An appropriate quiz from Peter Pereira after the humor in poetry talk…

So the talk went well on Thursday, I think there were about 40 people there, and not only were the other readers good, even the open mikes were surprisingly accomplished. One of the other readers read hilarious essays on, for instance, what Dr. Phil’s advice to Proust might have been. A good time was had by all. I discussed the dictionary definitions of different modes of poetry, like satire, parody, farce, irony, and black humor, and then provided different poetry examples for each (James Tate, John Berryman, Billy Collins, Dorothy Parker and Lewis Carroll all made appearances.)
Now I’m trying to finish a review of Denise Duhamel’s Two and Two, mess around with MS # 2 a bit, and print out new copies of MS #1 for another round of submissions.

Why I like British magazines so much better than American magazines…

The August issue of Harper’s and Queen Magazine (The British equivalent of Harper’s Bazaar) commissioned three women writers to write contemporary takes on three Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales, especially for the magazine. I’d love to see that in the middle of Cosmo.

Speaking of Cosmo, and self-indulgent vanity, I need your help deciding which picture to use for my web site and other promotional stuff – my old picture is a few years old now, so I had my husband take some new shots. Let me know which one is your favorite. There’s a time limit – I’m taking the pics down tomorrow night.

Also, I’m giving a lecture tomorrow at Ravenna Third Place Books on Humor and Poetry, so if you’re in the neighborhood, come check it out.

Some good-ish news and how is James Tate like The Barenaked Ladies?

Well, along with a couple of rejection slips in the mail, today I got a notice that I was a finalist in Kent State’s Wick Book Prize. Not as good news as say, winning, but you’ve got to take what you can get…
I’m preparing a talk for the It’s About Time series on humor in poetry, and so I was reading a bunch of James Tate. One of his poems is going to be my example for Farce, which is defined as, “a comic dramatic piece that uses highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, extravagant exaggeration, and violent horseplay. The term also refers to the class or form of drama made up of such compositions. Farce is generally regarded as intellectually and aesthetically inferior to comedy in its crude characterizations and implausible plots.” That pretty much sums up Tate’s work for me. One thing I noticed as I was reading was how closely the sense of play versus darkness and the turns in tone in Tate’s poems resemble the same action in the lyrics of the typical Barenaked Ladies song, which can switch from sincere grief or anger to flip jokiness with a turn of a line. Which makes you question whether the darkness you thought you saw in the piece was really there in the first place. Thoughts? Responses?

I knew it was only a matter of time before Barbie started wielding deadly weapons…http://www.mrtoys.com/barbie-dolls/Elektra-Barbie-Doll.htm

Finally home from Port Townsend, still wicked tired but glad to be back with my husband, my internet connection, my cats, and various other necessities like a phone and a television. Television, I’ve decided, is really my true muse – ten nights on the seaside with otters and herons, the full moon on the black water etc and nothing, no poems, but the minute I’ve watched some episodes of Futurama, I’m ready to write again. What is wrong with me? I also had a spurt of revisioning last night, I went back and altered about six poems to make them more interesting, brighter, tighter. I guess all that workshop time didn’t go to waste after all – it must have seeped into my unconscious at some point. Probably on those days when I only had three hours of sleep.
Waiting for me in the mailbox at home were beautiful contributor copies from Columbia Poetry Review, which featured many other women writers I admire, among them Alicia Ostriker and Denise Duhamel, as well as some well-known experimental poets (Heidi Lynn Staples, Arielle Greenburg.) Definitely an issue for me to read cover to cover.
Speaking of women poets, one of the lectures from the conference that has stuck in my mind was Paisley Redkal’s rather academic but fascinating delivery of a paper on the lyric I, anger as the “unacceptable” emotion in poems, how the recent rejection of emotion in poetry is actually a rejection of the feminine, how the reaction against “confession” in poems was likewise a reaction against poems about women’s lives, despite the fact that the first major confessional poets (Snodgrass, Lowell) were men. “You can write a poem about anything nowadays, except emotion” she said. “It doesn’t have to make sense, it’s all about wordplay and disguise, it highlights the intellect, it rejects those messy female “feelings.” Interesting stuff. It was enlightening to be at a conference where so many of the faculty (Debra Earling, Paisley, Rebecca Brown) spoke directly about “feminist” topics, about domestic violence, writing as a woman, what women are expected/allowed to say about their lives, etc. These things can seem so outré, so out of fashion in the current literary scene. There was a discussion of the saying in classrooms by girls, “I’m not a feminist, but…”
On a related note, the workshop I was in had several assignments, most of which involved writing poems re-telling news stories, fairy tales, pop culture. The point was to get away from the “I,” the poet’s own life, and widen the scale, while still keeping a narrative structure. Since re-tellings and persona poems are pretty much all I do anyway, I didn’t get many new poems, but I did enjoy looking in class at other poets who write these kinds of poems. Do I favor persona poems because I am afraid to write about the subject matter in the first person? I think mostly it’s because I’ve always been crazily empathetic, wondering about what’s going on in someone else’s head. In some alternate world I might have been a fiction writer, I love creating characters. On that note, I’ll try to have some empathy for my blog readers, and end this long rambling note…
It’s good to see you all again! And, a note of congrats to Paul Guest on his new job in Mississippi!