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The Head-Space of Revision
One more day in NaPoWriMo. I’m wondering: could May be NaPoRe(vision)Mo, and June NaPoSub(mission)Mo? Not sure I’m capable of it—the next few weeks are about as busy with teaching, domestic stuff, committee work, and miscellaneous deadlines as they could possibly be—but I’ll try. One potential snag: drafting is about openness and dreaming, restorative activities when…
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NaPoWriMo=Write more, sleep little
It’s probably not the poetry; I’m drunk on light. I spent January-July 2011 in the southern hemisphere, so this is my first spring in two years, and I feel transformed. I sit outside every spare minute, grading papers on campus leaning up against a white column or watching the sun set over House Mountain from…
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My daughter the spy and other angles on poetry classes
I’m usually more giddy than blue at the end of a term. I like my students, even the slackers and con artists, and I love talking about poetry for a living, but I also like addressing a new set of problems with a new group every time the season turns. And you just need a…
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Poems and chapels
When Alice Te Punga Somerville walked out of Lee Chapel a week ago Sunday, she looked around for water and ended up rinsing her fingers in a puddle, flicking the water back over her head. “Don’t want to take anybody with me,” she remarked. I had forgotten that traditional gesture upon leaving a burial place.…
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Undead T. S. Eliot
To my surprise, I’ve been asked to lead a critical seminar on sound in T. S. Eliot’s poetry at the next meeting of the Eliot Society, this September in St. Louis. Don’t tell, but coincidentally, I just published a poetic response to “The Waste Land” in Fringe Magazine. “Zombie Thanksgiving” brings together modernist poetry, George…
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Poetry’s chronodynamics
So if poems are time-travel devices, they ought to travel sideways and forward as well as backwards. I recently hosted a reading by Natasha Trethewey, who definitely points her universal remote towards the past in Bellocq’s Ophelia, Native Guard, and Beyond Katrina. I’m teaching the latter two books in various courses and our conversations focus…
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Heterocosmic
My mother divested herself of all kinds of things last year—furniture, dishes, adulterous husband. On one of my visits she loaded me up with a bin of old papers and photos. I quickly divided them into four piles: one each for me, my sister, and my brother, and one for disposal. Then I left my…
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Speculating
I’m about to become an author of speculative fiction. The Receptionist and Other Tales has just been accepted for publication by Aqueduct, a feminist science fiction press in Seattle. I’m both thrilled and nervous. Thrilled: I love the mission of this small press. I’m joining a list that includes many wonderful writers—Ursula Le Guin, for…
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Points on my poetic license
I have a guilty sense that I’ve deluded people, cast up a falsely shimmering mirage of the Productive Poet-Scholar-Teacher, when someone asks how I get so much done. I feel perpetually behind, anxious about what I should have finished but haven’t started yet, and believe that last year’s publishing rate is a fluke. Really, my…
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Zombie poems, just in time for Christmas
Zombidextrous Maggots spill from one wrenched hand; from the other, your tedious to-do lists. Zombivalent Listen or regret: undead lips upthrust from soil, grunting out the songs you would forget. Zombiguity If Schrödinger’s cat is both dead and alive, don’t open that box. Zombience Mournful twanging from the pyre. Decay perfumes the dark. A toast,…