Yearly Archives: 2020

85 posts

About That Darkness Before Dawn…

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Maybe I like the poem because it’s not everything-is-beautiful á la William Wordsworth. Maybe I like it because everything was decidedly not beautiful when it first appeared in Poetry magazine during 2020, the Year of Covid and Trump’s lack of leadership under pressure (not that you need to apply pressure to see his tremendous lackings).

In that sense, poet Maggie Smith has it right. She pulls no punches. She acknowledges no sacred cows. Hell, she’s even willing to step into the ring against light. That’s like taking on family, bluebirds, and apple pie all at once.

But, hey. Someone has to write these counter-poems. Dark will have its day (and I don’t mean the night) and, in fact, is having its day in world events right now. Behold:

 

How Dark the Beginning
Maggie Smith

All we ever talk of is light—
let there be light, there was light then,

good light—but what I consider
dawn is darker than all that.

So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize

as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break

over us—as if light were protective,
as if no hearts were flayed,

no bodies broken on a day
like today. In any film,

the sunrise tells us everything
will be all right. Danger wouldn’t

dare show up now, dragging
its shadow across the screen.

We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf

of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark

the beginning of a day is.

 

I guess the poem’s value depends on the lens you view it through. I have no idea if Smith meant this literally and literally only, but many readers (including this one) can see light vs. dark in a figurative sense as well.

Thus, one of my favorite lines from the Bible: “Through a glass darkly.” These days, I see a lot in this world “through a glass darkly” because a lot of things are sinister in a déjà vu, 1930s kind of way.

Of course, you can put your head in the sand and avoid all that, brightening up your own life, but then you stand accused of contributing to the dark forces by removing your own resistance from various causes for good.

For me, then, Smith’s poem speaks to things that have crawled out of dark sewers into the light of day. They are the new normal, and they are decidedly encouraged by each other and by their new freedom to operate in the light of day.

That may be far from Smith’s intent, but the reader-writer compact tells us that both have equal roles, as long as within reason.

Reasonably yours,
Me

Epistolary Poetry: Secrets and Epiphanies

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An old issue of Poetry offers an interesting poem by Jessica Greenbaum, one that holds up to rereading because, well, it requires as much.

It is unusual in a few respects. For one, it is written as an epistolary poem with the salutation, simply enough, as the title. Two, it is one very long sentence, loaded to the gunwales with introductory phrases and clauses, breathless almost. And three, it has a turn and gets somewhere—a conclusion, a change, though the reader has to work to figure out the relationship between the speaker and the titular Charlene. The other challenge is positioning the exact moment in time the poem is written.

Me, I like working for meaning. Simple poems are nice, but sometimes the exercise of rereading (as in Anne Frank’s Diary, which makes a cameo in the poem itself) offers its own rewards. The fifth reading won’t be the same as the first, in other words, and all the introductory clutter will move more smoothly because you, the reader, will become more adept at reading them the way they should be read.

 

Jessica Greenbaum

Charlene,

one night, leaving your son’s makeshift bedroom in the loft
of the barn, in that first house I knew you in,
crunching through January’s snow back into your kitchen,
past dinner’s left-out dessert plates, then past the fireplace whose embers
still chittered like the chatting old sisters on the bus
I had taken here the day before, north, for eleven and a half hours—
a trip during which I sometimes crocheted what became
a rather long scarf for your son—then up the stairs past your bedroom,
to the guest room, up to the gables with its sloped ceiling
where waited the bed’s patchwork quilts, a painted comb, the lamp
you left on for me, and for some reason lost to time
a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl near enough—
maybe on a low bookshelf outside the room?—near enough
for me to choose it, and once under the covers I was awake
from start to finish with Dear Kitty again, with the Epilogue, again,
though I felt I was reading it for the first time, or more like
I was a tree to which a bird returns and this time sees
the branch on which it will make its nest, and so I understood—
because being told of your death I want to parse all I have learned from you—
I understood we were to have some experiences many times in our lives
if we were lucky, but we would live them each time differently,
which seems obvious now, but then I was sixteen and didn’t know,
I didn’t know that each experience wasn’t just the first of identical ones to
come,
like a rack of same dresses, and for that reason I thought
the mother of men I loved would all be like you, and all their sons
as kind as he, and that the journey between barn and house on a winter
night
would always show a spray of constellations that would connect
all I was feeling with the goodness of the earth, also turning.

 

After reading this, you might try writing poem as old-fashioned snail-mail letter yourself. If it is written to a person whose life has made an impact on yours—and if it is driven by the engines of emotion, especially—you might find a poem you can work with.

Dear Reader,

What’s to lose in trying?

Sincerely,
Me

Dear Student, What If You Were the Teacher?

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Dear Student. What if you were the teacher? What if you had to conduct a lesson on this or that challenging poem?

That’s the best advice I can give to students who make the mistake of Googling “[poetry title] analysis” the minute they are assigned a paper. They may as well be typing “[poetry title] think for me because I don’t believe in myself” into the search  bar.

What do you love best, student? Sports? Dance? Karate? Music? Gaming? And how would you go about teaching the basics to someone who was clueless about this pastime you love?

True, you would use your experience, but you would probably want to brush up on things you still DON’T know or certainly could IMPROVE UPON to do it right and to separate yourself from lazier teachers.

News Flash: People who teach for a living are first and foremost students themselves. To teach well, they must first learn all they can (and the well is bottomless, so on and on it goes) about their subject matter. The knowledge they gain makes them sharper, more interesting, and more impassioned about their subject matter.

So, dear student, take a page out of their books. Read that poem over and over. Put it to song if you must. Make sure you know every definition of any word you don’t know, then choose the best fit so there’s complete clarity, at least on the surface level.

Remember, as teacher, you have to know what many others don’t bother to know.

Think this is no fun? Then stop playing victim and handing the remote control to your life into other people’s hands.

Put some intrigue into it! Play detective (or cast yourself in any police drama slash mystery program you love from TV). Come up with solutions and interpretations that satisfy ALL of the evidence in the poem, not just some of it.

Solving something challenging is way more satisfying then figuring out a nursery rhyme, so why surrender at the get-go (a.k.a. “Google”) when you can make this fun?

And then there is pride. Anyone getting up before the class to teach (even if that’s not the case with every poem you read for class) would want to look competent, no? For the same reason you shower, dress properly, brush your teeth and comb your hair before going out in public, yes?

The bottom line is this: Analyzing poetry or any literature takes time. There are no shortcuts. You don’t do free throws in basketball at team practices only. If you want to be good at crunch time—team down by one with two seconds on the clock and the gym filled with screaming fans— you put in time at home.

Believe in yourself, student. Because any teacher worth his or her salt believes in you, too. Just as in every good teacher there is a perpetual student, in every good student there is a perpetual teacher (someone who keeps repeating to self, “What if I were the teacher?”).

That’s the secret to success, and though it may be a reach, it is within—and not beyond—every good student’s reach. Yep. That’s you. Get used to it. Then take some pride in it.

 

Writer / Readers Can Reject Journals, Too

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reject

For writers, rejections sting, but let’s think about it. As readers, writers are in the position to reject as well.

Writers often get rejections from editors that read something like this:”We are sorry we are not accepting your work as it is not a good fit for our journal. This is by no means a judgment of your work, however, and we wish you well in placing it elsewhere.”

We know from research that the reader-writer transaction is an equal one. Readers need writers. Writers need readers.

And so it is that readers who subscribe to journals have an equal right to say goodbye to a subscription—not because the journal’s content is bad or even suspect, but simply because the reader doesn’t feel his or her tastes are a match with the editor’s selections.

That said, there is one way readers and writers are not equal. Readers are not necessarily writers, but writers are necessarily readers. Call them writer / readers, a substantial part of every magazine’s subscription rolls.

To complete the logic, then, writer / readers who subscribe to literary magazines might find themselves not renewing (the equivalent of rejecting) a journal by saying, in so many words, “I am sorry I cannot read your journal any more as much of the work you print is not a good fit with my tastes. This is by no means a judgment of your journal, however, and I wish you well in selling subscriptions to others.”

Of course, editors don’t get that message unless a lot of subscribers sign off. Still, for writer / readers, the message is empowering. Rejection, fairly done, is a two-way street. And just as the sun will rise in the east, there are other literary magazines with editorial decisions more closely aligned with your tastes.

All this came to mind as I decided, after two years, that I don’t really enjoy the poetry journal I’ve been receiving in the mail. Yes, I’ve submitted work to them, but it really made no sense to do so.

After all, if I don’t care for the editorial team’s tastes as a reader, what makes me think they will care for my poetry as a writer?

I know, I know. Writers aren’t the most logical of creatures. They can even get delusional at times. But give us the benefit of the doubt. We’ll think it through and eventually come to our senses—as writers and readers both.

 

Publishing Preference: Online or Print?

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market

When it comes to seeking markets for your work, you can be an omnivore who treats print publications and online ones equally or you can get fussy about your diet. There are advantages to each, of course, but lately I’ve surprised myself by drifting in an unexpected direction. Just don’t call me the publishing version of a militant vegan, is all.

Print journals are classic, traditional, and old-school—three adjectives I rather admire. As a writer, I like the appeal of print much in the same way I like print books in my hands as a reader. Kindles and computer-reading have their places, like on a plane or a trip where carrying books is inconvenient, but me, I like the heft and feel of a genuine book in my palms, not to mention the smell of paper and ink.

For the vast majority of literary journals, payment comes in the form of (wait for it!) the literary journal itself. The routine goes like this: You receive the journal in the mailbox, at first wonder what it is and why it is there, and then recall you “sold” a piece to this magazine a year (give or take) ago. “Payment” has arrived!

Holding your breath, you flip to your work, read it quickly, then read it slowly. The breath bit speaks to your fear that there will be a typo or missing line or mix-up on the bio or, as happened to me once, completely missing bio. (“I’m Nobody. Who are you? Are you Nobody, too?”)

Another unexpected hazard of print journals is the cover. Some covers containing your work are uber cool. You’d be proud to leave it face up on the coffee table, strut like Chanticleer in the barnyard and say, “Yep. That’s me in there.”

Then there are the other covers. These journals typically land face down or, more likely, get shelved such that spines show only. It’s aesthetically best for everyone, you figure.

One fellow published poet confessed to me that she reads her work and her work only whenever she scores a page in a journal. Then she shelves it. Is she alone in this practice? Rhetorical question, many writers would confess (sheepishly).

Finally, though I still send work to print journals, I’ve found a disadvantage I never thought I’d consider a disadvantage—shelf space. As if the hundreds of books that follow me and my credit card like groupies aren’t enough, I’ve seen precious bookshelf real estate used more and more by journals that printed my work.

How often do I reread my work in these poetry journals, you ask? And how often do others pull their spines to read it themselves? Don’t ask.

This is why I have found myself, curiously enough (for me), bending toward online markets of late. They do not take up expensive shelf space, squeezing the gorgeous Penguin paperbacks and New York Review Books (NYRB) that are already bickering for position like grade-school brothers.

Online work often spans into perpetuity, too. That is, if the journal lasts. Many upstarts have a short life and go the way of all fruit flies.

Plus you can easily share your work with people online. No one’s going to order a copy of the journal that printed your work, but most everyone will be willing to follow a link and read it (or at least pretend to).

In some cases, you even get to read your work aloud and include an online recording. That is, if you can stand your recorded voice (and I know many who cannot).

So, yes. The traditional prestige of print is still quite nice, but the convenience of online only has come up on the inside rail of late, making it attractive as well.

And who are we kidding, anyway? Any editor who says, “Yes!” to your work is the editorial equivalent of Maxwell Perkins, be he or she the steward of print or online.

Can we get an “Amen to that!”?

The Pesky Business Side to Writing

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wallet

The trickiest thing about writing for money is the most obvious one: there’s an artistic side and a business side.

What’s tricky about that? Few writers are accomplished at both. Some generate all manner of writing, often very good, but fail because they market themselves poorly or send to the wrong markets.

Then we have writers who are sharp on the marketing strategy, but the goods aren’t high enough in quality for editors to commit.

It used to be that writers had to keep track of expenses like paper, envelopes, and stamps. Remember the SASE? How your own handwriting came back to greet you in the mailbox? Seems forever ago, doesn’t it?

Nowadays, those lacking on the business side have two main issues. First, they do not have the patience to research. On submissions pages of most magazines, editors practically beg writers to first read work they have already accepted, but the anxious writers either give the content a cursory glance or none at all.

The point of this research? For a writer, there are two. First, do you as a writer like the editor’s tastes? Second, do you as a writer feel your work is a good fit with this magazine? Would you be proud to see your words under its banner?

The second fault has a lot to do with Submittable. While the go-between site has become a Godsend of sorts for both journals and writers, it is not without its problems. It is, for instance, so convenient and easy that writers tend to rely on it too much. They over-submit. They submit before their work is fully cooked and ready for serving.

Then there’s the money thing. More and more we see fee-based reading. There are any number of reasons (or excuses, if you are opposed) for these fees, usually averaging $3 per submission.

Still, few writers bother to track these expenses. If they did, it might give them pause. The old-fashioned term “nickel and dime-ing someone” means that what appears small actually becomes large over time.

Would writers, looking at their yearly total in reading fees compared to acceptances, be so bowled over by the lopsided ratio that they might switch their allegiance to no-fee markets only? It depends on the writer and said writer’s wallet, I guess. When Submittable has your credit card or Paypal on file, it’s all-too-easy to click submit and not think twice. It’s the old delusion: If you can’t see it, it’s not happening.

Then we have the siren call of contests. Now we’re talking $20, $30, and $40 a hit. Writers need to ask themselves: “Am I willing to pay this kind of money? Is my work really that polished? Is it truly ready to go up against the incredible competition it is surely about to meet? And do I have honest friends and fellow writers who have read my work and agreed that it is, indeed, equipped to compete against other, very talented writers who have done their homework and put in the time to get their work as ready as it can be?”

Sometimes the money just evaporates because writers are kidding themselves. Granted, a little of that is necessary to win contests—dreaming big, I mean—but how many works go out before they’re ready for prime time? And what would the authors say if they saw the total damages of both reading fees, which bring magazines a profit even after paying Submittable, and contest fees across the span of a year?

That’s all business, which many writers find unpleasant and so adopt the ostrich strategy of heads-in-sand-and-carry-on.

Reconsider that! Work on both your artistic side and your business side this year. They are of equal importance because, frankly, if you want to be paid for your work (and you should be because it is work), then you have to be both diligent and savvy about it. And if you are falling behind in other financial areas of your life while rolling up the submission fees in the artistic aspect of your life, you might need to reconsider your strategy.

There are other options. It does not have to be so expensive over time.

 

Advice From 10 Who Made It to the Promised Land (Read: Publication)

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pw

I there’s one thing people can’t get enough of, it’s chocolate. (Wait. Did I say chocolate? I meant inspiration.) This is why I like Poet & Writers Inspiration issue the most. In the Jan./Feb. 2020 issue, we get surveys of ten poets who scored debut collections in 2019.

These ten are asked the same questions, answered under these categories: “How It Began,” “Inspiration,” “Writer’s Block Remedy,” “Advice,” “Age/Residence,” “Time Spent Writing the Book,” and “Time Spent Finding a Home for It.”

And while there’s a lot of interesting stuff here by people you can’t help but cheer for (they made it!), let’s focus on the advice, shall we? Because if there’s one thing people can’t get enough of, it’s advice. (Um. After they’re inspired and full of chocolate, I mean.)

  • Patty Crane (Bell I Wake To): “Believe in the work, be patient, persist. Quiet all the voices except the inner one. Less is more. If you’re not sure whether the poem belongs in the collection, it probably doesn’t. Make the book the final poem. Submit the manuscript to presses whose publications you love. Keep moving forward, thinking about poems for the next book.”
  • Camonghne Felix (Build Yourself a Boat): “You’ll never get another debut! Your first is your first. Fight for yourself, advocate for your project, and trust your community if they tell you it’s not ready.”
  • Jake Skeets (Eyes Bottle Dark With a Mouthful of Flowers): “Carry your manuscript everywhere with you.”
  • Yanyi (The Year of Blue Water): “I’ve found that it is more important to love your own book than getting it published. I mean the kind of nourishing love you feel when you read the poetry you admire. This is the love that will help you edit it. It will help you advocate for it and send it out again and maybe one day read it over and over as though it is still new to you. Because it should be. Become your own reader and someone else will read it too.”
  • Marwa Helal (Invasive Species): “Take your time—or, I am paraphrasing, ‘Time is your friend,’ which is what my teacher Sigrid Nunez once told me. Trust your path and your work. Talk about it; don’t be shy about sharing your dreams. You never know who is listening or willing to point you to the next step in your path.”
  • Maya C. Popa (American Faith): “Don’t worry about how much or how little you write. It’s judicious to practice some degree of self-discipline, assuming you’re serious about completing a project. But don’t compare your practice with that of others. Trust that as long as you’re paying the right sort of attention to your life and the world, there’s a lot going on in the brain that will allow for writing to happen later on.”
  • Sara Borjas (Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff): Write toward honesty, then really write toward honesty. Stop lying.”
  • Maya Phillips (Erou): “I’d probably say be bold. Experiment with your work, and don’t edit out all the fun and the strangeness and the wonder.”
  • Heidi Andrea Restrepo Rhodes (The Inheritance of Haunting): “Writing an abstract that articulates what the collection is about can help to communicate your work to editors while allowing you to create a map for what else your manuscript is asking to become.”
  • Keith Wilson (Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love): “Being published is a call someone else makes. It’s hard to know what to do to please others, and it’s maybe contrary to the place your poetry comes from. But someone’s first book changed you. Know that there are people waiting for yours.”

Pity-Driven Poetry

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Pity the squid. Or maybe pity the poet who pities, of all things, squids. (If you’re curious, I looked up the plural, which can be either squid OR squids.)

Feeling sorry for cute animals is a well-known human trait. Consider those heartbreaking images of singed koala bears being plucked from danger in the Australian wildfires.

But ugly animals? Not many feel sorrow for distressed snakes or possums or certainly squids.

It’s a tall order, then, for Sandra Cisneros to generate some sympathy for a squid. Is this the task of poetry? To which I can only reply: What other genre, if not poetry? Exhibit A:

 

Fishing Calamari by Moon
for A. Stavrou
Sandra Cisneros

At the bullfights as a child
I always cheered for the bull,
that underdog of underdogs,
destined to lose, and I tell you
this, Andoni, so you’ll understand,

though we are miles from bullrings.
The Greek moon a lovely thing
to look at above our boat.
We are an international crew tonight.
Greek sea, African Queen, you, me.

But I am sad. Probably the only
foolish fisherman to cry
because we’ve caught a calamari.
You didn’t tell me how

their skins turn black
as sorrow. How they suck the air
in dying, a single terrifying cry
terrible as tin.

You will cook it in oil.
You will slice it and serve it
for our lunch tomorrow.
Endaxi—okay.

But tonight my heart
goes out to the survivors,
to the ones who get away.
To all underdogs everywhere,
bravo, Andoni. Olé.

In MFA Programs, “M” is for “Mystery”

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$

MFA: It stands for Mystery For All-time.

Good? Bad? Worth it? Not?

Counting their pennies (or what’s left after countless reading fees and contest submission fees), writers of fiction, essays, poetry, and drama ask these questions.

“I wonder what would happen to my writing career,” they say repeatedly, “if I found, or borrowed, the money to get my MFA in ___________________?”

If success and publication (or publication with greater success) is the dream, you can understand this wondering.

Look at any poetry collection published by a big-time publisher. Check out the acknowledgments page. After the usual thanks to periodicals and e-zines that accepted and published poems in the collection, the poet goes on to thank people.

And oh my, the people! Dozens of people! Many times recognizable-name people!

These are, after a little research, established writers serving as educators in the MFA program the poet was a part of.

Here, then, is a central part of the wonder for would-be big-time writers and poets. Maybe this next thought is sensible and maybe not, but you can’t help but understand when they ask themselves, “Well, shoot. What if I had twenty talented writers reading my work and offering revision ideas? Wouldn’t that make a world of difference? And what if my humble or non-existent connections in the publishing world were enhanced by the connections of all my mentors? Isn’t it who you know?”

Well, yes. It is who you know. And I don’t care whose poetry it is, the quality can’t help but be higher with high-octane readers offering feedback.

So, no brainer. “Mystery For All-time” is worth the money, if your goal is publication with a well-respected publisher. No to buying your own books at discounts. Yes to royalties and reading tours.

Only there’s another voice in the wilderness here. One we cannot ignore. My dad always said that men who play the numbers and announce huge winnings in lotto drawings and on scratch tickets aren’t luckier than you and me.

“You only hear from them when they win,” Dad said. “You never hear about the weeks and months and years worth of money evaporated while feeding their addictions. The sum total of these losings wipe out any big winnings you hear about, rest assured.”

Meaning: For every MFA graduate with the published book and the star-studded acknowledgments page, there may be dozens upon dozens of MFA graduates with nothing to show for the time and money invested in an expensive program. The established writer / educators in these programs couldn’t possibly shepherd everyone in the program to success. Like everything else, it’s a numbers game.

Thus, we can conclude that it is a generalization to say that all MFA writers cash in on their connections and mentors. Like everything else, success stories are probably more exception than rule.

Which brings us full circle. MFA: It stands for Mystery For All-time. And if you think there are easy answers, yes or no, think again. Because, with the help of “who you know,” your talent may blossom to greater heights with the inside track of an MFA program.

Or not.

What We Don’t Know About the Brain Won’t Hurt Us

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brain

On Star Trek, they used to call space the final frontier. Truth is, there are mysterious frontiers closer to home, including the real estate between our ears.

Go ahead. Ask any scientist. How much do we really know about that cauliflower in the skull? Somewhere between “not” and “much,” from what I understand.

I do know that brains are the switchboard for pain. Your body parts don’t experience pain because your brain does it for them. This is why your brain won a service award in 2019.

If you want to play mad scientist by mixing humor and science (too serious for its own good, anyway), you can let words and associations fly and have a good time of it in a poem. Picture a kid, a blank canvas, and six cans of paint. Picture “artist’s block” as a very foreign term.

All you need do? Embed real words from science with lines and stanzas! The contrast of typically formal terms with atypically informal ones will only highlight your goal: make readers laugh.

What might that look like? Ron Koertge is always a reliable go-to guy. Here he explains the brain in a way your brain has never been explained before:

 

Geography of the Forehead
Ron Koertge

Everyone thinks the brain is so complicated,
but let’s look at the facts. The frontal lobe,
for example, is located in the front! And
the temporal lobe is where the clock is.
What could be simpler?

The hippocampal fissure is where big, dumb
thoughts camp, while at the Fissure of Rolando
dark-skinned men with one gold earring lie
around the fire and play guitars.

The superior frontal convolution is where
a lot of really nice houses are set back off
a twisty road, while the inferior frontal
convolution is a kind of trailer park, regularly
leveled by brainstorms.

The area of Broca is pretty much off limits.
And if you know Broca, you know why.

 

This is truly an example of knowing just enough to be dangerous, and damn, if it doesn’t look fun.

So if you’ve been knocking yourself out and feeling pained (it’s coming from the brain, by the way) in your writing efforts of late, maybe you should treat yourself to six paint cans and have some fun—if not with the brain, with something else. The humerus in your arm, maybe.