I agree with the editors of Sugar House Review that it is important to acknowledge which mind created which lines and to give credit where credit is due.

Okay, so I’m slow at learning how to use the settings on Blogger. I finally figured out how to change the text size of my posts. Apologies to anyone who has had to squint in the past!

Also, I joined Goodreads and have an author page there. If you are already there, please friend me!

September in the poetry world means more submissions of individual poems, of course, but it also means the new round of manuscript submissions. While there are a few publishers that accept submissions or host contests over the summer, I tend to organize my submissions by the academic school year. And so, I am trying to gather my courage about me like a shawl in order to begin the process again.

Frequent readers know that in August I struggled with the title of the manuscript. I think I’ve settled on using “In a World Made of Such Weather as This.” Partly, I just love that line, which is from a poem called “And Sweet Were the Uses” (which is coming out in just a few weeks in the new Copper Nickel…yay!) . Partly, the old title “Glacial Elegies” really only fits the first section of the book in its new incarnation. I know the new title is lengthy, but I did find a few of my favorite books have longer titles, and I also know that if this manuscript ever finds a publisher, the publisher can help me tweak the title as well.

All this is to say that this morning, I’ve spent some of my writing time reading through the manuscript in one sitting. I am constantly surprised at how difficult it is for me to read the book through the eyes of “the reader.” In the past week when I have tried to do this, I’ve found myself rushing through the poems, saying to myself “yes, yes, this is the one about the wind and the voice” and flipping the page. I work so hard on each individual poem that I become steeped in its nuances and feel it is as familiar as my own name, which makes it easy to skim. That’s not good if you’re trying to get a sense of how the whole thing hangs together.

Last week, I reordered some of the book, creating four sections instead of three and adding some of my newer work, removing a few poems that just kept rubbing me wrong. Today, I forced myself to slow down and really read every word from cover to cover (even if the covers are just the much-abused plastic covers of my three-ring binder). It was great. I’ve marked seven poems that either need a few tweaks of revision or need to be reviewed for removal. It feels like I’ve accomplished some real work on the book, which helps gather that courage, as I know I’m making the book as strong as it can be.

Next weekend will be the first round of working through the different submission guidelines of the different presses. I must forget the round of rejections from last year and remember that I have done the work of revision and am hopefully sending out a better book.

Forward motion is what it’s all about.

Yesterday: Last night I had to good fortune of being able to attend a talk by Francine Prose over at Hendrix College. The talk was titled “Word and Image” and centered around Prose’s work writing about art. Many interesting ideas arose as she unpacked that old cliche: a picture is worth a thousand words. While most of the talk focused on the attempt to write essays and reviews about art, towards the end she flipped the cliche and addressed the things that language can do that image cannot. [As a bonus, I got to enjoy a great dinner with friends beforehand.]

Today: This morning during my writing time, I took the single line that I’d managed to scrawl in my notebook on Monday and spun it into a draft for a poem. Woo Hoo! Not sure if it will stick, but it feels good to do the spinning.

Tomorrow: Teaching, teaching, teaching. Rewarding in its own way.