A few quotes + links (please click through!) from the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, plus occasional other poetry bloggers in my feed reader. If you’ve missed earlier editions of the digest, here’s the archive.
This week saw some interesting and off-beat takes on blogging, journaling, and other regular creative exercises, poetry magazines and submitting work, and a wide variety of other topics, some influenced by a sense of increasing gloom, whether literal or figurative.
–I went to early voting yesterday. The lines were the longest I’ve ever stood in for a non-Presidential year election–a wide diversity of people all patiently waiting and chatting. It made me feel weepy with hope–a great feeling these days! Everyone was civil and patient. I loved all the children emerging from the voting area with “I Voted Early” stickers all over their clothes and faces. One woman who works in the Danish bakery in downtown Hollywood brought 2 boxes of pastries for the workers.
–Voting makes me realize how much I love this giant experiment of a country. Our democracy doesn’t seem fragile when I stand in line with my fellow citizens, all of us sweating in the sun that’s still intense in November in South Florida. I stood in line with such a variety of people. This country is so huge, both in terms of land mass, beliefs, and types of humans–it’s hard to believe that we could go the way of Germany in the 1930’s or the former Yugoslavia of the 1990’s.
–Before we went to vote, we spent the evening reading the ballot, researching the various ammendments. I made a joke about our romantic evening at home, doing political research, but I was partly serious. It was a pleasant way to spend an evening, but we are odd that way as a liberal artsy couple. We often we have similar evenings at home, at least several nights a week, talking about a variety of philosophical issues.
–After a time of not writing much poetry, I wrote 4 poems this week, and one of them came out fully formed. I went to observe the Chemistry teacher yesterday, on the Feast of All Souls. I came away with a poem about rust’s slow will to conquer an oxidized nail–rust and oxidation and EMS compressions and people writing dissertations in geologic time and a dose of a feast day–I’m pleased with that poem. I am less pleased with my poem about early voting, but it has potential. I also wrote a poem rooted in home repairs, and a Halloween poem. It’s been a long, long time since I wrote 4 poems in one week.
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Nuggets of Happiness in a Gloomy Time
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Writing is one of the fundamental ways I experience and explore the world, both the external world and my own internal world. I think it was EM Forster who wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Blogging as I’ve come to understand it is living one’s life in the open, with spiritual authenticity and intellectual curiosity, ideally in conversation or relationship with others who are doing the same.
Rachel Barenblat, Excerpts from a continuing conversation
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I’ve noticed — maybe you’ve noticed, if you pay attention to when these posts come out — that I’m on more of a biweekly schedule with the blog of late. It’s not a bad thing, really. I am often negligent in posting to the blog because on Friday mornings, when I would usually write a blog post, I’m busy still working on the poem, and when 9:30 rolls around I switch to the Long Form Friday mode, and work on, well, long-form projects.
The poems are turning into a kind of long form project themselves, developing into what is undoubtedly a manuscript — but I’m nervous about assigning anything formal to what I’m working on. Lately, I’ve slowed down in the poem-generation, compared to my pace in August and September. Part of this is because I see a kind of narrative emerging, and that narrative dictates certain kinds of poems that must be written; and this is kind of unfortunate, because I don’t want anything to dictate any direction at this point. I like — I’ve been thoroughly enjoying, reveling in — the play, the fun of creating poems without any kind of pressure. I want to move back into that space instead of being further locked into a narrative. I don’t really know if I can do that at this point . . . but we’ll see. This upcoming week, that’s my goal. Play more, write more, worry about the big picture less.
Sarah Kain Gutowski, Blogging, Poems, Podcasts, & Homecoming
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I began posting a monthly count of my submissions, rejections, and acceptances. Each time I made one of those posts, several people expressed gratitude and encouraged me to continue submitting. At local literary events, people would thank me for my posts. They told me that my posts had encouraged them to send out their own submissions, and decreased their fear of rejection. I felt less and less like I was in competition with other poets. Instead, I felt like I was in competition with myself, and in a community with other poets. This change in outlook helped me to keep producing new poems, and to continue sending out submissions.
After a couple of these monthly posts, people started asking me how I was able to keep so many submissions in circulation at once, and how I kept track of open reading periods. […] So, in the interest of helping the people in my poetry community, I built a simple little WordPress website, and opened access to my submissions calendar. There are now a couple hundred reading periods listed on the calendar, and it has helped many of my friends and acquaintances (and people I don’t even know) submit to journals without as much of a time commitment.
Being open about my failures, and encouraging others to submit their work, has made really positive impact on my writing life. I still get jealous of others’ success occasionally, and I still suffer from imposter syndrome some of the time, but not nearly as often. I no longer worry about competing with other poets. I can genuinely encourage people to submit, and I can enthusiastically promote the work of my poet friends and acquaintances. Most importantly, I no longer see rejection and acceptance as accurate measures of the value of my work, and I don’t feel like there’s any chance I might give up on writing poetry, regardless of whether or not I’m well published.
“Overcoming the Competition” + submissions calendar! – guest blog post by Derek Annis (Trish Hopkinson’s blog)
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I am starting to break up with my crushes. Those literary magazines and presses I have sent my work to over and over for the past ten years to a uniform response of “no.” They’re just not that into me.
I see work in them that is not dissimilar in aesthetic from mine, so it hasn’t been a totally unreasonable reach. But these presses and mags are at least 8s on the hotness scale. So competition is tough. I’m just not catching their eye.
A few of them have occasionally given me a wink and nod, in the form of a “not quite right for us but please think of us again” kind of thing. But nothing ever came of it.
Of course I think it’s me, some days. (You may know the I-suck litany. Perhaps also the they-suck tirade. Perhaps you too have surmised that there’s an autoreply programmed for any and all submissions from people with your exact name.)
But really, as with all of life, submission is a crap shoot, only slightly gamed by carefully targeting your submissions. For all these years, I’ve hung my chances on the old coin-toss fact that with every submission to my dreamboat press/magazine, there’s a 50/50 chance of a yes. But after so many coin tosses, I think I’ll just pocket the coin.
Catch ya later, losers.
Marilyn McCabe, Don’t Think Twice; or, Shifting My Submission Priorities
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I’ve probably said this before, but it’s impossible to subscribe to all the poetry magazines out there, not only because of the cost, but because you end up not having time to read them. I like to alternate my subscriptions, trying a couple of magazines for a year then switching. Of course, if you get a poem accepted then a contributor’s copy comes your way and that’s a lovely and unique reward.
I make a point of swapping magazines too – I tend to pass mine along to the local poetry group and when they’ve read them, they return them to me and I post them off to a good friend in Gainsborough who sends me her copy of Poetry Review by return. I still end up with too many to read, and too little time to read them in, but I always get through them in the end.
What I like about magazines is that they’re up-to-date. They publish the freshest work. Okay, it’s not always to my taste, and my taste has changed over time, but it’s good to know what’s out there. When I have a poem accepted, it feels like it’s found a home. There’s very little money in it generally, but that, I believe, is a good thing. It puts the work in a different place and gives it a different status. Well, we could have a whole debate about that, couldn’t we? So, I’ll stop for now. However, I urge you to send your work out to these magazines, even if you can’t afford to subscribe to them, because they depend on new submissions and also, by sending them some poems, you’re doing your bit to support them.
Julie Mellor, Ambit
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My mother had a surprise last week. I gather she was knitting whilst listening to the BBC Wales evening news and, at the mention of Swansea University, she looked up and my ugly mug was staring back at her from the TV! How I got in there I don’t know but I hope somebody is going to let me out soon ;)
In The Art of Poetic Volunteering back on October 7th, I mentioned that I was intending to attend (that’s a nice phrase innit!) a seminar by poet and playwright Patrick Jones. I went with Yang Ming, a fellow MA classmate, and enjoyed hearing about the ways that writing can open up the lives of people living with mental disabilities like dementia.
Curiously enough, as a person who has had high dose chemo and radiotherapy, I know that early onset dementia may be waiting for me somewhere in my timeline and I wrote a poem, The Missing Man, that ponders what sort of man I’ll be if that transpires. I didn’t have my laptop with me so couldn’t use Hazel to read it aloud to the group, but somebody used their phone and pulled it up on the Ink Pantry website and Patrick read it out himself :)
What I had forgotten was that there was somebody filming a part of the seminar.
Giles L. Turnbull, PoeTV
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One Saturday in July I went to B Street Books with the 11-year-old to hear the author John Muir Laws talk about his field guide to Sierra Nevada wildlife and his approach to keeping a nature journal. […]
Laws discussed his approach to nature journaling and how to emulate it. In his view, it’s a way of stimulating your awareness of beauty and wonder — which also helps make the things that you see more memorable. The trick is that your brain gets acclimated to things that it thinks it already knows (oh, another California poppy, or even more impoverished: Oh, another orange flower) so it gets inured to the wonder-filled things happening around it all the time. Laws counters that with a three part approach designed to stimulate awareness, curiosity, and creativity. For each thing you record, note these three things:
Awareness: “I see…”: You notice something, draw a picture of it, make notes about it
Creativity: “It reminds me of…” (or more simply “IRMO”): You consciously seek out analogies to what you’ve seen and make notes about those
Curiosity: “I wonder…”: You ask questions or create hypotheses about what you’ve seen.
As an additional stimulus, Laws suggests making three kinds of notes on every page: drawings, words (descriptions), and numbers (measurements). That helps engage a wider range of your brain’s abilities and contributes to the awakening of awareness, creativity, and curiosity.
Dylan Tweney, Nature Journaling With John Muir Laws
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On a crisp, abundantly clear day (for a change!), I opened the car windows to listen to the corn stalks rattling in the breeze. After an unusually wet year, the fields have been too wet to bring out heavy farm equipment, like gleaners. They would get stuck in mud. So the corn stands and, finally, dries in the rapidly-cooling air.
And rustles and swishes, and produces the susurration associated with tree foliage, only louder, harsher. The November sun heightens the contrast between the grassy-looking stalks and the crowd of shadows below the strap-shaped leaves. Zea mays: one of the incredibly numerous poaceae monocots. Field corn, in this case. It surrounds two sides of the campus where I work. On windy days, I can hear it murmuring. It has a wistful sound to it, each plant crackling softly against its many neighbors.
Ascribing human emotions to non-human things is something poets often do and for which they have been occasionally excoriated (see the pathetic fallacy). It is really I, not the field corn, who’s feeling wistful. There’s no reason not to occasionally explore things such as the pathetic fallacy, anthropomorphism, or clichés in poems, though. Poems can be places for play, puns, irony, and over-the-top expressiveness…where else but in art do we have so much possibility for free rein and experiment?
Ann E. Michael, Murmurings
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Under the skin another skin,
and another and another.
The day we disappeared
was a spring day in autumn,
each fallen leaf had touched that skin,
briefly, first and last.
Magda Kapa, Autumnal
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What I like so much about this poem is its clear-eyed objectivity. It could so easily have been sentimental. Instead it’s close to heart-breaking. I love the way the anxieties of adults and small children are equally weighted, as are their disappointments, and the guilt of parents for which there is no atonement, and for which nothing can be done. Everything is managed through images that are utterly memorable and true….the way the parents make a mantra for the child that’s replaced by the mantra of ‘too little’ , like a radio breaking bad news every hour on the hour; the ice cream
which you wore / like a glove as it melted over your hand,
the clouds falling apart and mending, as reflections do, quite indifferent. I can imagine this poem being endlessly anthologised. I think it should be. Tom Weir’s poetry will do that to you, catch you aslant, unawares, tip you into a world where things like love and joy and security are fragile at best, where we are vulnerable. He makes me think of Larkin’s line that ‘what will survive of us is love’, although Tom Weir’s poetry is more unequivocal than Larkin’s on that. Every time I read it I see that quality of Tom’s poetry, the way you see a scene through a glass that suddenly shifts or cracks and refracts the significance of the moment into a different dimension that memorises itself as you hear it.
John Foggin, Normal service resumed: a polished gem revisited – Tom Weir
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This week I had an opportunity to audit a Masters class taught by Laura Kasischke at UMKC and the next night attend a reading followed by an interview with her for New Letters on the Air.
I first met Laura 12 years ago at a reading here in Kansas City. She captivated my attention with her book Gardening in the Dark, a book I would read and reread for inspiration from time to time when I felt stalled in my creativity.
What I liked about her poetry was the way she made me believe in the magic that can be found in poetry when the poet is so inclined to treat you to writing with twists and turns and language that will not stand still. There is a tactile quality to a lot of her work. It doesn’t just lay on the page.
Michael Allyn Wells, Laura Kasischke Returns after 12 years
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Softly we un-borrow the ivory shells,
learn to lean towards ourselves
Identity shifting in sand
Now it’s daily weather, with dunes
drifting at different levels
Every morning if the sun burns my skin
Would you call my name?
[…]
The poem, “Decolonisation,” was initially a series of separate lines, written at different times over four years – as thoughts from conversations with different people then and now. I placed them together to see how they felt. The result left me feeling satisfyingly unresolved. Like when you finish reading a good book or run a mile thinking by yourself. I’m addressing many themes in this poem – decolonisation, obviously, but also what it means to live and work in Dubai, the tropes people associate with this place and my tropes within it.
Grit & Decolonisation / an interview with poet Moylin Yuan (Bekah Steimel’s blog)
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the devil had none of me
nor the family swallowed limb
by limb
I could not suckle their blood
from my fingertips
feet, small clubs dragged
moaning across termite infested floors
I was not full of haunt […]
Jennifer E. Hudgens, NaNoWriMo #3 {Promises, Promises}
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When I live in cities, I walk in graves: unharassed, invisible, the dead and their trees welcome me.
Always with trees, the dead. Beech, Japanese Maple, Gingko, Maple, Oak: I missed fall this year, mainly, the time of year that makes me most alive.
This one spent fighting death again, in all its forms: a tiresome story now, so tired. The dead nod, whisper: we’re sick of it, too, they say, but look at the gold, the red, the green going ash but first to fire, to life’s final burst of bright, sharp joy.
Deep, the blue of sky right before winter. Shallow, the slanted light.
Memorials. Gates.
It’s always the cemeteries that offer peace and some reminder of wild in concrete cold.
JJS, November 4, 2018: leaves</cite>
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I’m a pretty busy person. Despite my teaching schedule this quarter, I’ve managed to get away for poetry weekends and readings. I’ve met friends for coffee or lunch (if they could drive to Everett!). But there’s something about my mother’s final days, about her death, about her burial and her memorial that has made me I feel as though I’m driving through a long tunnel. I’m aware that there’s a world “out there,” and yet to get through these days and weeks I’ve had to focus on staying in my lane and moving forward. There’s light, somewhere up ahead, but no scenery or detours or flashy billboards to entertain or distract me.
This morning (Friday, when I drafted this) I have been reading some poems — getting ready to do a Veteran’s Day poetry unit for my daughter’s fifth grade class — and this poem by D. H. Lawrence twice crossed my path. I think there’s a message for me here, but I’m not quite sure what it is.
The White Horse
The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent they are in another world.
–D. H. Lawrence
What we know about tunnels is that they feel dark and endless, but they do end. Tunnels are thresholds. They lead us to what comes next.
Bethany Reid, Where am I? What is this place?
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Generally I am an impatient person – you may have noticed that tone in some of my blog posts. I’m in a hurry to get my next book published, for researchers to find a cure for MS, for a better government in America (and elsewhere – whew, a LOT of fascism is happening around the world right now – feeling very pre-WW-II-y out there). But I was just musing on the benefits, sometimes, of waiting. The autumn months, which involve more hibernation and inevitable postponements due to colds and flus and bad weather. Sometimes waiting means you are able to gather more information – like getting a second opinion before starting a drastic chemo med, for instance, or maybe getting a rejection from one press means you end up discovering a new and different press that might be a better fit for your book. Even waiting for the lights to come back on, like we had to a couple of nights ago, can be seen as an opportunity to spend time being quiet and not being so goal-oriented.
I feel like I don’t talk about the benefits of holding off on things here most of the time – because of my health issues, I’m probably more keenly aware that mortality means we don’t have limitless time, so I’m mostly a hurry-up-get-it-done girl. But faster isn’t always better. Your first solution may not be the best one. And taking it slow can mean the difference between choosing the right thing and the most expedient.
One thing Murakami isn’t wrong about – sometimes spending time alone (in an isolated cabin in the mountains or no) can help us confront issues that have been bothering us, bust through any kind of artistic block, or spend time getting better at anything from perfecting a recipe to a novel. I’m spending time working on my sixth poetry manuscript before I send it out again, catching up on the very tall list of “to-read” books, and reading up on the latest MS research. I may be missing out – I’m frustrated I haven’t been able to take advantage of the many art and poetry events in Seattle recently – but the quiet rain is the best thing for revisions, reading, and, let’s face it, getting some extra sleep to fight off autumn colds and flus.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, What to Read at the End of the World, November Gloom, and the Benefits of Waiting
