Month: May 2016

Poetry by the Sea, Pt. 2: Seams showing

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“I’ve quit hoarding,” Kimiko Hahn said at her reading, “and now collect myself.” I, on the other hand, was hoarding good lines–hers was one of many I collected last week in a little notebook bound with blue thread. My tattered Moleskin is beginning to fill with quotes and drafts and lists and spiral doodles–and I gathered a variety of each at the second annual Poetry by the Sea conference, as I began to describe in my last post.

Some highlights: Jon Tribble, in a panel on publishing, reminding us that a good poetry book drives you to keep turning pages. Listening to him (an editor who personally reads a massive number of mss annually), I scribbled almost illegibly, with my sprained right wrist: “How does every poem reward you for being there?” That’s a good thing to think about, the flip side to the need for suspense in poetry, a subject I wrote about here a few months ago.

Alicia Stallings charged me up similarly by reading poems about the migrant crisis in Greece–work that could not have felt more urgent. Ange Mlinko commented during her lecture, “At Sea,” “how frequently the classroom is a site of humiliation”–a sobering thought for someone who wants to foster inclusive spaces for pondering art and speaking adventurously. I was pleasurably startled by a reading pairing Mahogany L. Brown, one afternoon, with Gregory Pardlo–an unlikely duo. Poems in Pardlo’s physical voice were funnier than I’d realized–especially some new work about raising children–and when Brown’s teenage daughter accompanied her mother’s verse by singing a cappella, I wasn’t the only listener who broke out in goosebumps. In another event, Marilyn Taylor made me laugh out loud and Joshua Mehigan’s intense long poem, “The Orange Bottle,” riveted my attention almost painfully. There are many, many ways to make people want to keep listening.

I also kept recording scraps of conversations, mostly with other women, about the life hinges we’re occupying–worrying over ailing mothers and struggling daughters. “Valerian tea for anxiety,” reads one page. I think I jotted that prescription in the meditation garden, looking out at the seam between the blue sky and the blue water. I have notes from Jane Satterfield’s memoir panel and also about the brands of cute-yet-comfortable shoes she was wearing. I drafted a couple of poems and a couple of flash fiction pieces, too, although I wasn’t enrolled in any workshops. The combination of gorgeous ambient language with a borderworld landscape–that’s just irresistible.

One intermittent list consisted of advice I quilted together more deliberately. Tell me something good, I kept asking, about approaching the age of fifty. I’ll leave you with some answers, as well as an invitation. If you’re in the D.C. area, please consider coming to the launch of of the annual Joaquin Miller series, this coming Sunday, June 5th, in Rock Creek Park (5200 Glover Rd NW, Washington, DC 20015). I’ll be reading along with some young contest winners, and I believe there’s an open mic, too.

Till then, the pluses of middle age:

  • It’s better than old age.
  • I care less about what other people think.
  • Fruitfulness. So many things you work for over decades finally come ripe.
  • Now I HAVE to cultivate a balance between body and mind; my body breaks down otherwise.
  • I have a deep knowledge of my own work rhythms now.
  • Clarity–the unimportant stuff drops away.
  • Time seems more limited and precious.

The last one I’m feeling. Carefree fruitful balanced clarity, hmm–here’s hoping I figure that stuff out before September’s wave drags me out deep again.

joaquin miller flier

 

 

Poetry by the Sea, Pt. 1: Edna Rules

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“Edna rules!” a woman declared to me in the hotel hallway, waving a vigorous fist. “I mean, Vincent!”

I organized a panel  on Edna St. Vincent Millay for Poetry by the Sea, an annual writing conference in Madison, Connecticut. The other speakers were Anna Lena Phillips Bell speaking about Millay as an ecopoet; January Gill O’Neill discussing the Millay colony at Steepletop; and A.E. Stallings considering Millay as a formalist. Waves were lapping the shore in the big windows behind us. Millay (who preferred to be called Vincent, not Edna) would love the location. I’m already considering whether I can get back here next year. It’s a lovely setting and there’s a lovely vibe here, too, among friendly and talented writers and readers. I’m hoping to post again after the conference ends, reflecting on some conversations I’ve had.

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Some loot (but I’m afraid I will buy more today)

But in the meantime, I’ll just say how interesting I found that Millay panel. My co-panelists were great and offered perspectives I really wanted to hear–of course they did, I chose them!–but I was also impressed by how lively and engaged the (packed) audience was. And more than a dozen people have come up to me since to tell me about their relationship to her work and their intention to read it again. I’m moved and excited by the enthusiasm.

Many readers of my generation, at least, have mixed feelings about the formalist femme fatale. In my two decades-plus of schooling, right through a PhD in modernist poetry, I never, ever encountered Millay on a syllabus. My teachers generally classed her with the “songbirds”–not innovative, not difficult, not male, not worth reading. And my copy of her Collected Poems was a gift from my mother-in-law, which was another kiss of death; Judy identified with Millay as a sexually liberated woman, and I really, really did not want to hear any more on that score. It wasn’t until the wonderful biography Savage Beauty that I went back to the poetry itself and found it quite different than how it had been billed to me: smart, adventurous, crafty, formally various, and often intensely moving, witty, beautiful. There’s a chapter on Millay’s radio broadcasts, and her other experiments with poetry’s various media, in my book Voicing American Poetry. I also treat her work in an essay called “Formalist Modernism” in the new Cambridge History of American Poetry, but I find myself still returning to those poems with more to think about, more to say. As I’ve written in a previous post, I recently became fascinated with her reproductive history, particularly the pregnancy she terminated in Dorset, England, in 1922, via a regimen of long walks and herbal concoctions administered by her mother. The passages of girlhood, pregnancy, middle age–I am endlessly fascinated by how other women poets have negotiated them.

I’ll leave off for now with a poem from Millay’s 1928 collection The Buck in the Snow. While clearly referring to her stay in Shillingstone, Dorset, she also alludes to an unnamed loss–maybe the pregnancy itself, a vanished lover, or, more generally, the poetic and sexual freedom she felt before 1922 (Millay married soon after and started banking on her popularity by undertaking exhausting reading tours). Her life was charmed in some ways, very difficult in others–like many of us, I suppose. Whatever her sorrow, I agree: Vincent rules.

West Country Song

Sun came up, bigger than all my sorrow;
Lark in air so high, and his song clean through me,
Now comes night, hushing the lark in's furrow,
   And the rain falls fine.
What have I done with what was dearest to me?

Thatch and wick, fagot, and tea on trivet,--
These and more it was; it was all my cheer.
Now comes night, smelling of box and privet,
    And the rain falls fine.
Have I left it out in the rain? - It is not here.
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Can you name that poet-editor, walking by the sound?

 

 

Toasting successes, fleeing gnats

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Even though I’m not teaching this year, I can SMELL that it’s the last week of classes. The campus, lush from an unusually rainy May, is full of giddy, jittery, sneezing students. My colleagues are staggering around exhausted, arms full of ungraded papers. Processing my heavy email load is like trying to get free of a cloud of gnats–they just follow you around, frantically propagating. I’m about to leave town and miss all the noisy graduation parties. When I get back, around Memorial Day, all traces of the academic year will be cleared away, except for a few stray Natty Light cans lurking in the shrubbery.

The chaos inside my house matches the energy of the neighborhood. My anxious 19-year-old, having just aced her first year at Wesleyan, has been interviewing for summer jobs, writing applications, scouring ads (keep your fingers crossed), so there’s been a lot of coaching in the evening hours. My 15-year-old has been taking standardized tests and has his last jazz band concert tonight (though I have to say, there’s no evidence HE is breaking a sweat). Chris is wrapping up this experimental, demanding, but very cool course. I had several blogging, reviewing, and editing gigs due this week, which are nearly complete now, but all this keyboarding with a sprained wrist is no fun.

And Chris and I are packing for our first weekend away as a couple in years and years. Tomorrow we take planes, cars, and boats to Martha’s Vineyard. On Tuesday he’ll fly home for W&L’s graduation, but I go on to Madison, Connecticut for Poetry by the Sea. I am SUPER-excited about this one. Lots of friends in attendance plus poets I’ve never met but want to hear from. So in addition to making lists for the kids of when the recycling goes out, etc., I’ve been preparing notes for a panel discussion on the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Right before I fly home on Saturday, May 28th, I’ll be reading from Radioland IN A GAZEBO. By the SEA.

Poetic report forthcoming, but for the moment, a photo of a bright spot this week–celebrating the birthday of one of my brilliant friends. (I think that’s Oliver Queen in the left background, but what I like best in this photo is how the dude behind me is really into his ice cream.) And hey, the finalist list for the Eric Hoffer Award is substantial, but Radioland is on it–that’s a small good thing. And The Robot Scientist’s Daughter by my friend Jeannine Hall Gailey–with whom I’m just finalizing picks for the SFPA’s annual Dwarf Star anthology–is there, too! Salut!

birthday drinks

Oh, mother

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Writing is a confidence game, and while generally I can play it with the necessary brio, occasionally I drop all the cards.

In many ways, I’m having a great spring. I love this new essay on Radioland by Athena Kildegaard in Bloom. I’m happily tinkering with fall syllabi, but I still have a few months before September hits, hallelujah.

I also have some cool events coming up. One is a long weekend with my spouse on Martha’s Vineyard (attending a wedding then just hanging out). Others are work, but the fun kind. With the usual ambivalence–feeling both that my work deserves attention and I am a total impostor–I applied last fall and winter to various series, and some applications resulted in invitations. See my Events page for details on May-June readings In D.C., Maryland, and CT. It reminds me that when you throw out lots of filaments, like Whitman’s spider, a few catch.

So with all that busy-ness ahead, plus a visit with my mother next week and picking up my daughter from her first year of college, I thought: I need to stay focused on the time-sensitive work, which mostly involves tying up the threads on big projects and getting them under consideration. I tried, with some success. I worked, got sick, recovered, worked some more. Then, last weekend, I froze.

I don’t know why I’m having trouble moving ahead, although I always find it harder to send stuff out than to write it in the first place. I know why I write and always will write–building a little world is joyful, healing work. Marketing a little world: less fun. Maybe I don’t want to finish these projects, at some level. Maybe I’m experiencing biochemical chaos, pollen allergies, unresolved anger. I’m worried about my mother, who face-planted in the radiologist’s office recently and knocked out her top front teeth. I was also disheartened by being laid up on the couch all weekend. I’d been so relieved by improved health in the last couple of weeks–I finally seemed to be on a path toward physical well-being, able to take walks again!–and then I twisted my heel and reactivated my plantar fasciitis. Painful for a couple of days, but trivial in the long run. What’s harder is being reminded that all my plans are basically imaginary and can be swept away in a moment.bookcase

At any rate, after that Saturday morning injury came several very low days. Honestly, I’ve gone into deeper holes, and for much longer. I know how to manage an unhappy brain, just like I know the regime of heat, ice, rest, and gentle stretches that helps my foot. I just slow down and do whatever work seems possible; trying to force progress on a project I’m discouraged about doesn’t get me anywhere, so better to clean out a closet or just read. (Although I’m not yet ready to face reorganizing my books–why did I once think all my contemporary poetry would fit in one bookcase?)

So this week I tinkered with writing that felt outward-focused, not self-aggrandizing. I know some people don’t see reviews as acts of generosity, but I receive them that way, and writing them feels like service to poetry. Having finished a couple of tardy reviews, I already feel better. A little.

One obstacle to feeling a lot better is, paradoxically, my basic sanity. A failure of confidence is actual a rational response to the literary market. Most people don’t want to read what any of us is putting out there. Yet, oh my god, am I grateful other writers persist. I need to immerse myself in their consoling fictions when my own imagination fails and I confront the stark truth of things.

Well, my lunatic desire to seek audiences has always resurged before. I just have to accept this latest highly symbolic health problem, that my feet don’t want me to move. Work on it gently, and wait it out. I hear I may be getting breakfast in bed this Sunday with some homemade blueberry muffins. My feet, honestly, ought to calm down–they have it pretty good.

 

 

 

Collaboration

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Lone wolf humanist here to tell you that while reading and writing in solitude are some of my favorite things, experiences with intellectual and artistic collaboration have astonished me, shaking loose all kinds of work and thinking I might never have otherwise produced. As poets

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Merrill and Jackson: collaborators on a seance-based epic?

Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton say in this great piece–which ends with the “10 Commandments of Collaboration”–working with another person can produce a “third voice” likely to surprise its parents. Yes, teamwork can slow down or intensify the labor, a big problem if you’re on a tenure clock or your collaborator’s literary metabolism differs radically from yours. I’ve also seen it speed and improve work in various genres. Writing can beget more writing.

That’s why, for the early-summer edition of my Modernism/ Modernity blog on the writing process, I’m seeking short reflections from scholars, editors, teachers, students, and artists about collaboration, in hopes that a collection of perspectives will shake good work loose from other writers, too. I sent out an email to some modernist scholars who collaborate, but I’d like to hear from people outside my network, so if you have something to say, please contact me! You can post replies here or email them to wheelerlm (at) wlu.edu, but I need responses by May 15th. The assignment:

  1. Choose one of the following prompts, or ask your own collaboration-related question, and send me an answer of under 200 words, along with a bio of 1-2 sentences.
  • How has collaboration changed your writing, your thinking, and/or the direction of your professional life?
  • What advice do you have for people considering a collaborative venture?

You can write this with a collaborator, if you want, or try a two-way interview. Just please keep it short and sweet. Alternately:

  1. Forward this to a friend or collaborator and ask him or her to write a reflection on one of these questions, or on another question you’d rather ask. It can be submitted directly to me, with a bio.

I’m looking for collaborators on modernism-related projects, but you can define that however you like. Collaborations in teaching as well as research, editing, and writing are absolutely fair game, as are student responses. Cautionary tales as well as positive stories are welcome—collaboration can be a complicated endeavor. (One of my first co-authors was my spouse, Chris Gavaler, on an article about H.D. for Sagetrieb, and we did a lot of anxious joking at the time about how commas were posing a marital problem.) My goal is to put together a June blog for the Modernism/ Modernity Print-Plus platform in many voices, with diverging perspectives. You can see the inaugural “process” blog post here, if curious.

lettersI could describe lots of other projects here, because I’ve been experimenting for a while now. Editing Letters to the World with a team of women I’d never met was a huge, at times stressful project with a beautiful result. I also love revisiting these poems I composed with Scott Nicolay in an email-based game of oneuppoetship. Last but not least, every class discussion is a collaboration, as we argue our way towards a joint reading of whatever text is to hand.

But I’d rather hear from you.