Category Archives: Poetry

Paging Dr. Reilly…’s Poems

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I have been neglecting you, my Faithful Five blog readers.  I’m so sorry about that.

Writing-wise, I’m in a good space these days, busy working on this collection about the Sibley sisters that I’ve set at the turn of the 20th Century.  I don’t have many poems yet, and a few of the ones I have are struggling with problematic last stanzas or are trying to do too much on a single page–which is to say, sometimes you can be too ambitious for one poor piece of paper, and you can’t fit it all.  Neither of these issues is keeping me down though, and it’s not like I’m up against a deadline–though I’d be pretty happy if I was near-to-done by the end of the year, so I could enter it in the 2011 contest cycle.

Now while I’ve just said I’m not down about the “too much poem for one page” bit, I realize that’s totally disingenuous.   The fact is, it is difficult sometimes to write narrative poetry because you have a lot of the issues that you’d have in writing a novel–I mean, you have to have scene, character, setting, plot, and Aristotelian dramatic structure–but you need to do it in a confined space.  This ain’t easy.  I’m sure I’m taking liberties here, but Blake Leland (who, frankly, knows more about poetry than God) has a theory that if you have to turn the page to continue reading a poem, anything on the second page is doomed and/ or no damn good, and I tend to agree with him.  I gotta love a poem a whole lot if I have to turn the page to continue reading it–otherwise the “tldr phenomenon” response kicks in.  So, with that caveat in mind, I’ve been trying to keep each poem on a single manuscript page.

The truth is, though, an 8×11 sheet of paper is not the same as a book page–so probably most of these poems are going to take up more than one page anyway, if only by a few lines, which is unfortunate–there’s nothing worse to me, aesthetically, than a page in a book with only 2 lines on it.  Which brings up another point–is this artificial one-page requirement serving the best interest of the poems overall?  Can the demands of narrative poetry be served by the single page, or does that curtail creativity and the full exploration of what the poem wants to present?  In other words, is fitting everything into one page unnecesarily acrobatic?

I have no doubt that I will, at some point, have to write a multi-page poem–possibly, a very long central poem, and maybe the titular one (though I don’t have a title yet)–so I don’t want to lessen the impact of that poem by having a lot of longish other poems in the collection.  I don’t want people–especially the Pulitzer Prize committee ;-)–tossing my book across the room in disgust because their eyes are tired of long poems, and they want a damn lyric already, you know?

It’s a weird tension, because at the core of this issue really is the reader’s attention span.  I’ll you what, when we were reading Brightwood in class, I did get a little irritated with how long some of R.T. Smith’s poems were.  I like shortness–that’s why I’m a poet and not a novelist–and I tend to think most readers’ expectation is that they’ll get in and out of a poem pretty fast.  That’s part of the pleasure of poetry–it’s that crystallized moment of literary purity–and then it’s done.

I don’t know that I can resolve this concern about ideal page length and reader’s aesthetics, other than to remind myself that it is my book, and I can kind of do what I want (as long as the DYPS think the poems are working at whatever length the poems turn out to be).  It’s early yet in the collection–who’s to say I won’t write a lot of short ones in the upcoming months?

I suppose I’ve been dithering over something less important than what actually IS the main concern–and that is, I don’t really have an arc yet.  I don’t really know where these poems are going, other than a kind of nebulous pseudo Southern Gothic end in mind.  I’m not writing the poems in chronological order–which is quite liberating in some ways, and troublesome in others.  And the main characters haven’t totally revealed themselves to me; I’m sort of learning about them as I write poems about their lives.

But, it’s breakfast time, and I’m too hungry to worry about the Grand Scheme of Things, at least as they pertain to the Sibley sisters, right now.

Tigerlilies & Valentines

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Mentioning the Tigerlily poems in the last posts got me thinking about them, both as long, narrative poems, and as Southern poems.  I remember that Karen and Grace both liked them, as well as a few others in that class, but I haven’t read them in years.  But I dug around and found the one that Karen was especially fond of, “Tigerlily Agnew Beaumont Recalls Her Coming-Out.”  That one, “TAB Spends Another Day in Bed with Convenient Vapors,” and “TAB’s Rejected Valedictory Address,” were always my favorites.

Rereading them, I have to laugh at my own hilarity and slyness.  They are funny–and terrible–poems.  Well, dramatic monlogues, really.  Tigerlily says despicable things, impugning people’s honor and heritage, nicely calling them whores or worse, but she says them with such aplomb and with such a charming Southern-lady attitude, you can’t help enjoying how she gets away with it.  I suppose all this sounds vain and self-glorifying–I don’t mean to.  But re-reading them is like finding an old friend and picking up just where you left off–I can’t help thinking that had I gone to Catholic high school with her in the 1950’s, I would have been one of the people she would have disliked, but I would have secretly been pleased at all the mean things she said about other the other girls.

Unfortunately, these poems were never a favorite with the editors I sent them to, and I eventually gave up hoping ever to publish them.  For one thing, they are unwieldy long–2 and sometimes 3 pages.  Not at all journal-friendly, where they’d probably be 4-5 pages long, and no journal is going to give up that kind of space to one poem.  For another, dramatic monologues went out with Browning (or maybe Donald Davidson). They are simply not done.

In some ways, you might think these poems would work as short-shorts, and I’ve taken out the line breaks and sent them out as fiction, but they don’t seem to work that way either.  (Maybe she needs her own novel.  But I wouldn’t know how to write one.)  So, as much as I believed that Tigerlily needed to be shared with the world so that everyone could adore her (you could say, she’s my Valentine to the Southern Poetry world), she’s been hanging around in a folder on my computer.  Until today, that is.

I’ve heard about an anthology looking for persona poems and DM’s, so I’m going to send a few.  I don’t have a lot of hope that she will find a home there, but I thought I’d try. Wish me (and Tigerlily!) luck!

And, if any of you are remotely interested in reading one of those poems, drop me a line, and I’ll e-mail one to you.  I’d post one here on my blog, but I wouldn’t want anyone to say “tldr.”  (And for some of you old fogeys who don’t know what that stands for, it means “too long, didn’t read.”)

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.

xoxox,

Moi

But You Can’t Take the South Out of the Girl

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Ok, so “tomorrow” came a few days later.  Sue me.

It’s weird.  My head is full of ideas–places I want to go in these poems, lives I want to explore.  I’ve been reading Southern history and articles about Northwest Louisiana, and I just joined the North Louisiana Historical Association and am looking forward to receiving their journal and reading things about where I’ve come from.

And I feel all of it’s enriching me, giving me insight into a place that’s always been home, but that is also “unknown country” as it were.  What do I really know about my home state?  What do I know about Shreveport?  I mean, in the 8th grade, everyone takes Louisiana History, but a) that was 100 years ago, and b) I was a kid, and didn’t give a crap.  (And c) everyone cheated like murder in that class, so I’m not even sure how much I actually wound up reading.  I might just have copied answers–I know, it’s a scandal.)  I don’t know why, but I just feel poetically rejuvenated.  Like I’ve been looking for something to inspire me, and something about poetry and Louisiana and now… well, it’s all clicking.  Of course, at some point I need to put the books aside and do some writing… I’ve been reading too much lately.  (Not like that’s a terrible thing.)

Something that just occurred to me:   Karen and I once talked about needing to be out of the South in order to see it properly.  Being in Nebraska was that lens for us.  And I think that’s really true, because until this recent kick, all of the “Southern” poems I wrote were when I was away from Louisiana.  It’s as if being in the milieu, I’m just too close to really have any kind of poetic vision about it.  Now plenty of Southern writers might not have that issue, but I did.  (And maybe do… we’ll have to see what the DYPS think of the poems I’m writing before I can see if my Southern myopia is corrected.)

We are reading R.T. Smith’s Brightwood in class.  Initially I wasn’t too keen on it–it seemed a little too deliberate.  Karen’s Colin’s word for it was “mannered.”  To me, there is just a bit of him trying to be overly studied in “down homeness.”  (Speaking of a put-on.)  This is not to take away from some fine poems and the very wonderful interconnections between poems (including the repetition of words/ ideas that operate as leitmotifs), or to discredit the craft that’s gone into them.  But the problem is the craft is obvious, when it should be invisible and organic.  You don’t want to feel, as a reader, that you’re being manipulated, especially not by a poet.

But the book has grown on me, the further I got into it.  I think what I do like is that Smith is a good story teller, as Southern writers ought to be.   You see these people he’s writing about, and the language that he uses to describe them, the scene, the time, the place, etc., is always on target.

I don’t like that most of the poems are too long–for someone who’s an editor, he shows a surprising lack of judiciousness when it comes to editing his own work (isn’t that always the way?)–his poems are routinely more than a page, when a page would suffice.  That’s what I mean about the issue of craft; it’s as if the attitude is, “Well, my words and technique are so good, I’m going to beat you over the head with them, and write 60 line poems when only 42 of them are great.  (But you won’t notice, because I’m so good at it.)”  Ok, ok, maybe that is being unfair.  I like the book more than I dislike it, but it has problems.  We are looking at Brightwood again on Thursday.  It will be interesting to see how my feelings about the book evolve as the class discusses it more.

Bye for now.

You Can Take the Girl Out of the South…

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Taking Karen’s Southern Poetry class has rekindled in me some Southern connection in my writing that has been dormant for a while.  One of the first questions she posed was, of course, what is Southern poetry?  Is it simply poetry written by a person living in the South or a person born in the South?  Must it have a Southern perspective or advance Southern ideology-mythology-philosophy?  (It’s always sticky when you delve into essentialism.)

I’ve always thought that a Southern writer is a person who was (at least) raised in the South and writes about the South in such a way that place becomes a character in the literature, that notion of “spirit of place” that D.H. Lawrence (and later Lawrence Durrell) spoke of–you know, the way the South is a character in Flannery O’ Connor or William Faulkner (and notice, I didn’t mention poets).

And, because that was my definition of a Southern writer, I’ve never quite felt like a true Southern poet–in the sense that a goodly bit of my writing isn’t Southern at all.  I mean, La Petite Mort doesn’t have a lick of Southern-ness in it.  If someone picks it up in the future, the only way they’ll know it’s by a “Southern” writer is because the author blurb on the back mentions that I’m from Louisiana.  And even some of my poems which are about family experiences in Louisiana don’t really have any specific Louisiana flavor.

That said, when I do write as a Louisiana poet (as I think of myself more “Louisianian” than “Southern”), I still feel a bit fraudulent, as if I’m taking on a persona.  And I wonder if that has to do with the fact that while Louisiana is my home, I’ve lived lots of different places which has tempered some of my Southern aesthetic.  And it’s not that I’ve even lived in the “good part” of Louisiana–I mean, Shreveport?  I love it, but it’s pretty generic “South,” not very charismatic at all.  Certainly not a place whose spirit can infuse one’s writing.  (Not much, at any rate.)  So again, when I write “Southern,” it always feels just a little like a put-on.

But let’s consider some of the Louisiana poems I’ve written–not that there really are many of them.  First, there was the “Tigerlily” series of dramatic monologues that I wrote in the early 2000’s–they were all written from the perspective of  Tigerlily Agnew Beaumont, a spoiled Southern debutante who, frankly, still wished she was living in Antebellum Louisiana.  She was someone for whom the War of Northern Aggression was still a real issue and who was just a little too preoccupied with everyone else’s business.  I remember Grace Bauer (a fine poet and my thesis advisor at Nebraska) said they demonstrated the “Southern grotesque” well–which was high praise.

These “Tigerlily” poems are quintessentially Southern in that respect–that whole Glory of the South B.S. that has kept the South coasting on nostalgia and arrayed in its tattered laurels.  And yet, despite her flaws, Tigerlily is very likable.  And funny.  Very much like me if I were rich, spoiled, and ignorant.  In some ways, also very much thematically like the poems written by the Fugitive poets that we just read in Karen’s class–even though I hadn’t actually read much by the Fugitives before January, except the little bits you might get in an American poetry survey class.

And then there was the title poem from my Dissertation–When Jesus Came to Shreveport. While the 14 poems in this sequence are about Shreveport in the present day, and every poem features some kind of Shreveport landmark, I’m not so sure the sensibility is 100% Louisianian/ Southern.  (Although I wouldn’t know how to characterize what other sensibility they have.) It’s true they’re about a kind of “Jesus witnessing” (as Jesus is on a bus tour of the U.S. and makes a stop in Shreveport and finds the I who shows up in poem 6), and everyone knows that religion often places a huge role in Southern writing.  But are they Southern poems just because they’re set in Shreveport?  If you use my definition, I suppose they are.  But I can’t escape this bit of “alien” that seems lodged inside of me, that affects my perspective and warps it away from me feeling like a Southern writer.  (This makes me wonder if Karen’s My Paris Year poems make her feel any less a Southern poet–or if she feels any of this alien-ness/ division that I do?)

But then there are other poems that I’ve written that seem totally-duh-Southern, like “Big Buddha on McIllhenney Plantation” (Avery Island, LA) or “Melon Stand South of Many” (Many, LA),  or “Kisatchie” (Kisatchie National Forest between Leesville & Natchitoches, LA) or “Old Kook” (St. Francisville, LA) or “Canal Street Look-Out” (New Orleans).  To me, Place is indeed a character in the poems, and the writing of these poems never felt like me pretending to be from the South.  They seemed as natural to write as the non-Southern poems I’ve written.  When you read them, you’d never think anyone but a true Southern poet could have written them.  But that puts me back in essentialist hell.

Anyway, all this leads me back to the rekindled Southern connection that I mentioned earlier.  As in, I’ve started a new sequence of poems that are very Shreveport-of-the-past, very, very Southern in attitude and purpose.  And while I am still feeling a bit alien, I also feel paradoxically in tune with my own Southernness as I have not felt in a long time.  I don’t know where these poems will go, or what I’ll end up with, but I am quite excited about them.

More tomorrow.

Poetry Overload

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Yesterday was the quarterly meeting of the Georgia Poetry Society, and I think it was one of the better ones.  For one thing, the programming ran really smoothly, and we we didn’t get crazy behind as we have in the past.  For another, there was just a really good selection of people who presented.

Since it was hosted by Kennesaw’s Foreign Language department, Robert Simon (the VP, and a faculty member in that dept.) had gotten two of his colleagues to present on poetry–one was an Italian scholar, and the other was Chinese.  So it cool to hear poems in a different language, and then to hear them translated.  What was especially interesting to me was hearing the musicality (which you know from my last post is something I’m particularly passionate about) of both the Chinese and Italian poems–the attention that the poets paid to sound was deliberate.  I enjoyed it.

Then Dan Veach from Poetry Atlanta and The Atlanta Review gave a really great presentation of his own poetry, Chinese poetry, and Iraqi poetry.  He was really engaging and funny–I mean, one of his poems was a paean to his ratty old underwear (which reminded me of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Underwear” poem… maybe just because it’s about undies).  And he had a funny Power Point to go with his poems that had illustrations and Chinese brush and ink paintings that he’d made.

And what was best of all was that he knows his poems to speak them–every last one from his someday-to-be-released book Elephant Water he spoke from memory.  Now he made a gag about this book being 30 years in the making, so I suppose, if you’ve had these poems lying around for 30 years more or less, you might actually have memorized them just by virtue of their longevity.

But I just think he’s one of those people who just memorizes poetry, which to me is amazing and impossible.  (I mean, I’ve memorized Pound’s “In a Station of a Metro,” but who hasn’t?)  I asked him about that when he was selling the book of Iraqi poetry he edited, Flowers of Flame, and he said that memorizing his poems is very good for his writing.  He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t stick around because I felt bad not buying the book (although, had Elephant Water been available, I would have bought that).

Lunch, of course, was a disaster (as always), although I did get my $$$ for winning a few of the 2009 GPS contests.  (Which I won’t complain about, except that the money I won will have to go to paying the boarding/ vaccinating fees for the little dog I found on Thursday, instead of something more useful.  But that’s another story.)

The afternoon program had GPS poets Robert Lynn reading from his new book, Midnight Verse, and Clela Reed reading from her new book, Bloodline.  So, I’m going to be a little petty here and say that Bob confused Petrarchan sonnets with Shakespearian (not only did he misidentify the form when he and I were talking about sonnets before his presentation, he actually misidentified it in his book!) and that irritated me.  Not like I’m the Sonnet Police, but I don’t know.  It seems to me, if you’re going to use a form, be sure which one it is–Petrarchan sonnets are quite different from Shakespearian sonnets in rhyme scheme and purpose/ organization.  Or, if you don’t know which one it is, just be safe and say generic ol’ “sonnet.”  (Ok, ok, maybe I am being a little police-y.)  But other than my bout of poetry form OCD, his poems were ok.

Clela’s poems, as usual, were very good.  I actually would have liked to have bought her new book, and might have felt more free to with winning that money, but because it’s all going to the boarding  fees, I didn’t.  Maybe at the April meeting I’ll see if she has any copies with her…

And then the meeting was over, and the Board went over some things, and I went home.

I really enjoyed yesterday.  Sometimes GPS meetings can seem excruciatingly long, but yesterday the pacing was just right.

And certainly, all of the kudos for my poems were, of course, well-deserved, but nice just the same to hear them. 😉

She on Honey-dew Hath Fed

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Because of the hard freeze after the snow last night, there is a good bit of ice on the roads, and Georgia Tech, in its infinite wisdom (and, as a great morale booster after the obnoxious furloughs last month), decided to delay opening campus until noon.

That was very nice, but I was planning on staying home to work today anyway because my office, with its one 100% busted heater and its other 87% busted heater, has been like Superman’s frozen Fortress of Solitude this past week.  (I suppose, to be more poetic, I might have compared it to Coleridge’s “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!” but my office is neither a pleasure-dome, nor sunny, though the caves of ice bit is real enough.  Anyway, the week before school, my office is pretty solitudinous.)  Then, I just happened to go back to the GT website, and lo and behold, they’ve closed the campus for the day.  So, ta-da!  We have a genuine snow day.

Despite a rejection I just received, I’m feeling especially inspired to write today.  Chris just said of the snow on the ivy, “It looks like tiny little white flowers, doesn’t it?”  And it does.  When I lived in Nebraska, an inch of snow would be de rigueur, and people would practically walk around in shorts.   Here, an inch of snow closes down the city, and I find myself looking out the window in my sunroom at the “tiny little white flowers” and the sun through the kudzu-covered pines and feeling a lightness in my heart that I haven’t felt in a while–and a desire to write about the wind, and the black birds thronging the trees in the distance…

Speaking of “Kubla Khan,” I just read the last few lines (which I love, love, love) out to Chris and commented that they (meaning the Romantics) really knew how to use sound.  And he said something that was really insightful (don’t be so shocked, Bob!)–“That’s because they didn’t have the white noise that we do.”  And I think that’s absolutely right.  I don’t think poets use sound to its best effect any more–the musicality of poems just doesn’t seem to be there.  And I am as guilty as my other poet peers.

I’m not saying we need to go back to rhyme, although I’ve been noticing a trend lately where rhyme is becoming retro-cool, but where is the music in poems these days?  Why aren’t poems as sonorous as they used to be?  Why have alliteration and consonance and repetition fallen from favor?  (Assonance is perhaps the last hold-out of sound–I know, for instance, with the DYPS, Blake is always looking for ways to repeat vowel sounds in his poems and ours, and I appreciate it.)

I think, in some ways, white noise really has dulled our ears.  We are inundated with the sounds of “progress” and technology, and so maybe we don’t want to have to hear anything else.  As a culture, maybe we’re all a bit ADD.

Anyway, the approach to poetry has shifted.  Because it’s become a reading activity, as opposed to a hearing activity, writers place less emphasis on how a poem sounds, and more on how it looks on the page.  The only time we ever hear poetry out loud is at a “reading”–a formal space where the Poet (TM) delivers a set of her poems to a passive audience, and who then offers her books for sale, so the poems might be read silently, in the privacy of the audience member’s own home.  It’s not really a communal activity any more…  Maybe I’m waxing nostalgic for the pre-industrial days (you know, like 200+years ago, when none of us were around) when families and friends sat in their drawing rooms or libraries and read poetry to each other.  (Although, perhaps that is an idealized image, brought on by watching too many Jane Austen movies.)

Anyway, I blame academic poets for this shift.  Since poetry on the page is more important than poetry out loud, poetic musicality is passe.  I think my fellow academic poets (and me, to an extent) are afraid to use some of those literary/ sound devices for fear of being thought quaint or, Goddess forbid, Longfellow- or Poe-esque.  (Eep!  Can’t have that.  Our collective response to that thought–it must be said–is “Nevermore.”)

About the only place where I consistently hear poetry that pays attention to the way the words sound is at the quarterly Georgia Poetry Society meetings–and these aren’t academic poets by a long shot.  Now, many, many of those poems sound bad–they use rhyme, meter, and repetition criminally.   I won’t lie.  But for the ones that are well done, the attention to sound really elevates the work in a way that I always find surprising–which tells you how infrequently I hear poems that are written to please the ears.  Those are the poems you want to hear out loud, could listen to more of.

We academic poets could learn from that, but we fear, we fear, we fear.

Happy New Writing Year!

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Says Chris:  “Now that the holidays are over, it’s time to start writing again.”

I’m paraphrasing, but he’s not wrong.  Frankly, I had great plans of writing over the break–especially the furlough days, courtesy of the State of Georgia.  But there always seems to be more to do at the holidays than you think there is–putting parties together, shopping for Christmas dinner, cooking, wrapping gifts, getting ready for family visits, driving everywhere…  And then it’s over, and you haven’t much to show for it, other than an overly-boring list of announcements about leveling up in one game or another on Facebook.

I’m sad that Christmas is over–and not just because having the days off was nice.  I don’t need to pontificate about how the reality never measures up to the hype, though I had a good Christmas day with Chris, and later my Mom, who showed up around 7:30 p.m. (and my wild mushroom lasagne for Christmas dinner was amazing).  But you go into the stores now, and see things on 75% clearance, and everything looks so sad and broken, and you wonder how it can be gone so quickly, and forgotten.

Anyway, it’s 2010 now, and since I accomplished my goal of getting a chapbook accepted for publication last year (although it won’t be out until this July–and believe me, I will be reminding all of you when Finishing Line is doing the pre-sale), my new resolution is to write a full-length collection that will be ready for the contest route in 2011.

I just need a theme (what I call the “gimmick”) that can help guide me in writing and shaping the collection–I mean, for La Petite Mort, the gimmick was the voice–it ruled the poems, both in subject matter and in tone.  I need something like that to help me begin writing the new collection; otherwise, I will continue to write a lot of random, unrelated poems that could never be a book.  (I just wish I’d be hit soon with some divine inspiration about what that theme/ gimmick could be.  *Sigh.*)

And I suppose the best thing about heading back to work is that our writing group will gear back up.  I really, really need that discipline.

Anyway, Happy New Year, everyone.  I hope it’s filled with poems, publications, and pleasant good times.

Revision? We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Revision!

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Actually, that’s not true.

I’ve been writing a bit lately, doing my usual 10 or so drafts before I show the DYPS (our writing group), and then when I show it to them, they offer about 4000 changes I need to make–actually, I think it’s become a kind of game to them–and so I abandon the poem altogether.  Which, it must be said, smacks of “crabby little baby who doesn’t get what she wants.”

I have several that are in this pile, which I haven’t gone back to look at since the sharing of them, and they’re starting to stink, the way all those Thanksgiving leftovers that are still in our fridge are starting to stink.  (I know, TMI–and yes, in case you’re worried, the cleaning the fridge is on my list of things to do ASAP.)

There is one exception–“December in Atlanta.”  This was a poem I wrote a week or so ago that I really liked the way it was.  On Revision 7 I thought, “Hey, that’s a pretty good poem.”  So I showed it to Bob who did not like it.  (You know you didn’t.)  His point, I admit grudgingly, was that the snow fantasy didn’t last the whole poem–and that was true, although that wasn’t exactly the point I was going for.  He suggested that I stick Atlanta landmarks beyond Midtown and Spaghetti Junction in it (which were already in there)–the Fox theater, Grant Field, the zoo, etc.

So I did it to please him–how’s that for being true to one’s art?

What was a short poem morphed into this whole-page-long poem, with lines 3/4 of the way across the page.  It’s really this giant, gangly poem that offends my sense of page aesthetics.  The poem doesn’t seem me-ish at all, and I think that must be why I don’t feel loving toward it.  I liked the compactness of the original, the tercets, and the four main images it contained.  I feel like this poem’s stepmother, as opposed to author–and we all know, if my past experience is anything to go by–that stepmothers hate what they are stepmothers to.

… Except, the revision is not without its charms, which I also grudgingly admit.  It is very Atlanta-y, and there are some fun images in it.  And Bob liked it, and that’s important.  I think I’m just having a hard time letting go of a poem that I really liked, but that maybe didn’t work as well as I wanted it to.   I’m not abandoning the  new version–just  setting it aside, to “age,” and to grow on me.

As for the other poems-in-process (a.k.a. currently abandoned), I’m hoping that I can come back to them over the break, when I’m fresher, and unimpeded by piddly things like work.  At least, that’s the plan.  It’s always astonishing to me how days will go by over winter break, and I’ll have accomplished nothing…

Favors, & Anguish, & Blurbs, Oh My!

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It is extremely hard for me to ask favors of people.  I’m not talking about the “Hey, Chris, can you please replace the toilet paper?” kind of favor.  I mean the kind where I ask someone to do something for me that requires a considerable investment in his or her time or energy (even when the person is my friend and probably wouldn’t say no).  Or, that has anything to do with reading my writing who isn’t the DYPS.  My hang-up is that I never want to inconvenience anyone.  It’s actually quite paralyzing sometimes.

All of this is by way of saying, a few weeks ago, when I was lamenting to Karen that I don’t personally know any awesome poets (who aren’t my good friends or former professors) to blurb my book, she suggested Marilyn Kallet and Julie Kane–both of whom are poets I admire, but neither of whom I know.

I was being my usual leery, bleah-y, doubting self, sure that they would be a) too busy, b) too annoyed to be asked by a stranger to do such a favor, and c) too unimpressed by what they read to blurb it.  But Karen, ever patient, said she didn’t think that was the case, and she reminded me that I had worked as the editorial assistant on Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:  Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, that Julie Kane and Grace Bauer (my diss. director) had edited, so maybe Julie would be more inclined to blurb my chapbook.  And I think she suggested Marilyn because she knew that Marilyn would blurb my book as a favor to Karen, since they are friends.

So, the long and short of it is, I asked both of them, and they said yes!  So now I’m just awaiting their kind words… (I hope they will be kind…)

Still Pinioned Under the Boulder, Bob

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We finally got Issue Four of Chickenpinata online.  We’re always a little more behind on things than we’d like, but this time (computer issues aside–don’t get me started on that) I had problems with several of the people that we sent acceptances to.

There were three who did not respond when we sent the congratulations announcement–we always send an e-mail acceptance and ask for the poet to confirm that the poem was still available to be published.  This time three people did not respond.  And this was really irritating because I’d already created their pages in the program and set up the links.  And while it’s not hard work, I’m slow at it, so I was disappointed that I had invested the time, only to have to withdraw their poems from the issue.

More than disappointed, I’m really puzzled.  I realize Chickenpinata is a small venue, but a publication is a publication, right?  Why go to the effort to submit work to a journal if you don’t care if it gets accepted or not?  If these three people had their poems accepted elsewhere, why not just let us know?  We’ve had people withdraw submissions from us before, and sure it’s a little irksome, but it’s no big deal.  It just doesn’t make any sense to me, not to respond to a journal they sent work to, and that wanted that work.

Whatever, I guess.  People are weird.

As for my own writing… I need to get back to it.  I don’t have anything really to write about lately, though.  I need to think of an organizing theme, or a “gimmick,” now that I have to start on book 2.

Someone, please!  Send me an idea!  I’m feeling all empty-ish and blah.