Trophy Poet

How the Abortion Debate Lies to Women about What Pregnancy Means

2011-11-09T05:08:00.000-08:00

Yesterday Mississippi rejected the idea that a fertilized egg is a person. Today there are so many blogs and news articles talking about how the amendment was a terrible idea, outlawing many kinds of birth control, invitro fertilization, life-saving medical treatment for miscarrying women or women pregnant with tubal pregnancies in addition to the hot button abortion issue.

But I'd like to look at how the whole idea that egg+sperm=baby is a hurtful lie. I know this, because since I was a teenager I've been interested in the abortion debate. I read lots on how one should treat egg+sperm, but not if egg+sperm is different from egg+sperm+uterine lining, and definitely not that egg+sperm does not equal baby A LOT of the time. That's why it's the miracle of life, folks. And it took a really sucky experience to teach me that the abortion debate had given me unrealistic expectations about what egg+sperm would mean in my life.

In 2007, I was trying to get pregnant. I was peeing on tests all the time. I was able to detect a pregnancy that had been incredibly brief, occuring, for some reason, somehow I still don't understand, between two menstrual cycles. I saw the line on the stick, thought, yay! Egg+sperm+uterine lining=baby! I bought boxes of baby clothes and I crocheted two baby blankets in the two weeks it took me to go from positive pregnancy test to next period. And at the hospital, they told me blood test showed that I had no HcG in my system. I hadn't been pregnant for about two weeks.

I was shocked, I was devastated. But egg+sperm+uterine lining =baby?!

No.

"Even taking birth control out of the equation, however, does not ensure that implantation will occur successfully, resulting in a natural abortion of sorts. In a 1988 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, sexually active women took daily urine tests to measure for traces of hormones that indicate fertilization. The study found that about 25 percent of fertilized eggs failed to survive past six weeks — so early that most of the women had no idea they had conceived. About 95 percent of the participants who lost pregnancies before they knew they had conceived were reproductively healthy and went on to have successful pregnancies within the next two years."

This is part of it, folks. And these are the eggs+sperm that make it to the uterine lining and set up housekeeping there. It is medically impossible to know how many fertilized eggs do not become pregnancies, not even these stealth pregnancies that end before women even know they are pregnant, much less those pregnancies (25%) that end well after a woman knows she's pregnant.

Finding this out the hard way, feeling duped in some ways by my body and my expectations for it, was not fun. I wrote Broken Plums on the Sidewalk about how difficult it was to pack up the baby clothes and the blankets and not have much to show for my experience but an old, cold maxim: "Don't count your chickens before they've hatched."

There's a lot to say about the Personhood Ammendment, but the thing I have to say, is that in my personal experience, equating a fertilized egg with a person is a heartbreaking fallacy. What makes the "miracle of life" a miracle is that so much biologically has to be overcome--and does, to the tune of a bazillion babies every day. But not every single fertilized egg. Not every single pregnancy.

A lot less than you'd think, actually.

2011-01-14T05:52:00.000-08:00

How You Became a Monster

It happened slowly.
Anger became a physical ailment,
it blistered up in scales.
You ran your tongue along your teeth
in exasperation. They were sharper
than you remembered; you slit your tongue
in half with the things you wanted to say
but did not. Hypocrisy! Hypocrisy!
You hissed and coiled in on yourself.
If you can't say something nice.
You have a hard look
you inherited from your mother.
You have a hard mouth
from keeping it shut.
They say you didn't raise
the moon-white child you gave birth to.
Your hair tangling up from the strands you lose
in clumps as months go past as you fatten
the growing demigod. The matts grow teeth.
Only one who also has sacrificed
the daily exercises of attraction knows
exactly how hard to comb your long
tresses become. The statues will never know,
they were not the kind to love like this.
They were the ones whose mouths are open.
But silent now, and so less unkind.
This is the process wherein vision became fatal.
You have circled back in on yourself until
you know how your species'
lizard brainstem works. You see pettiness
and aggression. You see the weakness
of the glass before it breaks and cuts you.
You see the loneliness in the ones
who slap your outstretched hand away.
It is still a human hand.
You see with the harsh light
glowing inside of you. It simmers
slowly,thickening.
Your heart, monster, is a human one,
and the violence of your eyes
is that of knowledge.

Photo by Mirco Delcado http://www.delcaldo.com/

My Chapbook For Sale

2010-06-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

I have my prize copies of Fragrant Inferno in from Anabiosis Press, and if you'd like one, here's the link to my Etsy shop to purchase one.

Postcard Poem 11

2010-06-21T19:25:00.001-07:00

Photo by Nicholas Bond.

Postcard Poem 10

2010-06-11T10:55:00.001-07:00

I'm officially over 12x12

2010-04-22T07:39:00.001-07:00

Deciding which poetry books to take with me to Charleston for 6 months while I pack up the rest for storage. I think I'm going to skip at least a few 12x12 months, and those books I'd planned to read and give away are stored to donate another day.

On the bright side I think I've got enough to read, and maybe I'll even write :)

Trying to find one last book, a chapbook by my friend Charlie about distance between lovers, the physical kind, to read when I'm lonely.

Postcard Poem 00

2010-04-01T18:51:00.000-07:00

Imagine a picture of empty cardboard boxes and a calendar with only 4 weeks left and a big circle in red sharpie around April 26. Yep, I'm moving. My poem this whole month, National Poetry Month, would read like the thought bubbles in a Cathy cartoon. AGH! AGH!!! AGH!!!!

See you in May, with more giveaways, picking back up with 12x12, and some mopey postcards.

A Year in Poetry: March, Dorothy Parker

2010-03-15T15:16:00.000-07:00

Again, I have to mention this project is from Dana Guthrie Martin at My Gorgeous Somewhere if you want to do it too!

The third month's challenge? To read a book written by a poet who has a movie made about them. As with last month, I have several of these books on my shelf already: Aurthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, and Dorothy Parker.

I've read Plath a number of times, and would rather read Parker, I think.

Postcard Poem 9

2010-02-27T09:52:00.000-08:00

Photo by H. Rotgers. Poem excerpt by Meghan Brinson from "How She's Changed"

Trying to come up with something uplifting for March, brrr.

Postcard Poem 8

2010-02-10T07:52:00.000-08:00

Photo by http://www.sxc.hu/profile/sumnix

Postcard Poem 7

2010-02-05T04:44:00.001-08:00

Postcard Poem 6

2010-01-28T07:50:00.000-08:00

Photo by Steven Bullhoes

Postcard Poem 5

2010-01-24T19:06:00.000-08:00

Picture by Carine de Maijer

A Year in Poetry: February

2010-01-24T07:28:00.001-08:00

Why is it so hard to find a poetry book recommended on a blog? I follow poet's blogs, but I really had to look around. Note to self: reccommend more poetry books on my blog!

Thanks to Diane Lockward's post about an Ars Poetica anthology (which I am too cheap to buy at 24$) I found a Copper Canyon Ars Poetica anthology for 4$ which I will read in February. Thanks to Sandra Beasley's blog post on Jehanne Dubrow's From the Fever-World, (which I found for an affordable 5$) I'll be doubling up on February's 12x12 poetry challenge.

Yes!! I feel sparkly all over with my poetry bargain reading list!

Calendar Poetry: Valentine's

2010-01-22T14:35:00.000-08:00

I'm a little concerned to post this, thinking my husband may put two and two together about his Valentine surprise. But I don't think he reads my blog.

I found the motherload of vintage valentines, and some of them are just too awesome. Heart on barbeque spit? Amazing.

These scans aren't good enough to use as clip art, but they are fantastic inspiration.

A Year in Poetry: January, Check!

2010-01-22T05:56:00.000-08:00

So I've finished American Primitive by Mary Oliver, a book published (in one of its editions) the year of my birth!

What makes me sad is that the first thing I landed on when I was looking for the cover art for this post was another blog saying they didn't really care for these poems or for nature poetry (maybe) in general.

While the line breaks are short and certainly seem to reflect a more "vintage" aesthetic, this the book of poetry that I luckily avoided during my MFA program. Because Mary Oliver's voice, what she seeks to do in poetry and what she accomplishes, where she looks for truth, are so similar to one of the strains of my own writing that if I had found this book then I might never have found my own voice. My first, egotistical, thought when I finished this book was "she reminds me of me!"

Mary Oliver's poems are infused with a bodily sensuousness, a preocupation with the bodily and the natural. She looks unflinchingly at the blood and guts of a pastoral world that is traditional sentimentalized. There is loveliness, heartache, strength, cruelty, and the basic inescapable truth that we are animals.

Maybe it's the "Back to Nature" throwback in me, but I think that everything about our modern, and then contemporary lives is designed to make us forget this. (I say "back to nature," although I would NEVER live in a yurt, but when I was a teen I was obsessed with, and memorized how, to homestead.) I mean, everything is sanitized, or fetishized, and it's totally perverse to me. People use "animal" as an insult. But for all that humans need to feed their minds and souls, it's the worst kind of foolishness to think we can ignore or dam up the needs of our animal bodies and be our healthiest selves. An animal is content in the form it was created--it knows no other. And there is a joy in that, and in Mary Oliver's poetry, of accepting as part of our humaness our physical natures. We are not angels--lucky us!

Postcard Poem 4

2010-01-21T10:50:00.000-08:00

Photo by Phillip Rassell

Peggy Shumaker Surprise!

2010-01-19T12:49:00.001-08:00

I'm a member of a women's poetry listserv called Wompo, which is sometimes amazing, sometimes really not. One of the plus's is that some really cool people, and some kind of famous people are on it.

A few months ago Peggy Shumaker posted something to the list and noted that she would be going to her favorite bookstore in Phoenix. I saw Peggy read at Desert Nights, Rising Stars while I was an MFA student at ASU, I had bought her book and pretty much thought she was awesome. Two days before her post, I'd been cleaning out my garage and found a Changing Hands book club coupon. I'd already mailed off a couple other ones I found to my friend who had since moved, so I had stuck it on my fridge to think about who was still in Arizona to send it to. It seemed like quite a coincidence so I emailed Peggy and asked if she wanted it. She said sure and I thought, hey that's cool, and that would be the end of a cool story.

In the mail today I found a package from Peggy with two of her books, Just Breathe Normally and Gnawed Bones and a little note! I know it's only January, but this made my 2010 so far. I can't wait to read my new books!!

Poetry in the mail is the best surprise ever. If you have a poet friend, just buy her something off the bargain books at Amazon or your local store, or a journal back issue and send it to her without telling her first. You don't have to be a famous poet to make someone's day!

Postcard Poem 3

2010-01-15T15:08:00.000-08:00

Photo by Sue Pierson

Postcard Poem: January

2010-01-13T07:04:00.000-08:00

Maybe once a month is enough for a multi-media poem! I got other stuff going on, isn't that the poet's lament? Luckily that other stuff is getting more submissions for MisFit: A Journal of Long and Short Poems!!

Photo by G Schouten de Jel

A Year of Poetry: January, Starting With Mary Oliver

2010-01-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

It comes as no coincidence to me, at this time of New Year's Resolutions, that I would find something to reinspire my poetry give-away project.

Thanks to Dana Guthrie Martin at My Gorgeous Somewhere I'm going to read at least one of my collections a month this year and challenge myself to give them away when done.

The first month's challenge? To read a book published the year you were born. I thought this would be a major challenge, but after a few pages of searching on Amazon, I discovered the last book I bought, Mary Oliver's American Primitive, was published the year I was born! Other years too, but this counts for me.

Maybe as I read these books, I'll be able to figure out how to fix my one-trick poem ending, which is making my book manuscript sad.

Are poets too polite?

2010-01-05T07:41:00.000-08:00

Not in real life, about their work. I've only very rarely seen public posts or discussions of issues that poets have had with shabby treatment from presses. And yet, after venting on Facebook about my own situation, where a chapbook of mine was printed without permission online, I discovered there were other stories like mine out there of unprofessionalism and bad behavior.

I've suggested, on a Read Write Poem discussion forum, that we have Feedback for presses and journals with contests, like Ebay. People would rate their experience in terms of professionalism, promptness, did they recieve the merchandise (subscriptions, winning manuscript copies) that were advertised for the entry fee? Were there administrative errors, or did the whole thing go smoothly, even very well?

Why not be able to check out the press before you send your work? And no vindictive sour grapes, Ebay has moderation for irreconcileable negative feedback to make sure it's legit.

Ok, Copyright Infringement

2009-12-24T06:08:00.000-08:00

We live in a digital age, when poets submit work to journals and contests via email, making it easier than ever to take digital copies of work and distribute them electronically without the author's permission.

For poets like me, this means that I have had work published without my permission twice. In both cases, the work published was a collection of poems rather than a single poem.

The logical step is to ask them to take it down. While internet publications will often disqualify you from other publication with the same work (especially in the case of single poems, editors were not willing to continue to consider them at most journals after they were published without my permission) I was lucky that the publishers who chose my manuscripts as winners of their chapbook contests were willing to take them even though they had been published by rogue internet publications without my permission.

What happens when a publisher continues, after a warning and plea to stop, to keep your work published online? Do you have any recourses to make them stop?

Yes. Your work is more valuable than you may know. It is protected, and even though poetry has very little "real world" value in most cases, infringing on your copyright is punishable with significant damages.

Yes, it's likely a non-profit that did it. Do you really want to bankrupt a non-profit?

I guess it depends on how big of assholes they were about it. For some poets, not being able to publish their work in the best venue possible means a major career obstacle and wasted contest fees. If a non-profit is cavalier about the real-world effect they have on a poet's life because of their illegal treatment of her work, they deserve a big wake-up call. Like getting sued.

It's easier than you might think to do it.

I found some very helpful pages that gave me a new understanding of my rights in this situation and I want to share them with you, fellow poets and publishers. (That's right, I'm a publisher too! See MisFit.)

An overview of copyrights.

Where to register your copyright, with lots of FAQs.

So here's my understanding from the overview and the copyright office.

1. As soon as you write a poem, it exists in a "fixed form" that can be communicated, say by email. You now own the copyright and are protected by copyright law.
2. If someone distributes or performs your poem in public, like on the internet, without your permission, that infringes your rights.
3. You can register your poem/collection and take action.
4. The remedies laid out in the overview I found are a. injunction b. damages c. statutory damages d. attorney's fees and e. impounding the infringing material.

So even though there may not be a cash number that you lose because of the infringement, statutory damages, according to the article, says you can collect at least $500 dollars of damages up to $20,000. If the court thinks the publisher/infringer did it on purpose, they could give you up to $100,000 dollars of damages.

That's right. The US government says your poem is worth at least $500 if somebody steals it.

Publishers, it is worth your time to be considerate of poets' rights!! You might not think that publishing without permission is a big deal, but if the poet does, and gets a lawyer, you could be fined big bucks! Get contracts, and keep track of them. This is serious.

I hate to admit it, I can't read another poem right now!

2009-12-22T17:49:00.000-08:00

Poetry book a week project temporarily on hold. Postcard poem a week project: go!

Photo by Vivek Chugh

Has To Thank Puddinghouse Press

2009-12-10T08:14:00.001-08:00

Thanks to the editor at Puddinghouse's nice words about my two chapbooks and her suggestion that I send her some new work, I wrote a whole bunch of monster poems which I think are awesome. Got three coming out in Copper Nickel! Thanks Jen at Puddinghouse!

I shouldn't but I am: In the Vein of Free Poetry

2009-10-18T05:51:00.000-07:00

Here's a list of places where you can read poetry from lit journals for free. If you are too poor to buy a subscription, or if you want to shop around before you buy a big name and then realize it has a different aesthetic, here you go. I think there's easily enough content here as zines come out, and as magazines update their samples, to fill ease poetry hunger pains!

But remember...support lit mags you like if you have cash! You don't want them to go all Quarterly West on you :(

Online:

Blackbird
Kenyon Review Online
Pebble Lake Review
Diane Lockward's Picks
Samples from Current Issues:

Missouri Review
Beloit Poetry Journal also features a poem of the day from the BPJ archives.
Fence
Black Warrior Review also has online content.
Field has sample poems from current and past issues.
The Gettysburg Review
The Greensboro Review
Gulf Coast
jubilat
The Laurel Review

and more later!

Good News For Me: Two Chapboooks Forthcoming

2009-10-14T15:12:00.001-07:00

I have two great pieces of news. My chapbook Fragrant Inferno, poems appearing on Thirty First Bird Review, won the Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition!

And my chapbook Broken Plums on the Sidewalk, poems appearing in Puerto del Sol, Gulf Coast,Cider Press Review, Locuspoint:Phoenix , Pebble Lake Review, and Bone Bouquet won the Mississippi Valley Chapbook Competition!

Poetry Give-Away VII: The True Names of Birds by Susan Goyette

2009-10-06T14:30:00.000-07:00

First collection of poems by Canadian writer Susan Goyette, The True Names of Birds, from Brick Press, 1998. Pristine copy available for price of shipping, $2. Otherwise, you can purchase the book here.

The poems of this collection about a recent widow turn daily domesticity into prayers to keep a family safe, or to bring it back. Moments of heartbreak circumvented, but made obvious by their outline. Moments of grace carefully and lovingly detailed and cherished in the face of loss. Goyette's poems tend toward shapeliness, often displaying very even stanzas of free verse. Sweeping statements pop up in inverted narratives and series of surreal logic. Well within the tradition of women's poetry that invokes witchiness and examines family dynamics, The True Names of Birds is at times fairy tale-ish, and involves a good deal of garden and herb imagery.

From "On the Road Crossing the Island,"

"...This road

has filled my shoes with birthstones
and turned my mother into a full
length mirror. There's no point

in trying to cover the flaws."

From "The moon on Friday night"

"...It coaxed buttons
to the lips of buttonholes and whispered, 'you're beautiful,
so beautiful' to women who speak the vernacular

of loneliness."

My favorite poems are "The Mythology of Cures," and "Again to Be a Daughter." The memories of the family built together, and the thought of the children who are grown and gone, and female contemporaries who remain close sustain the widowed speaker in her ability to go forward after loss. As a new mother/poet, The True Name of Birds reminds me to relish my time in the face of what can, and eventually will happen. Carpe diem, I guess. I'm going to hug my husband and call my mom.

Poetry Give-Away VI: Try by Cole Swenson

2009-10-01T05:08:00.000-07:00

First person to comment or email me gets a brand new copy of 1999 The Iowa Poetry Prize winner Try by Cole Swenson, for the price of shipping, $2.

Try comes in a square format which accomodates the long line that many of her poems play with. Looking at poems like "Prologue," you might describe Swenson's work as multi-genre, verse mixed with prose that I would not call prose poetry. It is like a nonfiction essay with bursts of lyric poetry at intervals. Try is a great collection for anyone who enjoys ekphrasis. There are a number of different approaches to writing about/in conversation with artwork, and Try illustrates, at my count about four, each reflecting something of the nature of the artwork in a nice organic way: complex and layered, streamlined and focused, ironic and casual, metaphysical and earnest.

The main themes of the collection are religion, hagiography, art, the experience of art. Long sequences, short lyrics, prosey bits.

My favorite poems in this collection are in the section "Triune: After Three Paintings by Olivier Debre." The lines are short, the meaning clear and strange. Here's three stanzas from "Liberty to C."

"The pale green makes the woman
seem freer than the rest of us.

Inside her is a blue egg.
She lives with it,
which is why she looks like that:

No one has wings.
No one lies."

I also really enjoyed the prose poems inspired by Hieronymous Bosch, although I will admit to not knowing who that is or looking it up.

To purchase, go here.

Poetry Give-Away V: Calling His Children Home by Gregory Donovan

2009-09-18T05:04:00.003-07:00

Gregory Donovan's book, Calling His Children Home,(winner of the 1993 Devins award for poetry, Univerity of Missouri Press) is a collection of 23 bluesy, sestina-esque poems. They may not have the repetitive word structure of the sestina, but they have the length, density, longer line, and slower pace that these formal poems often have.

My favorie poem in the collection is "Nietzsche in the Engadine." Here's the last stanza, my favorite bit from this book:

"I am safe only in the mountains.
I am every name in history, covered in snow.
And the one name,the small blue stone
nestled in its wooden box, sealed with the kiss
of animal lips on his outstretched palm
like a handful of matches in flames."

This copy is signed, and available for the price of shipping. Estimated $2.

Additional copies available through Amazon.

2009-09-18T05:04:00.001-07:00

Awesome Resource. How I'm Spending September

2009-09-03T07:29:00.000-07:00

Need a break? Yeah. First write a bunch of essays and shell out some non-refundable processing fees. You could go to France...

http://blog.32poems.com/writing-residencies-and-colonies

Poetry Give-Away IV: Singularities by Susan Howe

2009-08-23T13:36:00.000-07:00

Singularities by Susan Howe.

I read this in grad school and wrote all over it, mostly on the fly-leaf, some underlining, and very obnoxiously I wrote one poem all over page 27. If you're still cool with that, I think $2 will ship this one. If you want a pristine copy, try here.

Howe is mostly concerned with recovering historical voices, layering and mixing language, sometimes literally on the page by disobeying typical typography. An archeology of New England in poetry.

I'll admit I don't really get it. This book is challenging, using archaic spelling and breaking narratives to achieve the feel of little recovered pieces, marginalia and potsherds.

"Visible surface of Discourse

Runes or allusions to runes
Tasks and turning flock"

from "Articulation of Sound Forms in Time" Singularities

Poetry Give Away III: Hat on a Pond by Dara Wier

2009-08-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

I read this book in college and wrote all over it. So if you're not up for that, you can get it online here.

Dara Wier's book, Hat on a Pond, seems well situated in surrealism, working in the collage method: the "encounter on an operating table of an umbrella and a sewing machine." Many of her poems are lists of unlikely pairings of nouns and modifiers, example from "Balsam of Myrrh," "ditchwater green grenades." Hat on a Pond mixes up straight collage by weaving in some narrative; the general idea of domesticity confronted with industry, war, loss, and agriculture coalesces over the course of the poems. Abstract assertions loggerhead with the natural world (bizarrely described), form the platform for concrete description or seem to come organically from it; in fact, Hat on a Pond seems a study in the different angles of intersection that the concrete and the abstract can have.

An example of these two impulses, which I think define Hat on a Pond:

"Do you know what's the unluckiest thing
In the world, a differential grasshopper
said to me."

--"Awe of Everything"

My favorite poem is one of the more narrative poems to emerge from the surrealist background, "Devilhorses." The poem has a rural, folkloric listing of bizarre family chores and ends in a fairytale-esque description of the child/narrator's chore. The final revelation about the devilhorses, in fairytale fashion, is both comforting and menacing.

Here's another brief snippet, showing the loveliness that these poetics can achieve, from "A Ghost's List of Alarming Notes After a Drizzling Rain," (another list poem)

"Not one of them went anywhere without their bones,
A light rain dappled their soulpaper."

Link to title poem, "Hat on a Pond."

DONATED

Vintage Poets: Joanne Kyger and Susan Griffin

2009-08-23T09:14:00.001-07:00

According to Wikipedia, both of these poets are alive, so I don't want to insult them. Let's just say the poetry I'm looking at, the earlier poems in one book and poems '79 to '89 in the other. I'm pretty sure 60's, 70's and 80's are vintage now and those are the poems I'm talking about here.

There's an awkward time period in poetry for young poets coming up today, a time period not old enough to be taught as literature, as the critical foundation of poets of old, and not contemporary enough (or for some other reason not in the cannon or in vogue) and so it doesn't make it onto the required reading lists. Vintage poetry! In fact nobody you know, or maybe even your teachers, might have heard of some of the poets writing in the decades just before you were born. I think there are a lot of poets like that. Awesome poets that you have just never heard of.

You might encounter these poems from the 60s, 70s and 80s that you buy at used book stores or book rummages or you get randomly for Christmas presents because you're a poet, or are dusting up the shelves of your local library because somebody coming through your town at some point donated it. And you might read this book that posterity has put in your hands and notice how incredibly outdated or naive or just bad it is. Or maybe you are like, holy crap, this is different.

Being a reader of the winners of the last years' contests and the last years' poetry journals and journal submissions, I see the same sorts of things, the same images and words and poetics popping up in different genres, but still pretty much the same excercises (like a slew of villanelles, or, all of a sudden, a bevy of sonnets, or like, 15 poems with a parrot in it). That's what is so awesome about these books, is that people you know aren't reading them, people you know aren't writing these poems. You've been introduced to something new.

I have two of these books that I think have been almost more helpful to me than most of the books on the required MFA reading list, because these poems just say something in such a way that you think, ok, I could do that. I went through the first book, Bending Home: Selected and New Poems by Susan Griffin, and literally wrote "exercise," "line breaks," "hueristic," on the pages. I felt like I had learned about what a poem could do from this book. The line is super short in most of the poems, the content is often more abstract than I believed we were allowed to be before reading Anne Carson.

Some of my all-time favorite poems are in this book: "Her Sadness Runs Besider Her Like a Horse," and "Love Should Grow Up Like a Wild Iris in the Fields." While I'm trying to get rid of all the books I can live without, xeroxing beautiful poems and jettisoning the book, this book is full of gems, of things I didn't think were possible but can't wait to try.

A little quote from "Summer Night":

"This is civilization.
We have inherited it.
We love the glitter."

The second book, Just Space: Poems 1979-1989 by Joanne Kyger, I literally just started reading to microreview and give it away this upcoming week. Two weeks in a row and I'm not parting with the book I've begun to read! It's just too different, and too long. I want to take everything I can from it before/if I give it away.

From a poetics point of view, it's really interesting. The poetry is verse but has the feel of a prose poem. It sounds a lot in tone and in the way it leaps like The Rooster's Wife, by Russell Edson, or maybe anything by Russell Edson. It's got a narrative pretense but the leaps are lyrical and move the poems toward surrealism even though they are accessable and clearly about everyday narratives. The overall effect is like a dream where you are going through ordinary life but with dream logic, and everything is skewed.

The poems also use white space in a way I haven't seen before, with indentations, terracing, using almost concrete poetry-esque shaping but without any form emerging. The block of text, sometimes very narrow with short lines again, takes up more mental space because it isn't clinging to the left margin like a rat drowning in a bucket. The three or four word lines take up space and that somehow justifies them and gives them weight. It's cool. And then sometimes the indentations are like brackets seperating the different points of view, the narratives of different characters.

The tone of the poems in Just Space is different too, assured, confident, political but not taking itself so seriously. I don't think a fair-use quote is going to do these poems justice, so I won't try. These aren't super condense feeling poems with a bunch of stand-alone lines. The whole thing is an organic, sweeping, relaxed, scattered thing that comes together like an abstract painting. I really enjoy it.

Hayden Ferry Review on Amazon: I guess I did it all by myself!

2009-08-21T06:51:00.000-07:00

This is just a sidebar: I found one of the issues of HFR that I edited on Amazon.com. I am listed as editor!! Crazy! It says right at the top "by Meghan Brinson." This is funny because I'm not even alphabetically the first editor (there were several editors, people, two fiction, two international section, the managing editor, and the other poetry editor). That would be Aimee Baker.

But this is my thrill of the day to see "by Meghan Brinson" on Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Haydens-Ferry-Review-Winter-2007-08/dp/B0015RY77Y

Food Poem

2009-08-20T06:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks CRWROWPPS for this posting:

Alimentum Poetry Contest is seeking fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry all around the subject of food. Alimentum is the only literary journal all about food. http://www.alimentumjournal.com/submissions.html

Submissions open September 1, 2009 and closes December 1, 2009. Submit up to 3unpublished poems related to the subject of food or drink. Five-poem limit on poetry submissions. Do not consider previously published work. $15 entry fee which includes a one-year subscription. Snail mail only. First prize $500 and publication for a single poem.
Send to:
Alimentum Poetry Contest
PO Box 210028
Nashville, TN 37221

Deadline: December, 1, 2009

I don't have a food poem, but I'm reminded of Thomas Lux's "Refrigerator, 1957"
which I think is an amazing poem. I'm really tempted to write a poem for Nutella.

Poetry Book Give-Away II: Notes From The Divided Country/ Immortal Sofa

2009-08-19T09:27:00.001-07:00

I started reading another Whitman award winner, Suji Kwock Kim this week for my poetry give-away. But sorry people, I'm on page 15 and this is a book I'm going to keep and savor, one of those that specifically talks to you at a moment in your life (I just had a baby, and the first poems of this book talk directly to that experience).

It's a beautiful, soul-wrenching book. Notes from the Divided Country $6 from LSU Press..

So my offering this week is a book of poetry that I reviewed on Hayden Ferry Review's blog from one of our contributors: Immortal Sofa by Maura Stanton.
Warning, it is not a microreview.

Why I think you should spend $2.00 postage on this book:

"God's Ode to Creation," "The Milk of Human Kindness," are great poems.

Here's a sample though of one of my other favorite poems from this collection:

"I close my eyes, trying to conjure the warm
watery planet, sizzling with lightning bolts,
where I darted and turned my somersaults
and then, diving through transparent depths,
inserted myself through the waving seaweed
and came back up, my eye filled with joy."

from "Practicing T'ai Chi Chu'an"

Give this book a new home!

Had to Share

2009-08-18T18:51:00.001-07:00

I'm not a huge Ayn Rand fan, although my husband and one of my best friends are. But I can sure see her point. Put a point on the board for Ayn Rand!

I just had an interesting discussion about the children's classic The Giving Tree, which I've always hated (said opinion inevitably getting both me and my mother criticised), and this discussion prompted an online search that uncovered this illustration. Reillustration. Reactionstration. I love it!!

Thanks Objectivist Blog

Anyway, new challenge. Take a children's classic you've always hated (or loved) and rewrite it!! I'm going to do James and the Giant Peach.

Travel Writing

2009-08-16T06:17:00.000-07:00

Everybody's got the travel poem, but if you've got an essay, this might be worth looking into:

WHEREABOUTS PRESS
http://www.whereaboutspress.com/
---
Unlike guidebooks written by professional travel writers, our
books feature stories written by literary writers -- all of
whom who have lived in the places they write about. Most were
born there, or grew up there, or lived there for many years.
And they didn't write specifically for travelers. They wrote
because they had a good story to tell.

Thanks Funds for Writers!

Poetry Book Give-Away I: Carolina Ghost Woods

2009-08-15T16:53:00.000-07:00

Carolina Ghost Woods by Judy Jordan, 1999 Whitman Award Winner.

Rural elegies, a time capsule, a luxury of sounds piling up in long lines for a slow procession of sound and image. Folk wisdom, herbology, a catalogue of biology and dissapearance.

from "Sandbar at Moore's Creek"

"the delft-blue mussel shells,
fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn with loss."

My favorite poem: "Walking the Geese Home." Accessable, luscious, sincere.

TAKEN. But you can also get it from LSU for $6.00.

NEW PROJECT, THE MOVE

2009-08-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

There was a recent discussion on the Wom-po email list about trying to sell your house and having way too many books. A lot of the wompos came to the conclusion that having a house full of books is an awesome way to live. I disagree.

I come from a family of functional horders and I am fighting it. I've taken a good look at my three bookshelves that I've carted across the country already and decided that if I don't love it I'm not keeping it. My new goal is to read one of these books a week, give it a microreview on the blog, and GIVE IT AWAY. If you want it, send me postage and it's yours. Otherwise, it's going to the library.

I encourage others to do the same thing! Poetry should be shared, circulating, percolating, not gathering dust, costing a fortune to move and eating up home equity.

Donner Party Long Poems

2009-08-03T07:53:00.000-07:00

When I was in a graduate class on writing the long poem, I decided to challenge myself. I would think of the worst possible sounding idea for a long poem. I came up with the Donner Party. I wrote about 5 pages. I kind of like it.

I've since discovered about 3 book length long poems about the Donner Party and my goal is to read each one. So far I've got my hot little man-hands on one copy:
Keithley, George. The Donner Party. New York: George Braziller, 1972.

So far I've only read the first page or so and I despise it with a deep and loving, laugh out loud, oh my god I was so right this is the worst idea ever hatred.

I've decided to risk life and limb to bring you the first stanza of this book, this marvel of mid-century writing, which since it is but a tiny portion of the poem, perhaps the copyright gods will permit me to post here:

"I am George Donner a dirt farmer
who left the snowy fields
around Springfield, Illinois
in the fullness of my life"

That's all you get--that's all I will risk for you! If you want the rest (it is sort of delicious, this first page) you can get your own copy or maybe if you offer me $5 I will sell you mine. Shipping included.

I've tried to pawn off actually reading it on someone else, but no one I know will take up the gauntlet. 254 pages of Donner Party poetry just doesn't seem to interest anyone. Friends of the Library, here I come. That was some of the best 4$ I ever spent.

Because I also bought an Amazon bargain book, American Primitive by Mary Oliver. That makes this ok. yes!!! I was going to give you guys the link, but I think I bought the only 5$ copy. I don't know if this link to a search will work, but if it does, enjoy your 5$-ish poetry books. Love, Me.

What makes the whole Donner Party poem thing interesting to me is the rejection I just got from Anti-, which goes something like this: we like the concept/concept but the lyrical bit just didn't do it for us. If you've got something similar, send it along.

They liked that it was about the Donner Party, is what I think that means! But obviously my poem didn't pull it off, and with this hefty, gray, funky-smelling volume in front of me that I can't bring myself to read, do I feel implicated. (But my line is longer! Come on!) So when I laugh at this monstrosity, maybe I laugh at my own. Oh Blackbird, publish my long cannibal poem. Please?

Kwame Dawes Apologizes Also

2009-07-30T13:30:00.000-07:00

It is good to get an email from Director Kwame Dawes affirming that the publication of the bulk of my chapbook online without my permission was a mistake--done in the middle of launching the new site. I feel better about the Initiative that they did not do this on purpose. He still maintains, though, that it doesn't count as publication (he used quotation marks around the word in his email) and that I should be able to publish them anywhere. He offered to write a letter to any press that wouldn't publish them to that effect, which I think is generous if maybe not right.

I'm curious to see, and waiting to see, if the editors will continue to consider these poems, and if they would have if they were published on purpose and remained up on the website. The Wom-po consensus seems to be yes, this is publication.

I think it's important to clarify for others considering being involved in the site. For some people, this could be a good opportunity even if they relinquish first publication rights required by journals and first publication rights for the collection required by presses. But others might want to know how editors will look upon this website when they are deciding whether or not to allow their poems to be published there.

In any case, this has brought up a few very important questions, for me, that I think the literary community should solve and post in some conspicuous place, like CLMP, with some best practices. Maybe they have. I'll check.

In any case, we should all be on the same page about this. When you send your poems somewhere, you need to know what's going to happen to them.

SC Poetry Initiative Admits Mistake, Promises to Take Down Poems

2009-07-30T12:42:00.000-07:00

News: the assistant director of the Poetry Initiative sent me an email at 2:30 pm today saying that a volunteer made the mistake of putting the poems online, and they will be taken down. She apologizes but doesn't think this will harm the chances of this chapbook to be published elsewhere, since, as she correctly points out, it's only 10 of the 14 poems.

I really hope she's right. I've emailed the contests I've entered since last fall to ask that they overlook this brief, renegade publication, or at least consider a different manuscript in its place or refund my entry fee. I don't have enough money for these chapbook contests to have them blown like this.

Fingers crossed.

SC Poetry Initiative Published My Work Without Permission

2009-07-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

So here's a quick synopsis:

I entered a chapbook contest from the SC Poetry Initiative. 10 Chapbooks would be chosen for publication, cash prize, and free author's copies. Others would be published online. (There was no notice on the rules that entering meant giving publication permission, and that is not standard either.) It was the first contest I entered this chapbook to, and none of the poems had even been sent to journals yet.

I got a letter saying I didn't win. Boo! I recieved an email from the Iniative saying that my poems had been chosen for online publication. I said, no thanks, I really want to see them in print and this was the first contest. The intern who sent me the email punted to the Assistant Director. I had an exchange with her where she tried to convince me to let them publish three poems, but I refused. She finally acknowledged that I had withdrawn the poems.

Then I got an email this spring asking for an electronic copy. I replied again saying I had already withdrawn the poems. Charlene said, oh yeah, and acknowledged again that I had withdrawn the poems.

Now I get an email with a link to their new site with my poems published in two places: in the '08 Online Chapbooks, where they published my chapbook, and in the '09 Web Anthology, where they published the three poems.

I'm going to my husband's office to make a pdf out of the email exchanges this afternoon, so people can read them for themselves and make their minds up themselves. Also, check out the website for yourself and see if you think it's publication! It doesn't show up on google yet, they just posted it.

I've gotten mixed responses--some people seem to think no harm no foul, others are pretty darn upset. I'd like to know what anybody else thinks.

And if you think it's wrong, let other people know and let the SC Poetry Iniative Director know. dawesk@mailbox.sc.edu He was never in email contact with me, (although I sent him one on publication!) so I do not assign any blame in his direction.

PDF Coming!

POP HAIKU

2009-07-20T11:49:00.000-07:00

I had to post something new. I was recently challenged to write a new chapbook in one month. Day 20, and I have 4 poems. Failure? We'll see.

Anyway, one of the ideas I had for knocking out this ridiculous number of poems was to do pop haiku. I love the mix of the static, the contemplative, the classic form with the hectic, frenetic, undeliberated, the unending flow of pop life. Maybe the haiku can do something for Pop.

But I suck at haiku! So you try it. Here's a contest if you're interested in doing on about a Nintendo game:

http://kotaku.com/gaming/flackery/metroid-prime-2-echoes-haiku-contest-26589.php

Poem

2009-06-01T11:05:00.000-07:00

This Week They Killed Your Best Friend in a Church While He Prayed, Although Many Could Save Your Life He Was The Only One that Would

Now is the time
when they are deciding
who will decide
who owns your body.
If you are not a man or a child or a virgin
you are a cruise ship, or your body
is a cruise ship and you
are the captain and if
the ship goes down
so will you.

They decide
if tiny people can kill you.
You might have thought, oh yay, finally,
my tiny person is coming
only to discover they will
brutalize you.
The undertaker will have to stuff you
so you won't look caved in for your casket

though you don't have to die, you could maybe
keep your body a little longer--

your body, whose job
you thought it was
to keep you alive
and take you to work
this body which is all
you know has been lying to you.
It is not yours. It never was.
It is somebody else's, or could be
just like that. And whether that person
is alive, or will be for long your body,
your long lost first love or your hated enemy,
your spare tire, your jiggly thighs,
your pert nipples, they are
a life-support machine. Your blood,
your liver, your heart, your lungs--
they are a boat on a river.
To keep it all afloat they
will make cuts in you, they
will tear you open
like a cheap envelope.
Maybe they will put you back together,
but the final piece
death will keep for herself,
that bitch, she has owned you
all along
and your body, which would so like
to be beautiful and to create beauty,
will be an empty, sad thing,

and you will have nothing
but your luscious, meaty anger--

Dr. Tiller Murdered the Week Pro-Choice Supreme Court Judge nominated.
http://www.kentucky.com/181/story/814086.html

More Good News

2009-05-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

A few more upcoming publications to announce:

"Rupture," The Greensboro Review
"Garden Wall, Response to Picasso," Makeout Creek
"Sugar Bust," Southern Women's Review

Also, I've begun reviewing poetry books and chapbooks for Hayden's Ferry Review Blog. Check them out!

Western Michigan Poets POP

2009-04-15T10:18:00.000-07:00

I recently started reviewing books and chapbooks for the HFR blog, one done so far and several to go! As I was reading Roy Seeger's chapbook, A Garden of Improbable Birds, I was struck by how much I enjoyed his poems featuring John Travolta and Lon Cheney. These were not comic poems, the pop icons were translated into symbols in the poems that really opened up something for the speaker. It was pretty cool. I had recently run into another Kalamazoo guy at AWP, Cody Todd, who also has a chapbook out, To Frankenstein, My Father. And another fellow Western Michigan Prague Summer Program attendee, was featured in HFR #42 for a poem entitled, "Gorbechev's Houseboat."

Maybe that's not a very significant trend, but I've got my eye on these guys.

So my question is, what is useful about pop icons? Dracula, Chocula, Lou Ferrigno, Billy Joel, Tanya Harding, Kelly Clarkson, Miley (sigh for contributing in any way to the continuation of her name in the metasphere) Cyrus? The fact that they are popular, even hugely popular, I think says that people connect to them. They see something of themselves in these people or their personas. And then they just become huge off the two mirrors held facing each other refractivity of fame. But in any case, just like other cultural icons, they say something larger than a moment in time, but anchored in a moment in time. And that can become something very personal for an individual, these larger narratives.

Ah, my Kelly Clarkson poem is calling me...

Portmanteau

2009-03-19T12:30:00.000-07:00

I'm back from AWP and then a short baby hiatus! The little guy is napping on his Boppy on my lap, so I'm going to catch up with some notes I made at AWP.

I ran into an old friend at the book fair, Alex Lumans, graduating soon from his MFA program. When we were in an undergrad poetry class together, he wrote a cool poem using the word portmanteau, which I'd never encountered before. It's actually a pretty common occurrance, a portmanteau is two words smushed together to make a new one that has some of the old meaning of the two words combined. Think Bennifer or Brangelina but with more linguistic substance.

Here's a cool site with a bunch of examples: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/portmant.htm

I'm especially intriqued by the Dormobile. I was disapointed to find out that this is a type of car/truck/van, not a mobile dorm, which would suck so bad that I love the idea. Would you have to find it every day when you come home from class? Imagine the dialogue..."oh shit, I'm going to be late to class because the f.ck.ng dorm parked on the far side of campus this morning."

Thanks Slipstream!

2009-02-18T11:25:00.000-08:00

Happily, I came back from AWP to a PO Box full of rejection slips, my new Indiana Review (yes!), and an acceptance from Slipstream for my poem, "Women Like Me," appearing in issue #29, Spring 2009.

To order, visit:
http://www.slipstreampress.org/

It's a pretty classic definitional list poem: x=y, x=c, x=q. For example:

Blue birds are blue birds.
Blue birds are birds that think they are the sky.
Blue birds are feathers glued onto bone by a child
who wants to shoot the sky with his bb gun.
Blue birds are hot blue formica tiles cut up and soldered
into something resembling flight intersecting black tarmac.
Blue birds shit and fight and chase off gold finches.

What I like about the formula is that the farther along you go, the more interesting your definitions get as you come up with new insights, new language, new things to say. I think I'm going to do this thing again, for real though, not for blue birds, and this time list definitions for 'grotesque' in thanks to the last issue of Hayden's Ferry Review that I was editor for. Thanks everyone who came up to the HFR table at AWP with love for the issue. The HFR blog also has links to a very good review of the issue by The Review Review.

My Horn

2009-02-06T10:45:00.000-08:00

I want to take a second to suggest to everyone that they send some work out. Since I've had some time off from working, I've been on a major rampage submitting to journals and book contests. This has led to a lot of rejection, and I'm happy to share with you, some success!

Thanks to Cider Press Review, Puerto del Sol, and Gulf Coast , and Pebble Lake Review for my recent acceptances.

Thanks also to the Cider Press Review Book Award for naming my manuscript, Mystery School, a finalist in their 2008 Book Prize.

To read the poems, here's a link to the magazines.

http://www.puertodelsol.org/current.html Look for "Trojan Horse," in Spring 2009.

http://www.ciderpressreview.com/archive/volume9/index.php Look for "Love Poem," and "Museum," in Volume 10, Spring 2009.

http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=2 Look for "Apocalypse," in Fall 2009.

http://pebblelakereview.com/Look for "Pescadita," in the Health and Illness issue due out in May.

Be Mine, Valentine

2009-02-06T10:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not generally a huge fan of occasional poems, but I had fun with the Diwali poem I wrote for the HFR Blog Contest a while back, and speaking of keeping track of time and the passage of time, occasional and seasonal poems are pretty useful.

I'm going on blog hiatus while I'm at AWP and visiting my in-laws, so I'll miss Valentine's Day. You would think that Valentine's would be too super cheesy to even approach. I disagree! Wikipedia has some crazy interesting stuff, history of Valentine's and connected customs, including a gallery of beautiful vintage valentines. There's plenty of opportunity for dramatic poems, narrative poems, poems taking an interesting obscure fact or custom as a jumping off point, or ekphrastic poems using the cards. I'm especially interested in the ones that look like vintage tattoos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine%27s_Day

And that's not even getting into the personal/lyric poems that could come of out comparing these wiki-facts with contemporary events or personal events. Valentine to Blago? Valentine from the baby leopard to his piglet pal (look it up on Youtube!)? Valentine to a relative, maybe an in-law?

Whatever your Valentine Poem may be, have fun.

Calendar and Domestic Poetry

2009-01-30T13:43:00.000-08:00

I have a pretty big deadline coming in up in less than two months, and to honor it, I've begun a new poetry project! Finally. It helps me a little bit to think of the shape and content and big ideas in the project when I'm thinking about new poems to write.

In this one I want to pursue a couple of ideas 1. Time and 2. The Domestic.

That's pretty much my life right now, and whereas for the past few months I haven't been thrilled about it, I've finally come around that bend in the country road where everything illuminates and you realize you're in the right place.

So my next blogs will focus on ways/forms to help shape and show the passage of time, and forms that duplicate the domestic.

Project the First: Rag Rug.

I'm totally in love with the rag rug I've been making for my second spare room.The rag rug is an old-timey thing they still make a L.L. Bean, we had one in our family room growing up. It's made out of long strips of fabric crocheted together around and around. The one I've been making is pink, green, yellow and raspberry, totally cute. For more info, if you want to try one: http://vintagechica.typepad.com/the_life_and_times_of_thi/2006/10/rag_rug_tutoria.html

So for my rag rug poem, I was thinking about taking lines out of a journal or something, or maybe a paragraph and cutting it into lines, and then wrapping them and tying them together, around and around, until they form the whole. I'm debating too getting the "fabric" from non-literary sources, like taking snippets from books that I find and interesting "color" and using them to make the rag rug, like my Grim Fairie Tale collection, Lives of the Saints, and The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong.

Getting to Know You: Back Issues

2009-01-16T09:28:00.000-08:00

In most writing classrooms as well as on most rejection slips, you'll get a suggestion from teachers and editors that you read a literary journal before submitting to it (or read any literary journal before submitting to another one) in order to get an idea of what they might like.

There are a few problems with this advice. 1)Time: Many working poets find they don't have the time to read EVERY journal they'd like to submit to. OR 2)Money: They might skim over them at the AWP bookfair, look into their wallets, and sigh. There just isn't enough money, or usually a well-enough stocked library nearby for poets (or writers) to read every journal they'd like to. $20 bucks a pop doesn't get you very far on what most people have to spend. I know my subscription/ conference registration/ contest entry fee money comes out of a small grant I was lucky to get and have just about used up :(

Which is why I've spent a little bit of time lately going over journals I've read in the past or recently submitted to, looking to see who has affordable back issues/ sample issues. Some back issues are rare and thus legitimately expensive. But if most journals are anything like Hayden's Ferry Review, there's a room somewhere full of back issues that the magazine can't afford to store anymore, would give away free if they could. Maybe the editor ordered about 200 more than needed from the printer, the cover art wasn't so great, the issue came out during the Arab Oil Embargo of '74 and people just weren't buying journals like predicted. Thus the sample issue, as in "I've got 200 copies of issue #20, pay for the shipping and it's yours." And some magazines just don't charge that much, period.

Here's a list of links to back issues pages of literary journals that sell for less than $10 a piece. Although some of these might still be more than half of a current subscription (and some aren't), it's enough to get a taste of what the magazine's about and then decide which ones you want to add to your Christmas list.

Hayden's Ferry Review $7.50
http://www.asu.edu/piper/publications/haydensferryreview/subscribe.html

American Poetry Review $4.25
http://www.aprweb.org/subscribe/subscribe.shtml

Copper Nickel (issue 5) $8
http://www.copper-nickel.org/buy.html

Crab Creek Review $6
http://www.crabcreekreview.org/subscrb.htm

Cream City Review $7
http://www.creamcityreview.org/subscribe/

Gulf Coast $8
http://www.gulfcoastmag.org/index.php?n=3
I suggest issue 20.2 featuring my dear friend and Pushcart nominated writer, Aimee Baker.

Mid-American Review $5
http://www.bgsu.edu/studentlife/organizations/midamericanreview/archives.html

New England Review $6
http://cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview/archives.html

New York Quarterly $8

Slipstream (some issues $7)
http://www.slipstreampress.org/backiss.html

Cimarron Review (some issues $5)
http://cimarronreview.okstate.edu/new_subscribe.html

Fugue $8
http://www.uiweb.uidaho.edu/fugue/subscriptions.htm

The Gettysburg Review $6
https://biz.gettysburg.edu/gettysburg_review/back_iss.html

There might be more! Check out your favorite lit mag, and if it's got a good sample issue rate, let me know.

I'm not a bitch, I've got a histrionic personality disorder (and a boob job)!

2008-12-23T12:12:00.001-08:00

Where do you draw the line between sincere mental illness and just plain poor behavior?

Maybe it's just because it's the holidays, time to swap news, office gossip, and smile politely while relatives act totally inappropriately, but I suddenly find myself questioning:

When do these symptoms:

"pervasive disregard for the law and the rights of others."
"a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and a lack of empathy"
"pervasive attention-seeking behavior including inappropriate sexual seductiveness and shallow or exaggerated emotions "

become A) antisocial personality disorder B)histrionic personality disorder or C) narcissistic personality disorder instead of pervasive Bitchiness disorder? Does a diagnosis excuse poor behavior? It probably does to the person who is so self-obsessed that they exhibit "an enduring pattern of inner experience and behavior that deviates markedly from the expectations of the culture of the individual who exhibits it".

Who out there knows someone who behaves innappropriately and doesn't think anything at all is wrong with their actions?

I've had the pleasure of meeting several women with these issues, one actually diagnosed, excused from her job responsibilities, and now eligible for disability benefits. For being a class A bitch.

Thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_disorder for the info.

Sure, this is mostly just me having an ax to grind, and grinding it even harder once I looked up the diagnosis of acquaintences past (currently gestating, Merry Christmas!).

But I'm curious what other inexcusable behavior we can describe with syndromes (genocidal tendencies, fetal gnoshing disorder, perenial tardiness?), and then whether or not it would be worthwhile to take the viewpoint of the patient, the person making the diagnosis, or maybe the people living with the consequences, and do some dramatic dialogues. DRAMAtic dialogues? Probably pretty bad, eh? But if you didn't know/secretly dream of watching get run over by garbage truck someone with the disorder, then maybe it would just be an opportunity for dark humor? Or maybe lots of people know people with the disorder (booger displacement anxiety) and they would sympathize with the loved one struggling to steer her spouse through the tumult of dealing with such a socially devastating problem?

Merry Christmas!!

Almost Complete Face Transplant

2008-12-17T14:18:00.000-08:00

The first U.S. face transplant is the most complete one ever attempted. While it's nothing like what spy movies might have hopefuls thinking, that this is the ultimate plastic surgery or a better alternative to the witness protection program, for some folks who have been severely mauled or traumatized, this surgery may be the start of a new life.

To get more details follow links to article and photos:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/18/health/s18face.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

The doctor in charge of the team of specialists who performed the surgery responded to some criticism that the surgery is dangerous and unnecessary. She spoke about people who couldn't live normal lives because their faces were so destroyed. The soundbite that really got me was, "You need the face to face the world."

I can't stop thinking about The Phantom of the Opera, and how underneath all the Andrew Lloyd Webber there is a story that validates Dr. Maria Siemionow's point. Can you imagine life severely disfigured? Getting a face transplant? Waking up with a new face?

I watched a bad Lifetime movie about a brain transplant...a model's brain ends up in a housewife's body. It sounds like a comedy, but it was actually sort of disturbing. How much does a person identify themselves as their body? Who do you become, what does your life become, not when your body is damaged, but when it is changed to an almost normal version of some one else?

Thanks HFR Blog

2008-12-12T12:57:00.000-08:00

The HFR blog recently hosted a holiday blog poem/fiction contest with several prize subscriptions to Hayden's Ferry Review, gift subscriptions for a friend or loved one, and a free back issue of my favorite issue, #42 The Grotesque.

Thanks to the intern judging the contest, I won! To read my Diwali poem, follow this link: http://haydensferryreview.blogspot.com/2008/holiday-blog-contestpoetry_12.html

A poetry contributor from issue 42 also won a place in the contest with her beautiful poem! Congrats to Lauren Berry.

Mythology and Identity: Transgender and Mermaidism

2008-11-24T11:18:00.001-08:00

I've always been completely fascinated by the idea of transgenderism. The idea that people might be born needing to perform/ identifying with what I always considered a cultural structure has always sort of conflicted with what I thought and felt growing up--a very fierce and early determination that gender didn't and wouldn't determine who I was. So I've watched every special on TV, read every news article and magazine spotlight that highlighted new research mapping transgendered folks brains or letting them tell their stories. One of the most compelling and confusing stories I've heard so far was a recent article in The Atlantic online that follows the stories of transgendered children, who from an early age insist that they are really members of the opposite sex, and perform the exterior signals of that sex with a fierceness that the most Barbie/GI Joe crazy preschooler I've ever known couldn't live up to. To read the article, follow the link. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/transgender-children

One small detail in the article particularly grabbed my attention. The parents of one boy were discussing the similarities they found between their son and another transgendered boy they had seen profiled on 60 Minutes: they both were fascinated with mermaids.

I am so interested in this detail. The figure of the mermaid is one with a rich and ambivalent history. On one hand, like all composite creatures, the mermaid is a symbol of someone who exists in two separate spheres. At the same time, the mermaid is a character in literature (think Little Mermaid, but other folk tales as well) of extreme solitude and loneliness, with an intense longing for what is ultimately unobtainable and destructive, some might even describe it as a self-mutilating desire. (In Anderson's Little Mermaid, the mermaid undergoes great and continuous pain in walking as well as giving up her voice to the sea witch.)The flip side of the story is the folk tale The Selkie Wife, where the woman is captured and held by her husband in one of the dual worlds she occupies and eventually escapes when she is able to reclaim her dual nature.

It makes a lot of sense on some level (although I realize I am psychoanalyzing strangers here) that a little boy who feels that he is really a little girl would identify with this uber-feminine creature stranded outside of the world she craves to inhabit. Even as simply a composite creature, the mermaid could be a symbol of what the transgendered boy feels. From the waist up, a girl. From the waist down, a fish.

For a more complete background on the mythical figure, with photos, follow link. http://www.answers.com/topic/mermaid

While I haven't read a poem involving a mythical creature that was successful in quite a while, these creatures are powerful symbols of tensions and longings that inhabit us. How the particular creature that someone identifies with (a harpy, dragon, unicorn, Pegasus, fawn, sphinx) might say a lot, or help them say a lot, about what these tensions and longings are. The composite creature in particular, being a creature that combines disparate parts into one whole, seems tailor-made by/for people experiencing these deep identity tensions.

Writing Taboo as Diptych: The Southern Poetry Review is Anti-Condom

2008-11-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

Maybe. My recent submission, which included a poem about condoms, two about miscarriage, one about suburban voodoo and one about an bitchy person I went to grad school with all came back rejected in record time. The condom poem was on top, and looking at it, I was struck by the sudden idea that it was a little ridiculous that I had a poem about a condom and I had sent it to the Southern Poetry Review.

Now I'll admit I've never read a full issue of SPR, they don't have samples online, and I live in a literary vacuum now as far as lending privileges go. (Oh how I miss you, Piper Center Resource Library!) Skimming through the current contributors, I noticed K.A Hayes, a poet I know (somehow) from working at HFR. She wasn't one of the contributors on my issues as editor, but I think I solicited poems from her.
Since I can't comment on their aesthetic, I'll blame the condom poem.

It started as just a crazy idea; I liked the fact that a major condom company had its name in a two-part mythological boobie trap. Destroyed cities, viruses, and condoms--they share a physical and a linguistic connection! I wrote the poem as a diptych: on one side, the condom. On the other side: the condom's significance. After all, a condom seems silly and physical and just like a bathroom joke in some ways. But on the other hand, condoms stand in for protection, or lack there of, from disease, from pregnancy. They are a physical barrier in a sexual relationship where there is some need for physical distance. Deep.

I loved the poem I wrote and it has gotten mixed results. People liked the idea of two independent poems commenting on each other in the space of a page, but didn't like the two poems together. C.D Wright liked it the way it was, and suggested I write more. But at some level, the jokey-ness of where I tried to go, taking two words as poem titles that are innocuous together but suggestive when paired, (Trouser Snake) was fun, but didn't reveal everything that the first poem did.

After getting this rejection and thinking about it on my drive home (honking and braking to avoid hitting a vulture that was just a little too full to lift off a roadside deer quickly)I realized what it was I liked about the poem. It takes something physical and vulgar that elicits teen movie humor and school yard giggling and presents its very physical nature on one side. But the other side of the poem is about what the thing really is, it's about the push and pull of a sexual relationship, the desire for intimacy and fear that the intimacy will destroy the person who desires it. So that pun allowed me to get at something real in my life.

I'm thinking about what other "vulgar," "taboo," or "ridiculous," things might hide a real connection to who we are as humans on the other side of their surface. Things that people have taken the time to fetishize or make taboo are powerful things. They make us uncomfortable, and they show us how we feel and what we fear.

I'd like to take a moment to thank the Southern Poetry Review. I looked at a copy and met the editor at AWP Atlanta, and it's one of those journals I'd love to get from my family as a gift subscription this Xmas. And I'm sure they support safe sex.
http://www.spr.armstrong.edu/index.html

UPDATE: The condom poem, "Trojan Horse," was recently accepted by Puerto del Sol.

Naughty Nuns and Bad Habits: If They're not yours, they're even more fun

2008-11-20T13:54:00.001-08:00

I just found the Ploughshare blog. Ploughshares has long been one of my favorite literary magazines; I've been unsuccessfully submitting there, the Indiana Review, and Mid-American since college because I just LOVE them, and the editors were nice to me when they read in my bio that I was trying to get into an MFA program.

I like the blog because it's more than just an addition to the magazine; it discusses poetics and criticism. A recent blog post focuses on bad habits that writers/poets discover in their writing. We've all had that moment, looking over poems when we realize (or have pointed out in workshop) that we do the same thing routinely. For some of us it's a word, (I used "stone," in about twelve poems before someone in my workshop finally had enough)but sometimes it's a movement when we run out of other ideas, a default.

It's not that these are necessarily BAD habits, just that they're bad for us because, well, they're habits, and you can't really be new and fresh if you do the same thing every time.

My idea is that the next time I find myself following in my old ways, I'll use SOME ONE ELSE's bad habit instead. So I try to end all poems with a neat bow by throwing in some unrelated abstraction paired with at least two concrete details and hard consonants. When it comes off just too pat, maybe I'll try a slant rhymed couplet instead! At least it's not what I usually do, and isn't that the interesting and helpful thing about form anyway?

Here's a link to the blog for more ideas, and if you have bad habits of your own, you can post them in the blog comments :)

http://pshares.blogspot.com/2008/11/bad-habits.html

Man-Moth: typos and mondegreens

2008-11-17T12:18:00.000-08:00

I always thought the Cher song went, "gypsies, chimpanzees." Apparently, it's "gypsies, tramps and thieves." Oh well. Apparently there's a word (and a website, see last in list on bottom) for the phenomenon of mishearing song lyrics: mondegreen. Cool, huh?

A famous example of the misunderstanding made into a poem is Elizabeth Bishop's "Man-Moth." The poet was intrigued by a misprint of the word "mammoth" in a news article and subsequently wrote one of her more vulnerable poems featuring the character of the man-moth, a subterranean agoraphobe with the hidden, private spirituality of a hermit.

To read the poem, click here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-man-moth/

I was listening to some public radio jazz when I had a similar experience, thinking the lyrics of "I got my mojo workin" were "I got my mojo wagon." I loved the idea of a wagonful of mojos or a wagon that increases mojo...in an Austin Powers kind of way.

If you don't have any of your own misprints or mondegreens to fall back on, here are some online resources:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=0be_1226322379
http://www.flickr.com/photos/richard_winskill/sets/1337751/
http://www.amiright.com/misheard/

PostSecret

2008-10-31T11:01:00.000-07:00

We've done the postcard poem--one friend of mine even had a postcard poem exchange for her middle school students and ASU graduate poetry students for National Poetry Month one year. This is a whole different "art" exchange:

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

The idea is that people post postcard sized images with a secret on them. They range from the cliche and self-absorbed, to the political, to the funny, to the incredibly sad.

While I normally wouldn't suggest stealing people's stories (well, maybe I would) the nature of this project is that the contributors are offering up these secrets to be art, to be a part of collaborative art. I think some of them would make great poetry or fiction premises.

Thanks to PostSecret for creating a forum where people can share these things about themselves.

John Asberry's Autumnal Polyvore Work Outfit

2008-10-30T07:14:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of coming up with poem ideas, so this week I read a book: April Galleons by John Asberry. I'm not usually a big fan of Ashberry, (just don't get it) but I did enjoy the book a lot more than I thought I would. Interesting thing: anyone who remembers the Roethke exercise that involves a bank of words and a lot of rules--every one of these poems has one of those words in it. Gotcha Ashberry! And you thought you could just sneak 'tarmac' in there and no one would think anything of it.

I went through the poems and pulled out some words I like, which I plan on using in a few poems this week. I was like, ruffle!! I love ruffle.

Then I typed a bunch of them into polyvore to make a collage. Here are the words I used:

plum, ruffle, spot, sleek, proper, ribbon, and clean.

April Galleons by parrotflower
a huge list of Ashberry words follows:
vetiver smudges fishhook sleek mood sawdust hat bank plum taste thin floor sharp stick scrub door shave shake tactics ship ruffle fit cloak tilt tag crunch fatal bottom strive ask spot sink lost ribbon rust proper plug fresh quiet rich bound wander nourish kind riot wrist find tease canvas jug wisp honey forget fragile burnt pave balloon burst fetching cabbage shut slow moist calm mode lock cash claw simple fakes settle faint judge thistle clean tip lavish stir blind step shy stack stalk whisper

Note: Yes, in the original post I said Rilke instead of Roethke. Oops. To make up for it, the exercise, pulled from The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo, is as follows.

Use five nouns, verbs, and adjectives from the above lists and write a poem as follows:

1. Four beats to the line
2. six lines to the stanza
4. At least two internal and one external slant rhyme per stanza
5. maximum two end stops per stanza
6. clear English grammatical sentences, must make sense.

Nouns: tamarack throat belief rock frog dog slag eye cloud mud
Verbs: to kiss to curve to swing to ruin to bite to cut to surprise to bruise to hug to say
Adjectives: blue hot soft tough important wavering sharp cool red leather

Crab Orchard Review: The Personal Lyric and Culture of Change

2008-10-22T11:59:00.001-07:00

I probably wouldn't be blogging about what is, when you think about it, sort of a confusing call for submissions if it weren't for this color wheel. Doesn't it sort of look like the Wheel of Fortune, or that wheel on the Price is Right?

Anyway, I love the idea of taking a tack and sticking it in this wheel a couple times, making each color block it lands on a stanza, and the title of the poem an agent of change.

I think the key, as it always is when dealing with huge abstractions, is to find something small and personal.

Here's what each of these things would be for me the first time I stuck a tack in them:
Identity: waiting for my Georgia voter registration card two weeks before a presidential election
Work: watching the soda pumps from the back room of the theater concession stand
The Arts: ceramics summer camp where I learned how to play poker and a kid threatened me with an exacto knife
Tradition: baptism photos of my husband
Beliefs: the Augustus Caesar statue my husband got in Italy, sitting on our fireplace
Family: my little sister getting rolled out of the nursery in her terrarium
Change: my baby bump
Knowledge:I have an encyclopedia of trivia
Home: digging through the azalea hedge for a frisbee

Any of these sections of the wheel could be a pretty personal lyric fairly quickly if you just try to conjure up very specific episodes. If you have trouble keeping the agent of change in the title personal and concrete, list all the years you've been alive and stick a tack in the list. The episodes you picked will lie before or after this date and there's bound to be something that happened between the two.

I just did this and its sort of depressing to see how long the list of numbers is. I got 1999, my Sophmore year in high school, the year I went to Spain, a year before my cousin died. So depending on how morbid I wanted to be, there's my poem. Of course, if I didn't have anything important happen that year I could just see if any relatively obscure thing happened in the headlines. That could be even more interesting. W2K was pretty big, but maybe a Spice Girls tour stop in a small town would be good. I'm getting nostalgic already.

Thanks Crab Orchard Review for their beautiful publication and for offering a call to submissions vague enough to be interesting. To see the call go to:

http://www.siuc.edu/~crborchd/special.html

The Visit-- Poetry, Revenge, and Revelation

2008-10-15T15:32:00.000-07:00

Maybe it is just that I am nostalgic for Prague, three years later, and just got an email that Arnost Lustig will be in Kalamazoo soon, but this movie I just watched on TV has got me thinking. The movie is The Visit (1964) starring Ingrid Bergman, and although it isn’t as artsy as the Czech films we watched in Prague, it has that same dark flavor to it. I suggest that anyone who hasn’t watched it Netflix it immediately.

The gist of the movie is that Bergman was run out of town as a pregnant teen after filing a paternity suit against her lover. He bribes two witnesses for a bottle of brandy each to say that she is promiscuous. The authorities take her child, who quickly dies in an institution, label her a fallen woman, and she becomes a big city prostitute. Years later, she returns, a wealthy woman, with a proposition for the town that turned its back on her. They are struggling…the local mines, the factory, the riverside...all their business has mysteriously dried up and she offers them 2 million to kill the man who ruined her instead of taking responsibility for his child.

I’m not suggesting that people write a poem where they make an “indecent proposal.” What’s interesting to me about this movie is that by making this offer to the town, she puts her ex-lover in the exact position he put her in, a position where those in power, the people he’s trusted and grown up with, his own friends, actively set him up, ruin and finally move to take his life. This is the interesting moment to me, when he moves from disbelief, thinking of course that he was right in what he did, to struggling with the same forces he set in motion before.

I’m also not suggesting this be some epic poem about a life and death struggle, but that this kind of revenge, this very profound shift in position, is ripe for a lyric. Take a situation which you might still be harboring some grudge over, (unless you’re some profoundly well-developed person who doesn’t carry grudges) and put that person in a reversed position. The truly startling thing is the amount of sympathy you end up having with the character as they share, and realize they share, your same experience.

Formal Mechanics, the Rotary Lawnmower, and the Movement of Stanzas

2008-10-11T09:32:00.000-07:00

I've decided to create a form that mimics the movement of the rotary lawnmower.

The purpose of the form is, I think, like the purpose of mowing, to create order out of unorderliness through the means of repetitive violence, to create motion in form through repetition at the beginning and end of a stanza.

The first decision is, is the lawnmower a mulching or bag type? The second is, which words will be repeated? I've decided on two verbs, but I think nouns could maybe work too.

As for the lawn, I've toyed with the idea of making a list of messiness and then just mowing through it with the twin blades of my chosen verbs. But I think narrative situations offer messiness as well, so it wouldn't have to be lyrical.

I like the idea of quatrains, because they're nice and rectangular, like rooms and like lawns and I think that has a lot to do with the idea of maintenance, that there is a shape you are trying to trim things into. Line length should be even, but long or short might depend on the size of the lot.

The first verb should start the stanza, the second should end the second line, the first come back in the third line, and the second repeat in the last line, maybe at the end of the line, a full rotation.

If you have chosen the organically friendly and less expensive mulching type of lawn mower, you should pick a word in each stanza, that is particularly messy to you, like a tall weed, for the action of each blade to mow down and leave a piece of it in the next line. My husband volunteered "disheveled," which is a great example because you would never use it in a poem, and I think the remains of this word would show up as "dish" or maybe even "shovel," or "hell."

If you've decided to be the ultimate neat-freak, to bag and maybe (greenies) to compost, then instead of falling behind in clumps after the movement of the blades, these little clippings would collect at have to be dumped at the end.

Innocuous Weapons

2008-10-08T12:11:00.000-07:00

Ok, so it may be a gimic, but I love this thing I found while shopping for Xmas presents for my cousin. Why this was on a gift list for men ages 30-40, I'll never know, but who cares:

"Unleash potassium-rich projectile warfare with the insidious potato pellet gun! Punch the barrel into a standard-issue potato, break off a pellet and bring it! Mostly harmless, the potato gun can shoot pellets up to 50 feet. Potato not included." $5.95

http://www.x-tremegeek.com/templates/searchdetail.asp?sk=MX72143&productID=11553

This poem is a poem about people behaving strangely. Why they are compelled to do it, who they are, what the results of the attack are, that's up to you, but I love the idea of an adult picking something totally innocuous and making a weapon out of it. Of course, by itself, a thrown potato could be pretty dangerous. It's like, potato cannon, light. So maybe I would think of something actually dangerous and then the weapon would be something related to it. My little sister once hit me in the eye with a dirty shoe, so maybe I would attack her at her wedding with a rolled up tube sock.

It's a nice little narrative to break up a tense scenario, like serving divorce papers, or finding your sister in the sack with your husband. Something like that.

The Negative Superman

2008-10-03T12:37:00.000-07:00

The Negative Superman

The Obscene Jester is a pretty interesting performance art blog I read from time to time. While I was catching up on my blog readership yesterday, I came across an intriguing idea in the blog describing a musical art performance.

http://obscenejester.typepad.com/home/2008/09/loudly-loudly-c.html

The blog was talking about Peter Lorre, who inspired the album performed. The blog suggested that the character actor who had been typecast as a villain was an example of a “negative superman,” sharing such ranks with Vincent Prince, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff—the famous somewhat tragic villains of early horror.
The term "negative superman" has the ringing tone of film theory about it, but I haven’t been very successful tracking it down.

Still, it’s a compelling idea—the negative superman. The ubermensch evil one? The archvillain? I think what is perhaps most interesting about the character is the idea that these actors—aging, fallible typecast actors—play these larger than life mustache/cape twirlers.

I suppose for me this idea presents as a duality, a diptych. On one hand, the superhuman, the epic villain—and I suppose I would depart from a Milton-esque Satanic monologue here and maybe list or catalogue actions/narrative. (Maybe I think that’s what makes a villain.) A suggestion for this part: I just began reading an article from Comparative Literature entitled "Negative Comparison in the Literary Narrative Epic" and I see the negative simile, which poets will be familiar with as "describe what is by what it is not" or "what it does by what it does not" as being very potentially helpful here in describing the negative superhero. The formula sets up like this, x is not a, nor b, nor c, x is d.

And then in the second section, you pull back the Wizard of Oz's curtain. No longer a giant floating head, smoke, and thunder, a small, ordinary person is revealed. A person struggling, in the way that Mary Shelley understood: “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for the happiness, the good he seeks.”

For me, I see this second section something like the movie Ed Wood, where Bela Lugosi becomes a figure of pathos.

The Imaginary Poet

2008-10-01T13:49:00.000-07:00

Often in lyric poetry we get wrapped up in ourselves--what is true to us. I think it is much more interesting to lie outrageously.

Check out this issue of Blackbird online. It has a feature, "Tracking the Muse," with commentary by various poets about their process. Here's a link to Jehanne Dubrow's "Notes Toward a Nonexistent Poet." http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v7n1/features/muse/dubrow_j.htm

It is great. She starts off suggesting you lie a little bit about yourself, making up an experience you never had, like a childhood overseas. But she progresses toward creating a whole fictional poet and writing poems for her. While the amount of research needed for a whole book of works by a fictional poet might be a little more than a Wednesday afternoon will permit, you could pick a person you know and write a poem as them, or as a famous person, or as a made-up person.

My poet is Sara Johnston. She's from North Carolina, daughter of an Airforce captain, and her family lived in Germany from when she was eight to eleven. She recently was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma.

Netflix and the Poet's Workbook

2008-09-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Most poets I know keep a notebook, or should, for those moments when an idea comes to them, a phrase occurs, an image strikes and moves them. Often it is only when the poet is stuck trying to write a poem that they will go back to this notebook and do anything with the images and words trapped there.

These images and phrases are like the obscure documentaries, the classic movies, the less popular mid-eighties movies, maybe even the made-for TV miniseries or Christmas specials of the video rental store that is a poet's brain.

Enter Netflix. I urge you to pull out your notebook(s), or if you don't have one, to take a legal pad and jot things down on it over the course of the week. You can, if you wish, arrange or number items on your list in the order you would like to get them first. Then spend a stanza on each one. Each time you finish a stanza, imagine sliding the image back in its dirty paper sleeve, into its previously-used red envelope, mailing it off, and getting the new one in the mail.

Like your Netflix list, I imagine the poem will be pretty cohesive after looking at it for a little while.

Something to complicate this poem: I share my Netflix with my husband. The conflict! If you have a friend who's willing to let you have some of her poetry jottings, write your lists and then mix them up. Argue over whose image gets to come first, then second, et cetera. Something like, "your peeled orange is so lame. I did that in third grade. I want to see my broke-down Ford first." And then you both go home and see what you come up with.

Illustration by Mahendra Singh.

Thanks Poetry Foundation, for keeping it cool. For a feature on poet's notebooks: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/feature.html?id=181655

I Too Have Danced On Blades: Shamanism and Stilettos

2008-09-24T10:02:00.000-07:00

Alberto Rios teaches a Magical Realism class at ASU where the capstone of the class is to make a magical realist object. An example one of my classmates made was a bread noose. Tasty. Mine was a lame "Hairbrush," with hair where the brush should be. (For more on magical realism, Tito built a website with neat facts: http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/magicalrealism/)

What I’ve realized recently is that many objects hold a magical realist text within their name. I was thinking about the stiletto shoe, which compares the traditional, thin steel heel of the shoe with a thin knife of the same name. It made me think how many objects, particularly clothing objects, bear names that keep them only a step away from being absurd: the Peter Pan collar, the bell sleeve, the pencil skirt. The interesting thing about these pieces of clothing is that they get their name from a strong resemblance to the absurd objects their name implies—these are absurd objects realized and normalized in the daily world.

You can take that for face value, but a human mind has already done most of the poetic work for you in creating a dynamic metaphor—a metaphor so dynamic, in fact, that it established a reality for itself in the text of the clothing. For a pretty interesting poem, the only thing a bell sleeve or a stiletto shoe needs is to be estranged from its normalized context so that it becomes obvious how strange it is that women walk around on dull knives with tiny plastic tips glued on the ends. What symbolic paydirt could this relatively pat realization hide? More than the often noted fact that some men tie a noose around their necks every morning.

When I was thinking about the stiletto shoe, it hit me that I have actually seen women dance up on blades (in a video, no, not Beyonce). Korean shamanism is almost exclusively the realm of women, and I had watched a video about a young shamaness going through her (failed) induction ceremony. In this ceremony, an offering of meat on a balancing tripod is made to the gods, who consent to descend into the shamaness. She assumes the particular god’s costume from a box she carries around with her, jumps on top of a pair of blades mounted on a platform, and continues to jump and dance on the blades as she delivers a speech from the divinity. The shamaness in the video is a chicken, however, and no amount of prompting from the woman who is inducting her can get her to jump and dance on the rusty looking blades.

My poem is about my steel-heeled Guess stilettos. What you might find revelatory in pencils, bells, or Peter Pan is yours.

A Girl at My High School Was an Extra on Saved by the Bell

2008-09-12T17:36:00.000-07:00

Or could have been. This poem idea comes from my husband Tony, who is apparently very interested in the stories of nameless or less popular characters who live in a world run by and interested only in an elite few. Like the crew from Saved by the Bell.

As for credit for this photo, and to get any other info, it seems like pretty much anything you'd want to know about this sitcom can be found at http://www.movieprop.com/tvandmovie/savedbythebell/

So Tony's idea is, what do all these students and nameless teachers who go to or teach at this big high school think about the fact that every major club or event, from glee club to Prom, is dominated by this small group of kids?

He also thinks that a poem about what people do after they go home from a TV show like Law and Order or what undeveloped characters from the Newhart Show do offscreen, or what those guys in the back of the command room in NASA documentaries think.

Sarah Palin, Impregnated by the Spirit of Jack London, Gives Birth to a Strange New Pantheon

2008-09-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

Politics, Collage and Poetry

I'd like to thank Aimee of Vint Condition http://www.vintcondition.blogspot.com/ fame for introducing me to Polyvore. http://www.polyvore.com/ I realize this is an ugly collage, so I'll make this post as untechnical as possible.

Politics is like a collage. Poetry is like a collage. Political poetry is often not, but is more like the rantings of insane or crotchety or both older person on a street corner who smells bad. The idea behind this poem prompt is that you would pick something from the headlines that you might like to blog about, but that you think might be a very poor poem. Perhaps you have tried to write this poem, like my attempt at "Felix Pie's Twisted Testicle." Maybe you failed miserably.

Polyvore is a neat little internet photo collecting and editing doo-dad that allows you to trawl the web, pick images revolving around your headline and compile them in a collage. You can add fashionable accessories if you wish.

My suggestion is to add a ridiculous title, then not to talk about the inciting topic. For instance, the poem would have guns, bears, wolves, Alaska, the city of Bristol, a pipe or piper figure, some weeping trees, an Olympic track runner and trigonometry. I would not mention Sarah Palin, yet the entire poem would let you know exactly how I feel about her.

If you're less technically savvy, you could skip the Polyvore feature. But it's fun.

Seagull: Symbolic Objects at Rest

2008-09-05T07:22:00.000-07:00

Harnessing the Power of Symbolic Objects for Good

Some things I love about this photo:

1. Color
2. Allegorical Content
3. Center of Focus

Here is a palette of colors: aqua, deep cadet, dove gray, spackle white, matte steel, and yellow. Everything is cool, working toward a cohesive tone. It all belongs to the same landscape, a particular mood.

In this one image we have a seagull, an anchor, a boat, and the sea. All of these are literal things that are found in each other’s company, but they are all also supercharged with meaning when taken out of their ordinary context and say, for example, dropped into a Biblical quote or a Victorian morality story. What I love about this collection of symbols is that they act as themselves rather than the things they stand in for, so the immediate response is to the thing itself.

The center of focus on this photo is interesting—it works in some ways like a triptych. The seagull immediately gets attention, having the most animation, but the anchor is in the center of the photo. Behind the dull-colored anchor, the white muck that covers the boat is scraped away from a bright blue docking post.

My idea from this photo is a triptych, or a poem with three strong central images. I’d like to take a symbol, take it back to its literal object-ness, and surround it with two other objects from a scene that makes sense to its thing-ness. I think I’d put the weightiest symbolic thing in the middle, something alive in the first stanza, and a brilliant piece of landscape behind it. I’d be sure to fill in with details like texture (mud, grain, screen, dirt-spatter, nubble) and color.

Maybe I would suggest movement in the past, or movement about to happen, and name the poem “Still Life of a _____”

My example would be a wedding ring, a kitchen sink, and an insect on the window—maybe a grasshopper, a moth, or right now in Georgia, a pair of love bugs (which look a lot like two stink bugs doing it). Depending on which insect I gravitated toward, it would be a different poem. Right now I'm thinking, "Still Life of a Carpet Moth."

Thanks to Stock Xchange for the photo:http://www.sxc.hu/photo/602368

Creating Simulated Poems Using High Heat

2008-09-03T08:06:00.000-07:00

Verneuil Process

A fairly technical procedure for making gems, the verneuil process involves grinding up the raw material, superheating it, and dripping it onto an “earthen support rod.” The end result of the process is a “boule” at the tip of all the accumulated melted matter that crystallizes into the manmade ruby/whatever, which is broken off the support rod and sinter cone to be faceted and sold.

For more information on this process, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verneuil_process

Applying a similar process to create a poem is not new. Many poets suggest taking a favorite line of poetry, writing a poem using the “stolen” line as a first line, and then knocking the line off the finished poem. I was once in a workshop with C.D. Wright where she changed this up a little bit by taking a line at random out of a novel.

My thought is that the “support rod” for a poem doesn’t need to be literary. A line of directions, journalism, one stolen from a sibling’s diary or the letter of a famous person, or for that matter off the back of a cereal box might all work.

My suggestion for today: “The cartoonist beloved by GIs and regular guys”

Transletics: Translational Poetics

2008-09-03T08:01:00.000-07:00

It’s not at all a new idea to suggest that poetry takes inspiration from other art forms, the sciences, or the natural world. What I’m interested in here is the shape, the form, the organic theory of poetry and how different models of creation or elements of design from other disciplines: architecture, painting, astronomy, might be useful for creating new poems.

Thanks again Stock Xchange :)