One reliable test for checking out the effectiveness of a poem is to read the poem out loud. Even if you never plan on reading the poem in public, it's a good exercise to find stumbling points in a poem. In fact, an even better exercise is to have other people read your poem to see if they stumble in certain spots. I'm telling you this, because this week's workshopped poem is one I felt compelled to read out loud from the first line.

Here it is:

Surrogate, by Kisha Hughes

To be a godmother means to hold the baby and shut your mouth.
The job is kind of morbid--it doesn't become official until death takes everyone else.
In the meantime, I smile and appear at family functions.
It takes my godson a few hours before he remembers that I'm OK,
that I'm family--although I look nothing like his mother and father.
He rubs my face to see if the color comes off on his tiny hands,
to see if I'm just dirty although he doesn't know the word.
He grabs my lips and wonders at their fullness.
He pulls my hair and thinks of lambs.
Bah, bah black sheep.
is this what they call wool?
I have to wonder if this is what he'll think;
if one day I'll have to answer the question, "Why are you brown"
or "How are you mommy's sister if you're black?"
Not hard questions to answer, but will he understand?
Will he look at me like his father does.
will he wonder why I'm here?
Wonder why this black bitch is holding and cuddling and loving
his son like he does?
These looks hold me back, but my friend, his mother,
Her looks hold me there.
The smile in her eyes when she sees him surrender to sleep on my breast:
the giggle in her voice when she muses on how he's always been
comforted by me.
It is also the memory of holding him until my arms went numb
and my back tied itself into knots like a boy scout manipulating a rope.
It is the memory of the first time he smile at me,
The memory of dancing him around the kitchen while he sucked my thumb.
The hardest part of being a godmother is not holding the child, but holding my tongue.

*****

I really love that opening line: To be a godmother means to hold the baby and shut your mouth. And I really love the closing: The hardest part of being a godmother is not holding the child, but holding my tongue. Plus, there's a lot of really great material in between, but how do we get the most effective poem possible between the awesome beginning and closing?

First, we need to figure out what is essential to this poem. The opening and closing lines are soooooooo good that I really think that's where the strength of this poem lies.

That said, I think this poem really needs to focus on the content that underscores the godmother's dilemma of holding (or not holding) the baby but also holding her own tongue. Since there is an obvious tension between the narrator and her brother-in-law, this relationship should probably be the focal point of that middle part of the poem between the beginning and the end.

In fact, I'd recommend making the middle of the poem a scene or encounter where the narrator has to hold her tongue, even though the reader of the poem would totally support her giving the brother-in-law an earful. Maybe she's even on the verge of cussing him out when the godson grabs her hand, looks up into her eyes and smiles--forcing her to remain quiet.

Plus, I also recommend breaking the lines slightly different to make them a little more punchy.

Here's kind of what I'd envision a 2nd draft looking like:

Surrogate, by Kisha Hughes

To be a godmother means to hold the baby
and shut your mouth. The job is morbid with nothing
official until death takes everyone else.
Like my brother-in-law, who...

(...description of a scene or encounter in which the brother-in-law does or says something bad, or he does a series of bad things that drive the narrator to her boiling point when...)

I feel a tiny hand grip my fingers; I look down to see
my godson looking up at me, a smile on his face, full
of love. The hardest part of being a godmother
is not holding the child, but holding my tongue.

*****

Of course, I'm sure Kisha can phrase that better than me, but I just wanted to give an idea of what I think would serve this poem best.

There's a lot of great material in here that will have to be cut to service this poem. That's the price of writing a great poem, and I believe this could be a great poem. Any excised material can always be used in other poems.

One last thought: I would give the godson a name. That way you can refer to him by an actual name, which will make him more real for the reader. Maybe give him a name loaded with meanings, which will make it more fun for your more sophisticated readers.

So here are the recommendations on this poem:

• Keep the opening line
• Keep the closing line
• Connect the two lines with a scene or exchange that shows the truth in those lines
• Break the lines for more effect
• Give the godson a name
• Have fun with the revision process

*****

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*****

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Friday, October 09, 2009 12:23:03 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [12] 

Today is the first day of October, and we're more than a week into autumn now. So, I think it's appropriate that we look at a poem from the season that has just passed: summer. From Alberta, Canada, Kathy Larson has provided us with "Summer School."

Here's the original draft:

Summer School, by Kathy Larson

They file in each morning slack-faced,
Sleep still in their hair, and on their cheeks;
It falls in dusty crustlings from their eyelashes.
They barely acknowledge my cheery 'good mornings'.
Sometimes, a mumbled "lo', but no eye contact.

That's okay, though, I get it.

It's summer, and they're IN SCHOOL.
I feel sorry for them; wish they were still in bed,
To wake hours from now tangled in sweaty sheets.
Rising, like the undead,
In rooms filled with the fumes of their fetid mouth breathings,
Their hair plastered in greasy strings across shiny foreheads,
Pawing blindly, dumbly for the one thing with power enough
To move their leaden limbs - the shrill, siren call of a cell phone.

Believe me,
I am sincere in my wishes.
Far too soon the realities of life will prohibit
Any chance of sleeping in through lazy summer days,
Being surly, smelly and obnoxious.
Serious relationships, jobs, rent to pay, a car to finance,
Perhaps the ball and chain of tuition will take car of that.
In that not-too-distant-future,
They will rise programmed to face each day
With smiles and enthusiasm,
Driven by necessity, not desire.
Right now, a little slack is all they need.

Far too soon, they'll be me.

*****

First off, I love the idea of looking at summer school. And I love the idea of taking it from the teacher's perspective. For me, though, there's not a point in the poem as it currently stands where something sticks with me. That said, I think Kathy has plenty of options for her next draft.

Option 1: Make the poem more personal. This poem is written in the 1st person, so it would make sense for the narrator to explain why summer school is so important to her. Sure, this narrator talks about how she empathizes with the students, but we don't get a picture of how that relates to the narrator. Was she a summer school student? Did she not take things seriously? Let the reader know why it's so important to the narrator to share her views on summer school.

Option 2: Make it funny. Perhaps, you want to lighten the mood on summer school. You can do this by highlighting the ridiculous nature of summer school--perhaps with the intent of saying, "Cut them some slack." Maybe even make it rhyme.

Option 3: Make it specific. Instead of focusing on the whole big idea of summer school and all of the students, focus on a specific exchange between the teacher and a student or between two students (perhaps overheard by the teacher). Don't focus on the BIG idea, because that only muddies the waters for readers; specificity in small scenes can grab readers so much easier and allows them to come at it with their own lens.

Option 4: Do all of the above. Suddenly, this feels like one of those multiple choice tests where students can circle their answers. But seriously, one option is to make the poem more personal, funny, and specific.

Anyway, that's my take on the poem. If you agree or disagree or have other comments to make on Kathy's poem, feel encouraged to comment below.

I believe this poem has a lot of potential, Kathy. Thank you so much for sharing with the group!

*****

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Thursday, October 01, 2009 3:40:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [14] 

I'm one of those writers who is always coming up with these great ideas and concepts for poems and short stories. Where I usually fall short is making sure that I follow through on that idea or concept to write the best poem or short story I can. It's almost like the idea is so great that I can't deliver on the promise of the title. That's probably why many of my "great idea" poems don't get published while my unassuming pieces do.

Sharon Cameo Franz has shared a very great idea with her poem "The Delicious Man" in this week's workshop. Here it is:

The Delicious Man, by Sharon Cameo Franz

Like a French croissant;
Smooth as butter and flaky.
That was this delicious man.

1. Have the narrator swallow him whole. In this scenario, the narrator finds the delicious man so savory that she can't even enjoy him; she just swallows him whole.
2. Have the narrator pass on him. In this scenario, the narrator has had her fill of sweets (or she's watching her figure). Even though he looks so incredibly delectable, she feels she has to pass on his deliciousness.

As you know, I love the idea behind this poem, and I feel it has every opportunity of being a tremendous (and delicious) poem after a little more work. It's already a cute poem, but let's make it completely memorable. After all, you don't want your readers spitting out the delicious idea. (Question: How many times can I use the word delicious in one blog posting? Answer: Apparently at least one more time.)

• Focus more on the delicious man. We need a little more than he's like a French croissant, though that was a clever simile.
• Use specifics to describe the delicious man. What's his hair like? His skin? His odor? (Yes, food does smell--hopefully in a good way.)
• Remove the delicious woman. Give her a poem of her own, sure, but this is the delicious man's poem. Feel free to keep the woman narrator, but don't make her delicious. Instead, make her hungry or full.
• Don't spit the delicious man out. If he's delicious, it doesn't make sense to spit him out once he's in your mouth. So, either swallow him whole or pass on him (because the narrator is already stuffed or counting calories).

Final thought: I wish I'd thought of this idea, Sharon; it has a lot of potential, and the revision process should be a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing!

*****

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*****

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Thursday, September 24, 2009 2:23:44 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [8] 

As I mentioned earlier, my wife Tammy's second chapbook, No Glass Allowed, was recently published by verve bath press. Meanwhile, I've resisted the urge to interview Tammy for more than two years now. But the release of a poetry collection is too much for me to pass, especially when the poems are all so good. (Seriously, I loved Tammy's writing even before we started dating. No, really.)

Tammy's writing has been (or will soon be) published in publications such as storySouth, The Pedestal, RATTLE, and others. She received her BA in English at Georgia State University and promptly became a paralegal. She was born, raised and still resides in Atlanta, Georgia--and can be reached via e-mail at tammyfbrewer@gmail.com.

My personal favorite poem in No Glass Allowed is also framed on my desk in my Atlanta office. Here it is:

Sea Gypsies

You said you spent 5 minutes of your life
today looking for a staple remover.
Something to do with your job.
You edit, and sometimes
there is a need to pull things

apart. There are mountains
between us, and then a river.
The land swells with seeds
that fall from your pockets,
sewing the distance with deep
breaths, an entire city
in your smile.

I tell you about the Mokens,
gypsies of the Andaman Sea.
How they knew to flee the tsunami
before the first wave tore trees
from their roots, husbands from wives.
When the sky turns to salt, sometimes
there is a thirst. In their language

there is no word for want,
only an understanding
of give and take. You said
I took away your need
and you want

to share water with me.
The ground presses its pregnant
belly against my feet. I am
distracted by squirrels
in the trees. Wind.
When.

*****

What are you up to?

I've got the windows open and I'm listening to the wind and hoping baby Will stays asleep in his swing. And sipping some water and trying not to eat too many pretzel sticks.

Other than that, I have a new chapbook out from Verve Bath Press!

Within the past year, you changed your name--with earlier work as Tammy Foster Trendle and more recent publications as Tammy Foster Brewer. How have you handled that transition? And have there been any surprises (good or bad) as a result?

That's a good question. Foster is my maiden name. The first time I got married, I struggled with the idea of changing my last name. I was a Foster and I was proud of my family and my name. But, I wanted to have children and I thought it would be easier to change my name. My first poetry publications were under my married name--Tammy F. Trendle. I have a lot of publications (including my first chapbook) under that name.

I got divorced and remarried and didn't have any hesitations this time around about changing my name; however, I think I still published one or two poems under my previous name. Once I started publishing under Brewer, I decided to include in my bio my former name (in parenthesis). I joked that I didn't want anyone to think I was plagiarizing Tammy Trendle.

I don't think the name change has caused any confusion in my writing life; however, it causes lots of confusion for the pediatrician whenever I take Reese (my son from my first marriage) because he always addresses me as Ms. Trendle and then apologizes and calls me Ms. Brewer. It's weird having so many aliases--but a little mysterious, too.

The poems in No Glass Allowed have many great linebreaks. Do you have a linebreak strategy when writing poems?

Yeah, I put a lot of thought into my linebreaks. It helps me to type out my poems on the computer, so that I can see the linebreaks clearly and evenly. I like to break my lines at a thought or an image, so that the idea/image changes meaning from one line to the next. Each word in the line adds to the overall idea/image in that line. I like to have what appears to be a simple sentence broken over a few lines so that the words have multiple meanings. I hope that makes sense.

Do you spend much time on revision?

Oh yes. I recently finalized a poem that I started writing 1.5 years ago. Usually, I get the lines down and then I pour over each word methodically until I finally feel like it's done. I am a perfectionist when it comes to my poetry. Every now and then I'll write a poem that only needs a tweek or two. It's a great feeling when those poems come so easily. (By the way, the poem I just mentioned that took me 1.5 yrs to finalize is going to be published in the upcoming Winter issue of RATTLE.)

Your poetry has appeared in several publications--in addition to your two chapbooks. How do you handle your submission process?

It's funny. I think I go through phases where I write write write and then I submit submit submit. I'm not very organized with my submission process. Fortunately, I've had several instances where editors have contacted me about publishing my poetry. (I always put my e-mail address in my bio which I think helps.) I think I'm just about at a point where I've submitted all of my good stuff and now it's time for me to write more.

Speaking of writing more. Where or how do you tend to find inspiration for your writing?

A lot of times I get inspiration from reading other poets or from looking at pieces of art. Whenever I get stumped or feel like I need inspiration, I'll look at artwork and start writing out ideas that pop in my head. Also, I get a lot of inspiration from listening to other people (especially my kids). Something said in an everyday conversation becomes a line in a poem. Also, driving helps. During my long commute to Atlanta for work, I get ideas just from looking out the window. I'm a daydreamer.

When you're reading other poets, what do you look for in a good poem?

I think a good poem makes me feel. I remember reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in high school and getting goosebumps (that's when I knew I was a poetry freak). I like a poem that can take language and twist it on its head. To read something that seems ordinary and simple on the outside but has many layers of meaning beneath. I think a good poem is one that even non-poets enjoy and appreciate.

Who are you reading currently?

I just finished re-reading Jessica Dawson's chapbook, Fossil Fuels (also published by Verve Bath Press). I'm also reading Cheryl Dumesnil's In Praise of Falling. Of course, I always like to read some Bob Hicok. I am a big fan of the small press and small press poets--Pris Campbell, Amanda Oaks, Jacob Johansen, Barton Smock to name a few.

If you could offer only one piece to other poets, what would it be?

Never forget you are a poet.

Final question: Who's your favorite poet named Robert?

You, silly.

*****

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*****

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*****

 

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Thursday, September 03, 2009 7:44:52 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [11] 

I did not think I'd have time to do a poetry workshop this week, but I surprised even myself with how much I've accomplished through Wednesday. So, let's get workshopping!

This week's poem comes from Jane Penland Hoover of Durham, North Carolina.

Here's the poem:

On Writing and Love, by Jane Penland Hoover

Always a middle
somewhere to come from
somewhere to go

I imagined I could fall in love
with gardening, if only
I could be close to those
who loved the taste

of green, the feel of bloom
upon some stem.

and so I joined them
the little club
that met each week
in someone's den.

listening and talking
about hydrangeas, seedlings,
sufficient moisture, and
what the sun might do.

But I didn't fall in love
with gardening.

One must get closer
kneel into the damp
earth, reach deep into
its darkened soil

rise up again and again
fingers dripping dirt.

And so it is with writing
still, the smell of ink
bleeding into skin, words
trailing back lead me.

*****

There are some obvious errors with capitalization and punctuation, but this is a pretty good start for the poem. What I really love in this poem is the metaphor Jane uses. Recently, I've been reading an advance copy of Robert Frost Speaking on Campus (due out at the end of September from W.W. Norton), and Frost was very much into metaphor.

In fact, I think there are two good ways to immediately strengthen this poem. One, correct the capitalization and punctuation. Two, strip out anything that does not directly relate to the gardening metaphor.

Here's the second version of Jane's poem after doing those two things:

On Gardening and Love, by Jane Penland Hoover

I imagined I could fall in love
with gardening, if only
I could be close to those
who loved the taste

of green, the feel of bloom
upon some stem.

And so I joined them,
the little club
that met each week
in someone's den.

Listening and talking
about hydrangeas, seedlings,
sufficient moisture, and
what the sun might do.

But I didn't fall in love
with gardening.

One must get closer,
kneel into the damp
earth, reach deep into
its darkened soil,

rise up again and again,
fingers dripping dirt.

*****

Already, this poem is much stronger. It still works as a possible metaphor for writing, but by focusing squarely on gardening, this poem also works as a metaphor for any hobby that someone could love. "Whether you're interested in writing or cooking or whatever," this poem is now saying, "you can't fall in love with something by merely talking about it. You have to actually work at it."

Notice: The only word change I've made so far is to swap the word "gardening" with "writing" in the title. Everything else is in the same order and same voice as used by Jane originally.

Sometimes, it really is as easy as cutting off the beginning and ending of a poem to make it that much stronger. But just because this poem is stronger now, it doesn't mean we're completely finished with it.

The poem may be done now, but I'd advise Jane to play around with trying to add a few more specific details to see how they affect the poem. For instance, I feel that it might be more interesting to have the name of a person instead of "in someone's den." You don't have to use a real name; make one up. This is where you can get into the business of telling the truth but telling it slant (as Emily Dickinson would say). 

In the same vein, I'd advise Jane to try playing around with adding specific details and conversation (again, can slant the truth here) about these gardening club meetings. By adding specific details, this poem may become even more interesting. Or it may not. But Jane won't know until she tries incorporating details first.

Regardless, I do like Jane's poem very much and love that she provided such a great example of how metaphor can be used in our poetry.

*****

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*****

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Thursday, September 03, 2009 1:40:00 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [8] 

I really look forward to these Poetry Workshops. They've been tremendously helpful for me (and hopefully you), because looking at others' poems reminds me what I should be looking for in my own poems.

This week's poem is "A Lady and That Woman," by Harry Coss. It's one of those poems that already feels good, but there are still some ways for the poem to be improved.

Here's the original version:

A Lady and That Woman, by Harry Coss

I met a lady one autumn afternoon, years ago,
for just long enough to help her with her jacket.
It was in an old tea shop, she entered just behind me.
Noticeable were her white gloves and cautious walk.

She had difficulty taking off her light jacket, leaving,

one arm turned inside out, hanging on a hook.

She sat taking care to not wrinkle her skirt.

Her hair soft curl at her shoulder and high on top.

There was a hint of makeup at her chin line.

Her eyebrows arched.  She had the bones

of a beautiful but aging face. Her lipstick

was dark red--her mouth unsmiling.

She sat straight, lost in thought looking

at the small hexagon tiles on the floor.

She sipped her tea slowly, breaking off small bits

of scone with graceful well manicured fingers.

Her dress, close around her waist, a tailored bodice

and shoulders padded in the style of the 1940's.

I thought of young lovers torn apart by war,

sensing her heart may still be living in that era.

Finished,  she got up to leave but had difficulty

with her jacket, I rose and helped her,  as our eyes met 

she brightened and said, with a slight British accent,

"Thank you dear sir." I sensed some expectation.

Her right hand, palm down, was slightly raised. 

I thought to take it and say how nice she looked. 

In fact, I had a  fleeting impulse to kiss it;  But I didn't,

I only said, "Your welcome". She hesitated briefly.

She donned her gloves, turned, unsteadily walked

slowly toward the door.  I saw her bump

into the wife of a middle-aged couple entering.

apparently unaware of the encounter.

As they were seated she was saying to her husband,

"Did you see that woman who hit me, she reeked

of alcohol, her makeup was awful and her dress

is way out of style, way too young for her." 

Every once in a while I recall that lady, remembering

with sorrow, not telling her how nice she looked.

*****

It is a very good poem. I particularly like the 7th stanza. While I like that this poem has a delicate pace to it--like the lady the poem describes--I also feel that this poem could be made even stronger than it currently is by a little tightening.

For instance, the 1st stanza could lose the second line completely, because the poem will actually show the narrator helping the lady with her jacket. Also, the 9th stanza uses the passive voice when it should be active, "...she was saying to her husband..." All of these are slight revisions, but sometimes, it's these small revisions that can make all the difference when someone is reading your poem (or any writing for that matter).

Here's my attempt at tightening this poem:

A Lady and That Woman, by Harry Coss

I met a lady one autumn afternoon, years ago,
in an old tea shop. She entered just behind me.
Her white gloves and cautious walk caught my
attention, and she had difficulty removing her

light jacket, leaving one arm turned inside out
hanging on a hook. She took care to not wrinkle
her skirt. Her hair curled soft at her shoulders and
high on top, a hint of makeup at her chin line.

Eyebrows arched, she had a beautiful but
aging face. Her lipstick was dark red--her mouth
unsmiling. She sat straight, lost in thought looking

at the small hexagon tiles on the floor. She

sipped her tea slowly, breaking off small bits

of scone with graceful, well-manicured fingers.

Her dress, close around her waist, a tailored bodice

and shoulders padded in the style of the 1940's.

I thought of young lovers torn apart by war,

sensing her heart may still be living in that era.

Finished, she got up to leave but had difficulty

with her jacket. I rose and helped her. As our eyes

met she brightened and said, with a slight British
accent, "Thank you, dear sir." I sensed expectation.

Her right hand, palm down, was slightly raised. 

I thought to take it and say how nice she looked. 

In fact, I had an impulse to kiss it, but I did not;

I only said, "You're welcome." She hesitated briefly,

donned her gloves, turned, and walked unsteadily 

toward the door.  I saw her bump into the wife

of a middle-aged couple entering. As they sat,
she asked her husband, "Did you see that woman

who hit me? She reeked of alcohol, her makeup
was awful and her dress is way out of style.” 

Every once in a while, I recall that lady, regretting

that I did not tell her how nice she looked.

*****

As you'll notice this is still the same poem, still the same voice, still the same tempo. The one thing that has changed is that the poem has 8 quatrains (instead of 9 quatrains) matched up with the closing couplet, which I changed slightly to make a more complete thought.

Since we're reading both versions together, it may be hard to simulate, but the tightness of the 2nd version makes the poem a lot easier read just by cutting down some of the excess.

Here are some of the edits I made:

• Deleted the 2nd line of the 1st stanza. As mentioned earlier, why tell what's going to happen later when the poem will actually show it?
• Took the passive voice out of the 9th stanza. Whether you're writing poetry or prose, passive voice is usually something to be avoided.
• Chose one adverb for the 8th stanza description of the lady walking. The narrator used both "unsteadily" and "slowly," so I chose "unsteadily," because when I think of an unsteady walker, I also think of a slow walker. Using too many adverbs and adjectives can seriously weaken a sentence, whether used in a poem or any other form of writing. 
• Removed the 4th line of the 8th stanza. The reason behind this is that it should be apparent that the middle-aged couple were unaware of the encounter between the narrator and the lady (or that woman).
• Tweaked the final couplet. The word regretting is tighter than the phrase "remembering with sorrow," it allows the narrator to complete his thought.
• Removed "fleeting" from the 7th stanza. This is the stanza I love the most, but I feel that the adjective "fleeting" weakens the exchange here. The narrator does such a good job of showing that it was a fleeting moment by not kissing her hand that I think it's best to remove the word. Simple case of showing vs. telling.

I really like this poem. A lot. Thank you, Harry, for submitting it. And be sure to read the Comments below. I'm sure the Poetic Asides gang will be throwing in their two cents.

*****

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*****

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Thursday, August 20, 2009 4:35:31 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [18] 

I always keep pens with me. And usually paper, though I've been known to write on anything near me if needed: Post-It notes, receipts, envelopes, brochures, napkins, etc. Often, I'll write out a few lines, and those lines will either lead to more lines (and eventually--hopefully--a poem) or that's where the fun will stop: just a few lines. I copy all my lines into those marbled Composition notebooks whether they turn into poems or not. The reason?

Because every so often, I'll go through my notebooks and play a little game with the following rules:

1. Gather up a lot of lines from different sources. The lines can be stand alone thoughts or good lines from abandoned poems.
2. Try to make a poem out of these lines.

You can add new lines, too, if you want. But the fun of this game is trying to take a bunch of little nothings and turn it into a big (or little, I suppose) something.

Here are some random lines I've got together:

* sprawl la la la la

* I've been waiting all night

* Define yourself by what you like
   not by what you don't like

* situational ethics

* it's not the rain
   but the puddles
   that freak me out
   when I'm driving

* our toothbrushes lean into each other
   when we travel and when we forget one
   toothbrush we don't hesitate to share 

* All the ways you can hurt a man
   while tucking your hair behind your ears
   and squinting into the sun. Chewing gum
   with your mouth open, you pull
   your sunglasses over your eyes
   before leaving me alone beside the pool.

* Babies like to touch stuff

* these are the things we tell each other
   and the things we don't

* I've come for your taxes

* If I were born of the sea,
   I would carve your face
   upon a coral reef. My bottle
   would float its message
   for you to read. I would wait
   until the planet warmed...

* I got some kind of guilt

* let the old folks die
   let them wither and die

* Like this girl walking...

* I could tell you to prepare
   for the unexpected but we both
   know there's no point

* Blame it all on the girlfriend

* I can't figure your signals out anymore.

(That's a good starting point, I think.)

*****

"Situational ethics"

Blame it all on the girlfriend:
She's been waiting all night
for him to say, "I got some
kind of guilt." But he's a big
baby, and babies like to touch

stuff. Like this girl walking
while tucking hair behind
her ears and squinting into
the sun, she chews gum
with her mouth open and

leaves him alone beside
the pool to think, "If I were
born of the sea, I would
carve your face upon a coral
reef. My bottle would float

its message for you to read:
Let the old folks die; let
them wither and fade
as we sprawl la la la la
across the salty waves."

She points at the clock, says,
"I can't figure your signals
out anymore." He says, "I
could tell you to prepare
for the unexpected, but we

both know there's no point."
He defines himself by what
he likes, not by what he
doesn't like. So he shows
her their toothbrushes,

how they lean into each
other when they travel,
"And when we forget one
toothbrush, we don't hesitate
to share," he says. These

are the things they tell
each other and the things
they don't. "It's not the rain
but the puddles that freak
me out when I'm driving,"

she says. He pulls her close
and leans down to tell her,
"I've come for your taxes."

*****

Best poem? No.

Fun? Yes. And now, I've got a bonafide poem that I can try revising.

Try it out with your own lines.

*****

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Tuesday, August 18, 2009 3:34:09 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [32] 

Some poems include too many details; many don't include enough. Most poems (mine included) are often too abstract, but sometimes it's not abstraction that's the problem, which can make it very hard to critique a poem. On the surface, the poem can seem almost complete. Such is the case with David Gorgone's "How To Be Idle," which I was tempted not workshop because of how it does feel almost complete. These are the toughest to revise, so let's try.

Here's the original draft:

How To Be Idle, by David Gorgone

When you find the time
grow some vegetables and keep a spare
loaf of bread in the cupboard.

Do not nap, but sleep,
stretch out on your couch.
Find comfort in dreams.

See your children. Visit the orphan.
Comfort the widow. Where they are
one can meet a brief paradise.

When visitors over stay their welcome
offer them a glass of water. If they refuse
poor the water over your vegetable garden.

Enjoy the vegetables you grew,
laugh with the orphan,
and sleep seeking paradise.

*****

I think you'll agree that this seems like a very nice poem on the surface. Most poets would only be able to offer that a comma could come at the end of the second line in the fourth stanza or that "poor" in the third line of the fourth stanza should be spelled "pour." Very superficial types of edits, to be sure. And why? Because this poem IS very close to being there; in fact, it wouldn't even surprise me to see a poem like this accepted for publication.

So why workshop it? Because this poem could be even better. If done right, this poem (or any poem really) has the potential to go from just being a good poem to being a very good poem or even great poem.

Poets need to know when to walk away from a poem (so that they don't wreck it like George Lucas wrecked his original Star Wars trilogy), but often poets get to that "good" threshold and abandon their poems too soon. I'm not saying that David has a bunch of orphaned poems, but he wrote the poem I'm looking at this week.

To find the flaws in this poem, we need to study it carefully from the title all the way through to the last word. The title, "How To Be Idle," is a good one. I like "how-to" titles, because they offer up a lot of room for fun. The poem can actually show a reader how to be idle or how not to be idle. And this exposes the first flaw.

The first stanza advises growing a garden and keeping a spare loaf of bread in the cupboard. Great opening! Second stanza advises to sleep instead of nap, to find comfort in dreams. Reasonable, yes. Third stanza advises a plethora of activities--all very vague figures without shapes or personalities--and then caps off with meeting "a brief paradise." Fourth stanza is maybe my favorite with the visitors overstaying their welcome and pouring water on the garden. Fifth stanza attempts to tie things together.

By looking at the title and each stanza and how each stanza works with the title and how each stanza works with each other stanza, here are my recommendations:

• Go ironic and humorous. Since the title is "How To Be Idle," show how not to be idle. There's already a lot of that in here. From visiting orphans and having visitors overstay their welcome to maintaining a vegetable garden, the "you" in this poem is not being idle.
• Expand the characters. You don't have to introduce everyone by name, but maybe have an exchange or two between them. "Comfort the widow," is so vague. With other vague statements, it really weakens the poem. Try something like, "Comfort Aunt Matilda, who lost her husband to a car wreck 27 years ago. Let her know things will eventually turn around." With the tercets, you can make each exchange its own stanza, which reminds me...
• Keep the tercets. It was a great choice for keeping the poem moving. Remember: you don't have to end every stanza with a period. Just look at my poem from yesterday's poetry prompt to see how you can jump from one stanza to the next to keep the reader moving down the page.
• Take out the final stanza. That last stanza is a tie it all up stanza. I'm guilty of writing them myself, so I know. With the poem you have now, it would be better to end with pouring the water on the vegetable garden. Or, in a revision, you may decide to end the poem with the "you" waving the visitors off. Or with the "you" deciding something like: "Next time, go to Hawaii."

So it seems as if I've come down hard on this poem, right? Not really. This is a good poem--as I've mentioned--but we, as poets, should always be looking for ways a poem might improve. Once we've reached that point, then move on. But we should try to avoid abandoning poems prematurely. And I don't feel David's done so here; obviously, he submitted it to be workshopped--so even he felt there was something that needed done.

Hopefully, my comments will help as he makes tough decisions on where to take his poem next. And hopefully, you'll all add your words of advice and encouragement in the Comments below.

*****

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*****

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Thursday, August 13, 2009 2:42:10 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [18] 

I discovered Sydney Lea earlier this year while reading issue five of New Ohio Review. I loved both his poems, but especially "Early Life." As the founder and former editor of New England Review, I suppose I should've already known his work. Lea has published a novel, A Place in Mind, and two collections of nonfiction, Hunting the Whole Way Home and A Little Wildness.

Lea's most recent collection, Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books), is his eighth volume of poems. Its predecessor, Pursuit of the Wound, was a Pulitzer finalist and his To the Bone: New and Selected Poems was co-winner of the Poets' Prize. He's received fellowships from nearly everywhere and currently teaches at Dartmouth College.

Here's one of my favorites from his collection Ghost Pain:

Evening Walk as the School Year Starts

When was the last lobotomy, I wonder?
Too late for Carl at least, whom it's all but hopeless
to think of as a whipsaw of hateful passion
that would if it could have torn up his mother and father,
mild as they are; but that's how old villagers say
Carl acted before he was cut. Their smiles are rueful.
They shake their heads, subtle. A raven, unsubtle,
grates from a hemlock as Carl steps into sight.

His wave's familiar: he jerks and drops one palm.
How old must he be? He's ageless. His eyes are empty--
the operation. He turns now: ninety degrees,
then ninety again like a sentry, the other way.
He turns the same on each warm evening, retreating
past the house of our mutual neighbor, who will not speak
to Carl's father, for reasons likely beyond recall.
It seems a shame not to edit grievances.

It's some awful stink nearby that draws the raven,
but the rest of the world seems fixed on the morbid too:
a squirrel keeps pouring spruce cones down at me;
a gall-blighted butternut groans; the broadleafs wilt;
there's a pair of toads at my feet that wheels have flattened
side by side, like cartoon icons of failure;
mosquitoes strafe me, a mammoth dragonfly--
one of the season's last--attacks a moth

so close to me I can hear the fatal click.
The other day a son went off to college.
His mother and I are quietly beside ourselves.
We embrace each other harder now, and vow,
as one vows, to love our children harder too.
Though I hum to distract myself, the raven dives
loud as gunfire through brush to its mess. I jump,
but Carl doesn't seem to hear. I watch him limp

to his family's drive--then again that sure right angle.
Like him, our family finds a virtue in order:
we rise at six to eat our breakfasts together,
then make a certain sandwich for one of the girls,
a certain one for the other; we leave at seven;
we gather the girls promptly at end of school.
Carl opens his door and shuts it--click--behind him.
It's after Labor Day, it's end-of-summer,

it's another season upon us. Now he scolds me,
the squirrel on his branch, his store of weapons gone.
Why me, dumb brute? I haven't done anything wrong,
I've got no grievance with him--not with anyone really.
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.
The wishing star is not enough to light
the space around me while this bit of hymn from my schooldays
plays, while daytime's creatures crawl to cover,

and night ones, having no choice, confront the night.

*****

What are you up to?

Well, I just finished a teaching term at Dartmouth. My grad students are adults, many of them high school teachers in search of an advanced degree, and I feel, in my semi-retirement (one course per term), as though I'd died and gone to heaven. The students have been around the block a bit, have had jobs, marriages, children, deaths to contend with, and so on; to that extent, they command subject matter that's often beyond undergrads experience. That's not the undergrads fault, of course. I am moved and inspired by the examples of these aspirant writers in the grad program. Teaching them, to the extent that I can call it that, allows me to stay in touch with a younger generation, have a good deal of time left over for my own writing, and--almost best of all--though I am asked to, I never go to faculty meetings.

I'm also much engaged in non-literary undertakings. I'm the vice-president of Central Vermont Adult Basic Education, which is above all a literacy endeavor, literacy now including computer literacy and more and more, even here in Vermont, English as a second language. CVABE serves three Vermont counties and offers instruction to a thousand students a year. I've been a trustee for almost two decades.

I have also long been involved in a conservation effort in Washington County, Maine, where I, like my late father, have had a camp for decades and decades. Lately the local land trust bought the development rights on 345,000 acres, and bought 34,000 acres outright to be run as a sustainable community forest. Now another 22,000 acres has come on the market rather unexpectedly, so I need to help raise several million more dollars beyond the 35 that the last campaign required. In the grand scheme of things, my contribution to saving these pristine woods and waters may end up being the most important thing--beyond raising five kids--I'll have done.

I have just sold a ninth collection of poems to Four Way Books too, and am trying to finish a second novel; I hope to have it close enough to complete to let my agent look at it in fall.

You're the founder and former editor of New England Review. As an editor, what do you feel makes a good poem?

Oh, there is no short answer to that one! Fact is, I rather shy from the frequent tendency among authors, editors and publishers to choose up teams. If as a poet in my own right, for example, I tend toward formalism,  no one could ever force me into positing that approach as ipso facto superior. I love Don Justice in his formal mode, for example, but I also love Allen Ginsberg at his best. I do tend to dislike obscurantism, and ditto preciousness, and I can't for the life of me see what so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry is for.

Ghost Pain was your eighth volume of poems. How do you go about assembling a collection?

I was lucky enough to have Robert Penn Warren as a mentor when I was a younger man, and his description of how he knew he was done with a book still strikes home for me. He says that you write and you write and you write, and in due course you realize that a certain curve of energy has completed itself, that the stuff you are writing now is differently motivated from what you've been doing for some time. I know that's vague, but I can't seem to do better, in that I don't conceive of collections in an aprioristic, programmatic way.

You teach at Dartmouth College. Does teaching inform or influence your writing?

I may have answered that question above, at least in part. The plain truth is that I haven't been entirely innocent of stealing "ideas" from students, ones that they may have been too new at the game to have pulled off successfully. But that's a rarity. Teaching is important to me as a hedge against adopting a mood like Hemingway's at his worst: Long time ago good, now no good. For forty years, in every course I have found at least one young woman or man who bolsters my faith not only in poetry but also in human nature. Also, by my own choice I live a long way from alleged centers of sophistication, which is helpful to me in that it keeps me from the occasional belief of writers in this era of Creeping MFAism that EVERYONE is concerned with literature. Few of my neighbors are concerned with it, at least in the way that the MFAer may be. And yet I do need the "fix" of talking passionately about poetry, fiction, creative writing" in general, and I get it via my students; I get it a lot more from them than from academic colleagues at any rate.

Ghost Pain includes the long poem "A Man Walked Out." What's the most challenging aspect of writing a long poem?

Here's the weird thing. I have written a number of long poems, starting perhaps with "The Feud" in my second collection, moving through "To the Bone" from my 1996 new and selected, into "A Man Walked Out" and most lately into something called "Birds:A Farrago" from my forthcoming book, Young of the Year. And each of these poems seems somehow to have been given to me. Each seems to have followed on a fairly long period of disinclination from writing. Not writer's block but disinclination (whose causes remain unknown to me). Then these poems come in  a rush, and I rarely do much in the way of revising them. Is that "inspiration?" I don't know, don't even know if I believe in such a thing, really; rather, I believe these gimmes are the payoff for all those hours of revision that I have put into shorter poems.

So in a sense I am a poor candidate to answer your question. I don't conceive of long poems; they present themselves to me helter skelter. Weird, as I say.

Your poetry has been published in several publications over the years. How do you manage your submissions?

Oh, nothing special: I wait until I have, say, three poems that seem to be as good as they are ever going to be, and then I send them out. After three decades plus, needless to say I have certain favorite journals and editors, and I tend to give them first crack. No, that sounds immodest. They are the readers, rather, who I hope may smile on one of the ones I send on. I have had the experience of landing so many poems with editor X, however, that I begin to feel as if he or she is not sufficiently resistant to what I am doing; I need to overcome real critical skepticism in order to trust that the poem is significant to someone beside myself.

Who or what are you currently reading?

I am rereading the two latest books by Maxine Kumin. At 66, it strengthens me to see someone almost twenty years older doing such marvelous work, probably the best of her wonderful career. I am also reading Elizabeth Strout's stunning novel, Olivia Kitteredge. I read a great deal, too, in natural history publications. A delightful advantage of having given up my specifically academic inclinations a long time ago, despite my unlamented Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is that I don't think I need to read in a muscular way, to cover a field or keep up with critical postures. I enjoy, in Eliot's delicious phrasing, "the poet's necessary laziness."

If you could offer only one piece of advice to other poets, what would it be?

Oh, I am a terrible advice-giver, or rather just not inclined to give it at all. My way to practice writing is that and that alone; it is not "right" except for me, is not necessarily shareable. To the degree that it may be shared, I prefer to pass it on by way of engaging in dialogue, not laying down rules and prescriptions. I do have one piece of advice to my students, though: write a lot for, say, a decade, in the sure faith that anything you do with diligence for a long time is something you'll get better at. You may not get great (who's to make that judgment anyhow in our lifetimes?), but you WILL get better. I suspect that there were people out there who had as much talent as Michael Jordan, to use an analogy; Michael Jordan became Michael Jordan, though, because he relentlessly practiced his moves.

*****

* To learn more about Sydney Lea, go to www.sydneylea.net

* To learn more about Sarabande Books, go to www.sarabandebooks.org

* To learn more about Four Way Books, go to www.fourwaybooks.com

*****

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009 3:59:35 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3] 

As you've probably noticed (if you've been reading this blog for any length of time), there are so many possible poems out there waiting to be written. This week's poetry workshop will look at an event poem by Jane Eamon.

Here's the original draft:

Black Friday, by Jane Eamon

I was 24 that day in '39

They call it Black Friday now

But it was a day like any other day

Ole Frank Burns rang up to say

There was a fire burning

At the pine plantation and

Would I like to come along to see it

I seen a little fire on the telly

Fought with bulldozer, a grader

11 tankers and helicopters

All to fight a scrub fire we could

Have put out with 20 men

I grabbed my horse and my rake

And went along to see

It was a fire all right, burning in the dry top of the ridge

It went right across the Rubicon

Another 20 miles

I got to working with the other boys

Me with my rake

Them with crosscut saws and shovels

It looked like we'd made a difference

But she'd only pulled in for the night

The wind had other plans

Blowing fearsome, hot from the north west

That fire roared its presence

We couldn't do anything

We couldn't go anywhere

We bedded down in the bush

In the heat of the day

So we could fight it in the cool of the night

But we weren't making no difference

That fire was burning hungry

30 miles along and

Eating everything in its path

We found Ruth

Just lying in the road

Clutching tobacco and looked to be sleeping

She must have died from the smoke

Hermon's sawmill went up in the middle of the firestorm

All them trees just disappeared

No stumps, no nothing, like they'd never been there

The river dried up

14 miles up the Acheron Way

They say the river actually stopped running

For three hours

We did our best, we fought it

It came to rest

Sated like with a full belly

It took 71 lives that day

And burned to the ground over 5,000,000 acres

It's a day I won't ever forget

Funny how it was Friday the 13, January 1939

And here's a little note that Jane included after the poem: Inspired by the 2nd largest natural disaster in Australia's history – the Victoria Bushfires of 1939. Taken from an eyewitness account of Murray Thompson.

*****

I don't think the note is needed to explain that this was a fire, but I'm glad Jane included it, because knowing this was a huge event (as opposed to a minor one) can help a poet think about scope when dealing with the subject. We'll look at scope in just a few, but first, let's look at what we have here.

First, I'm not sure how close Jane is sticking to actual accounts. Hopefully, she has taken a real account and fictionalized that account. I'm going to make the assumption that this is the case with this poem.

Second, there are some great details in this poem--from Ruth, who "must have died from the smoke," clutching her tobacco to the narrator grabbing his horse and rake. There's a lot going on here.

Third, there's a lack of punctuation. I don't see a reason not to include proper punctuation. So, that's something.

Finally, this poem feels like it could be tightened. Of course, I love the narrative voice, but we can retain that voice while still tightening up the language. For instance, I would take out the first line because it adds little to the poem. We learn he's 24, but that doesn't factor into the story at all, and we learn that it's 1939 later in the poem.

In fact, we shouldn't even mention it's 1939, because the actual year isn't overly important. It's more important that it's called Black Friday and that it's Friday the 13th.

That brings us to scope of the poem. This poem is trying to take on a huge event--much like the narrator was trying to take on a huge fire. It took a team of people to fight the fire, and I think this event probably requires a team of voices to do it justice.

Recently, I read a very good collection of poems by Ted Kooser dealing specifically with the blizzard of January 12, 1888, on the Great Plains called The Blizzard Voices. He collected several fictional accounts based on actual recollections and recorded documents and let the individual poems create a document for this huge and devastating event. This is what I think Jane should do for Black Friday.

By collecting accounts, this would give each poem the freedom to focus on the event from the perspective of each narrator and allow for a more personal connection to how this fire changed lives. Each slice would then create a more complete portrait of what Black Friday really meant.

Of course, I'm asking Jane to do a lot of work. I'm asking her to do a significatnt amount of research to figure out what the various stories are. I'm asking her to write a lot of poems in different voices. But if she does put in the work, she should have something that is not only poetically signficant but also historically valuable. To achieve greatness, one has to be willing to roll up his or her sleeves and get at it.

So here are my recommendations:

• Expand the scope of this poem/project. This poem deals with a big event that changed many lives. Instead of trying to make the poem cover everything, let it focus on one aspect. Then, write more poems--in other voices--to make the event more complete.
• Keep adding in the great details. This poem has wonderful details--the kind that really help a poem (or a collection of poems) stick with a reader. As you add more poems, keep flexing your muscles in this regard.
• Tighten the language in places. Keep the voices unique and personality-driven, but don't let them ramble. In conversation, it's easy to gloss over when narrators ramble too much. This is even more true on the printed page.
• Add punctuation. There's no reason to avoid punctuation in these poems.
• Research. As you've probably noticed, I'm making the assumption that this one poem really needs to be a series of poems. To write a series of poems based on a historical event, there needs to be at least some level of research. Don't go overboard, and don't include every detail. Use what's essential and discard the rest.

As usual, realize these are just my thoughts on this poem and that many others will probably say they love the poem just as it is. I'm not going to argue that point, because judging each poem is a very subjective process that finally comes down to what the actual poet decides. In my mind, I see a very great collection possible if you're willing to put in the time and effort to expand this one poem into a series.

Thanks so much for sharing, Jane!

*****

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*****

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Thursday, July 30, 2009 6:06:06 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [22] 

Sometimes the hardest part of attacking a poem is figuring out what the real poem should be. In my opinion, such is the case with this week's workshop poem by Dianne Ryan. I'm not saying that she does a bad job with the way she wrote her poem--just that the more interesting poem would emerge with a shift in focus.

Here's the original draft:

Pebbles, by Dianne Ryan

It's been six weeks maybe more

since I left you standing at your door.

You wanted me to leave

not ready to take us to another level you said -

whatever that means.

So now I'm gone and out of your life.

You seemed so cold

not one tear or a trace of regret.

Did you care for me at all?

Was I just like a pebble that

you noticed and then kicked away

never to wonder where that pebble was today.

If you took the time you would have found

that this pebble was in fact a rock

solid but a little unsteady

waiting and ready

for someone to pick up

and notice what a wonderful

rock this pebble turned out to be.

*****

Before I get into why I think this poem is focusing in the wrong direction, let's take a look at a few things to avoid in general.

First, the opening two lines throw off the rhythm of the next stanza because they rhyme. As I've said before on this blog, I have nothing against rhymes, but when the first two lines rhyme that sets up an expectation on the part of the reader. This is repeated in the final two lines of the fourth stanza with "away" and "today" as well as in the fifth stanza "unsteady" and "ready." The fifth stanza rhyme is not as bad, but the fourth stanza rhyme seems intentional and a little forced--and since there's no consistency to the rhyme, it just seems more than a little out of place.

Second, there's the problem with abstraction. Stanza three especially is loaded up with them: "You seemed so cold"; "trace of regret"; and you have to be careful any time you use tears in a poem, because it's a loaded word and image that is often used too frequently.

Third, metaphor and simile are important and useful tools for a poet, but let's think about how they are used in this poem. The narrator is trying to make the reader feel good about losing her because she's now a "rock." I know the intent, but I don't think many ex-lovers are going to worry too much over leaving a rock behind. So, I'd just suggest thinking about how the metaphors and similes actually read before using them. 

Now as to the focus of the poem, I think this poem. I feel that the spurned lover thing has been done so many times. You really have to have a fresh take on the subject to grab the interest of your readers. At the moment, what interests me the most is the conditions of the actual break up.

Here are my suggestions:

• Avoid the rhyme. You always have to look at this on a poem-by-poem basis, and in this case, I don't think the rhyme is a factor in the poem.
• Avoid abstraction. Try to focus on actual descriptions, whether descriptions of physical objects or actual actions.
• Think about metaphor and simile. I would advise in this poem to avoid them outright. There are definitely times and places to use them, but I wouldn't suggest doing so for this poem.
• Write in third person narrative voice. Try writing this poem without "I" and "you." Instead, use "she" and "he." I think you'll be surprised how this can help focus the poem.
• Focus exclusively on the actual break up. Start with him telling her what he tells her. Then, let her actual actions show what she's thinking. Do this without telling what either actually feeling; remember to avoid abstraction. Just let their actions take over. This will allow your narrative voice to show instead of tell. I think you and your readers will be very surprised with the results.

So those are my suggestions. You can take them all; you can pick and choose the ones you want; or you can write me off as an idiot. As I've said before, there are rules and guidelines, but all of them are breakable and bendable.

*****

Do you want one of your poems workshopped? Click here to find out how you could possibly make it happen. 

Thursday, July 23, 2009 6:02:07 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [24] 

Cati Porter is founder and editor-in-chief of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and associate editor (poetry) for Babel Fruit, and is the author of a chapbook of prose poems, small fruit songs (Pudding House Publications), and a full-length collection, Seven Floors Up (Mayapple Press). Cati also participated in the April PAD Challenge this year on Poetic Asides.

small fruit songs is a fun little chapbook--not only is the entire collection prose poems, but they also all explore fruit topics. Good stuff. Meanwhile, Seven Floors Up is a little more of a traditional collection, though it is still a whole lot of fun. In fact, one of Porter's strengths as a poet is her sense of humor.

Here's one of my favorites from Seven Floors Up:

"Caution Please Do Not Try to Turn
the Head Forcefully by Hand!"

(Label found on my son's jeans after his first day of preschool)

I don't know where it came from but it's there, stuck
to his grubby little knee as though someone

saw his small head, how tragically
fragile, how it could turn, like a lid, quite

around. I am grateful to whoever had the foresight
to apply that label, grateful that they did not choose

"Open Me First" or "Discard After _____,"
grateful they turned my attention to the fact

that someday someone may turn his head.

*****

What are you up to?

Well, right now I'm listening to a screaming child tell me I'm mean. It's the last week of school for my boys before their summer vacation. What that means for me is that I'm frantically trying to finish up any projects that require quiet time. I'm now in the middle stages of putting together a second manuscript which is, I think, a departure from the poems in Seven Floors Up; it's very associative and image-driven. Most of the poems in this collection were written in the last year or so, with the core comprised of poems written during NaPoWriMo, after prompts posted to the Poetic Asides blog. I've also been forcing myself to make time to send out more of my work -- the new poems, as well as my chapbook, (al)most delicious, an ekphrastic series after Modigliani's nudes. 

I'm also just finishing my first year in Antioch University's MFA program, and preparing for the next residency which is coming up fast. I've been doing a lot of reading, some for the seminars, but mostly for my field study, and have a pile of Marilyn Nelson's and Molly Bendall's books on my desk.

Oh, and I'm beginning to read the submissions that are coming through for Poemeleon's gender issue.

As the Editor-in-Chief of Poemeleon and poetry editor of Babel Fruit, what do you feel makes a good poem?

There are lots of good poems. So so many competently and compellingly good poems. For me, though, they all have certain things in common. And that's the drawback. What's really rare, though, is the great poem, which is so much harder to define: It's the one that hits me in the gut; It's the one that makes everything become suddenly clear, or makes what was previously clear so utterly muddled that I'm dumbstruck. Good poems make me want to sit down and write until my fingers ache. Great poems leave me wondering if I'll ever be able to write again.

But great poems are difficult. In order to write great poems, we must first write good poems. (And of course, before that and in-between, the essential bad poems.)

Both good poems as well as great poems employ craft, image, music, voice, and use them to forward the ideas embedded in the poem. The devices inform, rather than dictate, the shape of the poem, become integral to the movement of a piece -- both on the page and in the head. To take a step back, what separates a good poem from a bad poem? The usage of those same devices: A bad poem uses them to ill effect -- sets out to write a sonnet and writes one, no matter whether the end rhymes are forced, syntax needlessly inverted, the phrases stilted and awkward. A good poem never does that, not without good cause.

But the difference between a good poem and a great poem? That's a little more subtle, but I think it's that gut punch. If it's not there, I might be willing to hang around with it for a while, but it's not the one I'm going to remember down the road.

small fruit songs is a collection of prose poems about fruit. What do you like about the prose poem as a poetic form?

At the time I was writing small fruit songs, I had previously been in love with received forms and was trying them all out. Often my results fell under the "bad poem" heading. But one day, after deciding that I wanted to write a series that used fruit-related terminology as its impetus, I sat down and just allowed my subconscious to take over, and what came out was very associative, unstructured, and organic, which felt like the right choice for the material.

What I like most about the prose poem is its versatility. I've read prose poems that read like stories, prose poems that read like excerpts from a training manual, lyric prose poems, prose poems as dramatic monologue, prose poems as pseudo-journalism, surrealist prose poems.... That said, as versatile as it is, I don't think the prose poem is the end-all, beat-all. It's not functional if the form is forced.

Do you have a writing routine?

I wish! I prefer writing in the very early morning when the house is quiet, but with kids and with a household to run, I have to be more fluid. I used to get up in the middle of the night, but I can only take so much sleep deprivation. I do get up at about five or five-thirty, sometimes earlier, but most days I need a couple cups of coffee -- and an empty house -- to be productive. If I can't finish what I'm working on while they're at school, it's catch-as-catch-can. And I can't use anything but a computer. My handwriting is awful so even if I manage to scribble a few lines while out running around, usually I can't read it later!

Seven Floors Up has some very funny poems in it, including poems inspired by eBay listings. What do you think helps make a humorous poem effective?

Humor is unpredictable. You never know what's going to strike someone as funny. My boys and I spent about an hour watching flashmob videos on YouTube yesterday. One of them was for the Best Funeral Ever. Later I described the scene to my husband. He said, "That's not funny." But it was to us, to me. I laughed hysterically at the sight of thirty people dressed in black showing up and pretending to know the deceased. Which now sounds so totally ludicrous, and inconsiderate.

At Poemeleon we recently published an issue on humorous poems which included a great essay by Renee Ashley on involuntary comedy. Humor is very personal. Heck, all poetry is personal. But what one person finds funny another may think is just plain dumb. I think the trick is not to set out to write a funny poem. If something strikes you as funny, and you decide you want to use it in a poem, do it right then and there before you lose the spark. When my husband was searching eBay for businesses for sale, he happened upon this thing called an inflatable church. I just started laughing. And I knew I wanted to write about it. So I stayed up late that night and got a first draft out. But it's not enough for the poem to be funny -- in order for it to be an effective poem it must also contain some other relevant nugget of wisdom or what have you. In the case of the inflatable church, I found it not just funny, but almost blasphemous (and I'm not a religious person), and in a strange way somewhat true -- thinking about prosperity churches and such, in their depiction of a church as a business opportunity.  

How did you go about putting together your collections Seven Floors Up and small fruit songs?

Seven Floors Up was a long time in the making. Before it was published, it made the rounds as a chapbook titled Where We Dwell, which itself began as a chapbook titled Seven Floors Up to the Kitchen of the Soul, a title I had hoped to return to but which my publisher thought was too long so it was shortened. The poems were written over the course of about eight years, beginning when my first son was born up until just weeks before the book went to press. And I spent hours, literally hours, laying all of the poems out and ordering them until it felt right.

With small fruit songs, I fiddled with it for a little while, but then noticed a trend -- the narrative seemed to follow the same trajectory as the alphabet, so I just put them in alphabetical order, and, Voila!, it was done. Oh, and I should mention, it was written in under seven days and had a publisher in ten. Go figure.

Who are you currently reading?

I've been reading a lot of work that's been loosely dubbed Gurlesque: Brenda Shaughnessy, Chelsea Minnis, Catherine Wagner, plus Arielle Greenberg; I've especially loved reading Ann Carson & Alice Notley. And of course Marilyn Nelson and Molly Bendall. I actually have a running list (with annotations) of books that I've read recently on the "What I'm Reading" tab on my blog.

If you could offer only one piece of advice to your fellow poets, what would it be?

Write bad poems. Take risks. Learn from them. Don't get bogged down in endless revisions. If it's a bad poem know when to let it go. Then go write a better poem.

*****

* Learn more about Cati Porter at her blog: http://catiporter.wordpress.com/

* For more on Seven Floors Up and Mayapple Press, go to www.mayapplepress.com

* For more on small fruit songs and Pudding House Publications, go to www.puddinghouse.com

* For more on Poemeleon, go to www.poemeleon.org

* For more on Babel Fruit, go to www.babelfruit.org

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in a Poetic Asides interview, click here to find out how you might be able to make it happen.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 6:04:11 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3] 

I've been meaning to incorporate revision tips into this blog in a helpful way since it first started, but I've had trouble figuring out a good method for doing so. Finally, I had one of those "light bulb" moments when the answer seems so obvious: I'll just workshop a poem each week.

The original poems submitted to me to get us started were submitted via Facebook. Members of my Poetic Asides group on that site were sent a message soliciting poems that I could try offering feedback. Not every poem submitted to me will receive feedback or appear on the blog, but every poem has the same chance. (I'll include directions on how to submit your own poem--if interested--in a later post on this blog.)

It should be noted that my feedback should not be considered the final word on any poem. As poets, we have to make the final decisions on what works and does not. But I will try to give many suggestions and ask the kind of questions any good reader or writer of poetry should consider.

Today's poem was submitted by J. Era Martin. Here it is in its original form:

Childhood, by J. Era Martin

They named me Era,

As though somehow the Word alone would empower me.

A man of Signs, my father

lifted me, a Tin of Elements,

to the moon and shouted Kunte Kente,

somewhat inappropriately, I’m sure.

He favoured the Yin and the Yang

without any clue to Balance;

he would fight and lose teeth—

three times he lost and replaced and finally lost

the front one.  But he never stopped

Smiling.

It was sort of maniacal, really.

You could tell he just wanted

to please, but there he was, unfolding

a Thousand Visible Lies right

to your Face. 

Christmas he’d spend

the morning with us, the afternoon

with his Illegitimate Family.  I would

hang up on his Mistress when

she phoned.

He’d keep a Job no more than five days:

having told his boss a better way

of pouring concrete, he’d be fired.

Daddy smelled like Budweiser when

I hugged him.

I would feed it to him and his buddies

in their F 250 Trucks in the driveway to our house.

I was a Good Girl.

Our family always rented.

The second floor was converted

to a Bedroom from a Game Room

For my parents and my baby sister.

Wolf Spiders hung above her crib.

The previous tenant had committed

Suicide in that room.

I remember I would wake up

to woodpeckers.  Their

Irregular Beats were fierce.

My father came home less and less often.

I think this is how The Story always goes.

His partying was excused:  better to

Stay The Night than Drive Home Drunk,

my mom explained.

*****

My first question: Why are so many words in uppercase? Signs, Tin of Elements, Balance, Face, etc. I'm assuming these words are meant to be emphasized, but doing so with a device like capitalization (or bold and italic) is often distracting for a reader. It was for me, and I can't see a good reason for emphasizing those specific words.

Next, I know the title of the poem is "Childhood," but I'm not sure if this poem is as much about the childhood of the narrator as about her father. It seems like shifting the focus specifically to the father would benefit this poem a great deal.

In fact, the strongest parts of this poem--for me--were when describing the father's teeth and his other family. So, a good strategy after discovering what this poem may be about is to cut out the rest of the excess.

*****

2nd version--taking out caps and excess information

Childhood, by J. Era Martin

A man of signs, my father

lifted me, a tin of elements,

to the moon and shouted Kunte Kinte,

somewhat inappropriately, I’m sure.

He favoured the yin and the yang

without any clue to balance;

he would fight and lose teeth—

three times he lost and replaced and finally lost

the front one.  But he never stopped

smiling.

It was sort of maniacal, really.

You could tell he just wanted

to please, but there he was, unfolding

a thousand visible lies right

to your face. 

Christmas he’d spend

the morning with us, the afternoon

with his illegitimate family.  I would

hang up on his mistress when

she phoned.

Our family always rented.

The second floor was converted

to a bedroom from a game room

for my parents and my baby sister.

Wolf spiders hung above her crib.

The previous tenant had committed

suicide in that room.

My father came home less and less often.

I think this is how the story always goes.

His partying was excused:  better to

stay the night than drive home drunk,

my mom explained.

*****

After the second version, I still feel this poem could be tightened quite a bit and made more immediate. In fact, I think the title should change to focus on the family element of this poem.

To make the poem more immediate, I'm going to once again strip out anything that does not relate to the tension in this family. And, as you'll probably notice, I'm going to flip the ending image to the front, because I feel like it's just sticking out at the end.

*****

3rd version--changing title, moving lines around and ever tightening

Our Family Always Rented, by J. Era Martin

My father came home less and less often.

"Better to stay the night than drive home drunk,"

my mom explained. A man of signs, my father

favoured the yin and the yang without any clue

to balance; Christmas, he'd spend the morning
with us, the afternoon with his illegitimate family.

You could tell he just wanted to please, but
there he was unfolding his hands like the lies

he fed us. It was sort of maniacal, really,

the way he would fight and lose teeth—

three times he lost and replaced and finally lost

the front one.  But he never stopped smiling.

*****

For me, this third version really gets the message across in a concise manner. In the beginning, this poem sets up the familiar story we're used to hearing about the father with a family on the side. Where this poem twists in a new direction is by focusing on his fight with his teeth. Trying to keep them, but ultimately losing the one in front. Regardless, he never stops smiling.

Great poem, J., and I hope some of my feedback has helped.

Of course, my feedback is not the end. I hope that the readers of this blog will jump in and offer their own feedback on J.'s poem. Plus, don't be afraid to refute my feedback and edits. I totally think the best way to workshop is to have several different opinions. The more the better. Plus, with more feedback, J. will have even more options for which direction she ultimately wishes to take this poem.

Thursday, July 09, 2009 4:54:32 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [37] 

Kathryn Stripling Byer is the former poet laureate of North Carolina. She has published five poetry collections, most recently Coming to Rest (Louisiana State University Press). She's also one of those rare poets who have a business card.

Coming to Rest is a great collection--even has two Halloween poems. Here's one of my favorites:

Coastal Plain

The only clouds
forming are crow clouds,

the only shade, oaks
bound together in a tangle of oak

limbs that signal the wind
coming, if there is any wind

stroking the flat
fields, the flat

swatch of corn.
Far as anyone's eye can see, corn's

dying under the sky
that repeats itself either as sky

or as water
that won't remain water

for long on the highway: its shimmer
is merely the shimmer

of one more illusion that yields
to our crossing as we ourselves yield

to our lives, to the roots
of our landscape. Pull up the roots

and what do we see but the night
soil of dream, the night

soil of what we call
home. Home that calls

and calls
and calls.

*****

What are you up to?

Just now I've been reading online Eavan Boland's essay in the May issue of Poetry, finding her description of the two contradictory ways of being a poet extremely helpful. With my term as North Carolina's first woman Poet Laureate coming to a close, I've felt the pull of the private grow stronger and stronger, even as I never doubted the importance of the position I held as Laureate. It's rejuvenating to find an essay giving voice to what's been milling around inside my own head, giving it context, both literary and historical, so that I can say, "Yes, I understand the lay of the land a lot better now." The two seemingly antithetical "types" exist in most of us, I think, and I know they do inside me. One minute, get me out of here, then the next, what can I do to bring more North Carolina poets to public notice? 

Having finished Boland's essay, I'm now worrying about the tomato plants in our garden. Two of them aren't thriving and one of the heirlooms is being nibbled by something. Rabbit? Raccoon? This afternoon I will hope to get back to some of my own work, print it out, scribble on the pages for a while.  I've a new manuscript I'm hoping to place, Descent, which takes me back to the landscape of the deep South from which I came. And what must be dozens of notebooks scattered all over the house containing drafts of poems, essays and stories--I have to track them down!  I'm hopelessly disorganized.

You were the poet laureate of North Carolina from 2003 to 2009. What were your responsibilities as North Carolina's poet laureate?

I was told at the outset that I could write my own job description. Well, with Fred Chappell as your predecessor, that's not going to be easy. Fred set quite a high standard, and I knew I was going to have to work hard to meet it. Mostly I wanted to help make poetry accessible in as many ways I could, whether to other poets (we have so many in our state!) or to readers, students, teachers, anyone at all who cared to listen to me on my soapbox.  

Right away the Literature Director of the NC Arts Council, Debbie McGill, and I began a web page on the Council site devoted to NC writers, with a poet of the week, new books section, and news. Finally we had to give up the week by week poet; it was a lot of work to keep that going. We moved to a Poets of the Month, and finally to a quarterly web page. I decided to set up my own laureate blog to facilitate what the Council was trying to do, especially now with the budget freeze in place.

So, what else did I do? I wrote occasional poems for libraries, events, really, all sorts of requests. One, even, for someone's 60th birthday! I visited classrooms, gave a lot of readings, answered a lot of e-mails, and wrote a lot of blurbs. I'd say my job description was "always available." I was always trying to track down new voices to share with an audience. Although the council can't afford to search for and select a new laureate till state finances improve, they've asked me to continue the blog, which I'm happy to do. Working on it gives me a lot of satisfaction.

How important do you feel community is for poets?

So many of us, of a certain generation anyway, have embedded in our imaginations the image of the solitary poet, the Romantic standing alone on the summit, brooding  over the world below and its connection with the world inside. At the same time, we know that  poets need each other, just as they always have, maybe now more than ever, and they need to feel that they are part of their own communities, where they become involved in the cultural and political life of that community. I've tried myself to become involved in various issues important to me locally—the new library, for instance, writing a poem for the groundbreaking, letters to the paper and so forth.  The moratorium on new development in our county drew me into writing guest editorials as well as poems.   

We are lucky to have a local weekly that cares about such things. The larger newspapers are turning away from their literary pages, even their guest editorials. I know the internet is picking up a lot of the slack. Blogs. Facebook. Twitter. I've just joined Facebook after keeping my distance for a good while. I was warned by a friend, "You will be falling into a black hole."  So far I'm still ok, and I'm discovering that I can post news there about my latest laureate features and other literary matters of interest to me. The definition of "community" is changing, no doubt about that, and I still prefer face to face community, but I'll use what I can to make the case for poetry.

North Carolina may be the best state in which to live if you are a writer.  The NC Writers Network was begun nearly 30 years ago, and it has worked hard to bring real literary community to the state, a state that for so long had its regions strictly marked—mountain (where writers got little notice), Piedmont (Mecca, as we used to call it) and eastern/coastal, as isolated as the mountains. Now, thanks to NCWN and umbrella organizations like Netwest, among others, I can say that the whole state is Mecca. It didn't happen overnight. It took years of ground-breaking by good people, like Debbie McGill of the Arts Council, Marsha Warren and her stalwarts at NCWN, and all the local folks who came together to form their own literary organizations.  Writers need each other and they need to feel a connection with their readers and future readers. It's fine to stand on a mountain-top and brood—I've done that myself--but we have to come back down again and live in our communities. Let our voices be heard.

In Coming to Rest, location factors into several poems. How important do you feel location is to a poet?

I firmly believe a poet has to feel located somewhere, in some physical place where light falls on the ground, the earth grumbles and sings, the leaves fall, the sewage stinks, and so forth. "You have to be from somewhere before you can write about anywhere else," as Fred Chappell, our resident genius, once said. Or as Flannery O'Conner said, "Our limitations are our gateways to reality." My gateway literally squeaked, rusty and old, there was pig-stink all around, my people were hard-scrabble farmers, but it was a way into my first poems.  And from there, I could go anywhere.  Anywhere!

You work in relationships with your daughter and husband in first person narrative poems. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction?

Sometimes it’s hard to know where to draw the line. I let the poem itself guide me. The poems drawing in daughter and husband in Coming to Rest were different in that personal inclusion. So many of my earlier poems had been "persona poems," where I could work out any inner narratives through a fictional character--the mountain woman named Alma, for example, or the aging Evelyn. James Dickey's famous statement, "Poetry lies in order to tell the truth," seems apt here, as does Richard Hugo's, "You owe reality nothing, your emotions everything." What I mean is, you fictionalize, you improvise when you come up against what you can't or can't yet say or may never want to say outright. Yes, let's don't forget Dickinson's, "Tell the truth but tell it slant." There are ways of getting around reality into a poetic reality.  The poem itself has seemed to draw the line for me when I am paying adequate attention to language and craft. The reality in a poem is, finally, language and how it is used.

How do you handle the submissions process?

Right now I'm not submitting much at all,  though I'm happy to oblige if an editor asks me to submit some work. Otherwise I'm dealing with the day-to-day business of being wife, mother, daughter, laureate, friend, and as you see, at the bottom of the list, poet.  But can't poet be intertwined with all of the above?    

I used to be diligent about the submissions process, keeping records, reading Poets & Writers faithfully, but I came to find the process taking up so much energy—what to send where and when, then the irritation (that's putting it mildly) of rejections, the envy of seeing friends with poems in magazines that had rejected my work, and so on. It began to be tiresome. I'm ready to try again, though, with the new work I've done over the past few months. I've been in P0-biz for 40 years. I still get a thrill from having poems accepted, and I still get pretty testy when they are rejected. I don't want to think of myself as over and done with. I simply won't, and that's all there is to it.

Why do you write poetry?

It's the best way I know to sing with the world. And because I couldn't be Renee Fleming or Emmy Lou Harris. Or Nina Simone.

Who are you currently reading?

Stacked at my bedside are books by Mahmoud Darwish, Tomas Transtromer, Zbigniew Herbert, Sandor Kanyadi, Chitra Divakaruni, Marie Ponsot, Adam Zagajewski, and Nazim Hikmet. I pick up one of them on any given night.  Chitra's novels, of course, I read straight through, but I enjoy going back to favorite passages. I'm especially fond of her The Vine of Desire and the novel that comes before it, Sister of My Heart. I'm staying away from most American poetry at the moment, but not NC poetry. You can read my laureate blog to see that I'm keeping up with that.   

If you could share only one piece of advice with other poets, what would it be?

I'll have to go with what Maxine Kumin told me years ago, "You have to be stubborn to make it as a poet." That advice was for a young poet struggling to see her first book published, but I think it still stands. By "making it," I now mean keeping it going, growing, digging in your heels and saying, "Here I am." We are a youth obsessed culture, including our literary culture. But women of a certain age like me must keep on keeping on. Living in the South, being thought "regional" by the literary powers-that-be doesn't help. But it doesn't hurt, if you pay them no mind.

It may seem paradoxical that to keep moving, you dig in your heels and stand your ground, but poetry can deal with those paradoxes. All of art can.  

*****

* Check out Kathryn's North Carolina Poet Laureate blog at: http://ncpoetlaureate.blogspot.com/

* Check out Kathryn's personal blog at: http://kathrynstriplingbyer.blogspot.com/

* Learn more about Coming to Rest and LSU Press at: http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on this blog, click here to find out how we might be able to make that happen.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009 12:24:27 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [9] 

Justin Marks' full-length collection of poems, A Million in Prizes, was recently released by New Issues Poetry & Prose after winning the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize. His latest chapbook is Voir Dire (Rope-a-Dope Press), and he's the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks.

I enjoyed reading both A Million in Prizes and Voir Dire, which is a semi-long poem. Here's one of my favorites from A Million in Prizes:

Matter of Fact

I wanted to create the ocean, the sky,
the intricate structure of a leaf

and thought by now
I'd have come close.

What joy I have in knowing
creation of that sort

doesn't exist.
The world has little

use for me.
Its glare blinds.

How glad I am
for the orbit I inhabit.

A planet to the sun.

*****

What are you up to?

Enjoying being a new dad. Working. Doing some writing here and there. Lining up readings for the spring and fall.

An entire section of your collection A Million in Prizes is one long poem: [Summer insular]. How is writing a long poem different from writing shorter poems?

Writing a long poem, for me, is more comforting than working on shorter poems. Something about knowing I have a large space to work in puts me in a good place emotionally. I mean, I love writing shorter poems, but they generally don't take as long to write and if I don't have anything else I'm working on, I'll start to get real anxious. But lately my short poems are all part of a larger vision/conceptual framework, a book or chapbook, so even when I'm done with an individual poem I know I have a lot more to work on in terms of completing that particular manuscript. It makes me feel more like I'm working on sections of a long poem instead of isolated one night stands, as Spicer called them.

The end of your collection is packed with prose poems. What do you like about the prose poem?

Those poems were a real turning point in my writing. I could sense that I wouldn't be writing too many more poems like the ones from the first section. Not because I didn't like them. It was just that...I don't know...the straight-up, individual lyric poem was starting to feel limiting to me. I was and am proud of the work that’s in the first section of my book, and absolutely stand by it, but in terms of my development it was just time to move on. One of the things a book is to me is in some ways a chart of a person’s development/growth as a writer during the time in which the book was written.

To try and enable that growth for myself I decided that I needed to focus on not caring about the end result and (as much as I possibly could) turn off my inner-critic and just write. One way I was able to make that happen was to not worry about line breaks any more. At the same time, I found myself thinking more in sentences than lines—or maybe more accurately: Thinking about sentences as lines. So that was one thing I liked about prose poems. I was able to sort of pack a lot in and move about in a more relaxed manner than if I were trying to write lineated poems.

Since then I've returned to prose a good bit. A new chapbook manuscript I'm finishing up is all prose. What I hope will be my next book is a series of sonnets, but even with those I keep trying to work prose lines in there somehow to kind of break things up and build some variety into the manuscript.

The poems in A Million in Prizes are all first person narratives. Where do you draw the line between reality and fiction in your poems? Also, what do you like about writing in a confessional voice?

I don't think writing in the first person makes one confessional. My poems in this book—and in general—explore the lyric "I", certainly, but that's totally different than being confessional. I'm not confessing anything. Besides, there are so many problems with that term, even as it has been/is applied to poets like Lowell and Plath and that whole "confessional" crowd—it doesn't feel useful to me.

One of the things I try to do in my work is get an entire self (if such a thing exists) down on the page, so I don't really draw lines between fiction and reality. It's all fiction. And reality. I take from my life whatever is necessary for my work to progress/evolve/change. It potentially gets tricky when I start writing about other people from my life, but so far no one has objected or asked me to not write about them. If they did, though, I'd have to honor that.

Your collection won the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize, and you're the founder and editor of Kitchen Press Chapbooks. What do you think makes a good collection?

I think about this a lot, and every time I start to approach a conclusion I'm reminded of some book I like that breaks the rules surrounding whatever conclusions I'm approaching. I guess, on a basic level, I think a good collection is one in which the poems become something more than individual poems that are somehow similar in feel and arranged together to make a nice flow. The poems in a good collection are in conversation with each other and form something greater than their parts.

But that definition, for me, is always changing. Over the last few years I've become way more invested in books that are projects or series/serial as opposed to more traditional collections, books that are more akin to Spicer's idea of the serial poem, or are a book length poem, etc. One of my favorite contemporary books is Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely. The subtitle is An American Lyric. I don't know what that means, or how one might define it except to say, read the book. It's prose, but I'm not sure if it's prose poems. Maybe it's a lyric essay or memoir of some sort. It doesn't really matter. Martha Ronk's Vertigo is another book I enjoy immensely that I think is a little limiting to just call a collection of poems (though it does have individual poems). It's more like a series or cycle of poems.

It’s one of the qualities I look for when I read manuscripts for Kitchen Press. Take Hit Wave, by Jon Leon. I don't know if you've read it, but I'm not really sure what it is: a collection of prose poems? A lyric novella? I could only put it under the rather general category of anti-poetic. And writing I love.

But then there's Old With You, by Lily Brown. I don't think anyone would argue that that isn't your basic collection of somewhat thematically linked, individual poems. But I love that book too.

So I guess what I'm saying is: There are basic qualities that I think make a good collection, but I also really dig work that makes questions just what a collection of poems is/can be. (As an aside, Tarpaulin Sky Press is deeply invested in putting out work that others might not consider to be "poetry.")

Your bio mentions an infant son and daughter. Have they impacted your writing in any way?

They impacted my writing before they were even conceived. I wrote Voir Dire around the time my wife and I were getting serious about trying to get pregnant. There are lots of references to babies in that mini-chapbook. There are also a lot of babies in the two manuscripts I've been working on throughout my wife's pregnancy and since the birth of our son and daughter. In a sense, it's all kind of topical. I never mentioned babies in my work until we started trying to have one/had them. I mean, I'm not writing about my babies as individual people per-se. I don't really write "about" specific people or subjects. Though I suppose there are poems in A Million in Prizes that you could argue are "about" specific subjects. Generally, though, it's not my thing. Anyway. That I'm mentioning babies at all, to me, means my babies have had a significant impact on my writing.

You work as a copywriter. How do the demands of writing copy differ from writing poetry? Also, are there similarities?

Marketing copy has to be concise and to the point, say as much as possible with as few words as possible, and it absolutely has to get and maintain the reader’s attention, even if it is only for a few moments and all you're ultimately saying is "Buy Now". Poetry is like that. (Though there are certainly worthwhile poetries out there that are not at all concerned with the whole maximum-impact-with-minimum-words model.) But I think the most significant similarity is that marketing copy is pretty conceptual. You have to think about all the ways what you're saying can be interpreted and if that fits in with what you want people to take away. For me, with poetry, it's not that I necessarily have a specific idea of what I want people to take away, but I definitely put a lot of time into thinking about how any random stranger out in the world could interpret my writing. In that sense, being a copywriter has made me a much more conscious and aware (I guess "better") poet than if I were in some other profession.

This feels even more true to me when I think about the connections between putting together a marketing campaign and writing a book, or even an extended project that spans across many individual books. You have to really be aware of how each part interacts with the other, whether it's individual ads in a campaign or poems in a book (whether that book be a more traditional collection of individual poems or something more extended/conceptual).

There's also the fact that corporate and marketing lingo is some of the weirdest, most mind-blowing shit I've ever heard. Total goldmine.

But the biggest difference between copywriting and poetry, for me, is that I often feel restricted when writing copy. I may come up with an idea or a line, but so many people above me will have their feedback that I have to find a way to incorporate, and there's also the whole staying on brand and within the voice aspect as well. And that's cool. But poetry, for me, is in large part about freedom. I really don't have anything to lose or gain career-wise with poetry so I feel generally free to do whatever I want. Of course that feeling winds up compromised by various factors and circumstances, as it must, but I'd like to think that that sense of freedom that I try to start from still remains somehow at the core of my poetry.

Who have you been reading recently?

Joe Massey, Eric Baus, Rodrigo Toscano, Jack Spicer, Frank Stanford, Barbara Guest,

Mathias Svalina, Aase Berg, Zach Schomburg, Harper’s Magazine, Wired Magazine, the most recent issue of the Agricultural Reader.

If you could pass on only one piece of advice to fellow poets, what would it be?

I've been given such large heaps of bad advice over the years, I'm hesitant to offer any of my own. So maybe my advice should be, “don’t take any advice.” Then again, I've also gotten some good advice that has often helped sustain me: Trust yourself. Don't let anyone or thing stop you. Be willing to change. Persevere. Stuff like that. That’s my advice.

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Check out A Million in Prizes and New Issues Poetry & Prose at www.wmich.edu/newissues.

Check out Voir Dire and Rope-a-Dope Press at http://rope-a-dope-press.blogspot.com.

Check out Justin Marks at his blog: http://justinanselmarks.blogspot.com/.

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 3:45:07 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)    Comments [3]