Medusa's Head

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...

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 ...

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 w...

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.

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...

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 h...

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 th...