Big Bang Poetry

Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World

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Reading More Poetry to Things That Don’t Care…on the Santa Fe Trail

I've been away for the last week, visiting my in-laws in Kansas. My husband and I decided to drive from Santa Fe to where his sister lives in Independence, Missouri, along the Santa Fe Trail. This little trek provided many occasions for us to stop and smell the indifference to poetry. I was able to add six pictures to Reading Poetry to Animals and Things Who Don't Care.

IMG_7305Reading poetry to the Santa Fe Trail outside of Clayton, New Mexico. Wagon train traffic, art thou so loud this trail cannot hear me?  (2012, photo by John McCray)

 

 

IMG_7415Reading poetry to the beautiful Kansas grass outside of Fort Larned on the Santa Fe Trail. When the wind blew, the grass whispered "husssssh…silly poetess."  (2012, photo by John McCray)

 

 

IMG_7418Reading poetry to fake soldiers outside of Fort Larned, Kansas. I tried to tell them I had the latest Walt Whitman fresh off the presses. They did not seem to care.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

 

 

IMG_7508Reading poetry to a sod house in Kansas. Although my poetry was as dense as a mud brick, this house of earth could not relate. (2012, photo by John McCray)

 

 

IMG_7511Still reading poetry to a sod house in Kansas. Come on, sod house! You have to admit that line from W.H. Auden was pretty funny.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

 

 

IMG_7369Reading poetry to one of the whirling fellows on a windmill farm. Although the blades say "I'm excited about the truths you're laying down," this reader does not believe that windmill will make any serious literary changes in his life going forward.  (2012, photo by John McCray)

 

 

To see the full set of things that don't care about poetry

Books About Poetry to Read

In a recent article I found for this week's poetry news, poet Katy Lederer provides an indispensable book-list of books on poetry:

  • Language of Inquiry by Lyn Hejinian (for a philosoph Bookstackical dismantling of poetic language and practice)
  • Attack of the Difficult Poems by Charles Bernstein (for a philosophical dismantling of poetic language and practice that's funny)
  • Ordinary Genius by Kim Addonizio (for writing exercises)
  • Real Sofistikashun by Tony Hoagland (for a survey of mainstream American poetry)
  • Beautiful and Pointless by David Orr (for a survey of mainstream American poetry that's funny)
  • Poetry Home Repair Manual by Ted Kooser (for analytical exercises with personal narrative)

That should be a good syllabus for winter's reading.

The Student Poets of the Institute of American Indian Arts

So I've just started my job at IAIA which, for those who don't know, is an arts college specializing in contemporary Native American and Native Alaskan arts, including 2D, 3D, photography, ceramics, jewelry, new media, etc. I went to their museum Sunday near the Santa Fe plaza and saw the most awesome things.

Anyway, the office they've given me has a book shelf and I noticed two student poetry anthologies sitting there. I borrowed them for a weekend and had a good time reading recent student poetry.

RadicalenjambThe first anthology I read was from the 2007-2008 school year and called Radical Enjambment, Neo-Modern Literature from IAIA.  I loved the poems from Ungelbah Daniel-Davila, once called "Bench Seats" about a difficult relationship with great lines like

I keep you in the back of my throat
like words I used to know

and

digging in the dirt for every piece I've lost.

"Last Dance" is another good one, a repetitive frolicking incantation of lines like:

Dance me out of bed.
Dance me into the triangle of light…

Dance me out of my skin.

Daniel-Davila also has two prose poems in there I like, "Sex in the Soda Shop," a pop culture piece, and "Birthday," a really amazing break-up monologue by a tormented older narrator and his young carefree girlfriend that is both raw and funny.

Monte J. Little has a poem called "Willing to Remove My Hands From my Eyes," an almost surreal meditation ending with the decisive line I can see what to hold true which creates a very pleasant counterpoint.

Anna Nelson has "Exeunt, For My Daddy," a very powerful and direct father tribute to an absentee father. Nathan Romero has "Afternoon Delight," a very funny bit of gossip in verse,

how do I put this/delicately…/well/she must've been getting/her grass trimmed for free"

you know/I'm not one to talk"

Finally, Sinte Jackson Torrez has "Infinite Now," a meditation on the pace of today and a rush to exist.

BirdsandotheromensBirds and Other Omens is the anthology from 2011/2012. Autumn Gomez has a good one called "Everywhere is War," similar to "Infinite Now" and its take on the chaos and insanity of modern life, closing on the powerful image:

"Let me tell you that you are dripping candle wax/from your mouth and neck."

She also has once called "Treaties" about a relationship. Her finales are great:

"My hair grew out and I stood up,/wanted to play in the dirt/force mud down your throat.

Another Anna Gomez one is "Petrology." I love how she attacks relationships and existing with emotions with an with almost riot grrrl anger:

"My stomach is filled with rocks.
I have to spit them
when you are not looking."

My last favorite is from Anna Nelson, back in this edition with "Plains," a poem that plays on identity, reality and mythology during a highway trip following the Indian rodeo circuit:

"somewhere between Casper and Cheyenne
that your heart was assailed by my many arrows
me in my buckskin dress and single black braid
straight down my back
you leaning on the jukebox
looking like yoakam"

Locating Your Strengths as a Poet

StrengthsfinderLast week got out of hand with my new schedule at IAIA. I wanted to talk about so many things connected with that, some new poems I've come across, some thoughts about the amazing places life sends you when you open up your ideas for the future. Hopefully in the coming weeks…

In the meantime, we haven't spent much time talking about life tips for poets.

I'm a firm believer that any attempt to improve your writing will fail if you don't attempt to improve one or more of the following:

a) your thinking (because if your thinking sucks, your writing will suck),

b) your thinking as it relates to the spiritual (say, for instance, you feel emotionally or intellectually stuck in some way), or

c) your understanding of the way you think.

And one of the best tools to zero-in on item c is with the book Strengths Finder 2.0 by Tom Rath. The results for the Strengths Finder tests actually go back to years of Gallup polling and the idea is once you identify your strengths, you can put more of your energy behind those strengths instead of trying to fix your weaknesses. It's about energy management.

And when the book talks about "strengths," this don't mean something like "I'm a strong writer" or "I have leadership skills." The kind of strengths categorized in this book deal with the way your brain organizes information and the way you understand the world. Learning my strengths was illuminating for me because it showed me why I gravitate to poetry, it showed me that I am strong in "Connection," meaning I like to take disparate things and connect them together…naturally I do this. This means, however, I'm not so strong in seeing differences. My brain looks for similarities. I may be strong in putting together metaphors but I need extra help with characterization. I also scored a strength in "Input" which explains why I feel the need to read 41 books on a topic before I feel like I get it, why it's hard for me to stop researching and start writing.

This kind of self-awareness helps me understand even my weaknesses better. 

The drag about Strengths Finders is that you have to buy the book to get the unique code to take the test (which takes about 30 minutes). You cannot borrow a book and re-use a test code: total waste of paper and eBook purchasing on the one hand; brilliant strategy for book sales on the other.

 

A New Book on Joy Harjo

CbOver the weekend I was checking out the hours of my local bookstore and I noticed on their homepage that Joy Harjo has a memoir out called Crazy Brave. In fact, I had just missed her reading at the bookstore this weekend. Fudge!

I love Joy Harjo. I don't know when I first heard about her but I have her book of poems The Woman Who Fell From the Sky and I went to see her one-woman show in Los Angeles a few years ago at The Autry Museum, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light. I felt like crying through the whole show I was so moved. Afterwards I asked her to sign my book and my husband talked to her about Muskogee history. I felt like an oddball fan the whole time.

The memoir is published by Norton (which is big and impressive). My husband and I went to the bookstore this morning and I saw the memoir but I talked myself out of buying it…although I kept looking at it longingly and pathetically. My birthday is next week and my husband surprised me by just buying me a copy when he checked out. He said it was an early present to launch birthday week.

I was so tickled! Going to start reading it today.

Monday Poetry News Roundup

Poetry headlines in the news

Publishing News

Contests

Calls for Submissions

An Old Book About William Dean Howells

WdhLast year I read Ron Power's biography of Mark Twain (I picked it up for a dollar at the LA Times Festival of Books). There I learned about William Dean Howells as a literary critic (I had read his novel, Hazard of New Fortunes, in college). Howells came up in the old book on Emily Dickinson I read a few weeks ago. His significance in bringing up so many writers of The Guilded Age intrigued me and so I picked up this book, William Dean Howells, An American Life by Kenneth S. Lynn, from the library at Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

According to Lynn:

"Howells is rivaled only by [Ezra] Pound for his sure identification of the literary geniuses of his generation."

His reviews at The Atlantic singled out many underdog writers including:

  • Henry James and his first short stories — many other editors and critics were hostile toward James' early published stories. Howells defended him.
  • Sarah Orne Jewett
  • Frank Norris when McTeague was published.
  • Stephen Crane after he self-published Carrie and was having trouble getting his book reviewed and into bookstores. Howells was the only critic willing to give the book a review.
  • Mark Twain — Howells gave some love to Innocents Abroad, gave a positive review to Roughing It and gave editing advice to an early draft of Old Times on the Mississippi. Later, when most critics presumed Twain was simply a humorist, Howells' commentaries on Twain gave his works artistic respect and transformed the way we read Mark Twain today.
  • Emily Dickinson – when her poems were first published after her death, reviewers were tentative and the public didn't know what to make of them. Howells championed her as a legitimate talent.

For some reason, Howells did not review Edith Wharton although privately he stated she was gifted. He also ignored Theodore Dreiser, many speculated, because Dreiser's work in Sister Carrie was too sexual.

Howells championed "western writers" and realists when the literati of the time was stuck in the grip of old Bostonian/New England writers and their romances. Howells said,

"Art must relate to need or it will perish."

Biographer Lynn also takes a close look at the unique heroines in some of Howells' novels compared similarly with Henry James heroines like Daisy Miller:

"One of the primary qualities of James and Howells' American Girl characters is their steel-like will."

Another interesting piece of trivia about Howells: his grandfather and father were both early abolitionists, long before it was a popular cause before the Civil War. Howells became one of the founding members of the NAACP.

Moment of Craft Fridays: Variations on Rhythm

Theodore_RoethkeTheodore thinking about his worrisome rhythms

One thing I've learned from many poetry workshops is that the sections of my poems that really hit it off with readers are those lines or phases which dramatically break a previously set rhythmical pattern. Like an orchestral piece of music, you take comfort in the ever-predictable musical phrases. However, it's the line that varies from that predictability that stops the show and turns out to be a crowdpleaser.

I figure it works like the architecture of a good joke.  Subverting expectations creates a laugh, creates a little heart squeeze.

In the book, On Poetry & Craft, the compilation of Theodore Roethke's essays and random thoughts, in the essay called "Some Remarks on Rhythm," Roethke explores the ways rhythms work to serve our poems:

While our genius in the language may be essentially iambic, partially in the formal lyric, much of memorable or passionate speech is strongly stressed, irregular, even 'sprung.'

What about the rhythm and the motion of the poem as a whole? Are there ways of sustaining it, you may ask? We must keep in mind that rhythm is the entire movement, the flow, the recurrence of stress and unstress that is related to the rhythms of the blood, the rhythms of nature. It involves certainly stress, time, pitch, the texture of the words, the total meaning of the poem. We've been told that a rhythm is invariably produced by playing against an established pattern….It's what Blake called "the bounding line," the nervousness, the tension, the energy of the whole poem. And that is a clue to everything. Rhythm gives us the very psychic energy of the speaker…

It's nonsense, of course, to think that memorableness in poetry comes solely from rhetorical devices, or the following of certain sound patterns, or contrapuntal rhythmical effects. We all know that poetry is shot throughout with appeals to the unconsciousness, to the fears and desires that go far back into childhood…"

Self-Publishing Poetry: First Things First

SpSo a week or so ago I spoke about why you might want to self-publish a book of poetry. Now I'm going to talk about the first few things I did to get my own project rolling.

Do Some Book Learnin'

First thing, I educated myself on what this bitch would entail: how to format a book, how to format an eBook, and what POD means. I would recommend these books to get your feet wet:

Self-Printed, The Sane Person's Guide to Self-Publishing by Catherine Ryan Howard – Also self-published, this book is full of step-by-step, no-nonsense, tough-love advice. I couldn't have done what I'm doing without this book.

The Fine Print of Self-Publishing by Mark Levine This is a market study on most of the self-publishing services out there. You must read this book to know how to be a savvy shopper. I was able to avoid an overpriced, poor-quality offer from a local publisher because I had read this book.

Sell More Books!  by J. Steve Miller — This book is good for two reasons: one is that it is full of typos and layout disasters, which exemplifies, in every detail, the pitfalls of self-publishing. But like my grandfather once said, you can learn something even from from a fool. Which brings me to the second reason to like this book, although the production of it may suck, the marketing advise in this book is still very good.

— Find the latest book on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the latest book on social marketing. Internet rules change so fast, you need a book published no earlier than 2011.

Create a Publishing and Marketing Plan

Publishing entails a zillion details, so you need to make a to-do list. It all may look overwhelming but remember, as actor Sherman Hemsley taught me in one episode of Amen, you can eat an elephant one bite at a time.

You also need a separate marketing plan. All the how-to guides on self-publishing agree on this fact: you need some real educating in marketing to sell your book.

Assets, Companies, Permissions, Introductions

  1. Set up a website. You have to at least have a website if nothing else. You can do this for free on WordPress.
        
  2. Self-publishing is remarkably affordable to do these days. But most guides I've read recommend you spend some cash on three items: your profile photo, your book design, and an editor for your book. I found a professional photographer I knew, Stephanie Howard, to take my profile photos. I've also researched the book designer and editor I want to use. They say this is the most crucial aspect of your project, a respectable cover. It's worth paying for. And if Sell More Books! had hired an editor to catch all the typos, the book wouldn't seem like something done by an amateur.
  3. Most poets love to begin their poems with an introductory quote to give the poem some gravitas. But you can overdo it. When you publish, you need to make some hard choices with those quotes because, unless the quote is from a piece of work in the public domain, you will need to seek permission to use it from the original publisher. This could take up to eight weeks to obtain and you should be prepared to hear the answer No. Do your poems lean on these quotes like a crutch? You should be able to live without them. I have two quotes left in my manuscript and I'm still waiting to hear back from the respective publishers, Discover Magazine and HarperCollins.
  4. You don't have to start an LLC book company to self-publish, but you can if you want a creative logo on your book jacket or your own ISBN number (alternatively, you can use the ISBN  provided by CreateSpace or the POD-publisher of your choice). In New Mexico, it costs about $35 to form an LLC and $35 more to obtain a business licence.
  5. I also arranged to have my first poetry mentor write the introduction to my book. This was probably the most sentimental piece of the project so far. This person taught me (pretty much) everything I know about crafting poems. My first semester with him was truly life changing and I was honored he agreed to contribute to my first book.
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