Why Is it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Mouthful

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-TYCA-SW

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

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

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

Finally, Just a Few Links to Think About

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

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

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

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

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

Bookaholics Anonymous

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

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

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

So, what did I buy? Here's the list:


Going Blind
Mara Faulkner, OSB
excelsior editions, SUNY Press, 2009
(My first collegiate writing instructor. I am indebted to this amazing writer in more ways that she will ever know.)


Hunger All Inside
Marie Gauthier
Finishing Line Press, 2009
(A new blogging acquaintance. Can't wait to read!)




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


Illustrating the Machine That Makes the World
Joshua Poteat
University of Georgia Press, 2009
(Joshua Poteat won the Anhinga Prize the year before me, and his first book Ornithologies is a must-read. I am thrilled for him about this new book!)





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

A Couple of Quick Links

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

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

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

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

Poetry and the Other

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

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

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

And here's the closing:
Do we seek out the influence of poets from other cultures? Allow ourselves to be influenced? Allow it and admit it and risk being accused of cultural stereotyping or colonialist tendencies? Allow it but keep it a secret and risk being accused of trying to pass off the ideas of another culture as one’s own?

Sometimes I feel the bigger my world gets, the more difficult it is to negotiate comfortably within it.

The conversation continues in the comments of Powell's post.

Letting Chaos Become Part of the Process

Chaos is what we got when we adopted our second cat (I know, I know...crazy cat lady poet promised not to talk about non-poetry stuff and here she is talking about the darned cats again...hold on, it does relate). Our second cat is young and we adopted her to be a companion for our first cat and to get me some breathing space at the writing desk, as our first cat imprinted quite firmly on me. Well, second cat is as awesome as first cat, but with more energy, which results in escapades at 2:00 a.m. that wake us up. Long story short, after getting up to remove the waste basket from our bathroom this morning at 2:00 a.m. so that the cat would stop tipping it repeatedly (metal bottom on tile floor = loud clang), I found myself back in bed thinking about the draft of a poem I'd begun on Monday.

I wasn't happy about the draft on Monday. It felt bulky and clumsy and ill-formed. Suddenly, in the middle of the night I thought of a new set of lines, a new way into the poem, in a slightly different form and had to get up and write them down. Despite what many poets say about keeping a notepad and pen next to their beds, this doesn't happen to me very often. But it seems that letting the cat's chaos become part of the process was helpful after all. I woke up this morning and jumped right into a new version of the poem that seems more promising.

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On a similar note, Carolyn Guinzio has a great post up at Linebreak's blog, Unstressed, today. She's been writing about memorable poetry, and today she touched on one of my big fears that I've written about here before...over-controlling a poem, squeezing the mystery out of it. Here's the quote that struck me:

There is a tendency to revise the memorable qualities out of a poem, out of fear, timidity, a desire to control. We want to use our minds to write; we don’t want our minds using us to write. The danger is in ending up with something controlled, beautifully structured, smart, and completely forgettable.

I love those intuitive leaps that happen as the words strike against each other in new and interesting ways, but I must admit to often losing those leaps in revision and worrying about the reader. This seems to be another tangent on the "letting chaos into the process" thread.

Help Wanted

Help! I'm working on a revised CV. (No, I'm not on the job market. I need to include it with a proposal.) I think I once heard that after a certain amount of time, you shouldn't lead with your degrees but with either your teaching or your publications. Does anyone have any good advice on this? Anyone willing to forward a sample?

What I'm Reading: City of Regret

For the past six months or so, I've been intrigued by individual poems written by Andrew Kozma and appearing in different journals. Most recently, I found two poems in Copper Nickel 12 that moved me to ask the library to ILL Kozma's book City of Regret. (I'm still trying to buy several books of poetry each month, but recently the budget monster reared its ugly head!)

I think I'm drawn to Kozma's work because his poems seem steeped in elegy and the kind of images that surprise without showing off. City of Regret is certainly a book about mourning but it is also a reconciliation with what it means to be alive in this amazing, conflicted world. The main mourning of the book centers around the loss of the speaker's father, but there are also hints of mourning for a lost lover and an opening toward hope in the end.

Here's a short poem in example:

The Transplant Ward

Even the most sincere in need
wait months or years, eyes fixed

to the walls like water stains.
They practice feeling hollow

with hands on their chests,
caging those small moments of space

they won't remember
when surgeons unhook the heart

and hold the body open
as it rushes to fill itself.



Some lines from "Dedicatory Letter"

... Now the silkworms
are wrapped tight in their own madness.

Will you hear their cries? Their demands lack teeth.
Their hold on you is an emptied leaf.

God, your eyes are closed, and though your breathing is even
this means nothing. Crops are as easily destroyed

by an apathetic rain as a broken dam.

And the closing lines from "Elegy for the End of the Day"

When the shadows devour the leaves
I remember your skin, perfect
for vanishing against unlit wood.

Bless this ending, this empty husk
that does not need to be saved.




City of Regret
Andrew Kozma
Zone 3 Press, 2007

Head Full of Hornets

I was going to say "head full of bees," but I think it's more than that, more "hornety." Today, I have some breathing room, and I came to the desk so full of hope. However, it appears that I can't settle down. I keep jumping up and jumping around in my brain. I fiddled with some household mini-chores in the hopes I would work off whatever excess energy this is, but now, I pick up one book and read a bit and fail to be sucked in, so I pick up another one, only to have the same thing happen there. As frustrating as swatting hornets, which I know is never a good idea.

Tomorrow I plan on checking over the manuscript one more time and sending it out to one contest this month. There is one last poem that still feels like a thorn in my side. I will most likely excise it tomorrow. I also have a few newer poems that I want to check on. They may or may not fit in this project. I know some poets see their manuscripts with clear edges and boundaries, mine are so often blurred.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Alas, A Lack of Time

Today's another loss to grading, but I'm finding the grading a reward of its own kind this year. I switched back to Comp I and the change had been good for me. Also, a colleague and I have been swamped with organizing a conference we are hosting at the end of the month. After Nov. 1, the time management should get a bit easier!

Dear Kind Editor,

I humbly beg your pardon. You are one of a small and select group who received a particular submission packet from me in August. In my rush to return to the world of poetry, I fear I spoke too soon. I sent forth these few half-formed darlings in a less than beautiful state. It is only now, upon quiet reflection as the rejections arrive one by one that I have realized my mistake. My only hope is that you erase this episode from your memory. I've heard tell of the mountains of poems that you receive each day, each month, each year, & Etc. May you find it in your heart to lose all knowledge of this one particular lapse in my judgment and not hold it against me (or my now more darling poems) upon future attempts at pleasing you enough to guarantee my words are published.

May it be so.

I am resigned,
Your Reckless Submitter

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This subject has been on my mind for the last two weeks. The poems in question I felt quite strongly about in August. So strongly that I disregarded the very smart comments of my faithful friend, Tara Bray. I shrugged her off, when I know better. (T., I'm so sorry!) You see, the poems were too new, and I made the same mistake I've made in the past (although not too recently). I rushed the poems out into the world before they were old enough for me to see them clearly. Today, I did not start a new draft as I had intended. Instead, I was recording rejections, and as they often do, they sparked revisions. Finally, finally, I saw what Tara meant about the ending of one poem. I began to tinker with one line and low and behold, I rewrote the last five lines of the poem. It seems that however long I've been working and reworking this process, it's never long enough. I stumble at the same points. Yet, I am heartened by the fact that I seem to stumble less often now.

Along the same lines, Victoria Chang has a post up about the errors she sees in manuscripts submitted for book contests. It's one of those dangerous posts that sends me back to my binder, scouring The World Made of Such Weather as This for any transgressions named in the article or post. Still, I think it is a valuable reminder. And some of the things she describes, I've never done, so I do get to feel a little reassured by that.

Now out into another gray and drizzly day here in central Arkansas. (For the love of God, where is the sun?)

Weekend Update: Sappho and Sedaris

I love the juxtaposition of the two events I attended this weekend. In fact, my brain is overflowing with very different stimuli.

Thanks to Josh for asking about the Sappho event. I had planned to blog about it Saturday when I returned home, but, alas, I became sidetracked. First, let me reiterate that the translator is my very good friend Rebecca Resinski, a classics professor at Hendrix College.

The word that came to mind after viewing and hearing the performance of Fragments from Sappho was "enchanting." On stage, twenty dancers (16 women and 4 men) performed, sometimes as a whole, sometimes in pairs or larger numbered groups but still all together, and sometimes as pairs or solos while the rest of the group posed in interesting configurations and "attended." (Let me just say that commenting on this type of work is way outside my realm of expertise, so I'm sure I'm missing some of the lingo.) Also on stage were two local soprano vocalists, Suzanne Banister and Joanne McDade. The music had been pre-recorded, but with the quality of technology today, it felt seamless with the whole. So, from time to time, the sopranos sang from the translation while the dancers created the most amazing forms on stage. From time to time, the dancers recited (sometimes still and sometimes moving) from the translations, forming a Greek chorus effect.

Rebecca gave me a little backstory into how this all came together, and I hope she won't mind me sharing a bit for the curious writers out there. Several years ago, she was working on a translation project of Sappho fragments. She translated the fragments and then "re-envisioned" them into a larger whole. Her piece contains 17 sections. Each section draws on words and clauses from different fragments, reformed into a whole. At the top of each section, she labels from which fragments the words are drawn, but does not break it down any further than that.

Rebecca showed her piece to some folks in the arts department and they wanted to collaborate on a performance piece. The translation was given to Karen Griebling, who composed the music and decided what would be sung and what would be recited. This was given to Brigitte Rogers, who choreographed the performance. Finally, the student dancers and the sopranos were brought in to rehearse and perform.

As I watched the piece, it struck me that I rarely see true performance pieces such as this. It was performed four times over the weekend, and now it is done. Poof, as they say. I'm sure this is a common occurrence in larger cities, and maybe even here in Little Rock and I'm just unaware of such things. However, most of the events I attend here are readings and performances of plays and such that are already in the canon. Of course, there is a chance that somebody might hear of this and want to perform/reproduce it elsewhere, but it would not be quite the same, I think. I feel fortunate to have been there.

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Shifting gears to David Sedaris, there isn't nearly as much to say, mostly because he's so well known. His reading was amazing and hilarious and touching in small moments and just what I needed at this point in the semester. On the walk back to the car, my chest ached from laughing so hard. It was great to hear that 1,300 people attended because the whole show was a fundraiser for the Arkansas Literary Festival. Unfortunately, I won't be at the Lit Festival this year because it is the same weekend as AWP, but I'm glad I was able to chip in last night and get such a great return. on my contribution. "Laugh kookaburra, Laugh kookaburra, Gay your life must be!"

Events This Weekend

I've got an action-packed weekend of great events to attend.

On Saturday, I'm traveling down the road to Conway, AR for this:

Fragments from Sappho
Fri.-Sat., Oct. 9-10, 2009, Fri., Oct. 9, 7:30 p.m.; Sat., Oct. 10, 2:00 p.m., Reves Recital Hall, Hendrix College
This collage of poetry, movement, and music will invite audience members to make their own connections among and within the arranged pieces. Text arranged and translated by Rebecca Resinski. Brigitte Rogers, director. Karen Griebling, musical composer.
For more information contact Henryetta Vanaman at 501-450-4597 or vanaman@hendrix.edu.

Rebecca is a good friend of mine, and I can't wait to take in this performance!

On Sunday, I'm heading to west Little Rock for this:

An Evening with David Sedaris

Best-selling author David Sedaris will appear at a one-night event to benefit the Arkansas Literary Festival at 7 p.m. Sunday, October 11, 2009. Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever and Holidays on Ice, as well as collections of personal essays, Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, and When You are Engulfed in Flames, each of which became immediate bestsellers.

Yay!