Poets in the Park, a Review of Three of my Poems, Poetry Can Feel Like a Losing Game (But Gardens Never Do)

Sunflowers and wildflowers bloom in Woodinnville

Welcome to Summertime

It finally feels like summer in now sun-soaked Seattle, where it hit 91 yesterday (youch!) Summer is kind of like kryptonite for us MS-folks (all my symptoms suddenly reappear after a relatively good winter-spring) but you can’t deny that the flowers are beautiful. I love to hear the birds, see all the flowers I planted in the last few years suddenly explode into bloom.

A Review of Three Poems in New Pages

Very thankful for a kind review of three poems from the latest issue of Spoon River Poetry Review in New Pages by Denise Hill. As a reviewer, I really appreciate it when I actually get reviewed – books, much less a series of three poems! So I felt really seen. The National Book Critics Circle monthly newsletter also included one of my reviews for the first time! Yay!

Poets in the Park

Redmond’s Poets in the Park was last weekend, and I decided to go out and say hi and support some friends who were reading. It was too hot (everyone was wilting by the time I got there) but it was great to see friends from the East side (and Seattle) I don’t see as often and see my friend Natasha Moni (and the terrific Floating Bridge poets she read with) do their thing. Here are a couple of pictures! I even wrote a poem that night – spending time with other writers always inspires.

Me with Natasha Moni after her reading, and with Rena Priest and Michael Schmeltzer from Floating Bridge

Blueberries and Lavender in my Garden

Poetry Can Feel Like a Losing Game (but Gardening Never Does)

Summertime can also be an odd time for poetry, where it seems like all the cool poets are spending their time getting paid to do workshops in a bikini in the Mediterranean sea or hanging out in Venice or Paris, while you’re stuck at home, getting rejection after rejection of books and poems you sent out with hope oh, six to nine months ago, or you find out someone else got the fellowship or grant or prize. No poetry journals seem to be open, so you’re just hanging out, piling up rejections. Which leads me to…

Pink roses from the back yard

Why Gardening Can Sometimes Be More Fulfilling than Poetry

Trying to publish poetry can be frustrating not only for those who want to get published but those doing the publishing, who are often underpaid and overworked. Both sides feel underappreciated. And for me, even after over a decade of sending work out, rejection still hurts and feels personal, especially books you think are your best work ever, grants you feel like you have a chance of getting, fellowships, or journals you particularly like. Gardening, on the other hand…if you put a rose or a dahlia or a blueberry or lavender shrub in the ground, you can almost guarantee in the Northwest that they will thrive and bloom and give you blueberries.

Hummingbird with roses and sunflowers

In the backyard, the flowers attract a ton of hummingbirds and butterflies, and you just feel the reward of doing work in the past that actually paid off. Sometimes in the poetry world, especially if you don’t have a big deal job with the Poetry Foundation or a tenured teaching job, you can feel a bit…unrewarded, both financially and spiritually. Gardening 100 percent has a better payoff. I planted an apple tree this year, and it will take years until it produced apples, or even shade, but I know I’m making the world a better and almost beautiful place – I mean, I hope my poetry does that too, but I know that planting an apple tree is 100 percent worth the effort.

Pink dahlia from my back garden

Of course, as I said early in the post, I am immensely thankful when people review my work or buy a book or publish me. But there is a lot of “no,” almost zero money, and a LOT of effort with no payoff. This is not only true of poetry – almost every successful novelist I know literally wrote a whole book, sent it out for a while, got an agent, sent it out more…and then ended up putting their first book in a drawer and then wrote another book and did the same rigmarole again. (But at least fiction writers have a better chance of getting paid than poets do!)

And becoming an editor or publisher doesn’t guarantee a lot of warm fuzzies – a ton of editors can attest to the hate mail they’ve gotten from angry and entitled rejected writers, and most of them don’t draw much of a salary, if any. I wish I could help build a better place to plant poetry. I wish I could help build a wider audience for the whole art form, help literary magazines get more subscriptions, help writers find their appropriate publishing avenues. I guess we can befriend and encourage other writers, we can give advice or blurbs, we can read and review others, and in that way, we are sort of cultivating the poetry world garden. If we all gave each other more appreciation, less envy and resentment, that would probably help the poetry world bloom.

Woodinville Wildflowers

Maybe the metaphor is cheesy. Maybe I’ve been spending too much time with my flowers. But I always remember the quote from the end of Voltaire’s Candide: “Cultivate your own garden.” I didn’t understand what he meant when I read that advice in high school. But as I get older, I’ve learned to understand that it means that we help create the world we want, that what we plant and what we work for, if we plant good things, maybe we make the world a better place in a small way. We certainly could use more people who care about making the world a better place, one blueberry shrub (or poem or poetry review) at a time.