Oprah and Poetry, More Girl Poets in a Boy’s Club
My thoughts are with everyone affected by the gigantic quake and tsunami that hit Japan last night. The biggest one that’s ever hit Japan, since the 1800’s when we started keeping measurements. I’m watching local news that showing tsunami surges in Seaside, Oregon.
Go check out these posts on Girls in the Boy’s Club by Kelli and January, definitely worth reading their continuations of the conversation.
Oprah Magazine’s April Issue is poetry focused. Check it out and make your own decisions about how this magazine helps or hurts poetry. Young up-and-coming poets in fashion layouts (weirdly – with no poems from the poets featured, sadly) and interviews with Mary Oliver and W.S. Merwin, little snippets from poets like Sharon Olds and Terrance Hayes. Wish there was more actual poetry in the magazine, but I guess anything that brings poetry to the masses…? Strangely ambivalent about this.
New poems out and about in the world, stylish bloggers, and truth versus lies
A few new poems out there in the world, including a few from my newest in-process collection called “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter:”
—Cerise Press’s Spring issue features two new poems, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [director or dictator]” and “Half-Life”. The issue also features work by Ann Fisher-Wirth, G. C. Waldrep, and Susan Musgrave.
—The journal Eleven Eleven (a beautiful little creation from the California College of the Arts) Issue Ten features three new poems, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Before,” “She Introduces Her Husband to Knoxville,” and one of Kelli’s favorite titles, “On the Night of a Lunar Eclipse, a Missile Shoots Down a Spy Satellite”. This issue also features Megan Snyder-Camp, Hollie Hardy, and Mark Wallace.
–The new American Poetry Journal Number 10 is a hybrid creation, romanced by cover art of two intertwined peacocks, with National Poetry Review. My prose poem, “Seascape,” is featured on the “American Poetry Journal” side, along with work by friend and blogger Keith Montesano, and many of my poet friends are featured on the flip side in National Poetry Review: Mary Biddinger, Tom C. Hunley, and Amanda Auchter. It’s a two-for-one deal!
I feel like now we should have a party with all the poets in these three issues of journals, featuring a wide range of aesthetics and personalities. I think it would be a blast!
I was remiss is not thanking Kelli for nominating me for her Stylish Blogger award a week or so ago, and then I think I was supposed to reveal some truths and a lie. Seventeen truths and four hundred lies. So, I will also use the poems that came out this week as a jumping off point for some truths and lies. Can you guess which is which?
–My childhood home in Tennessee, a two-story brick house on eight acres of farm and woodland, was razed to build an insane asylum. Which then was never built.
—The poem “She Introduces Her Husband to Knoxville” is based on a lie, as my husband has never been to my childhood home in Knoxville.
–I have taken many job aptitude tests that told me I should be a dancer or a director.
–I have owned a Barbie “President” doll.
See if this week’s poems hold any clues!
Links, etc…Book tours, submitting practices, six questions
Ever wonder what it’s like to go on an unfunded 17-day poetry book tour to promote your new book? Me too! Keith Monstesano gives us a blow-by-blow here.
Do you submit your poetry like a girl? Well, stop it. See Kelli’s post here.
Want to ask Kitsune Books’ editor Anne Petty six questions?
I’ve got another tendon injury. This one I can walk with, though I can’t do stairs or curbs, so it’s not as bad as the previous one. Still, I am wondering which tendon spirits I have been angering lately?
I also got my first blurb in. It was beautiful. I feel so grateful to everyone who has ever taken a look at my second book manuscript, to Rene Lynch for permission to use the beautiful cover art, to people willing to say nice things about me and my writing on the back cover of the book, and of course, to the editors at Kitsune. A lot of gratitude.
New Poet’s Market, Book Trailers, Slush Piles and Paris Review
Received my Poet’s Market 2011 in the mail today, opened it up…and discovered my article on chapbooks had been published in this version! (It also appeared in last year’s.) Surrrrrprise! G out and get a copy. Learn more about why you should do a chapbook. And also a bunch of info on poetry markets.
I’m thinking about book trailers lately as I’m trying to think ahead about the new book. Diane Lockward had a good post today on Book Trailers and Book Promotion. Kelli did a post a while ago on how to make a book trailer with iMovie that you all might find useful. Is it possible to make a cool poetry book trailer? I wish I was better with video software, images, music, and editing. What was I thinking, studying writing when I should have been training to be a video editor?
Two encouraging posts on the slush pile at The Rumpus:
http://therumpus.net/2010/01/for-the-love-of-god-people-the-slush-pile-isnt-dead/
http://therumpus.net/2010/01/a-necessarily-incomplete-but-hopefully-helpful-list-that-proves-the-slush-pile-has-a-pulse/
In other news, apparently The Paris Review accepted a bunch of poets, then un-accepted them. This blog does a good job of discussing the issues. I don’t believe in un-accepting things if possible. As a journalist, I’ve had projects and articles killed – and in my brief time as an Acquisitions Editor at Microsoft Press, I saw book projects killed. As a poet and poetry editor, I would say it’s less common, maybe because there are no kill fees involved?
Notes from the Northwest
Two spots still available for my manuscript summer camp session, so if you’re interested in getting some feedback on your manuscript this summer before you send out to the contests this fall, or are just putting it together for the first time and need some guidance, this is a great opportunity to let me know! I’ll be doing full manuscript critiques, and the other members of the class will be sharing their own work and their feedback as well. I’m hoping to have a place where we can talk about organization, structure, individual poems, publication opportunties, the whole nine yards. (Something that doesn’t happen often enough for poets, I think.) Starting July 1!
My first road trip up from wine country in California to coffee country in the Northwest, a great drive. Got to see Lake Shasta, the beautiful whitewater rivers winding through evergreen forests, astounding Mt. Shasta, a hugely tall volcano, completely snow covered, that the road passes closely around, and stopped the night in Ashland, Oregon, home to a big Shakespeare festival (and many little motels.) Yesterday we got to spend a sunny summer-feeling day in Seattle, having brunch with good friends (and Crab Creek editors) Kelli R. Agodon and Annette Spaudling-Convy, going to Woodland Park Zoo to see the new meerkat exhibit (more enclosed than San Diego Zoo’s, for the obvious rainy-and-cold climate reasons) and just generally enjoying the downtown area. Being back is wonderful, though we are supposed to have some rain coming up this week. Well, almost everything (zoo excluded) you probably want to do in Seattle is indoors anyway. Husband G will be at the office all day all week and I’ll be stuck in an East-side hotel room without a car, so I’m going to try to get some reviewing and other (paying) work done as well as some poetry revisions. Looking forward to seeing my MFA buddies at the reunion on Friday in Forest Grove, Oregon – and hanging around Portland for a day at the end of the week. I punctuate my visits to cities by bookstore – Open Books on Wednesday, Powell’s on Friday.
A week of blue herons instead of egrets, water and mountains instead of vines and rolling hills.
Take My Breath Away…
Sorry to make that Berlin reference.
So, nothing quite as humbling as having to rely on others to help you just…breathe. I’ve spent several scary days literally doing nothing more than trying to breathe normally. My husband spent two sleepless nights in the ER with me and my mom actually flew out from the midwest to help take care of me. Takes the wind out of the sails of the “me, I’m immortal” feelings that someone my age (only 34 after all!) can often have. Missing AWP was a drag, but really, I am just happy I am still alive. Puts things in perspective and also reminds me about my own dreaded and hated physical frailty, which I can’t really ignore although I’d like to. I used to play basketball and soccer, for heaven’s sake, I white-water rafted and rappelled and mountain hiked for kicks and loved horseback riding and all that kind of cool fun stuff. Now I’m like, gee, hope I can go to the grocery store on my own soon, hope I’m healthy enough to go teach a class every day in March, hope I’m healthy enough to…well, you get the point, nothing too challenging on my list right now.
I was thinking of all those literary cliches of sick women – you know, the cousin in Heidi, the young guy in the Secret Garden, all those laudanum-waving women in Austen and Bronte. Hey, isn’t the sea air supposed to be good for people like me, according to those books?
So, in the universe, all bad must be countered by good, or so, sometimes, it seems. The day I got the gigantic steroid shot and albuterol/oxygen treatment at the hospital, I also found out I won the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, along with Kelli Russell Agodon. It was a shock and I am very grateful for the money (lately, it seems like I’ve been scrimping and saving just to buy stamps! and I have about $300 in my bank account right now…how could I have afforded AWP again?) especially with all the extra costs of the last move. I haven’t managed to actually process the win or celebrate yet, but thanks to all of you who sent me notes and encouraging comments. Thank goodness for people who think it’s a good idea to give money to poets. And I’m very happy to have Kelli’s name right there with me.
For those of you following the story of our rental adventures, our propane tank was returned (un-repossessed?) and our landlord had it refilled for us free of charge to make up for the inconvenience. Sigh of relief.
PS Yes, I am feeling much better, thanks for your well-wishes! I think the combination of throat and chest infections are finally dying off and I blew a 400 on the peak flow meter tonight, which is pretty darn close to normal.
PSS To balance out all that depressing health stuff, some cute baby polar bear videos for you:
http://www.nuernberg.de/internet/polarbear/videos.html
