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...

We are experiencing temporal difficulties...

... please stand by (until November 3).

Dodge 2008 Revisited (In Progress)

I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?, tales of driving and being driven by Naomi Shihab Nye
Selected Early Poems, Charles Simic
Sam's Place, Charles H. Johnson
Boy, Patrick Phillips
Dog Years, A Memoir by Mark Doty
Through a Gate of Trees by Susan Jackson
The Poet's Child, a Copper Canyon Press Anthology edited by Michael Wiegers
and
Paterson Literary Review 36 (2008-2009) edited by Maria Mazziotti Gillan

First off the pile: Are You OK, an enjoyable set of essays, usually very short, about events, encounters and observations by by the author made while between destinations. Has the same feel as other poets' prose: closer to lyric essay than non-fiction, which I expect the Doty book to be, too, given his past efforts at prose (Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, Firebird...).

Another list I've been toying with posting here is "Assumptions Made About Me During The 2008 Dodge Festival" - a list of statements made describing (sometimes unflatteringly) various demographic groups that include me, whether or not the speaker of the statement realized it. But every time I start the list it starts to sound whiny and political, two things I try not to be in this space. Suffice it to say that my fellow attendees should be aware that there was at least audiencemate who sometimes plans his days around football, believes in the power and creativity of scientists, and has voted at least once in his life for a Republican presidential candidate.

Speaking of science, one of the more dissatisfying artifacts of this year's festival was a recurring and derogatory opinion of the natural arts. More than once a presenter, artist, or audience member aired a statement or question that used science or scientists as an analog for a lack of creativity. While I'm not a scientist (scientists ask "Why?", engineers ask "How?"), I have to say this position reflects a complete lack of understanding of the role of science in the world. Science, by definition, is the search for and communication of the broad truths of the universe. Poets use letters. Scientists use numbers. The rest - mostly - is parallel.

On a related topic, I've also been mulling my reaction to the response I got - in the "Poetry and Invention" workshop - to my query about whether technology enabled poetic or literary experimentation in a way that provided the reader more "entry points" (read: ways to engage) into a poem. The response of the panelists ranged from dismissal to bemusement; Forrest Gander offered a pretty extensive list of things going on at Brown on this front, but terminated his list with a "but that's not what I'm looking for in a poem". Maybe I didn't ask the question properly, but it seems to me that was the whole point of my question, if not of the workshop itself. Invention isn't what you're looking for, it's what surprises you in its own creation. It's the solution to a problem you didn't know you had. The US Patent Office requires an invention be "novel" and "non-obvious". If the poem were what you were looking for, it - by definition - would not be an invention.

Perhaps I'm taking the response too personally, it being my question and me being a technologist and all, but I went to that workshop expecting - from its title and panelists - to find openness to more things than just form and political expression. I guess I didn't ask the right question. But I just may complete and send the letter I've started to Jim Haba, the organizer of the Dodge Poetry Festival, with suggestions for a Poetry and Science subtheme for 2010. Or maybe I'll keep the letter to myself and find a way to stage such a presentation somewhere else.

OK, now. My spleen feels lighter. Back to the book pile.

Dodge Download, Day 3

In order of attendance...

• Early morning Rumi with Coleman Barks and friends was its usual self, replete with Sufi mysticism, home and ancient wisdom, and Nazradeen (or Bubba?) jokes. Video doesn't really do this event justice. "Putting Rumi to Bach. It's almost enough."
• Morning panel on Poetry and Invention. Brenda Hillman stated that even her experiments are informed by her experience as a woman. Forrest Gander quoted D. H. Lawrence and Richard Feynman. Coral Bracho noted that two people looking at the same photo see different things when looking through their own filters. C. D. Wright reminded that discomfort and literary invention go hand in hand. They like literary invention, but aren't crazy about infusing literary works with other forms of invention. Forrest Gander:" When people are discomfited, they grab onto the familiar, which is rarely transfiguring."
• Susan Jackson: "What a savage thing this writing down is. How it makes us believe this world will last." BJ Ward (an long-time favorite, after someone called out "Beautiful!" in response to his poem: "(Since) The poem exists between us, if you're seeing beauty there, there must be beauty in you." Luke Warm Water (likening his career to Rolling Stones lyrics: "This may be my last reading ... I'll walk away before they make me run."
• More stories with Dovie Thomason. The infusion of modern stories really deepens the experience of listening to her. From a discussion with a counterpart at NASA: "Why do you call it Mars? We're not in Rome. We don't need a war god in the sky. Maybe it's red like love, not red like blood. How do you know it's a guy?
• Quick quote from Steve Sanfield I forgot to include yesterday: "How many of you consider yourselves storytellers? What are the rest of you, fools?"
• Coral Bracho with Forrest Gardner: Bracho's poem "Water" was presented several times in parts before reaching the main stage today in its entirety. In the original Spanish, it's an amazing aural experience. Gander's translation is entertaining and accomplished, but it sounds like a completely different poem. Gander on the creating of poems: "There may be a narrative, but there are all these clues that suggest a deeper meaning"
• Like Forrest Gander, Peter Cole is both a poet and a translator, and he says that "may explain the extra bed in my hotel room". His work is heavily influenced by biblical and Jewish history. "Better a little suffering than too much cure."
• Chris Abani suggested people not clap but "just sit there with the poems. It's sort of more fun for (you) that way." He read much of what he'd presented in smaller readings. Jim Haba commented about Abani after his reading that he "likes writing poems, and in his novels he gets to write a lot of poems."
• Afternoon session on Poetry and Healing. Linda Pastan believes that "if death is everywhere, we might as well make marry it to beauty." Ed Hirsch sees applications for poetry in individual and collective healing. Mark Doty sees the healing poem a visible repair to a valued thing. Said Doty: "For most of us, poetry starts in struggle. You start writing and invariably come to a phrase that makes you stop and think 'I can do this better' and suddenly you have a little distance - sometimes the only distance you are able to get at that moment."

I wrapped up the day listening to Dovie Thompson. I departed with a few minutes left to her story, so I could take a little longing with me, to help me look forward to next time.

Favorite moments: The rooster joke, learning why NASA needs storytellers, new poems from BJ Ward, sitting next to someone grading math papers while listening to poems, meeting my family for dinner at the end of the day.

My brain is full.

Dodge Download, Day 2

In order of attendance...

• More stories in the morning with Dovie Thomason, who argued storytelling is not the sister art to poetry (as the festival literature claims), but rather the grandmother, predating even the cave wall paintings on the festival program cover. She related a Rabbit story to the elections. She made more cogent points than either candidate in the debate (at least the disrespectful bits I caught). "All traditions (in any culture) share the the thought of doing something for future generations."
• Chris Abani (a late addition to my plans - he blew me away yesterday) covered writing exercise and thinking exercise, Shakespeare and reggae, Britney Spears and Jabberwocky, and the parts of this thesis that referred to Batman. Absolutely the most contentful event thus far for me. "Treat the poem like a pop song. Don't be afraid to throw the poem open and play with the language."
• Joy Harjo has a million projects going. She shared poems, songs, parts of her play, canoeing stories and the meaning of her name ("So brave you're crazy"). She spoke of tribal and poetry ancestors, joined poetry with other arts, told of learning from the ocean ("don't fight it"). "Do you know who you are? Can you sing it?"
• The poetry sampler was good, though by this point I'd already heard many of the poems presented.
• Afternoon panel on Going Public with Private Feelings - featuring Mark Doty, Lucille Clifton, Sharon Olds and Linda Pastan. That's pretty much the "A"-team. Very good dialog on shame, privacy, fear, and other good reasons not to take poems public - but consistently insisting on writing those poems and holding them until they are ripe and you are ready. I have 8 pages of notes from this one. Lucille Clifton: "If we can talk about the awfulness that has happened, we can talk about its complexity."
• Steve Canfield was engaging and likable, though I'd have stayed away from the Native stories with Dovie already having read at the festival.
• Evening poets (up to when left) were Brenda Hillman, Franz Wright and Naomi Shihab Nye. Good stuff; my hand was cramped up by then....

Favorite moments: Learning Dodge has launched a You Tube Channel (name: grdodge), finding hot cider at one of the concession stands, having Dovie Thomason sit next to me at an event, lean over and say "You're a good listener. I've seen you.", noticing the fist-sized spider on my notebook before it started up my shirt.

I was already looking forward to tomorrow before deciding I needed some beauty to get the Mets and the debate out of my head. As long as the parking grass and walkways are not hopelessly sloggified after today, it should be great.

Dodge Download, Day 1

In order of attendance....

• Dovie Thomason is back from a head injury which caused her to lose all (600+!) of her stories. And she's added some personal modern stories. "When you're young, you're a treasuure. When yhou're old, you're a treasure. In between, take care of your treasures."
• Evie Shockley read poems, her own and others, influenced by music, folklore, and the sheer application of language. "There are some poems every poet must write, like every women poet must have a poem about her mother."
• Charles Simic spoke eloquently of the need to find something new to write about, lest your poems be (intentionally or ignorantly) derivative. His life experience set influence his consideration of even the most mundane objects. Of his poem "Serving Time", he said "I just took the phrase literally and started wrigin. I had no idea where it was going."
• Sharon Olds, having more fun than one might have thought possible, discovered her poems really do contain ideas, and misheard her way into a great new phrase: "Event sugar". She claimed influence from the "great poetry of the psalms, the bad poetry of the hymns."
• Beth Ann Fennelly advised us to "take red taxi", which is to follow the less predictable path between points. "Being a poet is training yourself to look."
• Naomi Shihab Nye actually relinquished her microphone to a student whose question during Q&A was "Will you read my poem?" She loves airplanes: "When else can I just sit and read for 3 hours?"
• Chris Abani, Coral Bracho, Forrest Gander, Edward Hirsch, and Patricia Smith had a great discussion about the relative and complementary values of reading and of listening as ways to acquire poems. Forrest Gander makes a great hillbilly. Ed Hirsch doesn't rap. Coral Bracho's poems are beautiful to listen to, even if mi vocabulario es muy pequeno. Patricia Smith can write a sonnet. Chris Abani summed it all up: "A good poem aims to be misunderstood."

Favorite moments so far: Dovie Thomason gently but firmly tearing down the stage and lighting at the first event of the festival to make it "suitable for a storyteller, rather than a poet". Poets adjusting their presentations and selections based on real-time feedback, thanking the audience for "playing along", digging out seldom-read poems because they fit with a theme the crowd had wandered in with our questions. Discovering cranberry-pistachio biscotti. Finding friends' books on sale in the Borders tent; catching up with those friends before and after the readings.

I ran out of energy shortly into the evening readings. More download (and maybe some links above) to come tomorrow.

In which the author admits he has let the excuse of being busy mask the brutal truth that he is a collosal grump

So, yes, I've been busy. Busier than usual, yes, but not in a terribly bad way. Things that I've been wanting to do coming to be simultaneously with the start of the school year and a rather nontrivial bolus of work from the primary occupation.

However.

Let the record acknowledge my admission that I've been actively refusing the muse (to infuse CDY's line with some assonance). Partially, this has been gradual acceptance of the state of my manuscripts (excellent feedback on the "complete" one making me realize my original vision was a bit too personal, acknowledgement that I'm not - yet - enough of a subject matter expert to properly complete the other). Also, I've been spending my free reading time in speculative
fiction and humor; not wasted time, but not the non-fiction and poetry that have always been essential to my productivity. The threat of Mets 2007 Redux hasn't helped much, either; I freely admit to a half-dozen fanboy mood swings this month.

But.

Last night I took my kids to meet the authors of the Spiderwick Chronicles, a series that recently settled into our house and acquired at least one immediate avid fan. Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black gave talk, took questions, gave away original illustrations drawn while the kids watched, then sat down and signed books for over an hour. We were well to the back of the line, yet when we got to the table, Tony and Holly were as engaging with us as they'd been all evening (2 hours old at this point). When my oldest asked a question that implied an interest in become an author, they reached down and found another gear, conveying more advice and encouragement than I could have hoped for.

I've been forgetting the fun of creating. Forgetting the joy of actually hearing an echo in the canyon.

Now, I don't know that I'd have been able to find suitable time to do much creating over the past month, but I'm suddenly looking forward to the Dodge in a way I didn't anticipate. I feel like I'm accelerating toward renewing my productivity. It's like things that I've been needing, essentials for getting refocused on my writing, are all coming to be simultaneously with some long-planned and necessary downtime from the primary occupation.

Hmm.

So, anyway....

I've been waiting for the Dodge Festival program to come out so I could begin to lay out my days and begin my accumulation of books for signatures, etc. The schedule has to be complete - it would have to be in the printing process by now, and some of the participating writers have posted their appearance schedules on their personal websites. Alas, the mainstage evening schedule is still the only thing online

Really, I'm mostly interested in a couple of things: selecting my conversations on craft and seeing how the poets are grouped for the panel discussions. I'm also very keen to know who the storyteller(s) is/are, but those sessions are generally at off-times (early morning, lunch), so I probably won't have to give an activity up to attend any of them.

But hey, before we get to Dodge, there are a few other events in NJ that are worth your time and attention. Among these are:

• John J. Trause (who is hosting Baraka in Rutherford), is appearing in Hoboken at Symposia Bookstore (for the Spoken Word Series)
• BJ Ward and Donna Gelagotis are reading for the Delaware Valley Poets

Speaking of NJ, if you don't already have it bookmarked, take note of Anthony Buccino's NJ Poets and Poetry, which is rapidly becoming an invaluable resource for Garden Staters.

Back now to waiting for the Dodge program....

(updated - one event was postponed...)

One Plus One Equals

I have two things on my desk at the moment.

First, I have Erin Malone's What Sound Does It Make, winner of the 2007 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, to which I submitted a version of my manuscript last year.

Second, I have some great specific and actionable feedback on that manuscript from a NJ poet whose name I'll hold back lest some net-trolling 'bot associate it with such a generous gift and create a monster for that poet.

It would be arrogance to put these two things together and say "I get it", but I surely understand "it" a great deal better this evening than I did a couple weeks ago. I'd like to think I'd have reacted to one or the other piece of input with equal open-mindedness (Right. What writer is objective about his own writing?), but the alignment of the feedback on my own work with some of the (very successful) poems in Malone's book has enabled me to sharpen my focus on my own writing, to be almost clinical about the possible improvements, the required changes.

This is where I continue to believe that being a technologist is a great benefit for a writer. No matter how biased one might be about the ideas one has birthed, when confronted with data, a scientist or engineer (a good one, anyway) should have the ability to accept feedback on that idea like a disproved hypothesis. Career technologists know that the best learnings are in the failed experiments, because only when we are proven wrong have we learned something we did not already believe.

Now, I don't think I'm a failed experiment. Not yet, anyway. But I do, for example, know quite certainly now that an organizational premise I've clung to, even in the face of prior feedback, is not worth clinging to. "Wrong" may be too harsh a word - but certainly not differentiating or impactful the way I thought it would be.

So thanks all around: to friends and their feedback, to publishers and their devotion to craft. It's up to me now to show that I have learned. Let me work on my next hypothesis and begin the experiment again.

Acceptance, Rejection, Anticipation

Acceptance * 2: Diane Lockward's "Seventh-Grade Science Project", originally published in the Harvard Review, was Friday's post to Poetry Daily. Let me zoom in on a meaningless detail to show you where my head's been this week: I took note of the proper use of the hyphen in the title and was completely aware that it biased me toward enjoying the poem before I reached the first line. Not that I need such bias; Diane's a terrific poet, and I'm not just saying that in case I run into her at Shop-Rite. Congrats, Diane!

Rejection = Acceptance?: Here's a different twist on things. There's a new journal online called "Redheaded Stepchild", which will only accept poems rejected elswhere, putting into practice the philosphy that "a lot of kickass poetry gets rejected, and we thought it would be fun to publish only previously rejected poems." They do not guarantee publication. What does it mean to be rejected by an editor that prefers rejects?

Ancitipation: 55 days to Dodge. The schedule's not posted yet but the appearing poets page has been stable for a few weeks, so it should be any day. The roster of NJ poets is really quite good, including Evie Shockley. Here are a few of her works, for your enjoyment.