Category Archives: publishing poetry

The Basket of Curiosities

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I have trouble getting anything done when there is visible clutter. This morning, the house was overrun with scattered toys, cuttings from various papers, books, and game pieces. So I spent twenty minutes getting everything back to its container and shelf. Unfortunately, there are always items that defy classification, don’t really have a place: kid’s meal toys that must be kept until they are forgotten about (for us, about a week); pieces large or small from games that are temporarily missing; “prizes” obtained from school – like decorative erasers – that must be kept but aren’t useful; bottles of soap bubbles. I guess everyone needs a junk drawer for all these things, so that the house doesn’t resemble the Island of Misfit Toys, and I found a deep basket to accommodate all these random shapes and sizes.

In one’s life, there are many such junk drawers. I have a writing binder – containing failed poems, interesting lines I’ve written but never used and probably won’t, heartening letters from mentors – that although I rarely look at it, would never throw away. The kitchen cabinet with rarely-used appliances reminds me on the bleakest days that I can whip up a Margarita in just moments. These stashes are different from the photo boxes or love letter bundles that are irreplaceable; they contain objects of often irrational desire, rather than things we solidly love or need.  Similarly, I find I get antsy when I don’t have enough incoming randomness in my life, whether it is a new friend, book, or image that pops out from nowhere – a junk drawer of the mind, so to speak.

I love Radmilla Lazic’s poem “Anthropomorphic Wardrobe” (translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic) for its interesting take on the objects in our lives. Here’s an excerpt:

There’s no more room. We are full.
Everything we stored, layer by layer
Folded, packed in as if bandaging wounds…

Forgotten. Taken down in a hurry.
Thrown in the corner: Turned inside out.
What is indispensable and what is less so
Thrown on top of each other.
Once made to measure, then grown short,
Grown too tight, faded or shiny — it’s all here.

Adam’s little broken rib.
The plucked angel’s wing.
Venus’s fur and love-stain.
Rings. Combs. Ghosts. Moths.
No one can find anything here.
Where is it? Turn it upside down! Rummage!
Lost, then found again.
Rejected, then cherished again.
Cobwebs sway. The mouse gnaws.
The butterfly spreads its wings.

Kids at poetry readings

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Last night, I took an enormous leap of faith and took my first grader to her first poetry reading. This particular reading – part of the Iota Reading Series curated by Miles David Moore and hosted by Iota Club & Cafe in Arlington, Virginia – seemed a good fit. I promised her a brownie sundae, and packed a bag of books, paper/crayons, and other items to keep her entertained while I listened. 

Poetry readings can be a wild card: profanity happens, and just about any subject can come up in a poem. When that happened last night (and it was possible to see it coming) I whispered in her ear about what she was writing/drawing/reading to distract her. I suppose at those times we could have taken a bathroom break as well. We hear “adult content” in public places anyway (just take a ride on the Metro to hear plenty of choice words, not redeemed by any possible artistic value). Explanations must be given at some point; she knows that adults sometimes drink different drinks than kids (alcohol, soda with caffeine), and make different choices (in behavior, language), so I felt I could handle whatever questions might emerge.

She loved it, and amazingly, asked when we could go to another one. Part of it was probably the brownie sundae and being out after her usual bedtime, but she also seemed to view other poets as exotic creatures (“Is she a poet? Is he a poet?”) and liked the lit-up stage and the bar stools. She paid more attention to the poetry than I’d anticipated, quoting lines back to me later, and citing particular poems (“I loved the pirate poem where they walked the plank.”). I did miss the usual moments of reflection afterwards; when my mind would normally be buzzing with the energy of the evening, I was bombarded with questions on the way home: “How did they get those lights to work? Can I get some for my room? Can I read up on the stage next time?”

She came out of the reading with a book she had written and illustrated, “Humphrey Saves the Cow,” about a heroic hamster who has to use advanced engineering skills (and tissues, string and rubber bands) to create a parachute for a cow falling from an airplane during a tornado. (Now, there’s a poem.) :)

One of my favorite poems by Sylvia Plath is “Child,” which illustrates the perfect vision that we all begin with:

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose name you meditate –
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

Connections

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As I write this, I’m on hold with a Verizon representative, who has left me on hold for six minutes as he investigates why our internet connection keeps dropping every five minutes. For every minute that goes by without hearing his voice, I know (from prior experience, unfortunately) my chances increase for being hung up on. I’m now up to minute 26 on this call. When will he return?

I participated in a poetry reading on Saturday which – in the way that good readings do – renewed my interest in my own work and in others’, gave me a surge of energy and made me remember why I write poetry even when most of the world gives it a thumbs-down and a broad yawn. Sometimes at a reading, you feel that the writers are connected, that they are all heading for the same place, though stylistically getting there in different vehicles. This was such a reading, when humor, image, feeling came together into a wondrous whole that echoed the newborn spring weather.

One poem that particularly affected me was Michael Gushue’s “Poem Beginning Inappropriately With A Line By Marianne Moore,” which invokes the image of a lava lamp. I still use my lava lamp from college; when I come downstairs in the morning, it’s often the first thing I turn on. I was sick a number of times this winter, and watching the teal globes pinging the glass, and each other, as the bulb heated somehow helped me through the dreary winter days. A reminder of heat, of connection?

Here’s an excerpt from my favorite “lava lamp poem,” from Gushue’s new chapbook, Pachinko Mouth:

…It’s a banana peel
cosmos out there–you can’t controlfreak
how to slip, but, you know, when I fall,

I want to fall for you. Why? Because lava
lamps tell time, and there’s a lot of beauty
in chaos.

… What is it time tells us?
To rise towards each other. If we pull
apart, break up, it’s the heat building
inside. If we hunker down, we’re one.

Asking for what you want: submissions and gender

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My two daughters – let’s call them OD and YD – resemble me in many predictable ways. Seven-year-old OD has hair that relentlessly tangles in the same spot as mine, loves writing and rhyme, and is a tomboy in the best sense of the word. Three-year-old YD has my oversized cheeks, laid-back manner, and love of animals.

But even at their young ages, they exceed me in confidence and general courageous action. OD is a skilled negotiator; when she encounters a “no,” she rephrases the question again and again, looking for any cracks in my argument, and steadily moves toward a settlement. Younger YD hasn’t this skill yet, and relies on the simple “broken record” method of toddlers, which she knows can’t be ignored.

This week, you may have read this article on the male/female ratios of publication for more influential magazines, inspired by the annual VIDA count.  Rob Spillman, the editor of Tin House – one of the few publications that improved its ratio – had this to say about the process of encouraging submissions by women:

“After VIDA’s initial count three years ago,” Spillman said, “you would think others would move toward gender equality, or at least make a gesture toward it. It really isn’t rocket science. For us, the VIDA count was a spur, a call to action. Our staff is 50/50 male-female, and we thought we were gender blind. However, the numbers didn’t bear this out.” So why not?

“We did a thorough analysis of our internal submission numbers and found that the unsolicited numbers are evenly split, while the solicited (agented, previous contributors, etc.) were 67/33 male to female. We found that women contributors and women we rejected with solicitations to resubmit were five times less likely to submit than their male counterparts. So we basically stopped asking men, because we knew they were going to submit anyway, and at the same time made a concerted effort to re-ask women to contribute. We also adjusted our Lost & Found section, which featured short pieces on under-appreciated writers or books. We had been asking 50/50 writers, but the subjects were coming back 80/20 male to female, meaning that both men and women were writing about men versus women writers. We then started asking both male and female writers if there are any women writers they would like to champion. It has been a total editorial team effort, and each editorial meeting we take a look at our upcoming issues to see where we are for balance. Again, these are all simple solutions. What I found interesting was that we had all assumed that we were gender balanced, when in fact we weren’t. Now, with a concerted effort, we know that we are.”

Spillman’s comments were eye-opening to me; I hadn’t thought much about how “submission behaviors” might be different for women and men. But I do fit into the more submissive group that he describes: when rejected once or twice by a publication, I tend to scratch it off my list and move on – something that the men, at least the ones submitting to prestigious Tin House, tend not to do. Even though I know the primary rule of getting published is “Submit, Submit, Submit,” there is still something in me that has trouble trying again after that initial rejection.

It appears I need to take a page from my daughters’ playbooks: ask, and ask, and ask again. The fourth section of Denise Levertov’s “Matins” reminds us of the importance of “following through:”

iv.

A shadow painted where
yes, a shadow must fall.
The cow’s breath
not forgotten in the mist, in the
words. Yes,
verisimilitude draws up
heat in us, zest
to follow through,
follow through,
follow
transformations of day
in its turning, in its becoming.

My Favorite Irish Poets

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I won’t be one of the many imbibing on St. Patrick’s Day this Sunday. But as a fan of Irish poetry – at least that written in English – I wanted to share a few of my favorite moments.

Contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland beautifully extracts a place from its political past in “How We Made a New Art on Old Ground.” Here’s an excerpt (full text is here):

A famous battle happened in this valley.
You never understood the nature poem.
Till now. Till this moment—if these statements
seem separate, unrelated, follow this

silence to its edge and you will hear
the history of air: the crispness of a fern
or the upward cut and turn around of
a fieldfare or thrush written on it.

The other history is silent: The estuary
is over there. The issue was decided here:
Two kings prepared to give no quarter.
Then one king and one dead tradition.

________________________________________

I try the word distance and it fills with
sycamores, a summer’s worth of pollen
And as I write valley straw, metal
blood, oaths, armour are unwritten.

…what we see
is what the poem says:
evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows—

and whin bushes and a change of weather
about to change them all: what we see is how
the place and the torment of the place are
for this moment free of one another.

 

In “The Cave Painters,” contemporary poet Eamon Grennan describes the light we find in an art composed in darkness. The full text is here, but here’s an excerpt:

They’ve left the world of weather and panic
behind them and gone on in, drawing the dark
in their wake, pushing as one pulse
to the core of stone. The pigments mixed in big shells
are crushed ore, petals and pollens, berries
and the binding juices oozed
out of chosen barks.

___________________________________________

We’ll never know if they worked in silence
like people praying—the way our monks
illuminated their own dark ages
in cross-hatched rocky cloisters,
where they contrived a binding
labyrinth of lit affinities
to spell out in nature’s lace and fable
their mindful, blinding sixth sense
of a god of shadows—or whether (like birds
tracing their great bloodlines over the globe)
they kept a constant gossip up
of praise, encouragement, complaint.

It doesn’t matter: we know
they went with guttering rushlight
into the dark; came to terms
with the given world; must have had
—as their hands moved steadily
by spiderlight—one desire
we’d recognise: they would—before going on
beyond this border zone, this nowhere
that is now here—leave something
upright and bright behind them in the dark.

 

The last two stanzas of Yeats’ “Among School Children” remind us that our labors – how we “blossom” and “dance” – are gifts we bring to the world, imbued with their own mystery. (The full text is here.)

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts — O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise —
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

VIII
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

 

And finally, Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney finds his path in “Digging:”

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

 

Update, 3/15/2013: After I posted the above, many of my well-read Facebook friends chimed in with additional recommendations of Irish poets. Just click on these links for beautiful work by Paul Durcan, Dennis O’Driscoll, Ciaran Carson, and Richard Murphy. Plus, a great selection from the Poetry Foundation. Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

A season of waiting

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This winter, most of my quests for excitement have collided with a paralyzed will, or body. Yesterday, my mom offered to babysit the girls so Jeff and I could enjoy a kid-free outing. Jeff now has the cold I had a week ago (and older daughter (‘OD’) had a week before that), so we decided to do something that required little walking – a movie and dinner. But upon arriving at our favorite second-run theatre to see “Skyfall,” we learned that we had gotten the show time wrong, so ended up talking in the car for two hours, heading to the grocery store for cough drops and ibuprofen, then getting dinner at one of President Obama’s favorite hamburger spots, Ray’s Hell Burger.

I later realized that this was a perfect afternoon because in everyday life, I rarely get to talk. Both kids talk constantly; they’re full of rhymes, songs, potential projects and fresh observations. They are the texting keyboard to my sticky-keyed manual typewriter. (Knowing that this is temporary and that all too soon they will be shadows passing silently in the hallway, the language stays inside, or hides in my bedside notebook.)

Even as my body begs for more sunlight, I don’t want to let the winter go until we have a good snowstorm, at least enough snow to operate our sled and build a snowman. We may get it on Tuesday night, it seems. Fingers crossed for ending winter with a bang. :)

This time of year, I love Stephen Spender’s poem “Polar Exploration,” for its sense of suspended animation:

With faces swung to their prodigious North
Like compass needles. As clerks in whited banks
Leave bird-claw pen-prints columned on white paper,
On snow we added footprints,
Extensive whiteness drowned
All sense of space. We tramped through
Static, glaring days, Time’s suspended blank.
_______________________________________

I cannot sleep. At night I watch
A clear voice speak with words like drawing.
Its questions are clear rifts:–Was
Ice, our rage, transformed? The raw, the motionless
Skies, were these the Spirit’s hunger?

My top five anti-love poems

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After last week’s Valentine’s Day love poem offerings (which you can read here), I thought a look at the flip-side was in order. So let’s get a little Alanis Morissette for a moment, and look at how some of the masters have handled the uglier moments. Because we’ve all been there. :)

1) Afraid to make a move: T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“

I first read this during my sophomore year of high school, when pretty much all thinking teenagers are in this paralyzed state. Here’s an excerpt:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

2) Mystified by love: Gavin Ewart, “Ella Mi Fu Rapita”

I love the last line of this poem, excerpted here:

And what can the lover do, when the time’s come,
when THE END goes up on the screen? …
Get friendly with men in bars, telling
how sweet she was, praising her statistics,
or admiring his own sexual ballistics?

No, that’s no good. Love lasts – or doesn’t last.
…Lovers must never crumple up like cissies
or break down or cry about their wrongs.
If girls are sugar, God holds the sugar tongs.

3) Unrequited love: Elizabeth Bishop, “Insomnia”

I love this excerpt, which describes the magical powers we’ve all longed for:

So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

4) Angry love: Margaret Atwood, “You fit into me”

This poem manages to capture all the intensity and anger of love gone wrong, in only four lines:

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

5) Jilted love: Louise Gluck, “Hesitate to Call”

(No commentary needed here.) :)

Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
Like netted fish inside me.
…Done?
It lives in me.
You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don’t.

The Harvest

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Yesterday we went apple-picking in the Virginia countryside, bringing home 16 pounds (!) of apples. Looking for recipes…

I’ve been reading Little House in the Big Woods to my daughter, and l love the details of the family’s preparation for the winter: stocking the cellar with home-grown root vegetables; hanging smoked, wild game meat from pegs in the attic; harvesting hay for the horses; and making cheese, bread, and butter from scratch. When my daughter asks if we can do the same – prepare all our food this way – I tell her that it would take us all day through the fall to stock enough food for winter if, like the Ingalls family, we had no stores or other resources to rely upon. So harvesting was serious business; it meant survival through the long, harsh Wisconsin winter.

The harvest is a common theme in poetry. I first think of Anne Sexton’s provocative love poem “Us,” which concludes:

and we rose up like wheat,
acre after acre of gold,
and we harvested,
we harvested.

And I love the first stanza of Seamus Heaney’s “The Harvest Bow,” a reflection on Heaney’s father and the work of his hands:

As you plaited the harvest bow 
You implicated the mellowed silence in you 
In wheat that does not rust 
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist 
Into a knowable corona, 
A throwaway love-knot of straw. 

A true California poet, Robert Hass works harvesting – whether catching a fish, baking a loaf of bread, picking vegetables, or raising children –  into his poetry in subtle ways:

How often we overslept
those grey enormous mornings
in the first year of marriage
and found that rain and wind
had scattered palm nuts,
palm leaves, and sweet rotting crabapples
across our wildered lawn.

By spring your belly was immense
and your coloring a high rosy almond.

--from “Adhesive: For Earlene”

In the summer
peaches the color of sunrise

In the fall
plums the color of dusk

–from “The Beginning of September”

This is what I have
to give you, child, stories,
songs, loquat seeds,

curiously shaped; they
are the frailest stay
against our fears…

–from “Songs to Survive the Summer”

Fall for the Book lineup: Danielle Cadena Deulen’s “Lovely Asunder”

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This week, I’m talking about some of the poets who will be reading in next week’s DC-area literary festival, Fall for the Book. (You can find the schedule here.)

I’ve been reading Danielle Cadena Deulen’s Lovely Asunder, which was the 2011 winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize.  Deulen’s graceful lyric voice draws us into these poems with gentle, but persistent, pressure.  Like Louise Gluck, one of the poets she thanks on the book’s Acknowledgements page, her carefully wrought language conceals a sharp edge, particularly when pertaining to romantic relationships. Though Duelen delves into many subjects, she writes most compellingly about the tug between desire and holding back, which seems to be the central conflict of the book.

Her poem “Written in Skin” expresses the simultaneous desire to be marked by another, and yet also to rid oneself of that marking:

Now that my first lover is a boy whose name
even he forgets, whose face is
a cloud, whose body has evaporated over the frozen
earth like the breaths of strangers. Now that I know everything
permanent fades from the body…Now that the shape of those years
rises from the horizon.

–from “Written in Skin”

 

Many of the poems, like Gluck’s edgy earlier work, enact the intensity and ambivalence of these relationships. Here are a few of my favorite moments from Lovely Asunder:

We could rendezvous like children in a place
we build ourselves, make a roof from branches,
bittersweet and eyebright, choose whose body
will be the structural beams, whose body will be
the windows, doors. If we are the house, who will
live in us? No time for rational thoughts, my
Skeleton Key, just hold me in your arms like
a pinata broke open. Why does this distance always
feel violent, you said…

–from “Lost Letter II”

Between houses there are trees with mangoes heavy as moons,
and beneath the trees there are lovers. At least,
I call them lovers. I don’t know what they call themselves.

–from “Morro De Sao Paulo”

Perhaps you think
I’m exaggerating. But consider that poor, docile girl,
pulled from Adam’s own rib to replace me -
She tried to leave, too. You’ve heard
what they say about her.

–from “First Wife”

What I loved of you
is plagued by wanting-desire
like a lesion of the mind.

–from “Overripe”