Like many people, I tried to catch as much of the United States presidential inauguration yesterday as possible. From watching commentary on Mrs. Obama's dresses to hearing Elizabeth Alexander's inauguration poem, I found the whole event interesting and hopeful (if only for a day).

Anyway, today's prompt is inspired by the coverage CNN provided of the event. While watching the commentators comment, I heard an interesting line from Alex Castellanos: "Nothing unites the people of Earth like a threat from Mars." For today's prompt, I want you to use this line as inspiration for your poem.

You don't have to write about Martians attacking Earth, though that may be fun. In fact, you don't even have to mention either planet. You can focus on the idea of people uniting, or you can write about facing a threat--alien or terrestrial. The nice thing about using quotes as a platform is that you can jump off in any direction that makes sense for you.

Here's my attempt for the day:

"X-ray glasses and hearing aides"

We spent our mornings searching
for odd jobs and loose change,
money to buy comics. We would
read them to know whether Joker
really bested Batman, to know if
The Flash really died this time. But
we also read comics for the ads,
like people watching the Super Bowl
for the commercials. X-ray glasses
and whoopie cushions. Gags and
business opportunities. Our parents
would tell us to quit wasting time
and energy on reading about
people in tights and capes, to quit
bugging them about spending
their hard-earned money on offers
found between their covers. But
we could never see their points
or hear where they came from.

One of my biggest faults as a poet starting out (and probably applicable to my writing now) is a tendency to go abstract with my language. When I was teaching online poetry courses, I noticed others doing this as well.

An example of overly abstract language:

Desire is not love, he thinks
as his lust betrays him
on the dance floor where men
sway in time with women
who want to break their hearts.
He thinks, desire is not love
and this dance floor is not heaven,
but that beat beats its way
into his soul. Thump-thump-thump.
He wants every woman to feel
his love, to feel his lust.

Okay. So this passage is abstract for a couple reasons. First, there are several abstract words in this passage, including desire, love, lust, hearts, heaven, and soul. (While heaven and hearts could be concrete images, in this passage they are used in an abstract way.) Second, the passage itself is abstract because it's not saying anything concrete. Everything is generalized, from the men to the women to the dance floor.

So, is this passage completely lost? No, I don't think so. There is a concrete protagonist (he) and a concrete scene (dance floor). To make this passage even more concrete, we could give the protagonist a dance partner.

She's not my wife, he thinks
as she leans into him and
he looks around for his friends
who've long since left. She sinks
down against his leg without
breaking eye contact with him.
He thinks, she's not my wife;
she's not my wife; she's not...

This passage is not perfect, but it does show how getting more specific can make a piece of writing more engaging. Both passages contain the same amount of feeling for the writer. (In fact, the abstract version probably contains even more feeling from the writer's perspective most of the time.) But making the writing concrete and specific is what usually engages readers.

*****

If you want an exercise, I'd suggest that you look over some of your previous poems and try to identify instances of abstraction. Once you can identify the instances of abstraction, you can then figure out how to tackle making things concrete. More than likely, your readers will enjoy the concrete version more.

Jeannine Hall Gailey is a West Coast journalist who publishes articles on subject matter as varied as how to bake a perfect scone to how to secure your web services application. (It should also be noted that she is writing a couple pieces for me for the 2010 Poet's Market.)

Gailey's poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, and 32 Poems, among others. She's published a chapbook, "Female Comic Book Superheroes" (Pudding House), and a full length collection, Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books). Plus, Jeannine is quick to point out that she still reads comics.

There were many poems from Becoming the Villainess that I absolutely loved, but this is my favorite:

She Escapes the Film Noir

I slip out the door,
wearing a raincoat as disguise.
It might have wrinkles, indicating a recent tryst.
Also, I may wear a fedora.
I will certainly have a lot of hair
falling over the brim of my eyelashes, either because
I'm too busy to cut it
or I don't want anyone looking me in the eyes.
Ominous footsteps echo in an unseen room,
along with distant thunder.
We are unsure of the dialogue in this script.

You watch me lean into the wet, shining street
and peer, nervous, into shadows.
Am I looking for you?
Or the man with a gun?
Either way, I'm holding tickets to Paris.
Care to join me?
I would light a cigarette
except for the damn rain. My lipstick
in this lighting is darker than blood,
and my hands won't stop shaking.

*****

What are you currently up to?

I just finished teaching my first class for National University's MFA program, an all-online Intro to Poetry Seminar. It was fascinating to try to give feedback on poems as a class without all the little tricks of body language and voice inflection; I remembered how much I rely on non-verbal cues when I teach. But it was a great adventure.

I'm working on some new manuscripts: one that investigates female heroines in Japanese pop culture and folk tales, and the idea of "mono no aware" or "softly despairing sorrow," another about being trapped in the physical body and the stories of Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, and the third is a just-begun collection about growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the shadow of the birth-place of nuclear bombs, as the daughter of a robotics scientist.  The first two I'm actively seeking publishers for; the third is still in progress.

Also, I just moved to Southern California from the Pacific Northwest, so I'm still trying to get used to all the palm trees, surfers and women that wear Ugg boots when it's 60 degrees. It's definitely an alien landscape.

Becoming the Villainess is your first book-length collection. Did the manuscript develop naturally, or did it go through many versions?

I began putting together a full-length collection as soon as Pudding House Press offered to publish my little chapbook called "Female Comic Book Superheroes." Putting together the chapbook made me realize just how many poems I'd written over ten years with the same themes, the same characters, the same voices. I originally tried to create a more conventionally-poetic, uplifting manuscript, but one day my husband came along and read my manuscript and said something about how the real story of the book was how the speakers go from powerlessness to power, from innocent to corrupt, from the princess to the villainess. So I titled it "Becoming the Villainess" and stopped trying to fight the dark side of the MS or impose a happy ending on the collection. I also had terrific insight from a bunch of friends about the manuscript during the eighteen months I sent it out. Finally, I decided to rearrange it according to comic book structure--the origin story, the character arc, the final frame, and so on. That felt right. And just after I rearranged it that way, Steel Toe Books' Tom Hunley called to say they wanted to publish it.

You have a website, a blog, and a presence on social networking sites, such as FaceBook. Do you feel having an Internet presence helps spread the word about your writing?

I do feel that it has helped, although, to be honest, I'm sort of a techie geek and love to be on the computer so I'd probably do the website, blog, and Facebook stuff even if I wasn't a poet. Shameful secret: I learned to program video games in BASIC on my Dad's TRS-80 when I was six. So I don't really need an excuse to play around with technology. But if I did, I think that all writers who want to hear from their readers and peers should engage online. You'll get to know people who will never be able to attend one of your readings, whom you might never meet in person, so in that way it does extend your audience. 

I do get quite a few e-mails from people who have found my work online and loved it, and I think the blog community has been very supportive. I've met a lot of people "online" and then read their work or met them in person, and was so thankful that they had a blog or website or posted on a discussion board, so I could discover their wonderful work.

On your website, you offer poetry consulting and editing services. What do you see as a common problem poets make in assembling collections?

I think it's hard for most writers (including me) to get enough distance from their own collections to really see what they are really about or what the collection is doing for the reader. What's the subtext? What's the arc? How are the poems related to one another in a larger sense? Sometimes when I read manuscripts I get interesting insights about the writer's personality, about what they choose to share with the world.  That's the delightful, fun part of editing a manuscript. It's kind of like a makeover show in that way. Usually people have a bunch of great work put together in a not-so-great way. As an editor, I want to help people present their work in the most intelligent, interesting, dynamic way possible. Sometimes people put together great collections of individual poems with nothing coherent about the collection itself, just a ramshackle bunch of poems. Sometimes the manuscript is terrific and coherent, but the writer chose to put their weakest or most off-putting work first or last. Or they take ten pages to get to the real subject of the collection. Often, it's just a matter of cutting a few poems, a bit of rearrangement, and talking to the author about what they are trying to say with their manuscript and making them aware of their quirks and their strengths. Then, they're usually off and running.

You've been published widely. How do you go about submitting your work, including tracking where everything is?

In Seattle I had a group of poet friends who would meet and encourage each other to send stuff out, make goals, bring in copies of their favorite lit mags, that kind of thing. That was tremendously helpful. I also spent a year reviewing literary journals for NewPages.com, which was probably the best way ever to research a ton of literary magazines I might not ever have heard of otherwise. I encourage every aspiring poet to spend a year writing lit mag reviews for NewPages.com.

As far as nuts and bolts: I've used Writer's Market's online submission tracker, Dueotrope, and I have made my own Excel spreadsheet of poems to send out and where they've been sent. Even with all that, I still lose track once in a while, or receive a rejection or acceptance from a place I don't remember ever sending poems to. I blame my (evil and disorganized) alter ego.

In Becoming the Villainess, you have to get inside the skin of several characters. Did you find this tactic liberating as a writer?

When I first discovered persona poetry as a younger writer, I absolutely felt at home. Persona poetry allows poets to use fiction writers' tools without all the commitment of a novel! Character, plot, dialogue--and a wonderful liberation from "normalcy." I am a champion of persona poetry exercises for writers because often it requires the writer to make a leap in imagination--kind of the opposite of the old "write what you know" adage, instead "write what you can imagine"--and empathy. To write a good persona poem, a writer must develop a sense of empathy for the character they're writing about, go beyond "good" or "bad" to really identify with another person. In my case, embracing and then challenging the stereotypes about women in popular culture and mythology also allowed me to re-write stilted roles--busty superheroine, powerless princess, femme fatale, etc.--which was very satisfying. 

Since you mentioned to me in an earlier e-mail that you're a "sort of comic book and sci-fi geek," I've just got to ask: Who would be the last person standing in a battle between Spider-Man, The Hulk, Batman, Superman, Catwoman, Wonder Woman, The Joker, Magneto, Wolverine, Storm, the Invisible Woman, Lex Luthor, James T. Kirk, Spock, Darth Maul, Obi Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Yoda, and Luke Skywalker?

Why does it always have to be fighting? Wonder Woman could use her "golden lasso of truth" and they could all get in a circle and talk about how it feels to be different--I mean, alien, mutant, evil genius--these are people that could use a little group therapy.

Seriously, though, Dr. Manhattan, of course. And maybe Dark Phoenix. They'd make a great couple, wouldn't they?

But my favorite comic book character right now is Joss Whedon's Fray. 

Who are you currently reading?

I just finished The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a French novel I can't stop talking about because I love it so much. Philosophy, Japanese pop culture, action movies, class issues--it has it all! And I finally got to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which was brutal but fantastic.

As for poetry, I'm a frequent reviewer and so I'm knee-deep in new books! Suzanne Frishkorn's Lit Windowpane, Michelle Bitting's Good Friday Kiss, Jericho Brown's Please…I think that's just the top three on a stack about three feet high.

I also recently read Alicia Ostriker's book of essays, For the Love of God. There's an essay in there about Ecclesiastes that blows my mind every time I read it. And I loved Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables and Rachel Zucker's Bad Wife Handbook so much I wrote an essay about them, which I am trying to find a home for.

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

Don't be afraid to write about the subjects you care most about; not every poem has to be about snow falling on an old farmhouse. Stick with your passions. Embrace your own special weirdness.

*****

To check out Jeannine Hall Gailey's website, go to www.webbish6.com.

For more information on Steel Toe Books, go to www.steeltoebooks.com.

*****

If you're a poet or publisher interested in an interview on this blog, click here to learn more about how to start that process.

For today's prompt, I want you to write a poem that somehow incorporates signs, whether in an abstract sense or actual signage in buildings or along roads or wherever. (Here's an example of a poem I wrote last Valentine's Day that incorporated many signs.)

Here's my attempt for the day:

"Signs like them ain't no friends of mine"

When three birds of two different colors congregate
on your front porch, your day will turn out exactly
opposite of how you expect. A dead squirrel
indicates someone close to you dreams of dairy
products, which means, of course, something bad
is in the air--like smog or men's cologne from
the dollar store. One lone owl perched in a tree
at night is harmless, but four owls hooting upon four
STOP signs at one intersection under the full moon
as a frog croaks Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"
never leads to a happy night's sleep. Seriously.
When a man removes his hat and reaches for a gun
concealed in his long coat, don't wait to see
if your prediction is right--just run, run, run!

After teaching a couple poetry courses over at WOW, I've decided to start sharing revision tips, since this seems--even to me--to be a very mysterious part of the poetry writing process. Writing is tough, but revision asks writers to look at their work and admit that it's not as good as it seemed at the time.

The best way to handle revision is to make sure it doesn't get personal. Go into a first draft expecting to need edits. (If you somehow don't need any, you're either very lucky--or you're being too easy on yourself.) Revision is what often sets good writers apart from the rest of the pack.

I dug into the Poetic Asides archives to share two revision techniques I employ quite frequently.

The first one is to Put THAT Thing Away! In this post, I discuss how unnecessary the word "that" is to most sentences and lines of poetry. You can cut "that" out of most statements where it's included.

The second one is to Cut IT Out! This post discusses the word "it" and how many poems can be improved by finding ways to cut "it" out of the poem by any means necessary.

I plan to share other revision tips as we go along, but these are always my first two steps when looking to revise my own poems.

So far, I've received more than 40 submissions to the November PAD Chapbook Challenge. The deadline is midnight (EST) today: 1/5/09.

For complete rules, go to http://blog.writersdigest.com/poeticasides/November+PAD+Chapbook+Challenge+Next+Steps.aspx.

I'm very excited to receive so many submissions, and I look forward to announcing a champion on February 2 (though I'm sure it's going to be a tough decision with so many submissions rolling in).