Early Cherry and Camellia Blossoms, New Poetry Books and a Rattle Podcast Where We Talk about Poetry Submitting

early camellia

Signs of Spring? Early Cherry and Camellia Blossoms and a Frost Moon

This week was a confusing and overstuffed week of a doctor visit a day (two brand new, which is always fun because you’re explaining all the weird stuff that’s wrong with you AGAIN) and three poetry Zoom sessions (two podcasts and a planning session for an upcoming poetry presentation).

On the plus side, a beautiful frost moon, at least one sunny day, some signs of spring around town such as early cherry and camellias blossoms—although we’re supposed to have snow tomorrow and again later this week. And some field trips—to Kirkland to walk on the water, and downtown during a windstorm to Open Books. More on that later.

Glenn and I in Kirkland on our one sunny day

Rattle Podcast on Poetry Submissions

One of the podcasts I did this week was “The Poetry Space” for the magazine Rattle, and I was joined by several other poets and the editors to talk about poetry submissions: advice about them, how we organize them, pet peeves, and more.

You can listen on Spotify (link below). It’s about an hour long, and I still don’t think we covered everything. Always interesting to talk about this sort of thing, the humdrum work of not writing, but getting published—a difficult and complicated chore that can be discouraging (all the rejections) and off-putting (all the different rules). But if you want to build an audience as a poet, it’s probably a good bet that you have sent out some submissions and will send some out in the future. (Although we also discussed sharing work on social media.) Anyway, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! I believe this podcast is also available on iTunes and other podcast listening options.

ep. 53 – How to Submit by The Poetry Space_ (spotify.com)

Sylvia in a bucket

New Poetry Books

Although I missed AWP this year, I did try to make up for missing the bookfair by picking up a few books at our Seattle all-poetry bookstore, Open Books, today, during a windstorm (A tree fell in a car in our neighborhood while we were away, the 520 was closed for construction, and I was nearly blown over walking down the street. Still, we would not be stopped!)

So far, I’m loving the essays on feminism and pop culture edited by Marisa Crawford, The Weird Sister Collection, and Dorianne Laux’s new book, Life on Earth. More on these later, but I particularly loved the essay the “White Male Canon as Nineties Pop Songs” by Marisa Crawford, and this beginning to the essay “The Honesty of Jean Rhys” by Kristin Sanders:

I recently had a conversation with a man about Bukowski. Had I read much Bukowski? I said I’ve avoided a lot of the bro-writers: Bukowski, Burroughs, Miller, Kerouac (though I’ve come to love Kerouac). He said, Yeah, those guys are great writers, but, you know, they’re not really great toward women.

It’s not surprising we have a whole genre of literature by men who disrespect, objectify, reduce, and silence women. A more interesting question is, who are the women—especially the early women writers—of whom we might say the same: they aren’t really great toward men, you know, but they’re still worth reading.”

This bit got me thinking if I knew any women writers who weren’t great with men but are still worth reading. Even Margaret Atwood writes at least as many female villains as male ones. Also, would I count as one of these? The men who show up in my poems aren’t always great, although I don’t think I’m mean in general to the men in my life, i.e. brothers, husband, male friends. But maybe male enemies? I had to think about it. The self that represents us in our writing isn’t necessarily the self of our real life. Anyway, a book I wanted to discuss with people as soon as I stopped reading it.

Open Books Haul