Maybe You Are Already Living Your Perfect Life

I was talking to a friend last night who is embarking on a new adventure in her thirties (medical school!) just as I am starting a new job, and how we had both just moved, and how what we envisioned for ourselves at this age when we were younger didn’t exactly resemble what was happening to us. We talked about all the things we wished we had done differently, how we wished we had arrived at our current states earlier.

And I thought, sure, we’re doing all these crazy things (like starting medical school and being poets,) and our lives didn’t turn out as we had expected – but that doesn’t mean we’re not exactly where need to be. Though we have frustrations and money worries and pressure, though the camera-ready families we envisioned might never have materialized, maybe we are already living our perfect lives. After all, we’re following our dreams, everything that we’ve experienced along the way has taught us what we need and what we do not really need. Though we’re both nervous and stressed, though rejection slips still come in and we might be frustrated with daily obstacles, the objects in the mirror might be brighter than they appear.

Yesterday I was in for my yearly exam and in the waiting room there was a young woman crying into the chest of her boyfriend/husband. I thought, ten years ago, that would have been me (although I’m not really the cry-in-public type, these waiting rooms are an odd kind of purgatorial space, where people are waiting for good and bad news, waiting for their hopes and dreams to be answered. They raise a lot of anxieties…) Across the room, a middle-aged woman played, unselfconsciously, with her two toddlers while this young woman sobbed about losing her ability to have babies. And I wanted to tell the young woman, it will all be okay, later, you won’t feel like everything is such a tragedy, that not having kids doesn’t ruin your life. It is not the only way a woman defines herself. I wish we heard that message more often. Sometimes, happily-ever-after just looks different than you planned.

I have a wonderful husband, a new home to worry over, a new job to stress out about, a wonderful set of friends, plenty to eat and read, I have four books of poetry written and a fifth one in process. My health has been better lately, enough so I can focus on doing the things I love. I live in a city I love, though I might hate its weather nine months of the year, I love its libraries and bookstores, its coffee and farmer’s markets, its art and literary communities, the snow-capped mountains that peek out just when you’ve forgotten they were there.  It’s really not such a bad life at all.

Caution: You may already be living your perfect life, but you may not recognize it. Look around. You might already be exactly where you need to be.

Recommendations for Geek-Flavored Poetry Books and Useful Links

Have been in a whirlwind of work for my can’t-yet-announce-it-officially new job! It’s a good thing with had such grey cold drizzly weather, it helps me stay inside and organize and submit work and write e-mails.

One thing I’m looking at is a project for a community reading the same book of poetry together. My idea is to have the book appeal to the folks in my community – namely, a huge number of techies – so I’m looking for recommendations for recent “Geek-flavored” poetry books – leaning to the “accessible” side of the scale, something non-poets would enjoy as well as poets – with connections to science, math, comic books, sci-fi, etc…I’ve already decided on Kathleen Flenniken’s Plume and Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars, but want more!
Post your suggestions in the comments, please!

I’ve also got some useful links today.

For those stressing about sending out or marketing their poetry books, here are interviews with poets about the journey to publishing their first books:
http://www.kickingwind.com/interviews.html

Presses with open readings instead of contests:
http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/presses-with-open-readings-for-full-length-poetry-manuscripts/

A wonderful post from Marisa Crawford on the importance of creating a creative writing community for teen girls:
http://herkind.org/articles/on-my-mind/girl-talk-on-valuing-teen-girl-voices-creating-community

Kelli Agodon gives poets some marketing advice:
http://ofkells.blogspot.com/2011/06/marketing-for-poets-writers-who-prefer.html

A new poem from me up at the new Blue Lyra Review (with bonus childhood photo:)
http://bluelyrareview.com/category/current-issue/

Happy 4th of July! Go and try my grilled watermelon salsa out for tomorrow’s cookout, too! We are going to try out the house’s new grill for the first time, as long as we have some sunshine…

What would you want to do for your community for poetry?

If you had the opportunity to do whatever you wanted to make your community a better place for poetry, a more artistic place, a place where people would actually want to read and talk about poetry…what would you do?

I’ve lived intermittently on the East side of Seattle for thirteen years, ever since I was recruited here by Microsoft in late 1999. Back then, I wandered through libraries and coffee shops looking for posters or notes about poetry readings or workshops, not finding anything. I remember complaining, I am ashamed to say, with other East siders, about the lack of culture on the East side, how we had to go downtown to do anything literary – even though the East side is and has been crawling with artistic types, writers and visual artists. Redmond and Bellevue actually have some of the best libraries I’ve ever used. Yes, the lack of bookstores (since Borders closed recently) is a little offputting (I have to drive 20 minutes to Woodinville or Overlake to find a literary magazine…)

So over the last ten years, I got the opportunity to know some people with RASP (Redmond Association of Spoken Word) and volunteered briefly with the poetry reading series at Soul Food Books. So there are poetry communities here. But if I wanted to do more…to create more opportunities for people to hear poetry, to write their own work, to create a useful space for poetry…Instead of complaining, to actively go out and create what we’re looking for…

What would you do?

The first poems you loved – Summer flu edition

I confess to having been in bed all day today due to a sudden onset of flu, complete with middle-of-the-night stomach upset and fevers that make me flushed and hot and then freezing, so forgive me if I indulge in a little nostalgic reminiscing. You can blame the fever! Although I was productive yesterday, today it took all of my mental and physical energy just to catch up on reading magazines. I just read Mary Ruefle’s lovely essay in Poetry Magazine’s 100 Years issue, and her essay made me reminisce about the first poems I fell in love with. My mother went back to college, having dropped out when she was 18 to marry my father, when I was in grade school, and so during her classes she would share what she learned, read me her textbooks out loud. I especially loved two of her books – a biology text by Stephen J. Gould and X.J. Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry (the 1969 edition.)
Two poems I first loved, I remember being nine, were John Berryman’s Dream Song that begins “Life, Friends, is Boring” and T.S. Eliot’s beautiful ode to middle-aged insecure men, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” My mother would read these poems out loud to me, and we would laugh and repeat our favorite phrases to each other throughout the day. The first poem I ever memorized was e.e. cummings’ “anyone lives in a pretty how town” for a middle school poetry recitation contest. The second was Louis Simpson’s “My Father in the Night Commanding No,” pretty much still the best disaffected suburban childhood poem ever. Mad Men has nothing on this poem in terms of mood and tone, trust me. Though both of these poems had a set rhyme scheme, both seemed to be written in casual, conversation language, none of that awkward phrasing that characterized (I thought as later as a teen in English classes) those terrible Romantic poets. Wordsworth and Longfellow? No thanks! And honestly, while I admire a rhyme that doesn’t call attention to itself, I’d still rather read something that at least seems like free verse, that doesn’t seem…well…caged or trapped in its form. Shakespeare aside. 
I was awfully young at nine and ten to understand or identify with Eliot’s early midlife crisis (he was in his twenties when he wrote Prufrock, FYI) and it’s curious to think about why I loved the poem so much. It’s great sonics? The sense of humor? The precarious sense of decay and disaster? The slightly whining tone and the sense of irony in both this and “Life, Friends…” would seem totally outside the experience of a nine-year old girl who grew up on a farm in Knoxville. I read these poems out loud in my room, memorizing the poem by repetition, trying different inflections, different tones and speeds, trying to understand the mindset of the writers.
I wonder how these poets affected me as a person and a writer, how the idea of humor from Eliot and Berryman being important in poetry, how Simpson’s use of surrealism heightened the sadness of his poem by making it slightly dreamlike, how their tricks might have slipped into my own work over the years. Once in a while I’ll be re-reading a poem – maybe Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom I loved in sixth grade, or H.D., whom I loved as an undergrad – and I’ll notice the echo of one of their lines in a poem I had just written. Now that I am, ahem, middle-aged myself – quickly approaching forty, not thirty – do Berryman and Eliot’s angst resonate any more than they ever did? The magic of poetry is the willingness of a nine-year-old girl to imagine a thirty-year-old man’s fear of balding, a child to imagine the state of mind that would render great art and literature dull. What were the first poems you loved? How do you think they’ve affected you?

Rose Red Review feature, Persona Poetry Discussions and LA Review in Redmond!

A kind of mini-preview of my next book, Unexplained Fevers, is up as a feature at the brand new and wonderful Rose Red Review’s summer issue. There is a poem from Unexplained Fevers and a piece of accompanying art by Deborah Scott here and here. (We’re thinking about using Deborah’s “Snow White” piece, the one with my Rapunzel poem, as the cover for our collaborative art/poetry book…what do you think? She has so many good fairy-tale-themed paintings, it’s hard to pick just one!)

Kathleen Kirk has an interesting discussion my essay on Persona Poetry at Escape into Life here, along with Sandy Longhorn’s work…bringing up interesting points about empathy, how one person’s vanilla might not be so vanilla to someone else…

Last night I got to see two LA Review editors read at Soul Food Books, Kelly Davio and Tanya Chernov. They did a wonderful job reading, and I’m so excited to find more poets on my side of town! And LA Review remains as beautiful as ever – a great journal! 


I’ve got so much stuff coming up this summer…a special (job-related) announcement coming up July 17th…then I’ll be teaching up at Port Townsend Writers Conference…then doing Geek Girl Con and a reading for Cincinnati Review in August – what happened to the long slow days of summer? And speaking of which, as it’s 59 and raining outside…what happened to summer in general? (Weather report: gray cold rain for six days straight. Okay, Seattle, ha ha. Joke’s over. Let’s bring out that blue sky!)