High-five me! Finally finished the first all-out terrible assignment I’ve been given in my MFA program: reading and writing an essay on Wordsworth’s Prelude to the Lyrical Ballads and Whitman’s Democratic Vistas. I had to keep punching myself to stay awake, much less make sense of these two essays. Maybe I’ve been away from academia too long to do this stuff anymore. I literally got angry at these two “fathers” of Romantic American literature as I wrote. What’s up with all Whitman’s “Lo’s!” and all those exclamation points? And could Wordsworth BE any more pompous? Anyway, I spat out as much summary and examination as I could and now I don’t have to do it anymore. I think I just don’t like people who are Transcendentalists. No offense meant, of course, to any transcendentalist readers.

On the plus side, I find I’ve been reading several members of my blog roll lately – I’ve just finished Suzanne Frickshorn’s Red Paper Flower, Paul Guest’s Resurrection of the Body and the Ruination of the World, and Rebecca Loudon’s Tarantella. All three were so much better and more enjoyable than so many other books that I’ve bought and read – Red Paper Flower was both lovely and punch-in-the-gut moving – Guests’ poems had the perfect combination of wit and sobriety, of pathos and merriment, and Tarantella was brilliantly fierce, lyricism with fangs. So, way to go, blogger/poets. It just goes to show that if you enjoy people’s blogs, you should definitely buy their books. Also, if I were the one handing out book prizes, these three collections would all be big winners.

Haven’t managed to write any new poetry since I’ve been home (almost a whole week now! Snert! Snick! and other sounds of anxiety) but I’ve sent out some batches. I received the standard rejection from Poetry in the mail today, which, for some reason, disappointed me more than it should have. I mean, we expect rejections from Poetry, don’t we? Now onto more homework assignments, all hopefully less painful that this first one.

Finally home from Pacific University’s second residency. Exhausted and kind of out of it and also surrounded by boxes in a new place, which has made me a little disoriented. Have a reading tomorrow night with some other excellent poets on Bainbridge Island, which should be fun. I’m going to read from my new chapbook.

Can’t even remember all the highlights of the trip – Marvin Bell and Glenn Moore’s workshop on reading poetry with jazz accompaniment which was a blast, the panel with all the poets (Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Marvin Bell and Pattiann Rogers) on “What Makes a Poem Sexy,” and meeting all the new students were definitely up there on the list. Also, a quote from Pattiann Rogers: “Disney Has Ruined So Many Words.” I don’t even know exactly what that means, but it sounds like it would make a great poem.

I’m actually really looking forward to reading my book list this semester, which includes a ton of newer books, mostly by women, people like Dana Levin, Tony Hoagland, Marie Howe, Carol Ann Duffy, Denise Duhamel. I’ve also been made the editor-in-chief for the launch of the new MFA-based lit mag, to be named soon, which is exciting, but I’m trying to figure out how to balance school and the lit mag and volunteer work and paying work and health stuff – and oh yeah, all that writing and trying to get published stuff. I’m sure it will all work out. That, or I’ll collapse in nervous exhaustion. Either way 🙂

I need to catch up on my mail and reading – I’ve got three books waiting for reviews and a friend’s MS I promised to look through. Not too mention all the back episodes of Lost and Alias I’ve missed. One thing that was really funny about the students at the MFA program was how many of them share my geek interests – coding, X-Files, Buffy, video game addictions, etc. Weird.

Off to unpack and then sleep as long as possible. Hopefully I will recover my ability to write cogently after that.

Happy 2005. Let’s hope there are fewer wars and natural disasters in this twelve-month cycle. For those who want to help victims, check out a local group that does a good job of actually delivering aid to victims: http://www.nwmedicalteams.org/ Also, if you are employed by “the man,” see if your company matches donations, that makes your dollar stretch even further.

Onto less serious matter: Music. I am in love with the soundtrack of Garden State (the movie also impressed me) – especially “New Slang” by the Shins, and a rediscovered favorite, Simon+Garfunkel’s “Only Living Boy in New York.” More soundtracks? Don’t hate me, but The OC Soundtrack (Mix 1) was my favorite album of the year. Hey, you’d be surprised by the indie cred on this collection. I just loved everything on it (except for Phantom Planet’s “California” – that gets annoying if you listen to the chorus over and over.) I wish Rufus Wainwright’s “California” had been on it – that song is genius. And Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah.” Both these songs were featured in the first couple of episodes, but aren’t on there.

I also have to admit a certain excitement about the beginning of the new season of “Alias” – my current “Buffy” substitute. It is supposedly much better than last season. This is really the only television I watch religiously these days, unless you count “The Daily Show.”

In the middle of my move and packing up for school. My brain is fried and I feel unable to focus on anything for more than five minutes. This could also be because I am recovering (slowly) from the flu. Our new place is walking distance from a library and a grocery store. I haven’t lived anywhere that was “walking distance” to anything since I lived in Cincinnati.

Feeling very grateful right now for many things. Good friends, kind acquaintances. One special thing to be thankful for? A very nice note from Rhino, announcing they had accepted a poem for their Spring 2005 issue, which I received on New Year’s Eve. I’ll take an acceptance over champagne any day 🙂

New year’s resolution? To have better health. And to appreciate stretches of non-acute-illness or injury more. I am also resolving to tackle some health-related topics in my magazine writing, which have mostly been limited to food or technology. I read so damn much health research for my own stuff, someone else should benefit from it without having to dig through doctor’s journals and academic papers etc. Will send queries after I’m done with graduate residency.

One exciting thing: I have started working on a second poetry manuscript. It feels good to work with some new subject matter, try out some new styles. Yes, I know the first one hasn’t gotten published yet. But fussing with it anymore feels wrong. I don’t write much in the middle of a move – like many Taurus-types, I’m happy when my routine and domecile are firmly established – but I am collecting and tinkering, which still feels like good work.

Also: I rarely find something in American Poetry Review that is absolutely essential reading, but the new issue’s essay on Ecclesiastes by Alicia Ostriker was not only stunning in its intelligence and compassion, but gave me a feeling of…dare I say it…hope? faith? in the powers behind the universe. Good reading for those who, like me, turn on the news only to be deluged with spiritual angst.

Poetry finds you where it can…so here I was going over all these new poetry books I got for Christmas, and then I noticed this book Silverfish Review Press sent me (for just the cost of postage!) when I entered their book contest. It’s called “Dime Store Erotics” by Ann Townsend, and it kicks. Do you know that thing where you’re reading a poem and you could swear you or some future (better) version of you wrote it? That’s what happened to me with that book. Check out the poem “Mall Life.” Great, funny, sad, weird stuff. Plus, any poet who writes about her childhood obsession with the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” gets my respect. Anyway, now I have found another publisher to love and respect. How many can there be?

My new graduate residency and my move “off the island” are drawing ever nearer, which means everything, everything is in boxes. We still put up a Christmas tree and ordered a little ham, because dang it, I want to celebrate even if we are in the middle of chaos. Haven’t been writing much but have been hopping around playing Dance Dance Revolution in a sadly obsessive way.

I’ve been rearranging the poems in my first book MS and decided to rename my MS for a new set of submissions to various contests from “A Thousand Tongues” to “Becoming the Villainess.” Perhaps less poetic but more indicative of the post-feminist, pop-culture/mythology-oriented themes. Hey, time for a vote: Is Villainess a real word? And who likes the new title better than the old one? Leave a comment if you have any strong feelings about any of this.

In merry old Seattle, the lights on the houses are bright, the moon is shrouded in fog, and Santa is just waiting to drop a winning-contest announcement on my house at midnight on Christmas Eve. It could happen, right? Yesterday Santa brought me two rejections. I must have been naughty instead of nice.

Best holiday wishes for everyone out there. May happy elves bring you new shoes.

Thought the last blog entry was just too darn depressing to leave up much longer, so I will chime in from Cincinnati, Ohio, where I am visiting my parents, in-laws, several brothers and friends, and various pets. The pizza here is very good, I don’t know that Cincinnati in general is at the top of many culinary scales, but for pizza, they’re up there. I think I have eaten pizza for dinner three nights in a row. Pepperoni, fig and proscuitto, apple and apricot, some veggie-combo, and one which was some disgusting combination of pineapple, bacon and onion, which I really can’t recommend. I have also been staying up til six or seven in the morning every night, which may be b/c of the time change, but also because my brothers and their friends are genuinely fun to hang out with. PS Watching a bunch of twenty-something guys try to be manly while outdoing each other at the game “Dance Dance Revolution,” esp. after they’ve drunk a lot of whiskey, is very, very entertaining. One of them was a nuclear physicist. There’s just something extra funny about that.

While I’ve been gone, one of my good friends (also a poet) as been watching my house and cats and very kindly e-mailing me when any poetry news comes in. Only poets can accurately ascertain which mail may be of interest to other poets. So, while it’s been mostly rejections, at least I don’t have to worry that I’m missing some incredibly important time-sensitive poetry-related correspondence, like some famous poet writing that I’ve won a book contest but if I don’t get back to them within 48 hours the prize will go to someone else, not that that is likely, but it’s the kind of insane thinking that I’ve succumbed to on other trips. Thanks N!

The trip has been good and making me realize how much time I normally spend by myself, since we are staying at my parents house and my brothers are staying too and various people drop by all the time, and there is very little alone time. The guys are all playing video games as I write which gives me a little break. I consider myself very social, but since I’ve become a freelancer I usually spend about six hours a day alone working. I guess that’s a lot, and I’ve gotten used to it, even though I thought I would miss the social interaction of either the office or a “regular” grad school program (I’m going low-res.) It has really boosted my writing productivity, which just proves the old theorem – solitary time=more poetry. I did manage to sneak in a poem tonight, which was good. And snuck in some visits to some other poet-blogs, for fun. Now, back to the Xbox madness.

Received three rejections this week, and am trying to face up to the fact that I have to have some serious female surgery when I get back from my holiday trip home to Cinci this year. For some reason, though I have never really been a particularly maternal type, facing up to not being able to have kids someday has really gotten to me. I know this because every poem I write lately has to do with women who can’t have kids. I can’t get this one Bible verse out of my head. It’s about a woman, Hannah, who is upset, nearly crazy, over the fact that she hasn’t had kids yet, and her husband says “Why is your heart grieved? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” So I have to write a poem about that. There are a lot of assumptions about women who don’t have kids – that they are selfish, that they spend all their time on themselves, that they aren’t whole. I went to get my nails done yesterday and the girl there was saying, “Oh, you’d be such a great mother – why don’t you have kids?” And I was like, “Hmm, I don’t think you really want to know all the icky scientific details that would answer that question.”

Also, my mother was really sick yesterday, she had to go to urgent care and they diagnosed her with kidney stones. It’s her birthday today, and that was her body’s very special birthday present. Hmph. Sometimes I think we women would be better off if we were just little floating brains attached to attractive and fashionable clothes. OK, that’s a weird image. I apologize.

Okay, here’s a problem only a poet would have. I have a poetry reading on the 20th of January and the 20th of February, and since the surgery takes a few weeks to recover from, I was like, how can I best fit this surgery in so it doesn’t affect the readings? Typical shallow me.

I remember doing a report on the female reproductive system with my best friend in 6th grade. We giggled the whole way through it. At 21 she had a twenty-pound cyst removed from her ovaries, and now I am facing getting the works removed. Guess we should have paid more attention to the “what can go wrong” portion of that report.

Sorry to be a downer this week. I am sure I will have more cheerful news soon. It’s raining and cold outside, typical Seattle Christmas weather, that makes me not want to leave the house. On the plus side, I did get the opportunity to watch Zorro, Lara Croft Tomb Raider, and The Mummy all in a row last night. What I should have been doing was finishing a book review and a profile of a chef for Seattle Woman Magazine. Glenn started packing up the house yesterday for our move. So we are going home to Cinci, coming back, packing up the house, celebrating Christmas, starting the move on the weekend of the new year, then I go to my residency in Forest Grove, and when I come back, we’ll be in the new place. Then, the surgery. A very exciting upcoming month and a half, that’s for sure. I should check my horoscope. It might say, the stars see travel, gifts, educational opportunity and a horrible hospital stay in your future. Also, my complaint? How come horoscopes never predict death? Surely someone with that particular sign dies every day. I guess the Onion’s horoscopes predict something like that.

Happy Thanksgiving! You know I try to subject you to as little of my actual poetry as possible, but since I wrote this poem a little while ago when a friend and I discussed keeping gratitude journals when we felt the most grumpy, and it seemed appropriate to the day, I thought I’d go ahead and post it:

Keeping a Gratitude Journal

For string beans, rubber bands, black cat calendars

green tea, green trees, tiny green frogs

envelope glue, mango lip balm, marabou

halter tops, high-heeled shoes, hair mousse

comic book heroes, Slavic jaw bones, cheese

scratching mosquito bites, the deep breath at the end of a swim

his face beneath your hands

your skin beneath a copper coin moon

your breath in and out slippery as fish

the can of sea glass half-full

that you still can applesauce by hand

that you can wake, one more morning, your one last chance.

There has been an interesting discussion going on in different blogs about poetry accessibility and whether or not poetry should be, in Billy Collins’ phrasing, “welcoming” or not. One blogger argued for difficulty in poetry, saying that poetry isn’t meant for “the masses” and that’s okay, and that one shouldn’t try to commodotize poetry, etc. I often hear this argument from poets whose poetry is difficult and experimental. The other argument, from those in the New Formalist camp, is that the masses want rhyming, metrical verse – and that most readers aren’t even aware of poetry written after 1950, because free verse has somehow turned them away from poetry.

Since I like to express opinions that make me unpopular, I’ll just say that neither of these arguments holds water for me. Why should poetry force people to climb a barbed wire fence? I am a poet, and spent time and money to study poetry, and I still won’t willingly read a book that gives me a headache. Well, maybe once, to see what the hoopla is all about. And I just don’t believe that people are staying away from poetry simply because they don’t like free verse. I know that if all I knew of poetry was the Tennyson, Keats, etc they taught us in grade school, I wouldn’t ever have picked up a poetry book voluntarily. Free verse can be done wonderfully, and anyone who doesn’t believe me should pick up something by Rita Dove, or Louise Gluck, or James Tate, or any poetry anthology that includes writers born after 1920. I think the reason most people stay away in droves from poetry is because a. they didn’t like the poetry (Tennsyon, Keats, et al) they learned in high school, b. they once went to a poetry reading that frightened them, or c. they simply think poetry is irrelevant. If they want to read, they read a historical novel, or crime fiction, not poetry.

I like to think of myself as a populist, and I try to write poetry that an average person could pick up and understand. However, I’ve been told (by both editors and friends) that a lot of my poetry contains too many references (to mythology, folk stories, etc) to be considered widely accessible. I’m certainly not referring to things in order to keep people out of my poems, but I guess it could have that effect. Is my poetry difficult? I don’t think so. But it does assume that a person either knows or might bother to look up a character, for instance, like Persephone, or Cinderella. Harumph. So am I a big hypocrite? I’m capable to writing direct poems that don’t include references, of course. And I know those poems might have a wider audience. But I only write those poems about 20 percent of the time.

I think there is space in the poetry world for difficult, experimental poetry, there is space for formal poetry, there’s space for every school out there. A book that might seem flat and dull to one reader might be exactly the thing another reader loves. I know as a reviewer that I don’t love everything I read – but when I review, I try to keep my mind open to the fact that other readers’ tastes might be different than mine. So I might say something like, “While this challenging work leans to the elliptical” which is code for “I don’t really feel like putting any more effort into what seems like self-aggrandizing pretentious nonsense, but I know that some people really get into this kind of thing.”

My family is full of intelligent people without MFAs who might actually read poetry for fun, so I like to ask them questions about poetry. They do things like research robotics, train corporate clones, program web sites, troubleshoot telecom networking, run medical scanning tests. My grandmother worked on a farm her whole life and retired with nothing more than a GED (which she completed by eighth grade) – but is more well-read than some of my professors have been, and can quote the Bible, Dante, and Coleridge by heart. These are people that work long hours, and want to be rewarded for their effort when they read. They don’t care about what school of poetry someone comes from, but they want to read something that grabs them, that moves them, that might take them from the familiar to the unexpected. They want someone who talks like they do, not with a lot of “fancy bullshit.” (Hey, my family has working class roots. Wanna make something of it?) I don’t necessarily always write the kind of poetry my family might want to read were I not related to them, but I hope that sometimes I do.

In the meantime, I like to read poetry that is mentally challenging, but not willfully obscure. Is that line hard to draw? Sometimes. Can poetry matter? Of course. It’s not like we poets should give up and say, well, no one’s ever going to read this anyway, so why bother trying?

To sum up in a jumble of pop culture references:

The audience is out there.

If we build the right poem, they will come.

Life is always a bag of mixed blessings, isn’t it? I’ve been struggling with an ongoing health problem (which I won’t go into here, suffice it to say it’s been making me very tired and cranky) but seem to be writing poetry at record rates. We finally found a cute little townhouse a bit cheaper than our current place to rent next year, which takes a weight off my mind – but it’s a long trip from the new place to visit all my poet-friends. I’ve been getting almost daily rejections this week – but also received two more acceptances from Pearl (who wrote a very sweet handwritten note) and American Poetry Journal which, along with the Iowa acceptance, I think makes a record for most acceptances I’ve ever gotten in one week. Then, sitting down with friends yesterday, I found out that a lot of them are going through really terrible times – losing jobs, loved ones, etc. So I am trying to think good thoughts for them and wishing that poetry could do more than it can – that it could magically alleviate money problems or health problems or grief or anything. Sometimes I wish good things would happen in vacuums – so that when they do occur, you could totally focus on the good thing and appreciate it. But instead, it always seems like any celebration is hindered by a hundred other problems. This seems to be an ongoing theme in my blog lately, hmmm – how to be grateful and positive in a world that seems daily to become more challenging to navigate. Like a lot of other people who write poetry, probably, I struggle with not getting so overwhelmed with the feeling that “these bad things are happening, and they’re never going to end.” Wintertime in Seattle is always a struggle. I’ve already started dreaming of the Arizona desert, all the cacti and hummingbirds and lizards, sun and sand. I have no trips planned to Arizona, just, you know, idle mental wandering.

I also started on The Best American Poetry 2004, finally, and just finished the two introductions by David Lehman and Lyn Hejinian (usually, sadly, my favorite part of the BAP series – the essays.) And I have a new stack of poetry journals to review for New Pages, and new goals to turn in for second semester of school, and an article for Seattle Woman Magazine that’s almost due. So back to work I go.

It is a day of many good omens. In the month of November, when the whole Pacific Northwest is usually drizzly and miserable, the blue sky is clear and bright, and when I went on my usual daily walk around the boat docks (I own no boats, but I enjoy being near them) I saw three – three – sea otters in the water, not ten feet away. And I got an acceptance from the Iowa Review, which was very exciting and encouraging (and did a lot to dispel the sadness from two rejections on the same day.) I’ve written a poem about bad and good omens coming in threes – three sea otters, three responses from journals, three…million dollars? years of perfect health? I can’t help but feel optimistic.

Still looking at places to rent for next year. Haven’t found anything yet. Ah the renter’s transient lifestyle, moving every year, constantly having to worry about missed responses and rejections and lost mail. But hey, if I wanted to be a homeowner, I would have stayed in Cincinnati. Or Richmond, VA. Or, really, anywhere but in the Seattle area, home to many Microsoft millionaires who enjoy driving up the prices of homes and groceries.

I am reading Marge Piercy and Margaret Atwood today, trying to write an essay for school and a chef’s profile for Seattle Woman Magazine at the same time. If I am lucky, I won’t mix them up and suddenly start writing about pumpkin gnocci in the poetics piece.