Pre-conference quiz
1. I am attending AWP 2020 because:
a. I am legitimately excited about sharing my book, seeing literary friends, and hearing strong writers talk about what they do
b. As a former board member amazed I ever carried that load, I’m glad to support the current board members and the organization’s great new leaders, all of whom work super-hard with a budget much, much smaller than that of, say, the MLA
c. I would feel tortured by book-promotion-guilt and FOMO if I avoided it
d. All of the above
2. I feel stressed out about AWP 2020 because:
a. The conference is gigantic, overwhelming, and bound to make me feel like a crumb on the fancy-pants of life—and will anyone really show up for my book-signing?
b. Events run from morning to night and while I AM scheduling in rest this time, historically, I haven’t been very disciplined about taking that rest
c. It’s not like work stops—in fact, my teaching/ committee load before and after the conference is MORE intense because I have to make up for being away
d. All of the above
3. I’m lucky to attend AWP because:
a. It’s freaking expensive yet I can more-or-less manage the cost despite having already used up my university conference allowance, in part because my kids are pretty independent now and worrying about their care is no longer a big complicated thing, especially since my spouse and I are going together
b. I’m more aware than ever of how many friends can’t manage the conference due to cost, disability, and caregiver obligations—travel is hard, never mind the intensity of such events and the difficulty of navigating huge conference centers when your mobility is limited
c. Really, look at a. and b., I really ought to just calm down about the stress already
d. All of the above
So I score a “D” on this quiz, what else is new. I’m still having a good week. It’s February break, just after our midterms, because we start so early in January, and I managed to take an actual weekend off, which did me a lot of good. And to my amazement, ARCs of my novel just came, and they’re beautiful and terrifying! I think this is one of the best moments of publication—there’s no immediate obligation attached, it’s the culmination of a ton of work, and damn, they’re just really gratifying to look at. Thanks to all the people who have already expressed interest in reviewing it or my new poetry book; let me know if you’d like to be added to that list and receive a free copy. I’ll be back with some post-AWP reflections one of these days…
Poetry and heart
I looked up “heart” and found definitions including feeling, courage, enthusiasm, vital part, “the condition of agricultural land as regards fertility,” personality, disposition, compassion, generosity, character, charity, humanity, and of course love. It has associations with memory, too (“by heart”) and deep concern (“to heart”). Obsolete: intellect, which is pretty much the opposite of what most people mean by “heart” now. My curiosity about the word is probably connected to valentine season, but I’ve also been reading a ton of poetry lately and thinking about what draws me to some poems more than others–a set of qualities I sometimes call heart.
My reading includes twelve finalist mss I’m musing over for a poetry prize as well as assignments for a course on documentary poetry: first Rukeyser’s sequence “The Book of the Dead,” then Forché’s The Country Between Us, then a sampling of poetic responses to Hurricane Katrina including some by Cynthia Hogue (interview poems), Raymond McDaniel (ethically problematic collage), and Patricia Smith (often persona poems). Most recently we finished Nicole Cooley’s Breach, a rewarding book to teach not least because it’s so various in forms and approaches. It was a student favorite and when I asked why, they said “authenticity.” When I asked what the signs or markers of authenticity were, the answers seem to boil down to vulnerability. Self-interrogation; courage; generosity; getting to the heart of things, even when exposure makes you look bad. In Cooley’s return to post-hurricane New Orleans, her childhood home, with her daughters, this sometimes means longing to be mothered rather than to mother, a taboo emotion for a woman to admit.
Extracurricularly, I just read Molly Spencer‘s recent If the House too, and it’s an open-hearted missive from the interior of a body, a marriage, and multiple houses. I love the porosity of Spencer’s containers, the flow of information inward and outward. You could call it circulation.
I’m in a receptive mode; I’m not writing much, except for an occasional blog post or tweet (and a bazillion emails). I often write little poetry in winter and then things turn in spring, partly because of the academic calendar and partly the natural one. My sweetheart and I just took a walk in the woods–every Saturday, we try to get out of our neighborhood, walk elsewhere, this time on trails a bit of a drive away–and it was so bright, cold, and still. Wild onions had sent up curling leaves and the moss was green, but otherwise it was just gray boles, brown mud, fallen branches, leaf duff. Inner and outer weather match.
In town, though, crocus and snowdrops are arriving, early omens of a busier season. I’m not sure I’m ready for spring and the associated book-launch madness, but at least I have the generous blurbs below to reassure me the book is worth at least some attention. That matters so much, when writers you admire will spend their time reading your work and saying thoughtful, encouraging words about it. It gives me heart.
Still at the Egg-life–
I’m dormant these days, sometimes “chafing the shell,” as Dickinson wrote, but also conserving energy and trying to stay focused. Some hibernaculum thoughts:
- I clearly know nothing about words or publishing, because I posted my most popular tweet ever this week and it was about…boots. Success, if that’s what that is, isn’t always confidence-inspiring.
- I am working hard to launch my books with a bang, but this effort is grounded in sheer stubborn grit. Made a promise to myself; gonna keep it.
- “February is not my favorite month,” I told a kind person who is also my hairdresser. He answered, “Good title for a poem.” Maybe I’ll write it when I hatch.
- I’d be lying like a Fox newscaster if I didn’t admit to cracks in my self-containment. Thanks to Colleen Anderson for posting a Q&A with me in her Women in Horror Month series. Two magazines with my work in them just arrived, too–Hampden-Sydney Review and 32 Poems–and those editors have placed my poems in dazzling company.
- I am also reading the news and issuing an occasional plea to representatives (talk about horror!). I suspect and fear this corrupt and compassionless president will be voted into a second term, not least because he’s doing his best to disempower voters. I want a President Warren and don’t understand this country’s grudge against competent women–of everyone in the running, she’s the person I trust most profoundly to fix what’s broken–but whoever wins the Democratic nomination, I’ll be all-in. The stakes are so high for vulnerable human beings and for the more-than-human world.
- A zone that’s smaller, but in which my power and responsibility are greater: I am, again, amazed by my students’ energy, talent, and ambition, and I am determined to serve them well, but I am struggling to keep my teaching and advising load within a reasonably-sized container. This term it’s a composition course on speculative fiction; a general education course called Poetry and Music; and a small senior seminar on documentary poetics (we’re currently reading poems responding to Hurricane Katrina). I’m also advising an honors thesis and prepping a brand new Whitman-Dickinson course for our May term, all of which is fun, but could easily keep me in my eggshell office around the clock. The grading alone!
- Yet I AM making some time for those double book launch preparations–not a ton, but some. I’m inquiring, applying, and updating my Events page when something comes through, all the while trying to tamp down my delicate-flower dismay about asking for things AND pondering how much busy-ness Future Me will be able to handle (Chris sometimes says, “Former Chris, the one who put me in this position, was an asshole.”) Next year is my sabbatical, so there has to be time in there to write, revise, recharge.
- Tiny triumph: please check out the book launch party flier below, which despite its simplicity took much of Saturday morning to put together.
- I also finally squashed down my loathing of being photographed to book a headshot session with Anne Valerie Portrait. Turns out the photographer is a lovely person with a calming vibe. When she said, during our first meeting, that she usually has a long preparation process but had read my blog and recognized that I need to do this efficiently, conserving energy, I almost burst into tears. Maybe it can be good to be seen.
- What I’d like to do right now? A box of mss just came from Cider Review Press, because I’m serving as this year’s judge. I want to read read read–something I know for sure I’m good at. Pondering them will be good work for February’s closed-in evenings, when wind rattles the tin roof and poems are the only hubbub I feel drawn to.
She's in a state, all right
THIS is the best thing about this week: a stunning cover for my forthcoming poetry book, featuring a painting called “Censer” by Ida Floreak and designed by Nikkita Colhoon. Nikkita’s work was one of the draws, for me, in working with Tinderbox Editions–all her covers stop you in your tracks. I feel really lucky. I owe thanks, too, to Clover Archer for bringing Ida’s art to Staniar Gallery on campus, and to Kevin Remington for getting a high-quality photograph of the work. I went to Ida’s talk just as I was puzzling over possible covers, so there was something magical about the convergence.
Like Ida’s other work, “Censer” has a meditative quality I love. She’s arranged a shrine out of natural objects, highlighting their grace–and the cracking egg suggests rebirth (when am I being reborn again? I’m ready!). Ida says she’s influenced both by botanical drawings and religious art, and this book is full of plants, creatures, and spirit-questions. I had wondered what colors Nikkita would choose for the words on the cover; the pink is both surprising and right. The poems reference pink constantly, from pussy hats to magnolia blossoms to rose-tinted medicines. And somehow the pink lettering makes the shadows more striking, which feels appropriate to this collection, too. Yes, I know I’m close-reading my own cover at length, but I’m excited, dammit.
Of course, having a cover helps me kick publicity into high gear (well, as high a gear as I can manage in my rural location, with no publicist). I’ve been busy arranging a local launch and seeking readings elsewhere with more success that I’d expected but also some disappointments/ loud silences, as you’d imagine. Here’s a preliminary list, but I’ll fill in more details soon. One thought: I’d somehow imagined that when big-name poets posted their tour dates, bookings had just fallen into their laps, because of their dazzling fame. Maybe that happens sometimes. But now I’m suspecting there’s way more hustle involved (my list represents a ton of cold queries and painstaking applications, but also many kind suggestions from allies). I don’t have chutzpah but I am diligent, so I’m trying to compensate for one with the other. I’m also taking any and all ideas about reading venues and I’d be grateful for yours.
I’ll be traveling this spring and summer from Vermont to the Carolinas, with a detour to Wisconsin, and I’m both thrilled to get out there and a little worried about pacing myself. I’ve always been an anxious person but anxiety has been WAY harder to manage this year than ever before–the old tactics and treatments are almost useless, as they sometimes become during menopause, I hear, and I’m having to reinvent my approach. One of my doctors pointed out recently, “The bell rings, and you jump,” meaning I consistently meet my obligations, even when I feel bad. I even enjoy some of them–teaching and giving readings, for example, are generally fun for me. But the costs are higher; I take longer to return to calmness. So I’m thinking maybe I should pair each professional event with a restorative treat–following a guest workshop with a couple of silent hours in an art museum, for example, or a cozy dinner with Chris in an interesting restaurant. I also think I need to decouple the pleasure of sharing work from anxiety about whether the event sells books or not. Sometimes I feel wonderful, knowing that my poems connected, and then I feel crushed when all the impecunious people rush out without buying. But one should not negate the other. Ideas on how you manage the emotions of promotion would be very welcome, too.
Not resolutions but invocations
Last year, I substituted a mantra for a resolution: “breathe.” It helped a little. This New Year’s Eve I wrote up more resolutions, got upset about them, and then decided: to hell with self-improvement. I need fewer bullet points on my endlessly guilty, mildly self-loathing to-do lists. And better ones. In fact, let’s not even call them bullet points. They look like open pupils, too. Pencil points. Poppy seeds.
In considering what words I and others DO need to hear, I’ve been crafting a call for Shenandoah‘s next poetry submission period that will read something like this: “During our March 2020 reading period, please send us prayers, spells, charms, curses, blessings, invocations—poems that try to make change happen. All forms, styles, and procedures are welcome. A selection will appear in a special Shenandoah portfolio in the Spring 2021 issue.”
I know I’m not good about practicing self-care, but I want to keep asking for help this year, sending something like prayers or petitions outward and earthward. (I don’t believe there’s a god up in the sky, although it’s fine with me if you do; I do believe in a living earth that I can listen to and do better by.) I plan to mutter, be kind, pay attention, especially to myself. (And I will remind us to vote for kindness, too, whenever a crooked system gives you the chance. Fires blasting Australia, the U.S. president stirring up war to deflect attention from impeachment–I’m not sure we or the more-than-human-world can take much more of this.)
It may seem paradoxical, given these meditations on care, that I’m beginning 2020 by trying to be in two places at once. As the term starts here in Virginia, I’m handing a pile of syllabi and first-day lessons to my professor-spouse (I swear he’s fine with it, and well-rested!), then hopping on a plane to Seattle to attend the MLA convention. After thinking deeply about whether saying yes was another instance of crazed dutifulness, I decided that, actually, I want to go, as long as I can conference kindly.
The first thing I’m going to do when I arrive is hang out, for the pleasure of it, with a long-distance friend I hardly ever see, Jeannine Hall Gailey. Over the next few days, I’ll attend a few panels, and I’m speaking on a fun one, too (and trying not to stress about it). I joined Janine Utell’s MLA roundtable, “The Space Between Creative Nonfiction and Literary Criticism,” because I thought it would enrich my thinking as well as making my own work more visible, especially the creative criticism in my 2021 book Poetry’s Possible Worlds; this is the kind of conversation I want to have more of, genuinely. On Friday night, I’m part of an all-star lineup at the MLA Offsite Reading (2 minutes each and I’m quite sure most stars will peel off by the time we get to my part of the alphabet, which is fine with me–see the poster below). And on Saturday night, I join Jeannine Hall Gailey to read speculative poetry at Open Books. In between I’m planning to sleep, avoid my email, take a walk or two, and do minimal homework, as well as being super-nice to the anxious job-seekers in the MLA elevators.
Attending is also a way of being kinder to myself as a writer, rather than being maniacally diligent as a teacher (what do you mean, miss a class?!–we will NEVER GET THAT HOUR BACK!). I’d like to do better at fulfilling my responsibilities to what I’ve written, as Jeannine says in PR for Poets, which I’ve been rereading. In addition to the aforementioned 2021 essay collection, I have a fifth poetry collection, The State She’s In, and a first novel, Unbecoming, to launch this spring (look, I made pages!). I believe in them and I want them to find readers. No more prioritizing a tidy email inbox over inquiring about a reading series or submitting to a post-publication prize! I need to do less busy-work, somehow, in 2020, but also keep priorities straight. I will achieve this imperfectly, if at all. But it’s not about checking off a list, right? It’s about keeping those pupils wide. Wish all of us luck. And write some powerful spell-poems, please, no matter where you plan to release their magic.
Reading by the glow of a year on fire
2019 was a good year for books but a weird year for reading. For pleasure, work, and mood-medicine, I read constantly, but it’s been different lately: my poetry rate is typical, but fiction and I have had some problems. I couldn’t finish things, or I read multiple books in alternating fragments, concentration flickering. I received less solace from it.
What worked best for me were predictable genres: mysteries, fantasy, historical fiction. I’ve heard others say that they’re overworked and sad about politics, so the more escapist a book turned out to be, the better. That’s true for me, too, but personal stresses have diluted my attention even further. On the happy side, reading Shenandoah subs takes time and energy I used to devote to reviewing. I’m also launching my fifth poetry collection and my debut novel next year, and an essay collection in 2021. Good LORD did I reread and revise those mss, over and over, and when you’re reading your own pages you have less time for others’.
I still read and admired lots of poetry collections–many of those listed in “best of 2019” articles, and also small-press volumes by Erin Hoover, January O’Neil, Kyle Dargan, Martha Silano, Amy Lemmon, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Ned Balbo, Jeanne Larsen, Niall Campbell, Hai-Dang Phan, Paisley Rekdal, and Oliver de la Paz. I reviewed Franny Choi’s Soft Science for Strange Horizons. My brief year-in-review piece, forthcoming soon in that magazine, gives a shout-out to poetry collections that touch on sf as well as fun novels by Atwood, King, and a few others. Some sf-ish books I was excited to read, though, disappointed me, especially Ta-Nehisi Coates’ novel, which I found tedious (am I the only reader who thinks “Slavery is” might be an inauspicious way to begin a sentence?).
A few more books that touched, haunted, and even changed me: Joy Harjo’s Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings, especially a prayer-poem near the beginning. A Holly Black fairy-tale my son recommended. Angie Kim’s Miracle Creek, because of its disturbing exploration of “bad” parenting. Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, I don’t even know why–dark side of Downtown Abbey, maybe? Patchett’s The Dutch House, perhaps because I took it in more slowly than usual, as a brilliantly-delivered audiobook by Tom Hanks. And as I’ve posted before, I didn’t think The Slow Professor was a great book, but it gave me a lot to chew on as I considered how next year ought to be different.
2019 saw a lot more beautiful poetry books by beautiful people, and I WILL get to them in 2020, as well as voting for whatever candidate the Democratic party puts up against the current flaming-ass-in-chief. Oh, and I’m going to keep rereading this little treasure as I try to launch my own little fire-starters as brightly as possible. Happy new year, fellow readers!
POETRY (78)
1/8 Hoover, Barnburning* (review)
1/13 Hayes, American Sonnets* (reread for class)
1/14 O’Neil, Rewilding* (fandom)
1/15 Komunyaaka, Dien Cai Dau (reread for class)
1/20 Barnhart and Mahan, Women of Resistance* (for class)
1/25 Coleman, Words of Protest, Words of Freedom (reread for class)
1/29 Macfarlane, The Lost Words* (for class)
2/6 Bashir, Field Theories (reread for class)
2/7 Harjo, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings* (reread for class)
2/23 Dargan, Anagnorisis* (fandom)
2/24 Abraham, al youm (for class)
3/4 Mathieu, Orogeny (for class)
3/5 Nezhukumatathil, Oceanic (reread for class)
3/13 Silano, Reckless Lovely (reread for class)
3/16 Michelson, Dreaming America (reread for class)
3/25 Kaminsky, Deaf Republic (buzz—Twitter mostly)
4/6 Brown, The Tradition* (loved the title poem on poetry.org)
4/6 Jernigan, Years, Months, and Days (review)
4/11 Camp, One Hundred Hungers (reread for campus visit)
4/15 Lemmon, The Miracles* (fandom)
4/18 Fisher-Wirth, The Bones of Winter Birds* (fandom)
4/20 Silano, Gravity Assist* (fandom)
4/20 McCarthy, Surge (new pressmate)
4/21 Balbo, 3 Nights of the Perseids* (fandom)
4/27 Shakespeare, Sonnets (just got caught up in them)
4/30 Nethercott, The Lumberjack’s Dove (friend’s recommendation)
5/1 Kaneko, The Dead Wrestler Elegies (planning for his visit)
5/4 Youn, Ignatz (Krazy Kat fandom)
5/5 Xie, Eye Level (strong reviews)
5/14 Miller, Emily Dickinson’s Poems As She Preserved Them (teaching prep)
5/18 Larsen, What Penelope Chooses* (fandom)
5/18 Hayden, Exuberance* (fandom)
5/18 Selznick and Whitman, Live Oak, With Moss* (comics version, teaching prep)
5/18 Seay, The See the Queen (teaching/ visit prep)
5/18 Alleyne, Honeyfish* (teaching/ visit prep)
5/23 Camp, The Turquoise Door* (campus visit)
5/23 Nguyen, Ghost Of* (good reviews)
6/4 Nelson, The Freedom Business (forget where I bought it!)
6/10 Frank, Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country (bought at a reading)
6/12 Bashir, Where the Apple Falls (research)
6/17 Campbell, Noctuary* (fandom) 41
6/18 Rekdal, Nightingale* (fandom)
6/20 Bashir, Gospel (research)
6/21 Gray, Radiation King* (received review copy)
6/22 Schwartz, Miraculum (found it on my shelf)
6/23 Phillips, Reasons for Smoking (found it on my shelf)
6/23 Honum, The Tulip-Flame (found it on my shelf)
6/23 Baker, waha / mouth (fandom)
6/24 Phan, Reenactments* (fandom and research)
7/1 Choi, Soft Science* (for review)
7/4 Matejka, The Big Smoke (found it on my shelf)
7/8 Satterfield, Her Familiars (reread for research)
7/11 Bray, Small Mothers of Fright (research)
7/12 Ginsburg, Dear Weather Ghost (research)
7/12 Ginsburg, Double Blind (research)
7/13 Dawson, Big-Eyed Afraid (fandom)
7/14 Legros George, The Dear Remote Nearness of You (found it on my shelf)
7/15 Calvocoressi, Rocket Fantastic (found it on my shelf)
7/16 Ali, Sky Ward (research)
7/17 Mlinko, Marvelous Things Overheard (bought at a conference)
7/20 Winslow, Defying Gravity (by a friend)
8/25 Hancock, Cairns* (by a friend)
9/19 Gailey, She Returns to the Floating World* (reread for teaching)
9/23 H.D., Sea Garden* (reread for teaching)
9/26 Seay, To See the Queen (reread for her visit)
9/28 Lusby, Catechesis* (buzz)
9/30 de la Paz, The Boy in the Labyrinth* (fandom)
10/4 Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations (reread for class)
10/8 Eliot, The Waste Land (reread for class)
10/10 Giménez Smith, Be Recorder (awards nominations)
10/? McLarney and Street, A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (I’m in it!)
11/10 Hong, Age of Glass (met her at conference)
11/19 Hughes, Montage of a Dream Deferred (reread for class)
11/29 Jones, dark//thing* (met her at a conference)
12/8 Sze, Sight Lines* (prize win)
12/24 Heid Erdrich, Curator of Ephemera (prep for a possible campus visit)
12/27 Parker, ed., Changing is Not Vanishing (friends’ rec, for teaching)
12/31 Graber, The River Twice* (fandom)
FICTION (36)
1/5 Miller, Song of Achilles (daughter’s recommendation)
1/19 Miller, Circe (daughter’s recommendation)1/27 Burns, Milkman* (book group)
2/9 Walker, The Dreamers* (reviews and Emily Mandel’s blurb)
2/23 Anders, The City in the Middle of the Night* (fandom)
3/17 Oyeyemi, Boy, Snow, Bird (friends’ recommendations)
3/31 Oyeyemi, Gingerbread* (fandom)
4/6 Martin, Passage to the Dreamtime (play) (bought at a conference)
4/19 Black, The Dark Part of the Forest (son’s recommendation)
4/25 Chambers, Calls for Submission (met at a conference)
5/3 Herriman, Krazy & Ignatz (teaching prep)
5/8 LaValle, Destroyer (teaching prep)
5/19 Garstang, The Shaman of Turtle Valley* (local writer)
5/28 McLaughlin, Bearskin* (local connections plus Edgar win)
5/31 Atkinson, Transcription* audiobook (friends’ recommendation)
6/17 Walton, Lent* (fandom)
6/22 Crouch, Recursion* (NYT review)
6/23 Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (reread for teaching)
7/1 Hubbard, The Talented Ribkins (gift)
7/7 Kim, Miracle Creek* (reviews)
7/12 Ginsburg, Sunset City (research)
7/19 Ray, Whiskey Tales* (translator is a friend)
7/20 Rosenberg, Confessions of the Fox* (daughter’s recommendation)
8/1 Adieche, Americanah (teaching)
8/3 Waters, The Little Stranger (fandom)
9/9 Horrocks, The Vexations* (preparing for her visit to campus)
9/16 Atwood, The Testaments* (fandom)
9/25 King, The Institute* (fandom)
10/16 Joukhadar, Map of Salt and Stars (preparing for visit)
10/? Pullman, Book of Dust* (fandom)
11/? Patchett, The Dutch House* (audiobook for travel, word of mouth)
11/28 Coates, The Water Dancer* (ads; sounded good but wasn’t very)
12/15 Stout, Fer-de-Lance (friend’s recommendation)
12/20 Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (had never read it!)
12/25 Hoffman, The World We Knew* (friend’s recommendation)
12/30 Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January (friend’s recommendation)
NONFICTION/ HYBRID (21)
1/26 Fennelly, Heating & Cooling (reread for class)
2/6 Harjo, Crazy Brave (preparing for her visit)
3/16 Traister, Good and Mad* (college colloquium)
4/29 Sacks, Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie (research)
5/? Gay, The Book of Delights (fandom)
5/21 Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (reputation)
5/22 Davis, Why Art?* (gift)
6/4 Hayles, Chaos Bound (research)
6/10 Atkins, The Laws of Thermodynamics (research)
6/10 Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory (research)
6/22 Darling, Je Suis L’Autre: Essays and Interrogations (research)
6/22 Kiefer, Nestuary (fandom)
6/24 Anker and Felski, Critique and Postcritique (research)
7/10 Vargas, Dear America* (teaching)
7/14 Moore, 16 Pills* (pressmate)
7/17 McSweeney, The Necropastoral (research)
8/7 Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera (reread for teaching)
8/25 Rich, Permeable Membrane (gift)
11/27 Berg, Seeber, The Slow Professor (to co-lead faculty book club)
12/2 Hughes, ed., Sylvia Plath Drawings (fandom)
12/29 Slate, Little Weirds* (gift from daughter)
*published within the last year or so
Not with a whimper but a bang!
Actually, that title sounds sexual–sorry. I MEAN to tell you how my year is ending, show off some cool student work, and wish you a happy solstitial impeachment frenzy.
My happy news–honored above by a photo of Ursula ecstatic about catnip–is receiving a Katherine Bakeless Nason Scholarship to Breadloaf Environmental Writers Conference this June. This is also the season I gear up for book publicity, and I’m SO glad to have ONE set of dates in stone now, as I query bookstores and reading series and the like. I’m thinking I’ll roadtrip to Vermont and book a few dates at mid-points along the journey, since both the poetry collection and the novel will be out by then. I’m also applying for additional conferences, residencies, etc., which is a ton of work. I’m really grateful that of the dozen or more applications I’ve already put out there, one came through. In the spirit of making visible my shadow c.v.: I’ve also received a cartload of rejections and non-answers (if you can imagine those ghostly silences filling up a cart, anyway). That’s just the way it goes, but it’s good to have one nice shiny “yes” to light up these long dark nights.
I’m also preparing, intellectually and socially, for the MLA conference in Seattle in January, where I’ll be speaking on a panel organized by Janine Utell called “The Space Between Creative Nonfiction and Literary Criticism: Theorizing, Writing, Publishing Critical/Creative Hybrids.” Right up my alley, but I still have work to do on my remarks. I have a lovely date set up with Jeannine Hall Gailey for the day I arrive, and I’ll also be reading with her on Saturday the 11th at Open Books, but I’d love to see as many friends as possible, so please let me know if you’ll be there.
That’s on top of Shenandoah and tenure-file reading, holiday prep, and all the other little tasks I fell behind on during the term, so this week has been pretty intense. I hope to put up a blog around new year’s, though, about the year’s reading, and another about certain resolutions that are forming in my stubborn brain. In the meantime, some delights from last week’s grading.
In U.S. Poetry from 1900-1950, my fall upper-level seminar, the students became so excited about researching little magazines that I ended up giving my students an experimental option in lieu of a second conventional essay: they could create 8 pages of a little magazine from the period, including a cover, masthead, mission statement, table of contents, and a few “solicited” submissions (mostly real poems from the period, but they were allowed to make up one or two plausible imaginary modernists, too, and write poems in those personas). They also had to write reflective essays explaining their literary and design choices and providing a bibliography of models and other sources they consulted. You’ll notice that’s actually MORE work than a conventional essay, but perhaps more fun. I’m sneaky that way. Pictures below, plus a particularly cool videopoem from my creative writing workshop.
Moving Poem by Amanda Deans
Screening Shenandoah submissions
It’s the last week of classes! I’m participating in what will be a brilliant reading at 4:30 today (in Hillel on W&L’s campus), from the beautiful Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia! And can I say it again?–this intense term is nearly DONE!
In corners of time, I’m also screening poems for Shenandoah, both for the fall 2020 issue and for the Graybeal-Gowan Prize for Virginia writers (both categories get equal consideration for publication). I thought it might be useful for some people to know what that process looks like, and I understand it better myself than I did a year ago, when I was just beginning my tenure as poetry editor.
I log on to Submittable for a 20-30 minute block on most days during the submission month (this time, Nov 15-Dec 15) and do a quick screening, marking each new batch yes, maybe, no. The majority of subs are “maybe”: I can see some great language going on but I’m not ready to make a decision. “No” is for the poems that clearly don’t fit what Shenandoah is all about–the poems we want involve powerful material, skillfully treated. If a first reading reveals a lot of cliche, ineffective linebreaks, and a high level of predictability, I just can’t spend a lot of time on it (we’ve already received more than 600 batches of poems and I have a time-consuming OTHER job, with no course releases or extra money for this editorial labor of love). “Yes” is vanishingly rare this early in the reading period, but occasionally a poem grabs me by the throat. In that case, I wait a day or two, reread, and then ask Editor-In-Chief Beth Staples what she thinks. If we both agree that it would be tragic if some other magazine scooped the poem(s) up, I accept the work right off. I don’t accept ANYTHING without Beth’s agreement. Usually we’re on the same page, but occasionally we disagree, and then both of us have to consider: “do I need to fight for this one?”
Final decisions on all those maybes will happen by sometime in January, as well as selection of the Graybeal-Gowan winner (by both me and Beth–hiring an outside judge would decrease the prize amount so we decided against). I might write individualized rejection to poets who came close, but mostly a work-study student rejects what I’ve marked as a “no,” using a form letter.
Some things I like:
- Amazing poems! I love editing because I get to bruit terrific poetry.
- When the poet takes the time to address us by name and mention something they liked in a recent issue (although I try not to read the letter before the poems, the way the Submittable screen works means I sometimes catch phrases before clicking on the attachment).
- Professionally formatted subs, with one poem per page in a single file and an easy-to-read font. This whole bullet point is relatively trivial, but if you’re really anxious to make every little detail play in your favor, most editors, I think, have a (sometimes unconscious) preference for serif fonts. I am less fussy than many; I really don’t care which one. Shenandoah‘s font is Minion.
Some things I don’t like:
- Turning down poems I really like. I still have regrets about work I rejected last year, in fact. But 800+ batches of poems, 15 spots…the math just means good work slips away.
- Separate submission of every poem–too many clicks! Also, submitting multiple times in a single period without being asked to do so will get you rejected unread.
- Submission of fiction/ nonfiction during a poetry-only period. That’s a jerk move that means extra work for Beth when she’s busy trying to finalize the new issue (debuting this Friday!).
- Cover letters that begin with an insult to the submission guidelines or the magazine itself. You’d be surprised.
- Poems including racist, sexist, or other dehumanizing language, or otherwise displaying prejudice against groups of people. Again, you’d be surprised.
- This is more trivia, but I haven’t yet liked a poem that’s centered on the page or in a goofy font. I’m open, too, to reading work by teenagers, but in almost every case it just isn’t skilled enough yet. Let your work cook longer before hitting send. Poetry keeps.
- That I don’t have time to write more personal rejections. Honestly.
Modernism in Native American Heritage Month
Some terrific people at my university just organized our first ever Native American Heritage Month, involving two lectures, two documentaries, and a poetry reading with tastings of traditional foods. I made it to four out of five events, and every one was interesting, moving, and really fun–I’m so grateful to the organizers for their work.
The commemoration also made me return to a teaching/ research question that’s bothered me for a long time. My “modernist” poetry course hasn’t, in fact, carried that label for years, because I find it limited and misleading. Instead, I teach “U.S. Poetry from 1900-1950.” Alongside the modernist canon I was trained in, and the white women poets I added to my mental list of innovators during my PhD years, we read the formalisms of Frost, Millay, Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and others, and the poetic experiments of the New Negro Renaissance (these people and bodies of work overlap, of course). I’m currently teaching the most inclusive version of this course I’ve ever constructed. So where are the Native American poets?
There are a few modernist scholars out there doing great work to answer that question. I read a 2017 essay by Kirby Brown last week that I found really helpful: “American Indian modernities and new modernist studies’ ‘Indian Problem.'” He trains some light on Native prose writers–some of whom I knew, like Zitkála-Šá, and some novel writers of the 1930s I’d never heard of, especially John Joseph Mathews, D’Arcy McNickle, and Oskison. Of course, many scholars would say my periodization is wrong. I’m ending my course around 1950, and it’s easier to find work by marginalized writers in the modernist style, or bearing some relation to the style some call modernism, in the 50s and 60s. The prime example there is always Scott Momaday, whose hybrid novel (containing lots of poems) House Made of Dawn was published in 1969. Once you get into the 1970s and 80s, there’s a much richer array of Native writers publishing in every genre, and there’s no excuse for syllabi surveying those periods excluding them.
But what it I want to focus on the jostle of poetic styles and agendas in North American in the first half of the century–defining the class by decade instead of by style? I know Native America was visible and interesting to certain white writers, especially Marianne Moore (who taught business English in the Carlisle Indian School as a very young woman), H.D. (mostly in her novels), and William Carlos Williams. I have also observed that numerous biographies ascribe Native American heritage to poets of the New Negro Renaissance, although usually in a vague, distant way. Anne Spencer knew she had Seminole forebears and identified with that nation; biographers of Georgia Douglas Johnson and Langston Hughes, however, merely say they had “French, African, and Indian blood,” with no hint of how to find out more. I point out those intersections to my students, but it still doesn’t seem like enough.
Kirby Brown did give me one lead I’m excited to follow up: Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), most famous as a playwright (he wrote the play upon which the musical Oklahoma! is based), also published poetry. I’ve ordered the one collection he published in his lifetime, The Iron Dish (1930), and the posthumous collection, This Book, This Hill, This People (1982), but they’re out of print so might take a while to arrive. In the meantime, I showed my students a few poems published by Poetry and therefore easy to find online (bless the Poetry Foundation!): a sonnet about loss, “Dawn–Late Summer,” and an incantatory, mysterious poem in quatrains, “The Room” (1943). Maybe I can assign a more robust grouping, with more understanding of how to read them, next time. That’s always the hitch, and the intriguing puzzle, isn’t it? As the endlessly irritating and yet not wrong T. S. Eliot observed, each new writer makes you reconsider everything that has come before. I need to find ways to read Riggs, and doing so will put the whole canon in a different light, just as making a deep study of Millay, Hughes, and modernist poetry performance did.
In the meantime, my students have given me permission to share their visual readings of my favorite long poem, Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes. They’re pretty great, including one reading typgraphy as musical notation, and another, by Garrett Clinton, clocking the poems’ hours. (See here or here for more on how I construct the assignment.) There’s just one more week of classes after the Thanksgiving break (on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat). As usual, I feel sad about that–and not a little grateful.
Uncanny paneling
When you write a poem that resembles a spell, prayer, charm, curse, or blessing, are you trying to make something happen, and if so, what or how?
That’s what we talked about on the Uncanny Activisms panel I organized for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference last weekend (the conference as a whole was wonderful, especially the keynote by Camille Dungy). “We” from left includes Hyejung Kook, Jane Satterfield, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Anna Maria Hong, Ashley M. Jones, and yours truly, talking with her hands again. Some brilliant tidbits I scribbled down from this brilliant cohort: Ashley remarking that all poems are spells; Anna Lena responding that spell-poems are the poemiest kind of poem, and speaking about how poems help us focus attention; Jane musing about shape-shifting through reading and writing, and how poetry can be a means to power, sometimes as an alternative when legal recourse isn’t working; Hyejung talking about poetry as an act of transformation (and about Icelandic fart curses, which I have yet to look up). I LOVED this conversation and it seems as if others did, too, which made me happy, as if we might be a small band of spellcasters setting out to fix the world through verse. If you want to join the effort, check out the amazing prompts I gathered from these writers for a pretty handout (less prettily listed below). We will be soliciting uncanny activist work for a future issue of Shenandoah, but for the moment, note that poetry subs open today (11/15-12/15), and there’s a special prize for Virginia poets: $1000 for the Graybeal-Gowan award, no entry fee, judged by Beth and me. Everything submitted will be considered for general publication as well as the prize. I’m excited to start reading but also a little worried about managing the deluge. My novel galleys just came in, and my students need lots of conferences this time of year, and I’m trying to squeeze in time to apply for book promotion opportunities…oy.
In other news, my review of Franny Choi’s amazing collection Soft Science is up on Strange Horizons, and my poem “Spring Rage” has been posted by storySouth. Thanks to the kind and careful editors at both magazines.
I’ve been down despite all the good things happening, at least partly because I’m not finding enough time to rest and read and think and play. I didn’t bring my laptop to the conference and that gave me respite, but Monday morning I was neck-deep again as soon as I walked into the office. I’m trying to take better care of myself, and I’m wondering if I shouldn’t start with one of these prompts. Writing poetry tend to channel the simple magic, at least, of temporary self-transformation: I feel calmer when I’m immersed in the work, possibly BECAUSE there’s so little money or prestige involved. Hope you get some drafting time, too.
Counting-Out Rhyme, from Anna Lena Phillips Bell
a. Choose a category of being- or thing-in-the-world—plants local to or new to your region; particularities of the way your family or community speaks; geologic formations or soil types near you; songs from a specific tradition; birds or small mammals or insects. List as many beings or things in this category as you can think of.
b. Optionally, write a paragraph describing what you’ve chosen, as well as any threats to it that exist. Save this text as a plain-text file, and feed it into the n-gram generator available at http://bit-player.org/extras/drivel/drivel.html, created by Brian Hayes. Copy the resulting text into another file, print out the pages, and mine the text for new words that speak to what you’re writing about. You may wish to search for rhyme-words within the text; or you may simply highlight words you like.
c. Write a counting-out rhyme using the words and phrases from your list. If you’ve used the n-gram generator to create new words, incorporate some of these as well. Write in lines of trochaic tetrameter (or choose another meter and stick to it); optionally, end each stanza with a line of trochaic dimeter. Where pronunciation of a neologism is unclear, use the meter to help guide readers toward how you hear it. Employ a rhyme scheme (aaa, bbb, ccc; abab cc, dede ff, ghgh ii; or similar), however slant your rhymes may be.
d. Your poem will evoke one layer of the landscape or community its elements are part of. For each being or thing you include, imagine how it helps make a portrait of that layer in the time during which you’ve experienced it. Read your completed poem to the beings or things it includes. Read it to other people. Revise based on these readings and imaginings.
e. Memorize your revised poem: make it part of your body and mind.
Ambitious poem, from Lesley Wheeler: Think about something you desperately want to achieve, an aspiration you may be embarrassed to admit. Imagine how you would achieve this goal and imagine taking those steps; consider who might have the power to help and imagine them giving that help. Write a fourteen-line poem in the future tense describing this process. The first word should be “let” and you should repeat the first line exactly, or almost exactly, at the poem’s close. Weave in references to: a so-called weed or wild plant you noticed recently; a scent that makes you feel good; and something other-than-human that produces a humming sound. (adapted from a prompt by Oliver de la Paz)
Self-invocation Poem, from Hyejung Kook: In this poem, we are going to name, invoke, and invent our most expansive self. Start by doing some research into your given name–how it was chosen, etymology, other people who share it, etc. If you prefer, do this work with a different name that calls to you. From your research, choose the three words that resonate most powerfully and incorporate these words, a color, an animal, and a scientific/historical fact that fascinates you. Use “In my wildest dreams, I” at least three times and allow yourself all the possibility the phrase grants you. Once your draft is complete, remove the phrase “In my wildest dreams,” from the poem.
Another possibility is to turn the naming-invocation outward, using the phrase “In my wildest dreams, you” while writing.
Po Go, from Anna Maria Hong: This exercise can be harnessed to jumpstart a new project, clear the deck, meditate on a question, or find a new question to guide your writing now.
1. Designate 15 minutes of your day to this exercise for 40 days. Ideally, do this exercise before you speak to or interact with another human being each day (dogs and cats, OK), but if this is not possible, allocate another time free of distractions.
2. Ideally, also designate a place for this exercise.
3. Begin each session with an invocation to the “gods” of poetry—whichever spirits might be enlisted to help you—household objects, ancient deities, your ancestors, etc.
4. Begin writing this invocation as a list: “I call on the bedside lamp, Jupiter’s moons, and the turnips in the fridge to assist me in my writing today.”
5. Then, free-write for the rest of the session and/or pick up threads from previous sessions (without looking at the previous entries).
6. Stop writing after 15 minutes.
7. Repeat for 40 days, and then and only then, review your writings.
from Ashley M. Jones: Think of an experience you’ve had that you wish others could experience to empathize with you—maybe it’s a struggle or a pain, or, maybe, even, more surprisingly, a joy that’s unique to your life. Try to think of something that, if experienced, would change the reader/spell recipient’s view or prejudice or oppressive mindset against you. Write a poem commanding them to feel that thing, focusing primarily on specific image. Take photographs with your words. Find the feeling, down to the hair. Your poem might be 10 lines, and it might include each sense (that is, The Five…or Six if you’d like).
from Jane Satterfield: Select a natural organism that you’ve admired or overlooked. Learn more about its species and life cycle; appearance, texture, smell. What are its beneficial or dangerous properties? Associations and attributes? What role has it played in legend, lore, and in myth?
Use tercets to weave your new knowledge of this organism into a poem that purges anger against someone or something that has hurt you, or that serves as a means of countering some injustice in your life or in the larger culture. Consider the way a curse can voice an appeal for restitution: a poem that begin as a curse can banish the harm you’ve experienced. Alternately, consider the way a curse can release the harm of the experience and turn the poem toward forgiveness and healing.
