Another Day, Another Doctor…

There I was, getting all better, giving poetry talks and going for power walks in the sunshiney parks and whatnot, then blam! Hit over the head with a new hydra head of this chest/sinus thing I’ve been dealing with since late August…now I officially have tonsillitis and an ear infection on top of the sinus/bronchitis and have been given a double dose of one of the only antibiotics I’m not allergic to. I tell you, some days I just get so frustrated with my body. I’m just like, hey, stay well already! Anyway, mostly this is just annoying, not life-threatening, but this is also the first time in ten years I’ve had to start taking daily inhaled steroids for my asthma, and not just as an emergency thing. Asthma is a tricky beast too – for years I’ve been fine just on Claritin and Singulaire, then suddenly, two dozen attacks in two weeks.

Anywho, for those of you wondering about the whole POETRY thing, well, the group I met with in Auburn, WA was very endearing – the group was mostly men, mostly older than me – hey, just like when I was working at Microsoft/IBM/At&T – so I was right at home. They were incredibly supportive, generous folks, and I really enjoyed hearing their work. Also, as an audience, they were very supportive of the reading, bought chapbooks, etc. I gave a short talk on persona poems, defining what they were and talking about why I thought they were a useful exercise for a beginning poet – one, they force you to exercise a little empathy, and two, they get you out of your own head. Then I read a bunch of persona poems from the upcoming book – half from sympathetic characters, and half from unsympathetic, and we talked about why writing from the perspective of someone we might initially judge as a “bad” person might be good for us. One guy, in response, read an incredibly powerful persona poem about an angry soldier. The host for the evening, who brought me to the group, was Lana Ayers, is both a wonderful poet and a very gracious person to be around. I was sad I didn’t get to meet Paul (sorry Tom!) but excited to see fellow blogger Lisa Jarnot was going to be reading in the SPLAB series. I hope I’m well enough to go!
I’m also STILL making changes to Becoming the Villainess, despite being so close to the cut-off date…I’m also stressing that I haven’t thanked all the people who need to be thanked…anyway, if I miss you in this one, let me know and I’ll be sure to get you in the next 🙂 assuming there will be a next, of course. I wanted to make the ending a little less depressing, so I added back in a poem I had pulled from the first MS and put into the second (as yet untitled) MS, and mixed up the order a bit. I also threw in a new poem I just wrote. I HAVE to stop writing poems for this MS. Bad me! Tell me I’m not the only person who has done this!
I was also interested in the conversation at Laurel and Mayhew’s blogs about how to determine if one belongs to the school of quietude or to the post-avant. It’s not so easy, I think, for we up-and-comers I think to wholly subscribe to one or the other. It seems kind of quaint. I like an awful lot of “traditional” verse – but I’m bored by a lot of poets described as SOQ too. I like a lot of people out there on the edge of weird experimental verse too – but some of them just seem shallow and show-offy, which can be equally boring. (No one reading this, of course 😉
I don’t think what I write could be described as SOQ – not enough nature? not enough epiphany? – but I don’t think I could classify myself as post-avant either, too much regular syntax, too many narrative poems mixed in with the lyric. I mean, theory wise I would say I lean towards the deconstructionalist, particularly feminist-type examinations of the constructs surrounding the expectations for women etc. But how much of that gets into my writing? Talking about new sincerity too – I have to say I’m attracted to verse that has something to say, and says it with emotional power. But is that what I write? Maybe sometimes. Am I sincere? Anywho, I do like reading in blogs and lit mags about different schools, but I sometimes feel they are more theoretical than applicable, meant to slice poets apart from each other – you can’t like that person, they’re not in your “school.”
So a few of my new favorite poets are folks like Dana Levin, Ilya Kaminsky, Rachel Zucker, Brigit Pegeen Kelly (okay I cheated, she’s really not that new.) What do these writers share in common? My fave lit mags tend to be those described as “eclectic.” Maybe I’m just an eclectic kind of gal.