New poem who dis?

I don't think I'm alone in saying that poets are often the most in love with their current work. At least that's the case with my poetry. I love my new poems so much that I leave them in the safety of file folders on my computer and do not even contemplate reading them at events or even sending them out until I have an urgent reason to do so. It's like my elementary school sticker collection. I wanted to protect the stickers, to keep them safe by not letting anyone--including myself--see them, let alone peel them from the harbor of their pages. 

Is this poem-hoarding? Perhaps. But yesterday was a brutal winter day, and once I finally made it to campus I had time to do a few revisions, and then I decided to read all new poems at the Lakewood Library event that evening. The day was so busy that I did not have time to fret about whether I'd miss a word, inadvertently "revise" something on the fly, or flub the cadence of a line. And somehow, when I was up at the podium, it all worked out. Since the poems were new I read them extra slowly, and they were kind to me. 

Reading the brand new poems when they were still brand new enabled me to return to the feelings I had when writing them. It was kind of like one of those capsules that expands into a dinosaur sponge when you toss it into the bathtub, only instead of a dinosaur it was a poem. In the wake of this sentiment, I vowed to return to the poems and get them ready to send out. Sometimes you find a "push" in the place where you'd least expect it. 

While you were out.

Is it possible for something to be both super easy and terribly difficult at the same time? This is the question I've been pondering lately. I have a number of items on my plate, and can't tackle them yet due to various factors. So I guess I can plan, store up energy, and try to enjoy this part of the summer for what it is. 

Case in point: my spider plant decided to bloom (bloom? bloom!) while I was out of the office. I'm so happy I was there to witness it briefly and take a picture, even if I was wrangling the kids at the time and couldn't spend much time admiring it. 

This sounds crazy, but I miss being able to go to work. It's not just the daunting matter of confronting a burgeoning, roiling inbox without an inch of quiet, but the separation of spaces. I don't want to cook next to an stack of poems, unless I'm choosing to do so. I would really, really like to be able to write a poem. That will have to wait until September. 

In other news:

Huge thanks to [PANK] and Sarah Henning for reviewing O Holy Insurgency here. There's no way to describe reading a review of your work where the critic clearly understood not only the poems, but your motivations for writing them. 

I have two new poems in this kickass issue of Banango Street. Yay! 

Furthermore, did you know that Barn Owl Review is celebrating women writers this summer? Poetry editor Sarah Dravec has been contributing a series of reviews of books by women poets. Add this link to your bookmarks, and check back every week for a new review. It's like an Advent calendar, except weekly, and filled with brilliant reviews of brilliant books of brilliant poems. 

In the miscellany department: I realized I've lived in our house in Akron, OH, longer than I've ever lived anywhere. Nine years and counting. 

I think that's it for now. 

Blog tour #mywritingprocess

I'm happy to finally participate in this blog tour, which I have been watching longingly from afar while buried in manuscripts and grading. Many thanks to Julie Brooks Barbour for tagging me. Julie's responses are here, and you must check out her poetry if you haven't already. 

Here's the interview:

1) What am I working on?

Primarily, I am working on not losing my mind over the summer. Having two school-age kids home, and no childcare, is always a challenge for writing. That said, I have ceased gazing longingly at other people's posts about retreats and residencies and some strange commodity called writing time. I'm counting the weeks and forging ahead. I am reading a lot of novels and making plans to send work out. So far I have succeeded at the former, but not the latter.

My current project is a series of prose poems in five or six stanzagraphs. Right now I have 18 pages, 5,662 words. I'm not sure if it's going to be a book or part of a book, but I just keep going. I didn't set out to write a series of prose poems, it just kind of happened. In June I wrote a poem a day, and many of those poems are part of this series. Since it's prose, it has a different scope from my other projects, and each poem is pretty different from the last, except for the presence of a consistent speaker. Themes: nostalgia, displacement, desire, unrequitedness. I've let myself be a little more objectionable than usual, because now seems to be the right time. 

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I write about uncomfortable situations and feelings, and include a lot of detritus in my poems. Sometimes I may care too little about the reader. I am guilty of harboring and cultivating obsessions. You might say that I am quite autobiographical, but I am also writing fictions at the same time.  

3) Why do I write what I do?

Demonic possession. 

Seriously, that's what it feels like. 

Maybe I'll translate that into "haunting" to make it a little more palatable.

4) How does my writing process work?

I have to take notes first. Lately, they've been on scraps of paper, or on my phone, though those often accidentally get deleted, which is a tragedy for me. I need quiet (ear plugs) and about twenty minutes. I've found that it's easier for me to write with my younger kid in the room (forbidden from interrupting) than to write while listening to both of my kids fight / potentially fight / stomp around. I am not a poet who has a writing space or a writing schedule. I have a bedroom and panic and a little time after dinner on some days. 

I need to finish a draft before closing the file and turning off the computer. This might seem more difficult when writing poems that are upwards of 400 words long, but the prose often comes faster than the lineated poems, for some reason. After I finish the draft, often I re-order the stanzagraphs. Sometimes I'll write a more poignant closing line in the second of five stanzas, and then rearrange. 

As usual, I read the poems aloud as I write them, each line at a time. I don't move on until the previous line feels right. Often I run out of time, and have to hurry to the ending. I put myself in a writing trance, and try not to allow any non-productive distractions to push me away from the poem. That said, I also allow productive distractions to influence me during the day. I may be watching a swimming lesson, but inside I am thinking about a girl who hitchhikes her way to a gas station on the edge of town. 

Next up in the #mywritingprocess blog tour is fellow Akron poet Nathan Kemp. His writing process is pretty damn fascinating. You'll find his responses here next week. 

Nathan Kemp is a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review, an associate editor for Whiskey Island, and a social media editor for H-NGM-N Books. His work appears or is forthcoming in American Microreviews and Interviews, Columbia Poetry Review, Cream City Review, and The Destroyer. He lives in Akron, Ohio.

Summertiming.

Things are getting a little lazier here in Akron, OH. It's time to put your ears back and lounge on some wooden stairs. Or at least that's what Klaus seems to think.

I've got a new poem up at Ampersand Review, which you can find here. It's called "The Jolly Anchor," and it is part of a prose poem project I am working on right now. Not sure if this will be the little book brother of Small Enterprise, but it's definitely coming along.

A Sunny Place with Adequate Water made its Cleveland debut last weekend at a lovely solstice reading. It's now in stock and available at SPD and Amazon, and Black Lawrence Press is running a special sale for the remainder of June. If you're looking for a review copy, please contact Diane at BLP, and please accept my thanks!

This is how we do it.

I'm not going to lie to you. Reading poetry makes me write poetry, especially when I read poetry that terrifies me. I read fiction because my engine runs on novels. I have to let my brain go to the place it makes for novels. But reading poetry, and criticism about the poems I'm reading, even though it's sometimes like wearing a shirt with a thousand itchy tags...there's no better way to get me writing.

I have been a neglectful blogger. This teaching full time again, it's amazing, but I find myself prepping all of the time. In the past few years I've taught nothing but poetry workshops, two levels of undergrad, plus MFA, and this semester I have a contemporary poetry lit lecture class, and a graduate lit + theory class on Modern & Contemporary poetry, in addition to the undergrad poetry workshop. It's dreamy, but I am still slipping around a little.

Oh, then there's this. Five new poems so far this month. It's like the reading for teaching is feeding the writing. I like what I'm writing. Every time I stop not-writing I return to writing as a different writer. The poems I am writing are a little more rude, a little more about the body. Haven't written a new Risk Management Memo poem in a while, but will.

O Holy Insurgency will be out very, very soon. I can't wait to meet her.

Also, thanks to the Poetry Foundation for putting this interview up on Harriet, and to LitBridge for asking all the questions.

And how.

First poem in how long? Weeks? Not necessarily a good one, but a new poem. Can I really be longing for fall semester to begin, so the kids are back in school and I have time to write?

This weekend we had several self-enforced stretches of mandatory reading time. It was glorious. Restorative, etc. I wish I could have more right now.

Feeling a bit daunted by looming syllabi needing to be written, but for now enjoying the extra sleep and general being home-ness.

An acute case of the Fridays.

This week has been all kinds of crazy. Keep in mind that I haven't taught five days a week in quite some time, and now I am doing so with a brand new prep, albeit one where I get to teach a bunch of my favorite books. I can't think of a better way to be initiated back into the world of professor-not-administrator. 

I have been blessed with a bunch of smart students who are open-minded and have things to say. The last time I taught lit was Fall 2009, and since then I have only taught poetry writing classes. I'd like to know how many calories I burn per class. It's a whole new ballgame. 

In other news, I have some new poems to share. Yeah! 

Three poems from A Sunny Place with Adequate Water, my newest collection (BLP, 2014) are now up at Blackbird.

I also have two poems from the manuscript I'm currently at work on, up at Interrupture.

This is all making me want to write more poems and send them out. I did revise two poems yesterday, and I wrote a new one with little fanfare and moderate success. I find that I'm editing more lately. Writing less. I need to set some goals, but I am giving myself a bit of a break due to the intense summer class (cramming fifteen weeks into five).

Tomorrow I am reading at the Cedar Lee Pub, for Heavy Feather Review. Here's the scoop. It's an honor to be among such fine company. I'll be reading at least one brand new poem.

It's funny how I feel more comfortable about not-writing now that I'm super swamped. I do really love "having to" read all of the time. After 7/11 I will be on vacation for a month. Perhaps next week I'll start a countdown. 

yes + no

It's been raining all day, but this time last year we had snow. I wrote a new poem today, organized some existing poems, punched holes in some existing poems, and upbraided myself a little (sometimes I think I write silly poems because I don't like writing somber ones, and right now I am writing kind of a non-funny series of poems, but some of them are humorous, only not the one I wrote today).

Classes are done for the year, but grading is not. Just getting started on a new poetics project. Wondering why there's so much damn laundry in my house all the time. Glad I made the cat stay indoors today.

And then there was _________.

Man, it's feeling autumnal here in Akron, OH. I am completely obsessed with a new series of poems I am writing. I just had to grapple with whether to use quotes and italics or to make a quoted part of a spoken passage non-italic. But that's pretty much the only thing I don't love about these new poems. I'm not bragging, just enthusiastic.

Maybe I do have a little extra swagger thanks to Kyle Minor's incredible reading of some poems from Saint Monica over yonder at HTML Giant. What a delight to wake up to. I am filled with gratitude!

For some reason, a poem doesn't feel completely real until I print it out on paper. I wish I could get past that, because it's silly. Somehow the screen just seems temporary. Like a bunch of stray light.

I guess that's what it is, technically.

I printed all these new poems up and I am taking them home with me.

Longweekender.

Wow, this long weekend was something else! All of the best things (bestest friends, poetry, beers of quality, curry cauliflower, my writers' group with amazingly inspiring girlfriends, broken things being fixed, new poems even though allegedly "not writing," cooler weather that makes one think about flannel pajamas, two poems accepted by supremely awesome journal, a little relaxation, not doing the stuff supposed to be doing, catching up on laundry, cats that like to walk across your chest while reading, and reading!).

It's hard to believe we're entering week THREE of the semester, and already a day ahead, at that.

My yard is starting to look like a real jungle, and not in a nice way.

I hope the universe doesn't consider this an invitation to throw me yet another curve ball, but I feel as if I am finally getting some things in order and figuring out a workable routine.

It's also not really Sunday night, so I shouldn't have insomnia.

Having some revelations about a new book project!

I'd really like this week to be a good one.

Wherein our heroine fears she has disappointed herself, and perhaps others, too.

Is it silly or ungrateful to ask the universe for fewer revelations? Because I feel like I'm about a week behind in understanding what's going on, and basically what's going on is that I have been feeling rather proud of myself for getting by and moving along, but I am really not accomplishing anything. The closets I vowed to organize over the summer? Even messier than before! The weeds I promised to pull? Raging. And I'm not even going to mention the poems, or non-poems, or the meandering.

I did take some nice pictures this weekend, though. And I've read more this summer than I usually read in a year (mostly fiction and nonfiction, for fun), so that can't be bad. But I fear it's Time to Buckle Down in a big way, as in: learn how to write poems with the kids home, and clean those damn closets. I will not even get into what we've been eating, because summer food on a budget is not the healthiest, though we are earning A+ grades for produce consumption, so that is a good thing.

The poem-writing might be easier if I had some kind of series or project, but my series concepts are a little willy-nilly right now. I was describing to Eric tonight that the best quality of my most recent poem (written today, because I forced myself) is that its lines are very symmetrical. I guess this means I need to try again, and again, and again.

Creepy Train.

Thankfully this train is no longer in town, but do you know what is? A really fun Saturday afternoon reading in a place that has WINE and BOOKS: Visible Voice in Tremont, 4:00 pm. Eric and I will be reading poems with Aleathia Drehmer of New York. I will read some Saint Monica poems and there will be copies for sale, and Eric & I will read the newest installment of our Scenic Birds of Ohio series, wherein we write poems imagining that the shuttlecock is a bird of Ohio. Oh, it will be so fun. We hope to see you there.

Underpin[n]ings

Thanks to the special miracle called Presidents (Presidents'? President's? Presidentses?) Day, my work pile is currently stabilized. Please do not interpret this as meaning that I am bored and idle and hankering to write a last-minute recommendation letter or to help you polish the gravel on your driveway. I have plenty to do. But I'm somewhat caught up, at least for this afternoon.

In most urgent news, there have been some new poems. Written by me! I am not especially in love with them, but they exist. I also found18-ish pages of poems I had forgotten about, written over the summer, so I've been chasing them around the yard with a paring knife. Or at least thinking about it.

In unrelated news, it's funny how a piece of lemon pound cake can completely turn my mood from gloomy to happy. Maybe it was the walk to get the pound cake. Or the fact that I told myself that it was okay to eat the pound cake instead of the last clementine lingering in my office fridge. I'm sure I will eat that too, by EOB today.

It's pretty empty here in the office right now. Where is everybody? It's warm out (my phone says 56 degrees) but too cloudy and gray to be truly frolicworthy.

I must confess that I've fallen a bit in love with Submishmash. I was a stalwart paper und envelope girl until now. This week I started kicking my ass a little in the submissions department, and wow, that Submishmash is just plain fun. We're even thinking of maybe using it for BOR.

Making a big trip to the post office tomorrow. Doing two readings in Cleveland this weekend. Hoping for more poems, and perhaps some relaxing, too, if I am lucky.

Breaking the law(s).

Are there certain things that you will never do in a poem, either intentionally or unintentionally? Are there things that you won't write about? Techniques you refuse to use? Sometimes it's fun to look at your work and see what rules you follow, even if you never set them in the first place.

Here's my list. Post yours as a comment, or on your own blog, and link back.

My Unwritten Poetry Rules

1. I don't write poems about writing poems. Not that I have anything against a good ars poetica. I just dislike poems that try to tell me what poetry is, and what is poetry.

2. I don't write (directly) about my family. I don't think I ever will. I do create versions of people I'm mad at, including family members, and put them in poems. But I don't think I could ever write a poem directly about my childhood, or my kids.

3. I don't make many allusions. If I do, they're (in most cases) unintentional allusions to other contemporary poems. A rare exception is here.

4. I don't write long poems, or short poems. I always have to use a set line length, and even when I vary lengths it's part of a pattern or shape. Some day, I have to overcome these neurotic tendencies.

5. I can write in form, but I don't. I don't rhyme. Sometimes accidentally within lines. But not on purpose. I feel slightly embarrassed that I never write in form, for some reason. It's just not my thing.

What are your unwritten poetry rules, O Blogosphere?

PS--Justin, I know the allusion in the title isn't industrial, but I couldn't help myself.

Just one fix.

This one's for the poets out there.

How do you feel when you haven't written a poem (or you haven't written the poem you've wanted to write) in what seems like a long time?

I feel like I've been surviving on Diet Coke, chewy granola bars, sugar-free altoids, and benedryl, and spending all of my time locked in tiny rooms with overzealous air conditioning.

I mean, yesterday they kept testing this speaker system in the library, and Jay and I were about ready to go and beast somebody. And normally we would've just laughed.

I can calm down. Everything will get done. I will get time to write, without interruptions, before 2010. The poem will come out. Right?

So how do you feel when your poem machine's on the fritz, and the repair man ain't available until next Tuesday?

Some poems are better than others.

About a month and a half ago, I wrote two poems that were good ones. They came really easily, didn't require too much editing, and made me very happy. As punishment, the universe has since then plagued me with duds. They're okay. There are a few good lines. Some slightly comical moments. But they're not even good enough to be B-sides.

My bff and first reader has suggested cannibalizing some of these duds to make a Frankenstein. I've done that in the past, and it worked. But which ones to tear apart, and where to stitch the legs on?

I guess we couldn't have real knockout, powerhouse poems without writing the occasional unfocused, meandering poem with a shower curtain and lawn sprinklers in it. But it's hard knowing how to value work that isn't right on (not to mention the poems that are right on, but that always get passed up by editors, who sometimes like the duds better).

So I pose this question: what is your relationship with your lesser poems? Where do you house them? Do you get out the defibrillator and try to shock them back to life? Do they end up being your best poems after all? Do they wind up in the poetry shithouse?

I keep promising that the next poem I write will be an important one. Hopefully it will not be about moustaches.

Trade secrets...revealed!

I have a pretty decent new poem, but oh! The task of giving it a title! Jay-R (not to be confused with Jay-V) extracted a title from the poem itself, but I feel like I need to come up with something new, something better than "The Enlightenment," which is what it's currently called.

So spill it. How do you come up with your titles? Any of the really good titlers out there care to give us some advice? Am I the only poet who stinks at titling? Yes? Oh dear.


On an unrelated note, I received my first royalty check for Prairie Fever yesterday, and it was way, way more than I'd expected. Wow!

Many thanks to everyone who bought the book, and to all of the teachers who adopted it. I am so very grateful! (FYI--I am always happy to correspond with students who are using the book in a class, and to do online/email interviews, so if you are using the book, just drop me a line).

In honor of the whole royalty thing, here's a picture that Jeannine took of me being royal. Or being a royal diva.

Comfort Beagle

Do you ever write a poem, get vexed because you think it stinks, put it away overnight, dread looking at it again, and then realize it wasn't nearly as bad as you thought?

That happened to me this morning. Though I'm still not 100% happy with the ending. I've had a couple of good endings lately, which raised the bar. Not so sure about this one.

This week will hopefully be less stressful than last week. At least I now have my grade book made up. Unlike most denizens of the 21st century, I do not use excel. I use the same old fashioned green Visionaid I've been using since 1996. The same style, that is.

Yesterday I had a great lunchtime walk with Rubi. The weather was so perfect--60 something and sunny--and she is getting a lot better at walking on the leash. I wish I had the time to walk her at lunchtime every day. One thing's for sure: there's no way I could ever sneak her into the office with me.

She emerges--briefly--from her office.

Wow, it's been a really busy week so far, with Kate Greenstreet visiting my class last night, and all of these department meetings. I have, however, written two new poems this week. I've been doing most of the assignments along with my classes. Without that I don't think I would ever write.

Still in prose poem mode and starting to wonder if the Monica book will be 99% prose poems. Kate Greenstreet likes my prose poems, though, so I think it'll be okay. I wrote two just for her and felt like an uber dork giving her copies last night. Have a great reading tour, Kate, and thanks for visiting Akron!