Cover the windows! Dim the lights! But not too much, because you need to get writing today and into the night (late, late, late at night). After all, today is an extra day that you only get once every four years. If you don't write today, you won't be able to write on February 29 again until 2012.

2012!

Seriously, can you really live without writing for 4 years?

Of course you can't!

This is an extra day--24 hours that shouldn't even exist. Make sure you take advantage of this little gift, this little extra bit of February.

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Here's a challenge. Why not try writing a leap year poem? Either write your poem into the comments below, or send to my email (robert.brewer@fwpubs.com). If I get one or two that knock my socks off, I'll feature them (and the poets who wrote them) in a future post. Plus, I'll get working on one myself.

As I’ve mentioned on this blog previously, I have a Facebook account under my full name (Robert Lee Brewer). And as I’ve mentioned previously, I’m all about playing online Scrabble at that account as well. And one of my more consistent opponents is none other than poet Dorianne Laux, who’s authored several collections of poetry and co-authored an instructional text (mentioned below) with Kim Addonizio.

Dorianne will be the first of what I hope will be many poet interviews conducted for this blog. I will categorize all these interviews under the totally misleading title “Poet Interviews.” ;)

So, let’s get started!

What are you currently up to? Any thing new coming up in the near future?

When I’m not playing Scrabble with you on Facebook, I’m packing to move to North Carolina where I’ve accepted a job at NC State.  We’re also trying to sell our modest little Cape Cod style house in Eugene so we can buy a modest little Cape Cod style house in Raleigh.  In the midst of all this I’m still teaching at UO (Oregon) until the end of the winter term and at the Pacific University Low Residency Program, so, there’s little time for new projects.  I am lucky in that I have two new books out. 

My first book, Awake, was reprinted in January by Eastern Washington University Press.  They did a beautiful job and I like knowing it will have a second life.  http://www.ewu.edu/ewupress/poetry/awake.htm 

And Red Dragonfly Press just put out Superman: The Chapbook, a gorgeous letterpress edition that contains six new poems.   http://www.reddragonflypress.org/

I have a jumble of new work I can’t wait to get to and revise.  This summer my husband and I are going to spend 5 fabulous weeks in May at VCCA, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, where we hope to write new poems, the Muse willing. I’m going to be culling and reviewing the last few years of poems and see if I can’t cobble together a working manuscript.  

Joe and I will both be teaching a workshop this August at Truro Center for the Arts near Provincetown.  It’s a beautiful spot and there are a bunch of wonderful classes and teachers there including Mark Doty and Paul Lisicky, Tony Hoagland, Eleanor Lerman and Martin Espada.  http://www.castlehill.org/workshops_writing.html

I’ll also travel to Guatemala in the beginning of July where I’ll join Joyce Maynard and Ann Hood to teach a poetry workshop.  Joyce has a home in San Marcos on Lake Atitlan and has begun to invite a poet and a fiction writer to join her there for a mini-lit fest. I’ve never been to Guatelmala and am aching to go.   http://www.joycemaynard.com/writing-workshops/lake-atitlan.shtml 

I’m collecting tennis shoes and writing materials to give to the children.  It’s a place where paper and pencils are luxuries.  I hope to bring poems back from the 10 days there. 

Right this minute, I’m working on a series of poetry columns for Writer’s Digest, short essays with model poems and an exercise, much like what’s in The Poet’s Companion.  The first one should be out this June. 

In The Poet’s Companion, which you wrote with Kim Addonizio, you mention that poets should write what they know. Could you explain this concept a little and why you feel this way?

As I get older, I become more and more sure that I know absolutely nothing.  I thought I knew about love, about death, about motherhood, men.  I know nothing.  I can only guess how much less I’ll know 10 years from now.  But, I do know my backyard, my street, the way light bounces off a car windshield in summer, how frost glazes the roses when they are fooled into bud in February.  I don’t know who we humans are or why we’re here or where we’re going, but I want to.  I think those eternal questions continue to be asked, in spite of their mystery, because of their mystery.  I explore those questions by looking deeply into the things I do know, the visible, touchable world. So often young poets try to speak to those mysteries directly, and unless they happen to be Rilke, they more often fail.  It seems to me that the world is a pathway, a conduit, to the invisible, the unknowable, and helps us translate what we feel through the bodies we touch and that touch us. 

In a review of Facts About the Moon, Robert Pinsky singles out the poem “Little Magnolia” and points to how the tree and man in the poem can be rooted and homeless at the same time. I’m often struck by how your poems are very accessible on one level, but have a lot going on beneath the surface. Do you think poems should try to be both accessible and layered?

I love that Pinsky chose that poem.  It’s a small poem, one that could easily get lost in a book of longer, flashier poems.  It’s a quiet piece, but yes, there’s more there if you take the time, slow down, look closely.  I remember going to one of my teachers to ask about a poem I wasn’t sure I fully understood.  She said, “Slow down.”  I said, “You mean read it more slowly or slow down in my life?”  And she said, “Yes.”  Any good poem is asking you simply to slow down and, as Stanley Kunitz said so beautifully, to live in the layers. Do you know that poem?  The final lines are:

In my darkest night,

when the moon was covered

and I roamed through wreckage,

a nimbus-clouded voice

directed me:

"Live in the layers,

not on the litter."

Though I lack the art

to decipher it,

no doubt the next chapter

in my book of transformations

is already written.

I am not done with my changes.

“Though I lack the art to decipher it.” That’s an important line.  He’s not sure what it all means, but he trusts the voice speaking to him.  I don’t think we can bend a poem to our will, or that layers can be consciously engineered.  Poems that try to do this usually come off as tedious and self-conscious, overwrought, but we can be fully present while writing it and hope that the complexities fold themselves into the words, that the passion we feel for our subject engenders a natural layering.  It’s simply not a conscious process and so it’s hard to take credit for it.  That said, yes, I want my poems to be accessed by everyone, anyone, as many as possible given the limitations of poetry. I grew up in a neighborhood of military brats, kids who didn’t give a damn if you could read the back of a cereal box let alone a book.  I think I often write to those kids, the ones I never fit in with because I wasn’t quite tough enough.  I write to the girls with ratted hair and denim skirts, the boys with butch cuts and torn T-shirts.  I want to reach them.  I also want to give them something beautiful and complex, something they can read again and again.  It’s what I want as a reader.

For me, the best poems are the poems I can read and understand.  On the other hand, if I understand everything in the first sitting, it’s merely information.  I think of a line I love from Li-Young Lee’s poem “One Heart.”  He says:  “Look at the birds, Even flying is born out of nothing.”  That’s a simple line anyone can comprehend on first reading, and yet each time you read it or say the line aloud, the more you think about it, the more it dissolves into mystery. 

Do you have any pet peeves with poetry?

The only thing I can’t abide is dishonesty.  I don’t care if you’re smart or stupid as long as you tell the truth.  That’s all I want to hear.  It’s what we all long to hear.  

You are married to poet Joseph Millar. So, I’m wondering what it’s like being married to another poet? Do you steal each other’s ideas? Do you share early drafts of poems? Did poetry play a role in bringing you together?

Oh we steal from one another all the time.  It’s impossible not to.  But then we steal from every great poet we know.  It’s all a pastiche.  We do share our drafts, though we’ve learned over the years to hold off as long as possible for fear of boring the other to tears with draft after draft.  We met in a poetry workshop.  I was teaching night classes for adults at an independent bookstore in Mill Valley.   He was a student, though it was more like a group of us who got together to share our work.  We knew each other for a couple of years before we began a relationship.  

So yes, poetry brought us together, and it has played a role in keeping us together.  We find that when we can’t agree on anything, or are pissed off at each other for one reason or another, one of us will bring up poetry.  He’ll say, “Hey, did you read that poem in APR by Tony Hoagland,” or I'll say, “Do you want to hear a new Lucia Perillo poem,” and that’s the white flag, the common ground, the fight is over and we can talk again. 

You’ve put together 4 collections up to this point (Facts About the Moon; Smoke; What We Carry; and Awake). Do you think about how collections might come together as you’re writing single poems? Or do you work solely on a poem-by-poem basis? Or is it some combination?

I simply write poems.  If I was good at the long view I’d be a novelist and make much more money and have a shot at the movies.  Not that I care so much about the movies.  I think I do, sometimes, but when I go deep, I realize that I am most happy when I’m writing a poem, or revising a poem, or putting a book of poems together.  I may be frustrated, but it’s a fruitful, soul-making frustration.  At my poetic best, I’m asking a question I have no hope of answering and making something that has little chance of being read by more than a handful of people.   And that’s fine with me.  I prefer it even. I'm at my best when I’m at my most anonymous, when I am one grain of sand hidden among the many, making my single pearl.

My books have always found their own way into being, poem by poem.  When the time comes that I have too many to keep in a binder--an irritation--I know it’s time to make a book.  I take them out and spread them on the floor to see what I have.  Each time, I’ve found a thread that holds them together.  We humans do this.  It’s in our nature to make connections.  But it’s also a frame of mind.  Each of us has a question that haunts us and we pull our poems up over and over, like buckets of water, out of that dark well. The poems may seem on the surface to be a jumble of our days, but they all spring from the same source.   

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

I once had a dream in which the poet Jack Gilbert came to me in a white room and sat down in a white chair at a white table. We made soup together and his had blueberries in it.  I asked him if he had any advice for me as a young poet and he said, “Yes.  Don’t write sissy poems.  And don’t be in collusion with your own poems.”  It’s still the best advice I ever got. 

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Note to publishers and poets, if you'd like to set up an interview for the Poetic Asides blog, feel free to check out the interview guidelines available here: http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/Call+For+Poets.aspx

It's been a while since I've tackled a poetic form, but as you know, I love the French forms. The rondeau is no exception. It has a refrain and rhymes--two elements I love in many French poems. The traditional rondeau is a poem consisting of 3 stanzas, 13 original lines, and 2 refrains (of the first line of the poem) with 8 to 10 syllables per line and an A/B rhyme scheme.

The skeleton of the traditional rondeau looks like this:

A(R)
A
B
B
A

A
A
B
A(R)

A
A
B
B
A
A(R)

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I recently visited Stone Mountain in Atlanta, Georgia. It's this mountain that is basically a huge granite rock. If you're interested, here's some more information on the mountain and park: http://stonemountainpark.com/.

As part of my visit, I hiked to the top of the mountain, which was exposed to very strong and very cold winds. If my boys were with me, I'd've been afraid they might blow off the mountain top. But as you'll see in my rondeau example, I'm masochistic enough to have enjoyed getting a windburnt face and sore muscles.

"Rounding Stone Mountain"

But I suppose that wasn't so bad,
finding our way to the triad
of Confederate Generals
who fought to maintain protocol
in a war that drove people mad--

when even sons fought their own dads
and the deaths of the myriad
Americans grew mystical.
But I supposed that wasn't so bad.

We saw the granite picture and
followed the yellow path, our hands
holding our hands against a crawl,
knowing we had no chance to fall,
still we fell and said, with hearts glad,
"But I suppose that wasn't so bad."

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As you can see, my A rhymes were: bad, triad, mad, dads, myriad, and, hands, glad.

My B rhymes were: Generals, protocol, mystical, crawl, fall.

Yes, there was a little slant in my rhymes, but there's nothing wrong with that.

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There are variations of the rondeau, including the rondeau redouble, rondel, rondel double, rondelet, roundel, and roundelay. Of course, poets tend to break the rules on each of these as well, which is what poets like to do. Because rules and poets don't get along sometimes, right?

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Here are a couple other online resources on the rondeau:

* Wikipedia entry

* from Alberto Rios

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In Southwestern Ohio, we've been receiving consistent doses of snow this month. The totals have not been overly impressive (usually 1-4 inches per storm), but the snow has hit a rhythm with the morning and afternoon rush hours--causing some interesting commutes. And it has been bone chilling cold (for this part of Ohio anyway--as I'm sure this blog has readers from further up north).

Instead of spending an entire blog post complaining, I thought I'd link to some poems available online that deal with the cold. So here you go.

* "Cold Poem," by Mary Oliver

* "Good-by and Keep Cold," by Robert Frost

* A couple snow poems, also by Frost

* "Snow Day," by Billy Collins

The editors at Pebble Lake Review offer a sample cover letter. This specific example is for fiction, but it's easy to see how it could be modified for poetry.

http://www.pebblelakereview.com/samplecoverletter.htm

A word of advice: Any time editors go out of their way to give you specific tips or samples of ways to prepare your submission, you should pay attention and follow their guidance. Trying to get overly "cute" or "creative" can get you an auto rejection slip.

"Windham Poetry Group Overcomes Adversity," by Heather Murdock from The Daily Campus, reports on a high school poetry group that's been performing locally and competing in poetry slams since early 2004.

As someone who founded and published a little lit zine in the mid-90s, I think high school is a perfect time for getting young adults interested in poetry. With all the fear, self-doubt and optimism that comes with being a teenager, this is the perfect age to record thoughts and emotions on paper (or computer screen).

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But just because high school is an opportune time, it doesn't mean that you need to wait for kids to grow complex emotions and apply for college. For instance, junior high works just as well.

"Poetry comes alive for some 7th-graders," from the Post and Courier, reports: "For the seventh-grade students of River Oaks Middle School, poetry will never be just a few boring rhymes they had to memorize in school."

And poetry never should be just some lines to read or learn. It should be something to experience and enjoy--whether the poems are funny, sad, difficult, or scary.

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I don't think you can ever start too early on building an appreciation of poetry in children. As the father of two boys aged four and six, I've been reading them poems since before they could talk themselves. Their favorite is probably "The Raven," by Edgar Allan Poe (they love everything spooky).

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So today is Valentine's Day. Some people love it; some people hate it; and some people think it was invented (or at least promoted) by greeting card and chocolate companies. Here's a fairly detailed Wikipedia link about the holiday: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine's_Day.

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Love and poetry are classically linked. What is The Odyssey but a very long love poem?

Also, poets such as Ted Kooser have openly admitted their early attempts at poetry were to woo potential partners (that's how yours truly got wrapped up in poetry). By the way, check out this review of Kooser's Valentines book.

Even the reclusive Emily Dickinson has been known to write a love poem or two. In fact, here are 57: http://www.bartleby.com/113/index3.html.

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And poets always seem to be hooking up, though it should be noted not all poet couples stand the test of time (for instance, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes). Perhaps, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are the most popular example of romance between poets--but they are not the only example.

Even today, there are plenty of couples: C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander; Dorianne Laux and Joseph Millar; James Cummins and Maureen Bloomfield; etc.

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And as part of the Valentine's Day celebration, I'm going to share a poem I wrote recently to mark the day. It was inspired by those stale Sweethearts candy with those little messages, the longing for youth, and, of course, the love I feel for another poet (she knows who she is).

"At the Arboretum"

From his box of Sweethearts, he hands
her candy that reads CUTIE PIE
before eating his own WILD LIFE.
They walk the paved path to a pond
filled with sleeping koi. A sign warns
KEEP OFF GRASS, but she leads him there
anyway. In high school, this is where
he would run across the frozen pond and
wander off the trails and into the summer
creek water. He hands her CLOUD NINE
and pops a CHILL OUT. He remembers
being young and cold in February, but
a sweater feels just right today. He's
not in high school anymore he thinks and
starts to move back toward the path.
But then, she touches his arm, whispers, "Stay."

I received a couple questions over the weekend as part of my Writer's Market thing I do. And I thought they both would work well as things to ponder here. In fact, I'm opening myself up to poetry specific questions at my work email (robert.brewer@fwpubs.com) if you put "Poetic Asides Poetry Question" in your subject line AND if you refrain from asking me to critique your poetry (while I'd be honored, I just don't have the time to critique everyone's work).

If I get enough good questions, I'll try and answer some here from time to time.

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Question 1 had to do with planning ahead. The writer was ashamed she didn't know where to start with writing and getting published. This is a common problem, and the answer is very simple: Start by writing and not worrying about the other stuff.

Too many writers, including poets, worry about making money and finding fame before they've actually finished their manuscripts. Don't trouble yourself over all the riches and awards your writing is sure to earn you. Just write and enjoy the writing process.

As you're writing, you can (and should) read as many literary journals as you can. This is where you will be trying to place your poetry, so you should be studying these journals to have a good idea which journals match up well with what you're writing.

After you've got a lot of great material, read up on the do's and don't's of submitting your poetry. Then, read the specific guidelines of where you're submitting. As soon as you pull the trigger on submitting, don't wait around for a response: Get your butt back in your chair and craft some more poems.

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Tied to that 1st question I received this email (name omitted for privacy): "I am a very accomplished author and writer and I have written eleven poetry books to date now in a series. But I cannot seem to be able to land a good agent to represent me with my poetry books. They keep saying that they don't do poetry. I know that there is a big market for good poetry books. My newest two-book set of 600 poems is going to be a hit. Please help!"

Okay, so that's not really a question. It's a call for help.

The problem here is that this "very accomplished author" has an unrealistic view of the poetry market. Most bookstores reserve very little room for poetry. And then, the space in that rare shelf space is dominated by "the classics" and major award winning poets. So, there's usually no room for "good poetry books" by other poets--whether they are accomplished or not (in non-poetry fields).

Poetry is not a "get rich quick" method of writing. And literary agents are usually going to have no interest in representing poetry, because agents make 10-15% of what their authors make. And no agent is interested in working for 15% of 2 free contributor copies or even $50 (for those poets who do hit it big).

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So the message of this post (I really should try to have a message, shouldn't I?) is that you shouldn't get caught up in wondering what's going to happen to your poetry after you write it; you should just write it.

Even though Nancy Breen has left the blog officially, she still shares various news she finds. And she's literally on the other side of cubicle wall--so she's still very close to Poetic Asides HQ (both in spirit and physical location). Here are two bits she shared with me this past week:

"Heath Ledger And The Poem To Remember Him By," by John Lundberg from The Huffington Post, discusses Ledger and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

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Sandra Soli, a contributor to the in-progress 2009 Poet's Market, was recently notified that her chapbook collection Trees has been chosen as a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award.

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Of course they should!

Read: "Poet-mania: Mary Oliver's sold-out appearance sparks a ticket frenzy on Craigslist," by John Marshall from SeattlePI.com

The article reports on the popularity of Mary Oliver in the Pacific Northwest with tickets selling out at venues in both Seattle and Portland. And the demand is still so high that tickets have been traded on Craigslist for as much as $100 each. That's incredible!

As you'll notice in the article, Oliver has managed to make an emotional connection with her fans. So while it is essential to study the craft and technique of poetry, never forget to inject a healthy dose of heart as well.

While it's doubtful poets will re-shape popular culture into a poet-centric society with tabloids following the personal messes of contemporary poets (a la Britney Spears and Michael Jackson), Mary Oliver's success in the Pacific Northwest is helping keep the dream alive.

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