Category Archives: Poetry

Thinking About the Reading at Poetry Readings

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This morning a colleague made some gratifying remarks about me and about my poetry, and while she is the kind of person who is elegant and generous in her praise with everyone (which, in some ways, lessens some of my pleasure in the compliments), one thing that she did say that I think was not especially florid or fullsome was that I am a good reader of my own poetry.  That is something I value.

We all have gone to to poetry readings wherein otherwise excellent poetry is ruined by the person reading it.  Either they read in a monotone voice, devoid of inflection or life (which in turns sucks the life out of everyone in the audience), or they end every sentence in that pretentious “poetry voice” where the tone seems to ask a question even when it’s completely inappropriate to the text.  It staggers me when poets read their work poorly.  It makes me think that a) they never read their work aloud to themselves, even just to hear how the words sound together; or b) (and worse) they cultivate that affected “poetry voice” because they have seen it modeled at so many other poetry readings that they think that’s how poetry out loud is supposed to sound.

Let me assure you, it’s not supposed to sound that way.  It’s utterly gag-worthy that some poets choose to read their poetry to a live audience with anything less than an animated, interesting delivery.  Hello, poetry is PERFORMANCE–even “academic” “on the page” poetry.  Somehow our spoken word poets have gotten that message–that poetry is performance.  They know that poetry is a dynamic medium–so they damn well better deliver it in a dynamic way.

What’s the excuse for “on the page” poets?  Why do they read in a manner that so often turns off their audience?  When they give a dull reading, or read so poorly as to make the audience wish they had cotton to stuff their ears with, they are actually ensuring that the casual poetry audience member will never return and will worse, actually despise poetry.

This is my suggestion for poets to help improve delivery:

  • Practice in front of a mirror.  This can help you remember to look at your audience once in a while.  Look up from those white pages!  Reading in front of a mirror can also help you notice any obnoxious mannerisms you may have, like holding the pages as if your life depends on it, or twisting a lock of your hair, or if you look randomly to the sky.  (I had a philosophy professor who did this–I always wondered what on the ceiling could possibly interest him.)
  • Record your voice…Listen to how you read.  If you catch yourself using that phony, pretentious poetry voice, nip that shit in the bud.  If you find yourself reading without expression, underline words on the page that you want to emphasize, and then emphasize them.  Or, print out copies of your poems with different font sizes on specific words–make the font smaller if you want to decrease the volume of your voice; make the font larger if you want to speak a word louder.  
  • Videotape your performances.  I personally am not hugely keen on being taped.  But it’s beneficial.  Or so they tell me.  With everyone having video-capable phones these days, it’s easy and cheap to do this, and you will gain a fuller experience and understanding of your presence on stage.
  • Learn a few of your poems by heart.  Say them to the air.  Say them to your cat.  If you learn a couple by heart, that can give you a couple of minutes where you don’t need to rely on your pages at all, where you can fully engage the eyes of your audience… even your imaginary one.  One thing that can help you learn your poem is to record it and say it along with the recording.  (I mean, this is how we learn songs, right?  The principle is the same.)
  • Attend many poetry readings.  Notice what engages you as an audience member and then try to recreate it at the readings you give.  What makes a dynamic reader keep your attention?  See what they do right, and model that behavior in your own readings.  
  • Write poetry.  Alot.  And then only read the best material to an audience.  You would think this was an obvious suggestion, but it’s amazing how often poets will combine banal poetry with horrible delivery.  Then it’s a total suckfest.

I think I’m going to try to make a few poetry podcasts and put them here on my blog.  (Of course, I have to learn how to do that first–hahahah.)

 

So, Productivity Can Pay Off…

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I haven’t totally maintained my goal to be sending out at least two submissions every day, but I’ve been pretty good about sending out several a week these last few weeks.  And today, Flyover Country Review published my poem “Stegosaurus.”  I’m so happy!  It’s my first publication in 2 years!  (Not counting being 25% co-author [with Karen Head, Blake Leland, and Bob Wood] of the anthology On Occasion:  Four Poets, One Year, which came out in March.)

I also have a couple of poems coming out in Kentucky Review.  As soon as they do, I’ll let you know!

Feeling Productive (For the Moment)

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I read this post on Facebook about annoying status messages, and the gist of it was, “Don’t post things that make you look like a smug bastard.”  And it’s a valid message for blog posts as well.  So, I’m hoping that I don’t come across as smug when I say that I have been a submission queen lately–in the last 2 weeks, I’ve sent 2 different chapbooks out to contests and poems to 14 journals.  I am not admitting this for praise (because, after all, no one reads this blog), but just to show (myself) that I’m trying to take my writing more seriously.  Which I’ve been needing to do.  (As we know, if you write something down, it becomes more real.)

Submissions are hard for everyone.  But they seem especially hard for me, as I don’t have a good sense of how to put poems together in batches that make sense to me, let alone editors.  Often it seems that my poems are really just very different from each other, so trying to group them is like a nightmare.  So, I wind up not sending poems out–not the best idea, if I actually want to be a writer that people actually read.

But I’ve been trying (as I mentioned)–and while I don’t know when I’ll be successful with any of these 16 submissions (and already I know 2 weren’t, as I received rejections today), I feel like if I can just keep trying–maybe just sending one or two submissions out every day–maybe I can start getting my name out there and seeing that name in print.

Poems: Instructions to Make Impossible Things

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Today I attended the SAMLA 2013 Conference, here at the Mariott Altanta Buckhead hotel (right across the street from Lenox Mall–and don’t I wish I had realized that, because I would totally have driven there and parked in the Mall lot–I took MARTA in instead), and heard some really great speakers on a variety of topics, from art, to fairy tales, to Dr Who.  The opening “pre-session” that I attended focused on the publishing biz for both academic articles and academic monographs–which isn’t something you’d think I’d be overly interested in, as I’m not on the TT.  But I went anyway, and I think I might have liked this session the best–because it was informative AND funny.

The main reason I was at the Conference was because of chairing the SAMLA Poets panel (again–really, I need to give this gig up–but no one else seems to want it, either).  And the three other poets on the panel–Emily Schulten (West Georgia), Andy Frazee (Georgia Tech), and M.P. Jones IV (Auburn)–were extremely diverse and interesting in their work.  Emily’s poetry explored her relationship with her brother, whom she had donated a kidney to.  In general, I’m not a big fan of “body” poetry, but what I liked about her poems was the relationship between siblings that she developed in her writing.  M.P.’s work struck me as both Southern and Poetic with a capital P–lyric poems, certainly, and quite good (his mirror poem about his dying brother was great), and he read with that “poetic authority” that I so admire–and envy.

And surprising to me most of all was Andy’s work, because I hadn’t heard his poetry before, and I had asked him to be on the panel because I knew he was a poet (and I like him as a person), but only gave him the sketchiest of directions about “something poetry and digital-ish.”  So it was exciting to hear him read because he’s written this series of somewhat found prose poems that have come to him mining eHow, lines from poems he likes, and of course, his own imagination.  As he was reading, I kept thinking, This will be such an awesome collection when he gets done… and how long will that be??

I’ve asked him to share his work with me, just because I’d like to see how it looks on the page and parse how he structures the poems.  They were really just cool–like the titles were a little funny, but often the poems themselves were serious and sometimes painful.  He said that “Poems [are] instructions to make impossible things,” which was just a brilliant, pithy definition.  I don’t know if that is an expression he made up, or if he heard it somewhere, but it really is awesome. In fact, I think Instructions to Make Impossible Things should be the title of that collection, whenever he finishes it.  (I think I’ll tell him that the next time I see him.)

There are a number of sessions tomorrow that I’d be interested in seeing–the Eudora Welty Society session, for instance (which is at 8 a.m.!).  And actually, I could make it, since our tennis lesson has been moved to tomorrow afternoon because of City Finals knocking us off the court.  But as I’m sitting here, I’m noticing that I’ve been sneezing and coughing alot today, and my throat is feeling kind of wooly… Which means, that cold I thought I’d successfully dodged last week is probably here.  So it’s probably best that I limit my exposure to other people.

I don’t want to share any more germs than necessary.  And let’s face it, if I could sleep in, who wouldn’t want to do that?

 

My Manifesto of Hate: a Friday Night Rant

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I hate prezi.

I hate spending 4 days working on a prezi because I really hate PowerPoint.

I hate that everybody and her mom, her dog, and her dog’s fleas make PowerPoints.

PowerPoints are about as riveting as toilet paper.  The itchy kind.

I hate that everyone thinks that the word “presentation” is synonymous with the word “PowerPoint.”  Except for those in the prezi camp.

I wanted to be in the prezi camp.  With the cool kids.

I hate all the cool functionality of prezi denied to me because the prezi website has the world’s worst instruction manual.

The instructions for prezi are on par with the instructions for Ikea.

I hate having to stay on campus till 10 p.m.  on a Friday night working on a PowerPoint presentation–the PowerPoint presentation that would have taken me a day and a half to begin with at most if I had and done it first–because I couldn’t get the prezi to work right.

I hate prezi.  I mean it.

I hate that PowerPoint wouldn’t let me print out the notes for my slides, so I had to cut and paste the notes into Word, which lost all my paragraph markers, and made the notes big, blobby, Sasquatches of text that I then had to go back in and reformat for readability.

My notes are really long.  And possibly pompous.

I hate that my presentation on Monday has to be a PowerPoint presentation.  With handouts.

I hate handouts.

I hate that I will have to finish up on my  handouts for my PowerPoint presentation on a Saturday because I didn’t get them done earlier this week when I was too busy fighting with prezi.

A Saturday.  As in, the day after I stayed in my office till 10 p.m. on a Friday night.  As in, this weekend.

I hate that I will have to go back to campus on a Sunday to print out 100 copies of the PowerPoint slides and other handouts so that I can give them out to people at the conference on Monday.

Handouts are a) tossed just as soon as the presentation is over, and b) a waste of paper.

I hate wasting paper.

I hate that I can’t just turn the handouts into .pdfs to e-mail to all of the people at my presentation.

I hate that no one will like my PowerPoint presentation, if they even bother to look at it.

I hate thinking the audience will be bored, and that any time in the future when I see one of the members of the audience, I will have to hide my head in shame.

I hate thinking that if the audience is bored, they will wonder why they bothered attending my presentation session.

I hate thinking that if they wonder why they attended, then I’ll have to question why I wasted all that time making the PowerPoint presentation and the abandoned prezi.

I hate wondering what an audience’s questions will be.

I hate answering an audience’s questions.

I hate not being good at answering an audience’s questions.

I hate that all of this is my fault:  the prezi, the PowerPoint, the 15 hours I spent on campus on a Friday, the work I will have to do to make handouts, the trip to campus on Sunday, the “having to stand up in front of people and give a presentation when I’d rather just sit passively in the audience” blues.

I hate the blues.  I hate having the blues.  I hate that my prezi was going to be awash in a theme of blue.

I hate prezi.

Hate, hate, hate prezi.

 

 

 

 

 

The Marvellous Marshes of Glynn (Well Ok, the Nice Enough Streets of Historic Downtown Macon)

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Last Saturday was the Quarterly Meeting of GPS, held down in Macon at the Sidney Lanier Cottage.  I had never been to Macon before, though I had driven through once, and though I didn’t get a chance to explore the town much, the homes surrounding the Cottage were old-timey and pretty.

What was surprising to me about the Cottage, though, was how austerely appointed it was–I think was expecting a house with tons of antiques and personal possessions he’d owned in his life, but the only thing of real interest was a wedding dress that his wife Mary had worn (and I think she had an 18 inch waist!), and a copy of a letter he had written to his mother that you could read which was sitting out on a secretary.

I didn’t know much about Sidney Lanier prior to visiting–other than a lake that was named for him.  But apparently he was quite the Renaissance man–besides being a poet, he had served in the Confederacy, was something of a mathematician, worked as a lawyer, was a self-taught flautist, taught at Johns Hopkins, and spent seven years playing the flute in a symphony.

The day started with a Sidney Lanier impersonator talking about his language.  And I’m sorry, but the only kind of “impersonator” I can bear watching is someone like Will Ferrell playing George Bush.  I just find impersonators unwatchable, so it was torture sitting there and listening to the Sidney Lanier character.  I was very interested in finding out about Lanier’s life, and it was quite extraordinary (and the Cottage is on the National Historic Register both for his music and his poetry).  If it had just been a lecture about his life, I would have enjoyed it so much more.

Maybe I just didn’t think the guy was very good–not that I have any experience of Sidney Lanier in which to compare the performance, obviously.  But what really annoyed me was that except for a little quotation from some famous Cantata that Lanier wrote, there was no recitation of his poetry.  Really?  Really???  We’re there for a day of poetry, and we get next to none of it in a performance “by” Sidney Lanier?  That seems a bit counter-intuitive to me.

And later in the afternoon, after Alice Friman’s excellent (but way too soft-spoken) reading (and I was sitting in the front–so I feel really bad for those sitting towards the back), we hear more poetry, but instead of Sidney Lanier’s poems (I would have liked to hear his famous  “The Marshes of Glynn,” for instance, which several of the Members’ Sidney Lanier-inspired poems referred to in the morning), we hear work from Andrew Hudgins’ 1988 book, After the Lost War, a book long series of persona poems based on Lanier’s life.  I enjoyed hearing them, certainly, because Ron Self is a wonderful reader (as well as writer), but come on.  I think we should have heard Lanier’s actual words.  But maybe that’s just me being a curmudgeon and a purist.

It was, of course, good to see all my friends; I never get tired of that.

Other than that, not much going on with me in poetry, except I’m still working periodically on the Sibley Sisters.  I thought I might have a full book of them by now (and maybe if I had written about them with more regularity last year, I’d be further along, but then everyone who knows me knows 2010 was The Year from Hell, and writing poems was hardly a priority), but I’ll get there eventually.

Sometimes, things just take longer than you’d like.

When Poetry and Drama Collide

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Saturday was the July quarterly meeting of GPS–it was actually a very good day over all.  I got to meet and talk with Tammy Foster Brewer, whom I know from Facebook and whom I’ve asked to read on the Java Monkey stage at the Decatur Book Festival,  and Robert Lee Brewer of Writer’s Market and Poetic Asides blog fame.  Tammy was warm and charming, just like her online persona, but I found Robert surprisingly shy, considering all the famous people he’s talked to and his very gregarious/ ubiquitous presence online, though he was also very nice.  I really enjoyed talking to them, and I liked hearing them both read.

It wasn’t as long-seeming a meeting as it usually is; maybe for  me, I was just engrossed and glad to be away from the  meh-ness that is my life.   On the other hand, I am pretty pissed off about  about the rampant jealousy being demonstrated by several people I thought were nice.  Oh, they’ve played it off as if they’re just “teasing,” but when you hear variations on the same theme from twelve people over the course of two meetings, it stops being funny and starts smacking of unkind pettiness.  And I don’t think I’m being oversensitive or paranoid–I think several people are being ugly.

First of all, let me preface this by saying, if I come across as bragging or “I’m so much better than them,” that’s not my intention at all.  I respect and like the people in GPS a lot, and I never, ever, EVER believe people have any reason to be jealous of my writing, because that’s just not how I think.  That said, when I entered the 2009 contests, OF COURSE I hoped I would win, and, as a member in good standing, I have every right to enter.  So, I sent in my poems last October, and they sent notices in early January–and I won a First prize, two Second prizes, and an Honorable Mention.  Well, I was elated, in my quiet-I-don’t-ever-say-anything kind of way.  So when they announced the winners at the January meeting, I was barraged with congratulations… and then the muttering, snotty comments started, the first of which was (and this is a direct quote):  “I don’t think anyone should be allowed to place in more than one contest.  It’s not fair.”

This was from someone who himself placed in one of the contests, and Someone Who Should Know Better.  Let me point out, that are 6 or 7 annual contests, and there are no rules that say a person can only enter one  of those contests (which would of course prevent her from placing in more than one contest if she won).   And the comments continued from lots of different people.  Here’s a sampling:

  • “You should let other people have a chance!”
  • “Wow, that’s really great that you won, but leave some prizes for the rest of us!”
  • “I got tired of hearing them announce you as a winner. (Ha ha.)”
  • “I was  sick of seeing your name!”
  • “I wish I was as …lucky… as you are!”

The editor of GPS’s journal did say some genuinely complimentary words to me (and, to be fair, there were a few others), and I was grateful… but she too commented about the quantity of poems that I’d won for (not in a mean way, though), and I mentioned to her that I was thinking of not participating at all in the 2010 contests, and she said that she’d noticed I hadn’t submitted any poems for publication to the Member Section, and she had wondered why.  Truthfully, I was afraid I might submit a poem that could wind up winning one of the Awards for Excellence, and the very last thing I wanted to do was open myself up to more back-handed compliments and complaints.

I’m still pretty seriously considering not submitting poems to the 2010 contests.  You know, maybe I really do need to give everyone else a chance.  I really wasn’t trying to make a sweep last year… but fair is fair, right?

We’ll see though.  I can always use the money (if I win).

    If Not Talking Back to the Muse, At Least Listening to Her a Little More

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    I’ve  been reading a lot lately, and realizing how much in the last year since Chris and I have lived together that that hasn’t been the case.  When I was single, I read about hour before bed every night–it could be poetry, it could be history or some other non-fiction, it could be memoir, or a murder mystery.  Sometimes I’d read all day on a Saturday, and even if I hadn’t gotten the laundry done, I’d feel like I had accomplished something valuable.  But especially before bed, it was good to do because it has a sedative effect–and the lack of reading plus the incessant snoring (I’m sorry, honey, but you snore really bad) this past year has really frazzled me.  I’m stressed out a lot.

    So I’ve been making a concerted effort to read.  And this is also helpful, because in my last post, I mentioned I was starting to stagnate and needed some fresh inspiration.  I’ve read some articles on Shreveport history, including the State Fair and Holiday-in-Dixie, and I also read Goodloe Stuck’s really fantastic (but unfortunately, not academically documented) biography of Annie McCune, who was an Irish immigrant who followed the Confederate soldiers from New Orleans up north to Shreveport, settled, and opened her own bordello.  He writes with humor, and a lot of the research is anonymous quotations from the men who used to go down to the Red Light District and see her or her girls, and some of it’s really funny.

    McCune was a real entrepreneur as far as building business; she sold beer for instance, and was in good with the cops so never got harrassed, and she was quite the philanthropist, giving all kinds of monies to charities.  Her house on 900 Fannin Street was one of the three most elegant/ top tier places in the District, and she regularly got her girls checked for “venereal disease.”  Their health was McCune’s priority; men knew they could go there without worry of carrying something home to their wives.

    Apparently Shreveport’s District was the largest in the country for a city its size–it was several blocks, and contained all manner of vice, from shotgun shack quickie whorehouses, to saloons, to places to get cocaine and other drugs, to the more palatial bordellos.  It was huge tourist attraction, with people coming in from all over the Ark-La-Tex–kind of, I suppose, the way the riverboats are now, which I wholeheartedly disapprove of.  (Of course, what does it say about me that I feel affection for a Red Light District where women are selling themselves for $3/ trick?  That seems very counter my women’s studies background…)

    Shreveport Madam came out in 1981, and it was kind of fun to read the acknowledgments, especially because I knew several of the people in the LSUS Archives Stuck thanked for help.  As I said, I enjoyed it–it was really engaging and interesting, and I could tell that Stuck had a real affinity for McCune.  I just wish that it had demonstrated academic rigor, beyond a few mentions, in passing, of newspaper articles–although it did have some maps and photographs.  Of course, one of Stuck’s points was that there really isn’t much known about her, so he had to rely on eye-witness accounts.  But when there’s no name attached to a quote, it kind of mitigates the authority and veracity of the account.  At least, it does for me.

    I actually think we have a copy of Shreveport Madam at our house back home; I want to say that I’ve seen it in my sister’s bedroom, although I can’t imagine how it got there.  I’m sure she’s never read it, and I wouldn’t have either, except that the Archives had multiple copies and sent it (and other books, like Chronicles of Shreveport [which had a print run in the 1890’s of 500, and mine is #470ish], Glimpses of Shreveport, Caddo 1000, and Caddo Was…) to assist me in my Sibley Sisters poems.  Anyway, I’m not sure how I will work Annie McCune or the Shreveport’s Red Light District into the poems, but it’s definitely good background.

    And speaking (round-aboutly) of inspiration, tonight is PoetryAtlanta’s program, Talking Back to the Muse, in which poets are invited to read a favorite poem, and then read a response/ answer/ reflection/ something else poem we’ve written so the two, in proximity, can “dialogue.”  There will be a ton of poets there tonight–Karen, Bob, Collin Kelley, Christine Swint, Rupert Fike, Robin Kemp, Megan Volpert, Dan Veech,  Cleo Creech, Kodac Harrison, Ginger Murchison, many others.  And me, of course.  I’ll be reading a poem that was sparked by Jane Kenyon, who has always been one of my favorite poets.

    I like to read Jane Kenyon because she is reflective and sees beauty in the smallest things; even though I have no point of reference for the farm life of New England, something about that way of life, as she presents it, comforts me and resonates with me…  I’ve also been reading good ol’ Anne Sexton, whose poems are the antithesis of Jane Kenyon–they burn me, skin me alive.  But I don’t read a lot of her work at one time–she wears me out.

    Anyway… if you need something to do tonight at 8 p.m., come out to the Composition Gallery and enjoy poetry, wine, and good company:  1388 McClendon Avenue, Atlanta, 30307, not far from L5P.   Call them for details:  678 982-9764.

    April is Poetry Month… & I Haven’t Made a Single Post (Horrors!)

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    Tuesday the 6th was Chris’s b-day, and instead of traditional birthday things, I dragged him to the DYPS’ reading at the Oglethorpe Museum (he was very amenable, all things considered).  The reading was in tandem with their exhibit, Henri Matisse: a Celebration of French Poets and Poetry. (As opposed to French poets and what, hotdogs???  Like, duh, of course poetry).

    I really enjoyed myself, even if the poems that Blake, Bob, and Karen read were mostly ekphrastic–and both Bob and Blake brought handouts to accompany their poems too, which was thoughtful.  I knew that we, as a group, had discussed the appropriateness of this venue for ekphrastic poetry, and as you know, I’m not a) a huge fan of it, and b) worth a damn when it comes to writing it.  So I had initially tried to get out of the reading, figuring that the few ekphrastic poems I’ve written (and they’re only pseudo-ek, because I think the convention of just describing what’s in the painting is kind of… well… dry) really ought not to be read–or hell, acknowledged–but my demurring went over like the proverbial lead balloon.

    So, making my apologies to the audience (which was, surprisingly, not just the DYPS and their significant others), I read poems from La Petite Mort, and from my as-yet-unnamed collection about the Sibley Sisters.  Here’s the set list:

    • Dystopic Love Poem
    • Besame Mucho
    • It Took You Half an Hour to Remember the Words “Wine Cooler”
    • Low Sunday
    • Valediction
    • Ex Somnium
    • Bee
    • They Say
    • Supplication
    • Tallulah Brings Home News

    Afterwards, there was an impromptu star party, as the director(?) of the Oglethorpe Museum invited us up on the roof to look at Venus and Mercury.  Sirius was out, as was Orion, and I think I saw the Big Dipper.  It was neat to be up there, although it went on a little longer than I would have liked, and Karen reminded me of the time we were at the observatory at the Sewanee Writers Conference (in 2002), and we saw the shooting star.  (How can that be 8 years ago???)

    Anyway… April is a busy month, poetry-wise, for me.  There is PoetryAtlanta’s Talking Back to the Muse program on the 17th, a poetry workshop on the 24th, a reading on the 28th, and possibly another reading sometime at the end of the month.  Well, I hope I can finagle some book orders out of all of this!

    Oh, and buy my book already! 😉

    La Petite Mort Available for Pre-Order!

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    The pre-sale period for my debut chapbook from Finishing Line Press, La Petite Mort, starts today (March 26th) and continues through Friday, May 7th.  It’s $14 + $1 shipping.  It will ship on July 2nd, just in time for Independence Day–so think of my poems as “freeing” you from banal reading for a little while.

    You’ll  have to hunt for my name among the hoards on Finishing Line’s New Releases and Forthcoming Titles page, but at least it’s alphabetically listed.   It’s well worth the trouble, though, and you will feel so glad for supporting the arts!

    By the way, FLP determines the press run by the number of pre-sales they make, so buy early, and buy often!

    And thanks!