The Truth: Writers Don't Write

Via Wil Wheaton:

Ask a writer what she values most in her creative life, and she is likely to respond, "Time to write." Not many of us have the luxury of writing full- time; we have spouses, families, day jobs. To the people closest to the writer, "writing time" may seem like so much self-indulgence: Why should we get to sit around thinking all day? Normal people don't require hour after continuous hour of solitude and silence. Normal people can be flexible.

And yet, we writers tell our friends and children, there is nothing more sacrosanct, more vital to our intellectual and emotional well-being, than writing time. But we writers have a secret.

We don't spend much time writing."

In his article at the Los Angeles Times, J. Robert Lennon goes on to talk at some length about his writing routine, with great precision and great humor. His basic point is that it focused writing time rarely is, although any moment of any day can turn into a writing moment (hence those T-shirts that read "I'm blogging this"). I think most poets have the added complication that our "routines" are more likely to be crammed in among other priorities closer to the base of Maslow's hierarchy than poetry. I don't really have a routine - I'm more of a streak-writer* - but if I did, it would be close to this:

• Complete the workday, begin drive home
• Dictate ideas into recorder OR refine idea from previous session.
• Get home, spend a couple hours with the family (dinner, homework, Disney Sorry)
• (after lullabies) Turn on the Mets, begin transcribing recordings
• move the laundry to the drier, reread last few transcriptions
• Bring some Tostitos upstairs, extract something from the transcripts to work on
• Iterate Mets - extraction loop until awakening to Twilight Zone reruns.

There are variants depending on whether I'm a submitting mode or a project/manuscript cycle, but this is the basic idea - writing time is after the "making a living" and blended with the "keeping the house". that's not a complaint, it's just an observation, and one which you'd think would make me want to focus more during the time I have available to write.

Operative phrase there is "want to". This post has so far taken me about 45 minutes to draft. Since I started, I looked up three games at BoardGame Geek, scanned the TV listings for M*A*S*H episodes, changed positions on the couch twice, located a journal I'm debating submitting to in Poet's Market, gotten a big glass of seltzer, and written these 331 words. Such is the life.

But in the end, I think adherence to a routine, or even having a routine, is less important than just committing to doing something with your writing every day. Just sorting my portfolio on the new computed had value, in that as I looked at each poem, I had a chance to decide if I still felt it was "done". That reminder of what was good in my own writing became a great filter for newer works in progress.

It's good to laugh at ourselves and the quirks of our "process". And essential to keep working while we laugh.

* - in the baseball sense, not the nude sense.

Poets and Fathers and Kids, oh my!

On days designated for nostalgia, poets (and omphaloskeptics) tend to dig a little deeper into our own navels for things to say that convey The Great Truths (tm) with Great Meaning. Of course, that's usually when we are at our pedantic worst - sentimental and craftless, caring more for what we have to say than how we have to say it.

Edward Byrne has avoided this trap with his poem "Florida Drought: A Remembrance" in which he tackles Father's Day in the forward-looking direction with a recollected moment with his son. While it's always difficult to deal with a sentimental moment in a poem, Byrne remembers to focus on the moment and let the meaning come on its own. My favorite lines are the last:

Somehow, I will always remember that night
how palm trees already were slipping to silver

under a cast of pale moonlight as a few full
sails still labored across the windswept bay.

I think the reverse direction - considering our own fathers - is even harder to treat successfully in a poem. Partially, that's because so many poets have had terrible relationships with their fathers and try every year to rewrite "Daddy" (please stop it, by the way), but more because so many of us seem to think that our regrets of incomplete relationships with the men we came to tolerate so late in their lives are unique (hint: they're not). When my father died I, like everyone else with a pen and a Norton Anthology, wrote my way through understanding his loss. Most of what came out of that was dreck, though some was passable. More interesting was discovering that I knew my father better than I thought, that the Venn diagram I carried in my mind actually had more than gender and golf in the center. So much so that I felt comfortable trying to create a portrait of sorts:

Of course, the mere fact of spending a few minutes on my father's memory is a discredit to it, as anyone who knew him will confirm. So while there is still time to go bowl a couple lines with my girls today and grab a nice sushi dinner, I will leave you, my six loyal readers, to your own remembrances and observations. But if you are fans of poetry or the late Ernie Vincenti, make sure to connect those observations to the present, and make sure you add a little value to today.

Happy Father's Day to all.

Opening Up About Opens

Though my six loyal readers are split nealty into three groups who won't be able to use this advice (accomplished poets who know better; non-poet poetry fans who don't need it, my mother), I want to capture a few thoughts on approaching open mic readings that might be useful to someone when this page turns up in a Google search*.

First, credentials and disclaimer: I've been participating in open mic readings for more than 15 years, and regularly hosting them since 2002. I have seen opens ranging from surprisingly good to unreportably bad, and received enough feedback from our featured poets in the Spoken Word Series to believe that some of this is applicable everywhere. Also, we have a small open with a number of regulars who've been with us for 5+ years, and some of my comments come from comparing the good habits of my long-timers to some other poets I've come across over the years.

Assumptions: venue is general-audience, 2 short poems or 1 long (5 minute max),

• Pick your poems before you set foot in the venue. You should have decided what you're going to read before the event begins. Experienced amateurs can narrow down to a handful and make the final call based on the setting, the mood, and the readers that precede, but even in that case you should be picking from no more than 5 poems.
• Start with the title plus 10 words. All poems have a history. Many poems, especially by amateurs, have the same history. Most poems don't benefit from having their history recited immediately before they're presented. Aside: I know many people like to hear a little about a poem before the poem. I do, too, to an extent. But when the length of the intro approaches the length of the poem, you've presented too much. Far too much.
• Avoid research projects. It's very easy to get caught up on the significance of our special projects, especially when longpoems or poems sequences are in progress. And you shouldn't be bashful or embarrassed about talking about those projects if asked, but until you're asked a simple "this is from a series of poems about yakkity yak yak" is adequate. If it's an obscure subject, leave it obscure, don't use an open mic for a history lesson.
• Don't give a geometry lesson. If your poem has a structure on the page that is essential to its understanding, think very hard about presenting it at all; but if you really feel the need, please don't, don't, DON'T explain the shapes and spacings on the page before you present the poem.
• Respect the other readers. This has a lot of other rules rolled up into it: don't fiddle with your papers while others are reading, pay attention with eyes and body to other readers, stay to the end of the open no matter where on the list your turn falls.... if you want to understand poet etiquette, pay attention to how a featured reader behaves when he or she is not reading.

Yes, there's a story behind each of these rules, and some other rules that I'm sitting on for volume 2. While you're waiting for that, here's another remnant from a defunct journal; today it's The Ogalala Review, and the excerpt is from Michael Foster's "Seven Love Poems"

1.

Between the peachtrees,
out of a ruined sleep,
wild strawberries grow.

4.

This morning I watched you beside the fish pond
until you stood. Your reflection was riddled
with golden arrows.

* and here are some keywords to make that search a bit more interesting: fission, pineapple, shortstop, antidisestablishmentarianism, Wyoming.

Is that an echo? (an echo?) (an echo?)

Seems every time I accumulate a little material and a plan for a series of postings, my schedule comes and piddles all over my plans. Ah well; let's try this again.

Received a lovely email from an artist I've mentioned a number of times in this space. I'll withhold names (I figure if she wanted her reply to be public, she'd have replied publicly), but I will say that it's someone I have a ton of respect for, so seeing her name at the top of my inbox was a boost to say the least. And it's someone important not only to me, but to my kids as well, so not only do I get a little validation of this space and a chance to correspond with someone I admire, but I get a couple "cool dad" points, besides.

Writer's Digest has released its annual 101 Best Website for Writers. One of them is a Flash stopwatch. Please, WD, you've got to do better than this. I accept that the poetry forums that also made the list are appropriate for most of WD's readers (though they're not really useful for anyone who has read much contemporary poetry from non-vanity publishers or taken even one serious class), but a stopwatch and a tagline like "Have trouble getting motivated? Use this free online countdown clock to get your rear in gear"? Ugh.

By contrast, AAP has launched a Poetry Resources for Teens page, with writing resources, "Poems Teens Like" etc. Not surprisingly, when AAP says "teen", they seem to be thinking about the the 6 months leading up to the 20th birthday; the references are pretty sophisticated (most seem to be links to content already on the site for adults), but I'll happily share this with my daughter with the expectation that she'll be looking for help in understanding. Better to stretch her than to expose her to online fluff that lacks an awareness of the art.

A stopwatch? Really?

Should hear from the chapbook contest within 3 weeks. As always, I hold back the name until the results are known. And as is typical for me, I decided to enter this one 60% based on the magazine, 40% based on the judge. More soonish.

Still waiting on one confirmation before I announce the next season at DeBaun. I really think we're again setting a new standard for diversity in style, content and experience.

And now, from the parcel o' the past as promised, here are the closing lines of Florence McGinn's "New Jersey", from the long-defunct New Jersey Review of Literature.

Ocean currents and salt marshes
raise the call of seasons as the damp sand

drag of horseshoe crabs, mating eager
and belly heavy with eggs, beckons
gray waves of sandpipers, screeching
shifts of gulls, and the hunting silence of cranes.

And always, the moving headlights
of motored commuters, glare and dim
on travel's liquid currents to curtained,
softly glowing windows of home

Reliving Learnings

Due to furniture arrival and subsequent rearrangement of the living room, I had the opportunity (read: "spousal mandate") this week to purge the contents of a cabinet in which I had stashed, apparently, the first 15 years of my writing hobby/career, dating back to college.

Oh my. Among the debris:

• two stacks of the Stevens literary magazine as it was under my leadership. Not terrible, if one accepts a 20-year-old worldview. We completely ignored the guidance of our faculty advisor, and it shows.
• my journals and some poem fragments from college through 3 years after. Who the heck was I?
• journals I collected during my early years of research. Most of which were completely inappropriate for me, but which are great reads now.

Also in that cabinet were 15 years (give or take) of Writer's Digest which, if I pile all together, will contain 206 tips to spark your creativity, 93 ways to get an agent interested in your work, 178 tips for more believable characters, 909 "best websites for writers" (and a few priceless articles on "How To Use The World Wide Web"), as many as 4 feature articles on poetry, and all that. I remember why I stopped taking the magazine; I loved the columnists for their style and their other works (Nancy Kress, J. Michael Straczynski....), but one 4-year cycle of tips is plenty to pay for. And good heavens Bob Bly is prolific - you don't appreciate it until you leaf through a couple years of magazines in an afternoon.

Some wonderful discoveries in that cabinet - I didn't even recall I owned a copy of Kenneth Rexroth's Love Poems from the Japanese. I think I'll start there and give some of my rediscoveries a victory lap:

I shall hide myself
within the moon of the spring night
after I have dared to reveal
my love to you
-- Chino Masako

Time for Carving

A Pact

I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman --
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood
now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root --
let there be commerce between us.

(Ezra Pound, Personae, 1926; from the Poetry Speaks desk calendar)

My father would have been 68 this week. As I continue to refine and resubmit (and refine and resubmit and refine and resubmit) my first manuscript, a collection of poems spoken from me to my children, I can't help from time to time being reminded of my relationship with my own father. I think our trajectory was fairly typical: From me wanting to be him, to me wanting to be anything but him, to me slowly realizing that I had become him. This poem, coincidentally appearing yesterday in the Poetry Speaks calendar, carries the same feeling that I recall having when I realized that Dad was the person in the world I was most like - however we'd come to be that way.

Our differences were fairly obvious. He never really thought much of my poetry hobby, he enjoyed hearing my play my accordion when I was competing but I don't know that he was all that interested when I stopped, he was pleased at my success as an engineer - but I think that was largely because he always regretted not becoming one himself. On the other hand, there were similarities that emerged unprompted in my adulthood, ranging from the silly similarities in our bowling styles to our shared ability to predict very early in the hand the one card that would sink our opponent in a game of pinochle. There were a couple of defining moments in our relationship as adults, and I realized at some point that we had become friends.

One of the ways that we were most similar was a (healthy) preoccupation with family and legacy, with planning and providing for the generation that would follow us. This, with its dialects of finance and probability, of complex decisions reduced to the objectivity of mathematics, was channel of communication that was always open for us, and frequently as good as a private Esperanto, as we went back and forth with terms - linguistic and statistical - that only we, among everyone in the room/house/family, really understood.

This is a very old poem; I penned it more than 15 years ago. I was tempted to neaten it up, to apply the style I've developed in those intervening years (repair those enjambments!), but I don't think that would be true to the memory of my father on his birthday. This is something we had. It was uniquely ours. It served us well at that time, and I choose to remember it today as it was, to remember the sap and root we shared, the (quite literal) commerce between us.

Sorry, this poem has been deleted.....

There will be time for carving soon enough. Happy Birthday, Dad.

Interlude: The Metsiness of Picking our Heroes

That's Rusty Staub, Phil Pepe, and me. I'm the one who doesn't look like he's been part of professional sports for forty years.

For those of us who were Mets fans in the 70s, it's sort of a credentialing process to list all the horribly lopsided trades that define the beginning of the dozen years of downtime that ended only as the bad boys of the 1986 World Champion team began to arrive. I did eventually adopt Steve Henderson's batting stance in pepper games, though I never stopped rooting for Tom Seaver, even against my Mets. But I never warmed up to Mickey Lolich. No, he didn't pitch all that badly in the hour-and-a-half he was a Met, but he came in exchange for Rusty Staub.

I can't tell you exactly why, but I've always been partial to The Big Orange. I think it's because he was a very good player at a time very good players were understood to make a difference in team's fortunes. We're completely star-driven in sports today. I don't know that a Rusty Staub would receive the same respect in today's baseball.

My favorite story of my own rooting for Rusty Staub was very late in his career, in a long (16-inning?) game, when he was pressed into service as an outfielder (once a good defensive RF, Staub was at this point a pinch-hitter and occasional 1B). With no one left on the bench, the Mets switching positions after every batter to keep Rusty and his limited range in whichever outfield position was less likely to be hit to. Naturally, therefore, Rusty got to make great catch* late in the game - which the Mets did, of course, win. Everybody in my dorm who had their windows or dorms open that afternoon knew something great must have happened somewhere when Rusty caught that ball. There's a reprint of a columnists' take on that game here.

Another reason I'm a fan of Staub's is that he became what his teams needed when they needed it. When he came back to the mets for the end of his career, he made himself a premier pinch-hitter and mentor. I wouldn't mind if I could look back over my career - as an engineer, a husband, a project manager, a father - and have someone say about me that I became what I needed to be when it was needed.

Who knows exactly why our heroes are our heroes? For whatever it means, Rusty Staub is one of mine.

Which is why I've gotten so adrenalized and tongue-tied the two times I've met him that I could barely speak... but that's a story for a different time.

* - I imagine it was great - all the reports at the time seemed to think that, but I was listening on the radio.

Contribute Your Instrument

"I regard myself as a beautiful musical instrument, and my role is to contribute that instrument to scripts worthy of it," [Ed Asner] says, sounding -- briefly -- almost peaceful. "And hopefully the music we play will be about decent human beings fighting against disease, fighting against corruption, fighting for the truth. and fighting for a day when all our jails are empty, and all our schools are full."

From an interview with Stephen Whitty. Whitty is one of four reasons I continue to receive the Star-Ledger at my house. I know I could read it online; that's OK for the dailies, but for Sunday features, there's nothing like newspaper. Even without James Brady.

(PS: Yes, I think Asner's loopy in real life. Yes, I think he's right about his art.)

Portrait of Life as Rob Petrie's Ottoman

Ugh. Terrible how life sometimes chooses to remind us that it is in charge. My streak of 6 weeks of 3+ posts per week came to a crashing halt in May. I could have predicted it, could have warned of it in this space but I remained optimistic.

Won't let that happen again.

News from around this vicinity:

• Great time at the Project Management Institute of New Jersey's annual symposium. Made to feel enormously welcome by audience and staff. The proceedings, including my presentation, are now available for your perusal in the chapter presentation archive.
• My town now has a poet laureate. And a fine one, at that.
• It's recital season for my kids. I am a lucky, lucky man.
• My Linked-In profile is currently 90% technologist colleagues, 9.8% artists, 0.2% other. That makes a great deal of sense, actually.
• The Spoken Word Series survived the downturn and will return for a 9th season. More on that in a few weeks.
• The New York Mets are a downturn all their own. And yet I watch and I watch and I watch.
• To the Ones is out there again. Didn't I say I was done with that? Are we ever really "done with that?"

Let's see if I can get back here before the end of the month with at least a few of the bullets my internal editor got to before I could post them. Early line in Vegas is 12:5 against.

Some Stuff I Thought About Once

Cleaning out my draft blogs folder, I've been finding it interesting what I seem to have found interesting enough to start writing about... but not interesting enough to finish the thought.

Among the incompletenesses I've accumulated over the past few years:

• Acrostics as a natural form for the poet with a technical education
• Homage poems after works by poets you see at the right, including Agodon, Lockward, and Pereira.
• A Top-10 list of Top-10 lists
• A discussion of the (first) cancer story line in Funky Winkerbean
• An observation that some of the subplots in my favorite works of speculative fiction are eerily close to reality today, and what genius that suggests in those writers

Also about a half-dozen Mets references, half that many Jets references, a couple medical device insights, and one insight about abominable snowmen.

Of course, the single obvious conclusions from this mishmosh is...

What, no accordion?

Boldly Go to the Cosmetics Counter

Have you seen the new Star Trek colognes?

Yes I want some.

No I don't care what it says about me.

Seriously, how can you not want a cologne called "Red Shirt" with the tagline, "Because tomorrow may never come."?

Confidential to Staten Island: Thanks for the tip. It'll be 29 years in September.

A From-the-Public Service Announcement on the NJ Gubernatorial

I know I don't usually get political here, but.....

Dear Competing Candidates: I will be voting in the NJ Republican gubernatorial primary. I have been attempting to sort through your respective credentials as available in the objective data of the public record so as to make an intelligent choice, representing the best potential for New Jersey.

But.

As of this moment, I have decided that the next one of you whose auto-dialing computers leaves a prerecorded three-minute diatribe about the other's shortcomings will officially be scratched from any future consideration on my part.

And.

Should the other of you follow up with a message of similar slant at any time between now and the primary, you will also be scratched from my personal slate.

So.

Please provide me with evidence of your qualifications. And let me decide. And be quiet until the debate. Please?

A Public Service Announcement on the H1N1

There are some scary elements of the current H1N1 virus scare. To take your mind off them, check out an engineer's take, and a preview of Alert Level 11. And if you live in the US and want to know what's really going on, there's really only one reliable source. Promise me you won't watch the 11-o'clock news for your H1N1 udpate. Please? Promise me?

Maybits (not Maybin)

Got to 12 posts in April. That's not bad. I wanted to reach my best best monthly total ever (14), and I even had three posts worked up that are still sitting in Drafts, but I didn't want to lower my already-low standards just to hit the number. But I'm spending more time with the words than I have the past year. That's good.

***

Want to have some fun? Try to borrow a supermarket hand-basket for a couple of days. Convince the store manager you're serious. What a great way to spend a Friday evening. Aside: Kudos to store managers like the one at my local Kings who actually took me seriously and tried to, creatively, help me out. Ultimately he couldn't help let me borrow one when I asked because his inventory was too low - because too many people take them without asking. And people wonder why my indignation levels are high sometimes: Nothing punishes you like following the rules when the rules are not generally followed.

***

Why did I need a handbasket? As a prop for this, of course.

***

Many NatPoWriMo participants are in the process of weeding their 30 drafts to the useful few. I didn't write daily in April (and won't in May - such is the schedule), but I completed 3 drafts over the past month, one of which has already been read aloud to strangers. So I got that going for me.

***

FYI, Maybin = Cameron Maybin, my Fantasy Baseball team's future starting CF. If he could just get his Ks down under 3 a game.....

Poetry Near Princeton

A great day in West Windsor, despite the heat. So many good poets in the audience! So many good moments....

... hearing Maria Gillan tell favorite and new stories about her life and her work...
... reading a poem about my daughter, which I've read in public before, and having the reactions of the audience make it a completely new experience...
... hearing people react with that strange unexpected recognition ("Oh, you're David Vincenti!")
... seeing a Met hat so close to Phillie country...

Unfortunately, the poet who conceived the event was (severely!) under the weather and unable to attend, so here's a poem from Catherine Magia, with my thanks for a terrific afternoon:

ECLIPSE

Somehow we had missed the eclipse
Slow thickening of shadow
Celestial molasses careening across
Smooth white dough, darkening and sweetening

To watch the moon close in my imagination
Curved silver eye; blinking, blinded, and reemerging
A survivor of the sky
A narrowing shutter unable to resist light

I don’t remember the sleeping,
Only the stirring, your isolated movements
How you position your body like a mummy’s
Indifferent as wood, unable to slumber with anyone touching

I dreamed of standing at the doorway
Perpendicular to the moon, elliptical light trickling
Through my bones, the momentary flickering
Of the earth’s silhouette, for a minute, swaying together
Like trees in the wind, an unlikely pair

It will be years before this happens again.

Go here to hear her read it.

Me A Poet

First the OSSP*: If you're thinking about coming to hear Maria Gillan and me read in the West Windsor Arts Council's Spring Poetry Awakening tomorrow, you can find directions here; it's not far from Princeton, NJ.

While preparing myself to read tomorrow, and to share the bill with one of my favorite poets, I happened to notice Bob and Margery at About.com reporting that Lulu has taken over the domain Poetry.com and that Watermark Media, they of the International Poetry Library and their regular Parade Magazine advertising , are out of business. This is interesting - an online version of Lulu's print service. I've been looking very hard at Lulu as an open of for the first manuscript... but more on that another in a week or two. Or eight.

For the record, I got over thinking ILP and its ilk were a scam a while ago. Sure, they extracted money from people who didn't know how pobiz works, but that was kind of the point. These folks were people who derived great joy from having a nice gold-edged book with their poem in it, who wouldn't care about any difference (if they noticed one) between a book from CavanKerry Press and one from Kinko's. When they stopped delivering those books because of poor cash flow, that became a different story, of course. It's not all that different from the people I used to see in my bowling league with the special bionic elbow contraption and the special spray for their sliding shoe, and the special glove with the Power-Angle Palm(tm). I know all that stuff was worthless and affected their score not an iota. But it made them happy and made them feel "like a bowler". If that's all they wanted, not to score better or be part of a better team, who am I, even as a reasonably accomplished bowler, to put them down?

There's a little buzz at Publisher's Weekly about Lulu and Poetry.com, which may interest you (and give you a brief insight into one of those bowlers - I mean, poets - I just talked about).

It's also telling that Lulu is aware that much of what they print is bad. But that awareness is part of what makes them legitimate. I have seen a couple of very nice self-published products this year. Given where the "real" presses endowments are going to be over the next two years, it's an option that more poets without bionic elbows may be considering.

Thus endeth the only comparison of poetry and bowling you will encounter today.

See you tomorrow?

*OSSP - Obligatory Shameless Self-Promotion

Confession

Kelli is much more thorough about her confessions, but every now and then an amateur can get a few things out in the open, right? So here goes:

I confess I purchased Valzhyna Mort's Factory of Tears entirely because she appeared on the cover of Poets and Writers with her accordion. Her ACCORDION!

I confess that I then dropped the book onto a pile and neglected to so much as crack the spine for months, reading more than a dozen other books before so much as taking the Copper Canyon reply card out of its original location.

And finally, I confess that upon reading the first two lines of "Music of Locusts", I resolved to finish the book before I read even the back of a cereal box:

what I wouldn't give

to be a small freckle on the wind's nose

Most of the poems have the Belarusian on the left face. And I confess, using the names in the dedications to sound out the phonetics of that alphabet and hearing those few words of Belarusian I can work out in my head is bonus fun for me in this book.

Here's the poem "Teacher", in its English entirety (the all-lowercase look is from the original):

if you are going to be my teacher
you will have to become a tiger
so that you can bite my head off
and i'd have to follow you everywhere
trying very hard to get my head back

Good stuff. Recommended.

Also good stuff, and since I mentioned her today, Kelli posted some good learnings she recently acquired on presenting your own work in public. Also recommended.

Some Time With Where Time Goes

This evening I was in the audience at County College of Morris for a reading from Sander Zulauf's new collection Where Time Goes (Dryad Press, 2008). I've been sitting with my copy since last year's Dodge festival, waiting for an overlap between his reading schedule and a night I could finagle to be free, and how lucky for me that tonight was that night.

Sandy read with a jazz trio, perfect for the tone of his poems (especially when they broke into "Inchworm"!). I wish I could recreate the mood of it here - the humor and nostalgia of both the poems and the songs, the warmth of the room (a wide white space with students' art projects behind the performers). I'm hopeful that bootleg DVDs of the event will be available someday, but for now, I leave you with the last few lines of my favorite poem in the collection, "Uncertainty", a kind of meditation on the observer-effect measurement disturbance frequently bundled with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle with tribute to physicist-poet Natalia Zaretsky (who also wrote about it):

(I) wondered whether God is
Uncertain about us,
Whether everybody
Who looks at God
And claims to see God
Changes God
Makes God
Uncertain
To everyone else.

Cleaning Under The Couch

Preparing for Sunday's reading, and using the opportunity to do some overdue file cleanup, I've been sorting through a large (virtual) pile of writings that at one time or another I've regarded as "complete", and am fascinated to be rediscovering some of my own work. It's been interesting to me to become reacquainted with works that have been off my mind long enough to have somehow acquired some newness. Not always a good thing, of course, as without the benefit of "the moment" some of the works I thought were refined enough to be called a complete poem are a bit lifeless, pedestrian even. Worse, though, is finding something that I obviously though was a good idea, but not good enough to imbue the draft with craft. But those moments are a gift of sorts, as they remind me that it's not practical to expect myself to be objective about my own work, especially too close to its birth.

But there have also been moments where I find something I don't remember writing, at least not in that "final" form, and I see something I can see my handiwork in - or better, something that has potential but I didn't have the chops to do right when I started it, but feel like I have enough tools in the box to be able to finish today. That's probably the most exciting moment.

So I'm sorting into three piles:

• Completed Writings - works that have been published or have had credible independent review (not that your opinion isn't important, Mom), plus some that I'm confident about. This is about half the work so far.
• Writings to Revise - works that have something interesting -a couple of interesting lines, a good idea poorly executed (which in my case usually means it's too long). This is about a third of the work.
• Old Writings - works that appeared in those early, forgettable, Poet's-Market-big-white-circle journals and are OK enough, but aren't interesting enough for immediate investment and which I wouldn't include in a submission package today. Some of these are candidates for the Revise pile, when it gets low enough. About a sixth of the work is in this bucket so far, but I have a feeling the remainder of the pile, which I've been slow in purging, is mostly headed for this category.

We'll see where it all winds up, but it's a good learning for me. Sharpening both my lens and my scalpel.

Don't Tell Me You Can't

I don't talk about the day job much, and I'm not going to start now, but for the next few minutes you need to know this: A substantial fraction of my career has been spent in roles designed to dealing with situations that begin: "We may have a problem here..."

Thirty-nine years ago today, Apollo 13 ended its mission by splashing down into the Pacific Ocean. If you've somehow avoided the movie for the last 15 years, this was a moon mission on which an oxygen tank exploded, and a series of improbable improvisations were employed to deliver the three astronauts home against incredible odds. It's one of those movies I'll stop to watch whenever it's on, and one I frequently throw into the DVD player. The story is a perennial reminder that just about anything is possible if you just "Work the problem". It's a tale I feel a particular kinship with. Because I'm an engineer, because it appeals to my problem-management-professional resume, and because I'm a poet.

Hmm? How's that?

The premise - assessing, deciding to, then doing - applies when there is no problem, too. If you have the tools and the desire, you can. Two areas where defeatism irks me greatly are poetry and music. Too often I hear people talk about how they "can't understand" poetry. Or when I produce my accordion, how they "could never" learn an instrument "at this age". Ugh. I had the good fortune one year to play alongside a 73-year-old man who had been playing the accordion for all of 2 years when he joined our accordion orchestra. He wasn't the most natural talent in the room, and he wasn't be best musician. But he was good - certainly good enough to hang with the rest of us amateurs - and he had by far the most joy in his playing.

Maybe it's not a direct analogy to writing poetry, but maybe it is. Maybe the energy that we B- poets bring to the band serves a purpose, feeds the soloists, keeps the literary tune lively, danceable, entertaining. One thing I'm sure we bring is a bit of knowledge, a bit of appreciation and a bit of dedication to the craft. Desire. An amateur's analysis, but a wealth of reading to inform our writing.

I don't know. Maybe it's a thin analogy, and maybe I'm too worked up about wanting to give accordion lessons again. But I see it this way: You can choose not to go the moon. You can choose not to get home. But if you want to do both, you may need help, but with that help will get you there and back.

PS: Three guesses who my hero in the movie version of Apollo 13 is. Hint: There's not even a close second.

Spring Poetry Awakening

Wishing you a Joyous Easter...

... and suggesting to you that now is just as good a time to make resolutions as January 1 was; maybe better. Do it for the holiday. Or for spring. Or for NatPoMo. But whatever's on your mind today, make it new. Yourself, too.

Things I've Been Doing Instead of Finishing My Taxes...

(1) Relentlessly refining for my PMINJ presentation in a few weeks. Check out the complete list of speakers who have been signed up; I'm in pretty good company!

(2) Flipping channels. There are some movies I'll always stop and watch, and I keep discovering new things to distract myself with.

(3) Organizing my material for the Spring Poetry Awakening. There's a pretty nice article about the event at CentralJersey.com; guess it pays to have that website, after all.

(4) Paying way more attention to my fantasy baseball team than is justified in April. But you can't blame me for being excited about picking Daniel Murphy, can you, Mets fans?

(5) Working on the day job. Catching up on my [redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted][redacted].

Eh, there's still time. What's on ESPN Classic right now?

National Whattity Month?

Thank goodness for the lovely invitation I received to read for the West Windsor Poets and Poems event this month. Otherwise, this April like the last several, would be consumed by other activity.

I'm not complaining, mind you. Taxes are predictable, my upcoming PMI-NJ talk bodes to be great fun and a great experience, and mid-year events for work are generally my own doing. But I do have a bit of jealousy when I click through Shanna's PAD, or Kelli's, or anyone's. I've avoided going to Poetic Asides because I know I'm not going to do anything with them. That's whining of course. What am I actually doing with my poetry this month?

Well, sorting through my old and current projects for the West Windsor reading, and having not done so in quite a while, I'm pulling some "finished" work for editing, discovering some unfinished scraps, rejecting some work I used to think was done... I think this is a fairly usual routine for the amateur, no?

Also, I'm forming more specific opinions about my manuscript, and I have made a couple of key decisions about it.

But I won't have time to do anything with them until after the 4th of May, also known as National Tardiness Month. I'll tell you about them then.

Rothenberg and Tobin

Through Silliman's Blog, I found Jerome Rothenberg's online presence this weekend; a delight to find. Primarily, for me, to see the way Rothenberg excerpts from his own prolific output into discrete and digestible nuggets. I know I'm not up to that challenge.

Also found the poems Rothenberg wrote in response to visual art by Nancy Tobin for the last installment of the Visible Word, an ambitious project the Spoken Word Series hasn't mounted in a few years. If you read these poems and check out the visual artistry behind them, I think you'll agree that's a shame.

Witte and Kelley in Hoboken

Come to Hoboken this Sunday to catch the NatPoMo action of George Witte and Tina Kelley at Symposia Bookstore at 3PM.

Not sure you can fit this into your schedule?

Go here. And here.

OK then. See you there.

Bleating

Old favorite James Lileks is part of the new newspaper generation over at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune. Check out this bit, remember this is off a daily newspaper's website and done by newspaper staffers, then forget that and laugh at Mr. Lileks. He comes on about 2/3 of the way through. News of the rough time the Red River is giving North Dakotans precedes the lightness.

Mark Your Calendar....

Just got the official information...

West Windsor Arts Council (WWAC) presents Spring Poetry Awakening featuring performances by Maria Mazziotti Gillan and David Vincenti, as well as open reading, Sunday, April 26, 3:00-5:00 p.m., at West Windsor Branch of the Mercer County Library System, 333 North Post Road, West Windsor. Information: (609) 919-1982. On the Web: www.westwindsorarts.org. Free to the public, contributions welcome.

Prior to the reading, cultivate your poetic license. Gillan will lead a poetry workshop from 12:30 pm to 2:00 at Grover’s Mill Café, 295 Princeton – Hightstown Rd. West Windsor, NJ 08540 (near McCaffreys Mall at Southfield Rd.). Because spaces will be limited, those planning to attend are encouraged to pre-register at www.westwindsorarts.com. $15 and $10 for WWAC members.

A Brief Aside

Today is World TB Day. Learn more about XDR-TB at xdrtb.org. Help spread the word...

Getting a little deeper

It being Billy Collins' birthday, The Writer's Almanac featured a poem by His Laureateness today. Introduction to Poetry is a poem I use in my workshops with kids, but not, I think, Collins' finest.

Here's one I prefer, from the same book:

Walking Across the Atlantic

I wait for then holiday crowd to clear the beach
before stepping onto the first wave.

Soon I am walking across the Atlantic
thinking about Spain,
checking for whales, waterspouts.

I feel the water holding up my shifting weight.
Tonight I will sleep on its rocking surface.

But for now I try to imagine what
this must look like to the fish below,
the bottoms of my feed appearing, disappearing.

Collins has said before that he feels he's at his best when he "has nothing to say", and I think comparing this poem to Intro demonstrates that. Atlantic is to me much more imaginative; I think Intro is funny, for sure, but the point is made early, and it could end either sooner or later to greater effect.

And a minor complaint to the Almanac: Old poems have been featured quite a bit, lately, and repeat poems at that. Aren't there any recent poets and poems worth presenting? Or even just newer work from the old favorites would be nice: this effort from Collins is circa 1988; I think he's published 6 books since then.

Composition Class

And then there's one more route by which a never-to-be-seen-again work can find its way into my archive pile: Exercises.

I will give myself an assignment once in a while, or take it from one of my friends and resources to the right, and I sometimes get a finished poem from it. Most times, though, I get something of interest, something that has a useful extractable nugget, something that I want to pull out and show someone as an exhibit (the same way I show them the parts of the basement that my cousins and I constructed ourselves: to say, "See? I can sorta do this!").

Actually, the basement is the right analogy here. I wanted to do the work myself because I wanted to know how to do it, to know I could do it, and to have a deeper appreciation for the folks who should do it (because they possess a proficiency I do not). For example, while I still dismiss much of the performance art most people mean when they say "spoken word" (rhymed whining is still whining, after all), having attempted to write in that sing-song, erratic-beat format gave me a much better sense for how hard it is for the ones who do it well to do it well.

So part of my pile is devoted to these failed experiments and horizon-stretchers. And no, it's not likely you'll ever see one unless you engage me in a discussion of how to incorporate metallurgical terms into a villanelle.

It's not pretty, but I can sorta do it.

A Needed in a Hatestack

It seemed like a pretty straightforward question: "Daddy? Have you ever written something you kinda hated, that wasn't really any good, but you couldn't bring yourself to through it away?"

Well, of course. That was easy.

That was Monday. Since then, I've been asking myself why I would be hanging onto something I hate. It seemed so obvious to me that I wouldn't throw away something I'd written, but I couldn't articulate why. I mean, don't we all hang onto every word we apply to the page? But why?

I think there are a few reasons I keep the words. Not only the raw efforts in my notebook or on my microcassettes, where deleting is actually more work than keeping, but also the hardcopies of the distilled drafts that failed in the middle of the seventh line. First, there's plain stubbornness: I started this, I can finish it. This is thought is usually wrong, but even knowing that, it's hard to overcome it once it has occurred to me.

Sometimes I've grown attached to a line or phrase and really want to make it work. Or salvage it from the dullness to which I've anchored it and build a new poem around it.

But most frequently, I think, I'm enamored with the character I've created. I'm primarily a purveyor of narrative, and when I create a narrator I feel an emotional need to let that narrator find his or her own way out of the poem. This fails when I've stuck them in the wrong poem.

I explained this to my daughter with the example from my poem "Legacies" (Outerbridge, 1994). It started as a solemn story about a man at his father's wake - first telling stories, then recollecting in silence, then interacting with sisters. Each time the piece died (no pun intended) early on, long before I'd started to see where I wanted to go. In a later rewriting, though, (5th or 6th as I recall) I twisted it into something a little more lighthearted, and then the idea had legs enough to ride to completion. I don't recall if the twist was a conscious rework or a spontaneous reimagining, but the piece worked well enough, whichever it was.

Do you hang onto your failures? How do you break them open to find the spec of gemstone within?

Saint Patbits Day

Shamrock: "A plant with trifoliate leaves, used (according to a late tradition) by St. Patrick to illustrate the doctrine of the Trinity, and hence adopted as the national emblem of Ireland; a spray or leaf of this plant." (courtesy the OED Word of the Day).

***

"Well, then. Now. I'll begin at the beginnin'. A fine soft day in the spring, it was, when the train pulled into Castletown, three hours late as usual, and himself got off. He didn't have the look of an American tourist at all about him. Not a camera on him; what was worse, not even a fishin' rod." (courtesy of John Ford's most excellent The Quiet Man. Did you know it's based on a story by Maurice Walsh?

***

"In the Middle Ages, beer (which is made from cereal grain) was one of the safest, most nutritious everyday drinks for northern Europeans - since grapes don't grow in the colder climate, and water was often polluted.

Occasionally, a batch would go bad, and people would blame the devil for the problem. To keep the demons away, brewers would place religious statues in their brew house, and ask the local priest to bless a new batch" (courtesy The Little Black Book, Six-minute reflections on the weekly Gospels of Lent 2009)

***

"May the road rise up to meet you. May the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of His hand." (an old Irish blessing)

***

Happy Saint Patrick's Day.

Poetry TV from Massachusetts

I was very happy to come across the website for HCAM, Hopkinton's Television Station. It seems to be a community access station a smallish (pop. 15,000) town in eastern Massachusetts. Amazingly, it carries two programs devoted to poetry and related perfoermance art:

Poetry in Motion is an interview format hosted by Elizabeth Lund. The website states that Poetry in Motion is a half-hour show designed for people who think "I love poetry," or "I hate poetry," or "I just don't get it." Elizabeth is a talented poet, critic, and essayist, and one of the early talent-donors in the life of the Spoken Word Series. I owe a big step in my own development as a writer to her working with me from her former position as Poetry Editor at the Christian science Monitor. There are two old episodes available on the site.

Wake Up and Smell the Poetry captures local open mic event that includes poetry of many sorts and original music hosted by Cheryl Perrault. There are several events available on the website.

Both programs are aired frequently on local TV; I didn't see a way to stream the channel on the website, but it seems both programs' pages are updated about monthly.

Check 'em out!

Respectful Misapplication?

What exactly do people who don't write poetry or read poetry think they mean when they say "poetry"?

In yesterday's Star-Ledger, there's a review by Bradley Bambarger in which the word "poet" appears 3 times: in the headline, in a prominent caption, and in the first paragraph; twice it appears in the phrase "avant-Americana poet". To get something out of the way, it's a fine review, well-written and multidimensional. But in assuming that the use of the word poet is a nod to an excellent use of language, then combining with the phrase "avant-Americana" (which means what, pushing the bounds of folk music?), I lose touch with my definition of the word "poet". I think of a poet as someone who works language the way a carpenter works wood: to produce objects of great beauty in which there is clear evidence of an awareness and style on the part of the practitioner.

I read an excerpt lyric, and tried to apply my definition of "poet". Here are the lines quoted in the review: "I can't stay here to hold your hand / I've been away for so long, I've lost my taste for home / That's a dirty final feeling, to be dangling from the ceiling / From when the roof came crashing down ... The next time you say forever, I'm going to punch you in the face."

Unexpected? Clearly. Powerful application of language? You bet. Make me want hear the song to hear how these challenging lyrics are applied to melody? Absolutely. Poetic? Not by my definition. I'm not even sure how "avant" this is, especially as poetry. Dark, confessional, narrative poetry of this sort is hardly at the forefront of art. I'll trust Bambarger on the Americana reference; I'm not a scholar there.

Pursuing my confusion, I turned as I usually do to the dictionaries at hand for specificity and clarity. In the Random House definition set available at Dictionary.com, aside from the obvious "a person who composes poetry", we find the following definition of "poet": "a person who has the gift of poetic thought, imagination, and creation, together with eloquence of expression".

OK. Interesting. Now "poet" applies to a way of thinking and away of expressing that thinking together. But the definition is still recursive: it requires the word "poetic". I'll spare you all the lists and links, but RH @ Dictionary.com lets us down there again: in 10 definitions, the only one that excises the word "poet" uses instead the phrase "literature in verse form".

What do we mean by poet? More importantly, what do persons who neither practice nor read poetry mean by poet? People tend, I think, to apply the word as compliment ("poetry in motion", "that was pure poetry"), but I bet the same people couldn't define the term in a way that didn't require the wrinkling of their noses or the use of a grade-school rhyme to complete their definition.

Here's what I think I mean when I say poet: An artist who, using language as their primary medium, applies verbal, visual, or aural effects to evoke impact beyond simple comprehension of the receiver. There are a number of ways this can evidence itself, of course, from Poetry Out Loud to VizPo, from Andrew Motion to Ron Silliman. It's a wide enough net to include Charles Bukowski (barely, I think), Amiri Baraka, and (depending on who you listen to) Billy Collins, but it lets out great songwriters for whom music is the medium, and it lets out those who practice rhyme and meter in the style of their 11th grade English teachers without trying to find something more in it than ABBA BCCB.

What do you think? Am I myopic? Off-base? Compulsive? Trying to apply engineering precision to language again? Wouldn't be the first time on that last one.

I just think the title should mean something. And after one morning's research, I can't satisfy myself that it does.

A Busy Week for Holiday Collectors

Did you eat your cubic radishes today? Tuesday's date, 3/3/09, defines it as Square Root Day - one of 9 such dates every century (or 12 such dates this millenium, depending on how you define it. If you still know where your slide rule is (which I do) I'm sure you celebrated it quite heartily.

And if you also scored well on the verbal, you'll be equally interested in National Grammar Day, which I will observe by carrying a red pen visibly in my shirt pocket all day. Actually, I do that every work day.

Indoctrinations

This weekend I took my daughter to her first poetry reading. I have always felt quite blessed to have so many generous and talented poets so near to my New Jersey home, and sure enough, Diane Lockward gave a rather interestingly purposed reading in one of our local libraries this past Saturday.

The "interesting purpose" had to do with the origin of the reading: four students at Caldwell College, as an alternative to writing a research paper, worked with Diane to design, publicize, and host a reading of her works that they had a hand in selecting and ordering for her. It's a terrific idea, and with Diane's teacher's demeanor, it came off quite well. It was for the students - by their own admission at the reading - their first contact with contemporary poetry, at least that they could recall. If one has to come to the art late, one could do much worse than to start with "Linguini".

Of course, the more important first contact was happening next to me in the audience. I'll spare you the fatherly nonsense; all you need to know is that she loved the event. I don't need to know if it was the friendliness of the crowd (which included NJ Po-Sceners Charlotte Mandel, Jessica De Koninck and Anthony Buccino, among others I'm sure I'm forgetting as I type this), the access to the art, the grown-up feeling about the event, or something that her middle-aged Dad wouldn't understand anyway (that infinitely-large and growing category). I'm just grateful for the chance to offer poetry to her this way.

As I learn more about myself and the legacy I covet, I suspect this past Saturday afternoon will become more important to me. I can only hope she begins to feel the same someday.

Unleashing the Poet on the PMs!

I think it's OK to talk about this, as the commitments have all been made. Did you notice a few days ago where I mentioned channeling the creative impulse over to the professional side of myself? (Not that we're not all professionals as published poets, that is... Oh, you know what I mean.) Well, I'm happy to report some positive outcome of said channeling.

My proposal for a talk to be given as part of the Project Management Institute's annual New Jersey Chapter Symposium has been accepted! Now, some of you are wrinkling your noses; don't lie, I understand completely. But I can promise you two things: First, those of you who have also spent some time with creative nonfiction understand that there is still impulse and the talent required in that arena.

Second, you can bet your tercet that the folks who attend my talk are going to know they've been hearing from a poet. Well, maybe not that, exactly, but they're sure as heck not going to get the same old same old that professional conferences tend to offer up. This particular conference is known for being a bit irreverent; several years ago one of the talks was "Management Lessons from Meatloaf" (the singer, not the supper). If I don't come across in the same useful but entertaining vein, I will have failed myself.

I'll sit on the details until the conference materials are available on the website, but if you're local to NJ and can provide a passable definition of the term "Earned Value Management" without following the link, you may want to keep May 4 free and visit PMINJ.org for more details.

I'm very excited about this. Does it show?

Heart day (in progress)

Sorry, this draft has been removed!

Bits and More Bits

Leafing through the Poetry Speaks 2009 calendar, a screenwriter friend came upon Billy Collins' haiku:

midwinter evening
alone at the sushi bar
just me and this eel

She asked "So what's so poetic about this?"

***

While it is true that creativity breeds creativity - that the act of creating makes the next act of creating easier for me - it is equally true that the creativity will come only in the form it wants to. The task, which has gotten a bit easier for me, is not to try to force the flow into a poem when it wants to be something else. Lately, the flow has taken a more professional slant, resulting in article and presentation ideas. Proposals have been made; more on that at the end of the month.

***

My screenwriter friend (see top) remarked elsewhere in our conversation that I was an aberration, being both creative and an engineer. That's an observation that usually gets the hair on the back of my neck up, but instead of my usual lecture on the creativity required to be a good problem solver (not to mention an inventor), let me offer a different exhibit. Here is the game company of a classmate (approximately) of mine; I've written before how a good game design is a good piece of writing, and I leave you to explore Blood and Cardstock's games to support my thesis. Let the Queen of Cards know if you think I'm right.

***

OK, I'll vent a little on creativity in engineering. Or let IEEE do it for me.

***

5 days to pitchers, catchers and KFC.

***

You think of an answer for my screenwriter friend yet? I surely haven't.

***

My grandmother would have been 95 today. At least a dozen times that I remember, she said to me "Do what you like. Dig a ditch. But dig the best ditch you can." So I keep digging.

Brief Bits at the End of Football Season

If you didn't like this game, please don't ever bring up football in my presence. Seriously.

***

Matt Thorburn calls attention today to an interesting anthology called Bridging New York City. If you, like me, had relatives in all five boroughs at once at some point in your past, it's worth a look.

***

Anxiously awaiting Ray Bradbury's new collection of short stories. I've written here before of my affection for the master's stories, and this one will help fill the gap to pitchers and catchers.

***

Have you figured out my "picture" yet? It's not hard, really. If you're thinking some kind of 80s-style, wide-shoulder, 3-chord rock band member's big-shouldered suit, you're both on the right track and amazingly off.

***

It's going to snow somewhere between a coating and an avalanche in the next two days, depending on which report you read. I'm going to log off now and sharpen the ice-edge on my shovel.

Readings and Writings and Readings

Reading (Definition 1)

I've been spending my free moments with Don Marquis' Archy and Mehitabel, and finding a great deal more there than I'd anticipated. I picked up a 1975 edition at Symposia, the wonderful second-hand bookstore that hosts the Spoken Word Series, and I've been taking it in a little at a time ever since. It has a great comic spine (as book purportedly written by a cockroach should), but there's a lot of satire to digest along the way. There's a great write-up on the book and the characters over at DonMarquis.com.

Writings (vicarious)

One daughter has composed her first song. She's diddled about with melodies and such since she took up the piano, but this weekend she produced a mature lyric and melody with a solid pop-song structure to it. I helped a little to realize it as a two-handed piano piece (yes, accordionists can use our left hands, those of you informed enough to be skeptical of such), but this was hers. I've produced one song in several decades of trying, and my one wasn't as good as hers. She's also about 17 years ahead of my literary publication record. Good gravy, I couldn't be prouder. Jealous as all get-out, but just as proud.

Not to be outdone, one daughter (not the first) demonstrated another creative compositional ability I've coveted for years and never been good at - that musical improvisation known as scat singing. For all the time and occasional money I've invested in my musical capability over the years, improvisation is something that's consistently escaped me. Maybe it's true that we exist to serve the next generation. I could live with that.

Readings (Definition 2)

Having mentioned Symposia and the Spoken Word Series earlier, I should point out that we have Bob Rosenbloom and Edie Angelo this Sunday at 3PM in Hoboken. They are representing the estimable Somerset Poetry Group, which serves as the beacon and incubator to a surprising number of members of the NJ Poetry community. Rest assured, Cardinals fans, you can attend the reading and still make it home for kickoff. Steelers fans, too, of course.

Writings (continued)

My two manuscript-length projects are both at crossroads this month, for very different reasons. I think I've made a decision on one and a plan for the other, but I'm not sure enough to begin kicking it around out here in the front yard. Come around back in a few days and we'll what we've come to. If you come back on Sunday, bring wings and wear your Warner jersey. I'll be the one with the Troy Polavoodoo doll in my hands.

And in closing...

Cardinals 23, Steelers 16.

A man can dream, can't he?

Writing Your Own Reality?

"For all the guilt there is to go around in the "Angel at the Fence" debacle -- including the willful myopia of Rosenblat's champions and editors as well as the man himself -- a deeper blame may lie with an audience that demands so much treacle and sensationalism that apparently even the Holocaust requires narrative embellishment."

This from a good column this week by Meghan Daum, which explores why the need to brand a story "real" is so present today. I've been trying very hard to develop a position against this statement, but I can't; this is true of many readers. And readers of poetry, in particular.

Before Sharon Olds dropped the fourth wall and announced/admitted that much of the graphic detail in her poems is truthful to her own experience, she conducted an interview with Terry Gross for Fresh Air in which Gross - an experienced and literate interviewer, stated quite clearly that the assumed or expected truthfulness of the experience was part of her enjoyment of Olds' work. At last year's Dodge festival, most of the poets - at all levels of experience - felt the need to include the introductions to their poems a map to the parts of it that were true. How often is the first question we face after we present something to a new audience or share a new work with a trusted reader "Wow, when did that happen?"

I find that question intensely frustrating, not in the interaction with the reader, but in how it feeds my internal interaction - my fight with the editor in my head. I will always fictionalize to improve the poem and sacrifice the more "truthful" word for one which increases my satisfaction with the sound of the line. But, anticipating that first, itch-inducing question, I'll sometimes find myself wanting to sacrifice entire poems (bury them, neither share nor submit them) if I fear I'll have to explain away something that I wouldn't want assumed true about me.

This, of course, is self-limiting, and is part of the reason I'm a B+ poet. And I don't say that with any self-pity. In any endeavor where you're not willing to fully give yourself over to the effort, you cannot achieve the highest performance. It's true for professional/career development, for creating art, for snagging line drives at third base - everywhere. Alignment of the level of your ambition with the level of your investment is the key to satisfaction, and to realistic expectation. I know what I invest in my art. I know what I should expect of that investment.

And what of the C- audience? I've always been one to believe the artist must reach out the audience, that the elements of craft applied must engage not only those who understand them, but also those who cannot. But I have also always believed that the audience member must make an effort to engage the art, that there is an expectation - and a fair one - that the reader/listener/viewer bring enough energy to their engagement with the art to develop an informed opinion. Bring your own rules, and don't worry if you can tell pentameter from a pentathlon, but be able to explain what it is about the craft of the poem that you like. That "it's so true" or you've "been there" just isn't enough. Align ambition and investment with expectation.

And this is where the idea of the fake-memoir is flawed. The gross misalignment of effort with expectation. The thought that this interesting story that you thought up is intrinsically worthy of reward, so rather than invest in crafting it and recrafting it, you brand it "true" and cash in. It's like putting a cube of clay on a pedestal, calling it "Life", saying "Life is important" and passing the collection plate. But if the plate fills up, is it wrong?

Well, yes. There's nothing wrong with finding an audience and giving them what they want. But I don't believe that any audience wants to be lied to. Nor that any artist can ever trust a lie more his ability to practice that art.

Of Origins and Infinitives

As a wise man once said, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. And it's particularly dangerous in the mind of an amateur grammarian.

One of my favorite columnists, Paul Mulshine, weighed in on word origins and interrupted infinitives this week.

Interestingly, a little Google action on some of the terms in the above article linked me quickly back to Steve Schroeder's blog, where he once issued a position quite similar to Mulshine's.

I need to get over to SPOGG and verify their take on these critical issues...

Poe's Shoulders

For Christmas this year, my Mom slipped a copy of Poe's Tales and Poems into a package for me. As I was flipping through the pocket-sized volume, I was reminded of how important Poe was to the development of my interests as a writer. Aside from an occasional Halloween rereading of "The Raven", I haven't really touched Poe in a long time, and I'd completely forgotten some of the ways his work touched me along the way:

• One of my earliest second-hand book finds was a history of bells containing, naturally, "The Bells" alongside the photos of old bells, the histories of churches and the handbell sheet music. How could a teenager with a thing for memorable language not be captured by "Keeping time, time, time/In a sort of Runic Rhyme/To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells/From the bells, bells, bells, bells/bells, bells, bells." I think this poem in particular is at the heart of the prioritization of sound that drives my style to this day.
• In sophomore English we would read short stories aloud by taking two-paragraph turns and going around the room until every student had read and we finished the story. One day "The Cask of Amontillado" came up, and I completely forgot to not be the primary geek in the room and got lost in the story and the characters and filled my classroom performance with all the forensic flair I could muster. Not for the class, not for Miss S. (well, maybe a little), but because giving voice to Poe's story was unbelievable fun.

Mom certainly didn't intend this introspection with her gift (or so I assume), but it turned out to be the best kind of present - a reminder of something I can easily pass along to my kids as their interest in language and storytelling grows (they're already a couple laps ahead of where I was, anyway), one that will inform my teaching moments when coach young writers.

Thanks, Mom.

A Poem for Christmas

(This poem has been removed. Merry Christmas!)

We return this year to the traditional writing of the Christmas Poem. I'll leave this one up for a few days.

May your holidays be filled with what you hope them to bring.

Reading and Wrapping

Recently rotated through the reading pile:

Bob Schieffer's America. Overall: an educated wind-down read. Politically astute and entertaining, short essays that can be scaled to whatever amount of time you have to spare. Schieffer is quite obviously unflappable and probably the most objective man with a microphone. From Section 1 ("How Washington Works - And Doesn't"): "The truth is, Washington does work. If it didn't, most of us would be leading far different lives under far different circumstances. But watching it too closely can be a nerve-racking, wrenching experience." Recommended.

Billy Collins' Ballistics. Some great moments ("Ornithography") and many typical one. I have a perhaps silly issue with Billy: If you're going to be conversational, please be grammatical. Surely it's too picky of me to want consistency in list construction (in verb phrase, verb phrase, the next phrase should be a verb, not a noun) and grammar ("you and I" over "you and me"). From "The Great American Poem": "But this is a poem, not a novel / and the only characters here are you and I / alone in an imaginary room / which will disappear in a few more lines." Okay.

Mark Doty's Dog Years, a memoir: Typical Doty prose stylings, openly flirting with sentimentality on and off (and acknowledged). Interesting construction, a little different than prior efforts. Acute observations on the larger issues contained in the death of a pet. From early in the book: "That's how sentimentality works, replacing specificity with a warm fog of acceptable feeling, the difficult exact stuff of individual character with the vagueness of convention. Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment....." Recommended for Doty fans and fans of memoir.

Also on the nightstand: A Christmas Carol, out for its annual reading. Some Christmas presents, awaiting my annual Christmas Eve wrapping rush. Christmas with The New Yorker, awaiting me to be in a cynical enough mood to open it up again.

So I like Christmas. More to come on that.

Matthew Thorburn at the Spoken Word Series

Matthew Thorburn will be this Sunday's featured reader in the DeBaun Spoken Word Series in Hoboken, at Symposia Bookstore at 3PM. I look forward to seeing you there!

A Few Entries Appropriate To My Attention Span At The Moment

So I'm thinking...

• that I hope the person who bet me $20 that the northeastern US would never see $2 gas again will do the honorable thing and come forward... I've forgotten who I made the wager with.
• that you should get two parenting points when you spend two weeks deeply afraid of something and your kids don't acquire that fear. Two more when you realize they've picked something up after all and have inherited your bravado glands.
• that Saint Ignatius was right: to teach people, you need to "(go) in at their door and come out at (your/His) own".
• that the more I consider the evolution of technology and the evolution of arts, the more poets look like buggy drivers. More on this in December.
• that covering economics, parenting, catechetics (teaching), and poetry in one post means I'm probably better off doing something else....

And What Might It Mean?

No matter what your opinion or preference was before 11PM last night, there's no question we are in a different era in American history and politics today than were a week ago. The conventional wisdom would suggest that a Democrat in the White House is good for the arts. Here are the some of the specifics on the subject from Obama's platform:

• Reinvest in Arts Education: To remain competitive in the global economy, America needs to reinvigorate the kind of creativity and innovation that has made this country great. To do so, we must nourish our children’s creative skills. In addition to giving our children the science and math skills they need to compete in the new global context, we should also encourage the ability to think creatively that comes from a meaningful arts education.
• Publicly Champion the Importance of Arts Education: As president, Barack Obama will use the bully pulpit and the example he will set in the White House to promote the importance of arts and arts education in America. Not only is arts education indispensable for success in a rapidly changing, high skill, information economy, but studies show that arts education raises test scores in other subject areas as well.

Health care and cultural exchange are also key parts of Obama on the arts.

Obviously, this isn't a first-100-days priority, but it will be interesting to see if these statements play out in policy.

Of course, knowing our President-Elect has a poetry publishing credit to his name can only be encouraging, no?

... and we're back.

Been three weeks (that's 21 in blog-years). Let's see what's been going on.

• Larry Lawrence was good enough to pinch-hit for us in the DeBaun Spoken Word series this month when Penny Harter was unfortunately unable to attend. Larry wrote a little about his experience at Symposia Bookstore. We had one of those small groups - the kind where the reading turns more into a conversation. Thanks to Larry for the late fill-in, and good thoughts for Penny, who I hope we'll be able to reschedule in 2009.
• The Presidential election build-up has become unbearable, with local elections getting even worse than the top of the tickets. Saturday Night Live has had by far the most even-handed coverage of any broadcast outlet ("Palin"/"Biden" was brilliant). Aside from one good summary in my local paper, I haven't seen an issues-based article or sound-byte since Columbus Day.
• Speaking of paper, the Christian Science Monitor is giving it up, going online-only in 2009. Seems late; most of the folks I know who occasion that periodical already do so online. But good luck to the venerable newspaper in its new incarnation. I'm partial to that paper because my first cash sale was to CSM.
• The Phillies won the World Series. The Mets watched the Series on TV. One of these things is news. The Jets lost to the worst team in football and beat the best in their division. Ditto.

Coming up: Matthew Thorburn in Hoboken, Holiday writing, side dishes for Thanksgiving...