Wednesday (Anxious) Musings

I began filling out my self evaluation at school yesterday. This is standard operating procedure at my community college as part of the end of the semester review. The evaluation itself didn’t cause any anxiety, but as I wrote it, I began to reflect, and, well, you can guess where that went.

Today is one of those days where I’m considering (not too seriously) of giving up the poetic ship. I think I’m just frustrated that I’m not writing as much as I should be. On the bright side, I am reading a lot (collections, journals, email postings, etc). I have some ideas but I can’t really commit them to paper just yet. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing enough and sometimes I don’t. There is also the “book question” that keeps drifting in and out of my consciousness like a dream I can’t quite remember. I’m a really slow writer, so the prospect of a book is very daunting. I keep thinking about cohesiveness in a collection and I’m starting to worry that my poems don’t really relate to one or another, or maybe they do and I’m not smart enough to understand how.
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In other news, the winners for the poetry contest I judged at my community college are now posted. I awarded first place, second place, third place and an honorable mention. I also chose one winner in the haiku category. Enjoy!
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Plenty, and at least part of it is personal. I recently finished my second thriller, or so I thought. When I sent it to several fine writer friends, I received this feedback: the protagonist and his girlfriend can’t spend the whole book unable to get in touch with each other. Not in the cellphone era.

Friday (Easter Weekend) Musings

I slept in till about 10 this morning and it was awesome. These last few weeks have been really busy and I’m looking forward to this three day weekend. Ashley is visiting and arrived at 1:00 this afternoon from Pittsburgh. Talk about ready for a few days off. Anyway. Right now RJ and Ash are playing Rock Band and Kweli is asleep under the coffee table. All is right with the world.
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Nocturne
Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons
in a broth of wind. Last week
they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,
and each car moves in the blind sack
of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—
the river passing under the tracks,
the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,
I rose violently toward my reflection
hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window
like a page I was reading—a face
coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,
looking for a phone. I gave him
a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found
I was alone with the voices that bloomed
as he opened the door. It’s time

to slip my body beneath the covers,
let it fall down the increments of shale,
let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,
my voice landing in its cradle—.
How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.
Which is not to be confused with sleep—
sleep gives the body back its mouth.

Wayne Miller
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Wednesday (Sunshine Returns) Musings

Last night I received an email notifying me that my poem “Pink Ruffles” was accepted for publication by the GW Review.
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Two Sewing
The wind is sewing with needles of rain.
With shining needles of rain
It stitches into the thin
Cloth of earth. In,
In, in, in.
Oh, the wind has often sewed with me.
One, two, three.
Spring must have fine things
To wear like other springs.
Of silken green the grass must be
Embroidered. One and two and three.
Then every crocus must be made
So subtly as to seem afraid
Of lifting colour from the ground;
And after crocuses the round
Heads of tulips, and all the fair
Intricate garb that Spring will wear.
The wind must sew with needles of rain,
With shining needles of rain,
Stitching into the thin
Cloth of earth, in,
In, in, in,
For all the springs of futurity.
One, two, three.
Hazel Hall

*Courtesy of Poetry Daily
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Monday (Winter’s Last Gasp) Musings

This poem welcomed me when I walked into my office this morning (I have a poem a day calendar):

First Blush

A freak spring snowstorm makes us take old
toute along a creek that flushes, gushes, touches
off tremors of foaming water so cold
and bright we know we’ve come to a sources,
the beginning rush of water’s course
that later will slake the thirst of millions–
but now we are alone with it and know
its potential. Possibility plays before us.
It fizzes and spills through consciousness,
rolling its April of yeses through groves
it will melt by noon, forcing
a green through naked fields, through us.

Molly Peacock

The first line of this poem is eerily relevant, as this morning I awoke to snow flurries and the prediction that the temp would drop down to the low 30s this evening. I knew the mild weather, sunshine, and flowering trees were all a little too good to be true, but snow flurries in April? Get out of here winter. I’m over you.
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A friend of mine already posted this link via Facebook, but for those who are not slaves to the social networks (I am one of those slaves) here it is again:

A few years ago, I started learning poetry by heart on a daily basis. I’ve now memorized about a hundred poems, some of them quite long — more than 2,000 lines in all, not including limericks and Bob Dylan lyrics. I recite them to myself while jogging along the Hudson River, quite loudly if no other joggers are within earshot. I do the same, but more quietly, while walking around Manhattan on errands — just another guy on an invisible cellphone.

I plan on sharing this article with my creative writing class Thursday night. They are required to memorize a poem for their poetry presentations.
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I have not jumped on the write a poem a day bandwagon for National Poetry Month, but I have been thinking a lot lines of poetry lately or just images that pop into my head that could eventually turn into poems. Yesterday, while driving along a street lined with magnolias, I started thinking about trees shedding petals, silken petals, and how those petals take on a translucent quality, kind of like skin or paper. And how when we walk over these petals, we leave our footprints, much in the way people leave their mark of words on paper. I don’t if that will amount to anything, but it kept me occupied for about an hour.

Saturday (Spring Cleaning) Musings

Our apartment has been in state of disrepair since we returned from Cabo, so today I’m going to do something about it. I don’t mind organized clutter but this place is just out of control. I also purchased a new elliptical machine for my birthday. I was not a planned purchase but the deal was too good to pass up, so I ordered it Wednesday, canceled my gym membership Thursday, and it arrived on Friday. I’m looking forward to powering it up.
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These were taken outside our apartment building this morning.

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Elegy for Sol LeWitt

The weather map today is pale. The lines on the map
are like the casts of fishing lines
looping and curved briefly across air.
The sky now, also, toward evening, is pale.
On Sunday, in Beacon, there were lines
drawn on walls and also lines
drawn across the canvases of the last paintings
of Agnes Martin. One of them has two pale squares
on a blackened field.

The lines on your walls
follows directions
as if

as if there were a kind of logic
charged with motion
at the end of winter: the pale blue northern cold
almost merged with the pale green
at Hartford, and then the blank newsprint of the sea.

Anne Lauterbach

*Courtesy of the Academy of American Poetry and their poem a day project for National Poetry Month.

Friday (Poetry Floods My Inbox) Musings

One of the best parts of National Poetry Month, as far as I’m concerned, is getting poems from different places everyday. A number of list serves, blogs, and organizations I belong to or follow are flooding my inbox with poetry. I love it. There is such a great variety.

I’m at school today until 5. This is usually my “free day,” but grading and interviews were on the agenda for today. It seems like this week has flown by. I think the main highlight was last night in my creative writing class. My students are working on drama, the last unit of the semester, and their assignment is to write original 10 minute plays. They’re in small groups and last night was their first official brainstorming session. I dismissed class about 15 minutes early and every group left, save one. These three stayed in the back of the room until 9:50 (at night mind you) and practiced kung fu moves for their play. Is there anything better that can be said about teaching?
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While grading I’ve had Hazards of Love on repeat…

Won’t Want for Love

Margaret:

Gentle leaves, gentle leaves
Please array a path for me
The woods are growing thick and fast around

Columbine, Columbine
Please alert this love of mine
Let him know his Margaret comes along

And all this stirring inside my belly
Won’t quell my want for love
And I may swoon from all this swelling
But I won’t wait for love

Mistle thrush, mistle thrush
Lay me down in the underbrush
My naked feet grow weary with the dusk

Willow boughs, willow boughs
Make a bed and lay me down
Let you branches bow to cradle us

William:

O my own true love!
O my own true love!

Can you hear me love?
Can you hear me love?

Tuesday (Happy Poetry Month!) Musings

Yesterday kicked off National Poetry Month. I had posted about the writing contest (is it really a contest) that the Academy of American Poets is putting on. Write a poem every day for the month of April. I briefly considered doing this, but then looked at my schedule and decided that I would have to scale down a bit. I plan to read more poetry and write more this month. I’ve written three new, actual poems since January and I don’t feel that’s so terrible. I’ve started countless others but they have not panned out. I’m also judging a poetry contest here at school, so I think that counts for something.
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Vernal Equinox

The scent of hyacinths, like a pale mist, lies between me and
my book;
And the South Wind, washing through the room,
Makes the candle quiver.
My nerves sting a spatter of rain on the shutter,
And I am uneasy with the thrusting of green shoots
Outside in night.

Why are you not here to overpower me with your tense and
urgent love?

Amy Lowell
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I’m listening to the new Decemberists album, The Hazards of Love, while I’m in the office today.

I love this group. It doesn’t hurt that their lead singer was a creative writing major, but I also like how their albums all have a story and a concept and that the lyrics are excellent.
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Thursday (Sweetness) Musings

I’ve been thinking a lot about sugar lately. I know these thoughts were prompted by my cooking class. Last Friday we had to go around the room and “name” what kind of snack we’d be. People were cookies, chips, and potatoes. What was I? Baked goods. Specifically? Cupcakes. I blame this partially on my genes. My dad has a think for Hostess cupcakes. Did you know one of those cupcakes equals 2 servings? Yikes.

Anyway. When I was making my power spheres, I used natural fruit juice as a sweetener. I was feeling all health conscious until I realized I’ve been using Splenda in my tea for about two years. Can we say chemicals? So I had to buy a big jar of honey to make my honey wheat bread this weekend, and I decided that I’d go back to it as a natural sweetener. What I find funny about this, is when I was kid my mom used to keep honey in the fridge for her tea. I liked to eat it raw. I mean I was a kid, but it makes me think that sometimes simple is best.

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“Poetry is a confrontation of the whole being with reality…It is the basic struggle of the soul, the mind, and the body to comprehend life; to bring order to chaos or to phenomena: and by will and insight to create communicable verbal forms for the pleasure of mankind.”
~Richard Eberhart
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On a recent evening, I had supper with a friend, a television executive. Like me, she was born in the era of World War II; like mine, her life was altered by feminism. “Tell me,” I asked, “what you remember about poetry and the women’s movement?” I saw memory cross her face, and then she said something remarkable: “The women’s movement was poetry.”
A version of this essay will appear as the introduction to Poems of the Women’s Movement, edited by Honor Moore, which will be published by The Library of America, April 2, 2009.
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The heart sinks to see so many poems crammed so tightly together, like downcast immigrants in steerage. One can easily miss a radiant poem amid the many lackluster ones. It takes tremendous effort to read these small magazines with openness and attention. Few people bother, generally not even the magazines’ contributors. The indifference to poetry in the mass media has created a monster of the opposite kind—journals that love poetry not wisely but too well.
I’m used to reading articles that attack the workshop and blame it for everything that is wrong with the state of contemporary American poetry. I feel the same way every time I read these comments: I’m over it.
I am a product of this school. I took my first creative writing workshop when I was in high school with a visiting writer. We had to write a brief essay to apply for the workshop and my friend Emily and I were pleased to be among the chosen few. We were put into pairs and asked to free write over several topics. After about ten minutes, our writing was collected and the author chose a few pieces to read from the group. She read everyone’s piece aloud except for the piece Emily and I wrote. I suspected at the time, and still do, that this author didn’t like our story because it was darker and not about horses or teenage love. In fact, Emily and I wrote a story about a young girl loosing her parents. However, this didn’t suit the author’s taste, so we were cut.
While I remember being upset at the time, I think this whole experience is a good representation of what the writing world is like. Basically, stop whining and suck it up. Are there tons of MFA programs out there? Yes. Are they churning out a lot of mediocre writing? Yes. Was there a lot of mediocre writing before MFA programs? You bet. Also, since when did any student take a poetry workshop and then say “Hey, I’m a poet!” I don’t know many. Maybe I’m encountering the wrong poets, but if students are coming out with this gross misconception, then the fault is the teaching not the workshop.
Workshop is a place to build community. It is a place to receive feedback. Workshops do not teach you how to write. Workshops do not make you writer. Also, if people like your poetry, what does that mean anyway? I read reviews in reputable journals like Poetry and these people praise a collection. Two weeks later, I’ll read another review in another journal completely panning the entire book. Guess what? It’s subjective. My first writing workshop experience is very similar to how I feel about submitting to journals. I’ll be thrilled if my work is accepted somewhere, but at the end of the day it is the hands of an editor. Their taste is what makes the journal, so if you fall in line with that on some level, good for you. If not, better luck next time.
All workshops do is give writers (on any level) a venue to receive constructive feedback. If you’re going into an MFA or PhD program thinking that upon completion you’re going to be the next biggest thing in poetry (and what is that anyway?), then you’ve got some things to think about. _____________________________________________________________________

Wednesday (Sent Submissions) Musings

I sent out 17 hard copy submissions today and submitted 3 online submissions. This brings my grand total to 20. Most of the journals have a 3-4 month turn around, so I’m going to try and put them out of mind for now. Most of the places I sent to I feel good about. I read samples online and in print, so I tried to send certain poems to certain journals. I also try to send to one or two long shots. In a way, this another way to torture myself, but I also think it can’t hurt.

I know that it is impossibly hard to get work accepted. The poetry world is flooded with a lot of mediocre poems but there are also a lot of wonderful, emerging writers out there. I know that out of these 20 submissions, it is a very real possibility that none of them will amount to anything. If that happens, then you send again the next submission period. Persistence is an important part of the battle.
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This is fascinating. I used to live in Texas…

Hundreds, if not thousands, of poetry enthusiasts, cowboys and the downright curious have come to Sul Ross State University for shows in the past, he said.

This troubling at the least. I’ll probably post more about it later this week, but for now here is the link:

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

Tuesday (Poetry, Envelopes, and Stamps) Musings

As today’s title suggests, I spent all afternoon putting submission packets together. I’m already starting to doubt myself, so it is best to get these out tomorrow before I tear them open and throw the contents into the garbage.
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Economic crisis getting you down? Why not buy a Matisse?

PARIS — Despite the global economic crisis, a lot of money seems to be left over. On Monday, the private collection of Yves Saint Laurent and his partner became the most expensive one ever sold at auction, bringing in more than $264 million on the first night alone.