mimsy and outgrabe

Rain & Exhaustion & Things That Have To Be Done Anyway

2012-02-24T07:14:00.001-05:00

Today it's difficult to get out of bed. It's raining outside, and I'm exhausted (coming down with yet another cold), and the dog makes a good nappin' partner. But I shall get out of bed. There are children to be wrangled, assignments to be graded, and a class to be taught. Into the rain I shall go.

I received an email yesterday that says the deadline for turning in our sabbatical reports is March 15. This is either a saving grace or a trap . . . I was prepared to have my report ready for March 5, but now I have ten extra days! I realize that the probability of using those 10 days to create a stronger, better written report and/or have more of my play written is very small, but I know I'll take them nonetheless. I'm not turning anything into the committee until I absolutely have to do so.

I've written two poems this week and yesterday I sent out another submission, after having received a rejection that freed up some poems for sending-out. Those are good accomplishments, but somehow I'm too tired to be very excited about it all. Hopefully morale will improve as the day wears on.

Here's an article I read yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Actually, it's one of their blogs, not an article from the journal proper. But it's still useful IF you're a writer who struggles with finding time to write, and particularly apt if you're an academic struggling with finding time to write. (If you've figured this out all ready, congratulations, and this post is not for you!)

Contrariness or Procrastination? Maybe Both

2012-02-21T07:45:00.000-05:00

The surest way to keep a project going is to make up your mind that the project is finished.

At least, this is the way of things in MY world, which is a contrary world and a confusing one at that. Yesterday I resigned myself to certain facts: one, that poems for the fairy tale (those "interruptions") and the myth section of the manuscript were not coming as easily as they did a few weeks ago, and two, that the deadline for my sabbatical report was fast approaching and I needed to print out whatever I had so far and begin writing the report.

These were fictions more than they were facts. Actually, "fact" number two is still pretty much true -- I DO need to start writing that report -- but I woke this morning thinking about beginning my revision of the first two scenes of the verse play, and ended up writing another interruption poem. I'm happy with the result, but I find the situation laughable. The verse play is never going to be written, at this rate.

Something in my nature ensures that I will always avoid what I think is most timely and important. I have no idea why this is -- I'm not going to attempt psychoanalysis (because I'd probably be lousy at it, and/or frightened by the result) -- but I've noticed this tendency in both my writing life and my academic life. Hell, AND my family life.

Laundry needs to be folded? I'll vacuum or file papers. Need to file papers? I'll go do laundry. Need to grade papers? I'll answer emails. Need to answer emails? I'll grade those papers! Need to work on my play? I'll be magically hit by inspiration for a manuscript poem.

Nonetheless, this was a good way to begin my writing week. I narrowly escaped having a depressing and lackluster beginning -- yesterday morning was dismal as far as the creation of something new. I did work on the manuscript. I typed an entire page of notes and attributions on the myth poems, which was necessary but not necessarily creative. I still need to do the same for the fairy tale, too, and I'll probably avoid doing it for a while because yesterday was so exhausting. I made the mistake of sleeping in and then trying to write while the kids were running around. Well, at first they weren't running around -- they were eating breakfast quietly and watching cartoons. But then they finished breakfast and they became bored with cartoons, and, well -- CARNAGE! CARNAGE! CARNAGE! (Actually, just a lot of bickering on their part, and then wild laughing and running around, followed by some yelling by either myself or A., followed by about two seconds of quiet, then more bickering. Then more wildness. Repeat cycle. ALL DAY.)

Transcript from yesterday:

A: If I hear you two fighting anymore, you're going up to your rooms.
The boy: Yeah, to play!
A: No, not to play, to sit on your beds.
The boy: You're poop.

Aaaaaaannnnnnnd, that pretty much sums up the parent-child dynamic in our family.

Anyway, so now I'm going to get ready for work and feed those children, who are beginning to wake up and . . . you guessed it . . . bicker and act wild! On Friday I managed to clean off my desk -- no small feat -- although this was after I somehow managed to leave all of my graded quizzes at home and neglected to brush the boy's teeth before we left the house. He informed me of this as we were about 10 miles away from his daycare, so I had to make a quick run to the store, buy a new tooth brush and toothpaste, run back to the daycare, brush his teeth, and then arrive at work about a 1/2 hour late. My transition from caregiver-to-sick-child to working-mom was not smooth, to say the least.

Today, and for the rest of the week, Little Miss Talkalot is going to her brother's daycare because the elementary school has their customary-and-inconvenient-for-working-parents Winter Break. I've promised that on one of these days she can come visit the college with me, and she is oh-so excited. (I'm sure my colleagues will be too!)

More Interweb Skulking

2012-02-17T07:32:00.000-05:00

The girl is, apparently and finally, disease-free. Today will be filled with grading, a club meeting, and a class! Woohoo!

In between breaking up fights between Blondie and her pesky little brother, I cleaned a little (dishes are done, some of the laundry has been conquered) and ran a few errands. Also, I checked my work email and shuddered at the amount of committee meetings that are beginning to clog my calendar.

Then, desperate for distraction, I read and mulled over the following:

1. This article in Beyond Margins on ignoring one's "life" in order to write.

2. This interview in TriQuarterly with fellow Hyacinth Girl Press author Brooklyn Copeland.

3. This article in the Washington Post that involves fake busking, Bach, and a violin prodigy named Joshua Bell -- all in the interest of social science. It's a good reminder that this week I should have -- in between shuttling between CVS and home for Children's Tylenol and Gatorade, swearing under my breath and sometimes out loud at Long Island drivers, and settling toddler/first grader disputes -- stopped and taken a moment to more fully observe the world around me.

I haven't written much this week. I've been tweaking the layout of the manuscript instead, and looking through the D'Aulaire books for epigraphs, and mulling over the "last" (last?) myth poem . . . when, of course, I'm not mulling over the things I read on the internet.

I may be in mourning over the "end" of my manuscript . . . if this is, in fact, the end. I feel a little down, which could be attributed to all of the time I've spent cooped up in the house. (The kids are happy to return to school today, too!)

Hopefully, this weekend/next week will produce something worthy of the manuscript . . . or maybe even the play.

Gatorade and Saltines

2012-02-15T10:03:00.002-05:00

Little Miss Talkalot is Little Miss Very Sad. Because she's caught some kind of virus replete with fever, she missed the Valentine's Day celebrations at school yesterday and she's missing today's 100th day of school celebrations. (Apparently, there's always something to celebrate in our elementary school, which really isn't a bad way to live life, is it?)

A. stayed home with the girl yesterday, and today it's my turn. I'm missing two meetings and cancelling the same class I had to cancel on Friday when the boy was diagnosed with strep throat. This season of illness is kicking my butt. It's been a week since I assumed the new administrative role and yet I haven't really had a chance to fulfill its duties. But at the very least, I can say that I'm not falling behind in four classes, just one.

Also, it's just really weird to see my daughter so sick. And it's not that she's near-death, but that we're just not used to seeing her act so . . . sedate. She's sleepy -- she actually napped yesterday -- and quiet and generally unhappy. It's a weird occurrence, and puts a weirder spin on my world. The universe is misaligned somehow when my usually chirpy, bright, bouncing daughter stops her chirping and bouncing and dims her little light.

The boy, meanwhile, is up to his usual terribleness. Which makes me laugh and laugh and then cry and cry because I've lost all hope of control. Today's top priority will be defending his sister once he becomes bored and begins to terrorize her.

There's also a literal mountain of laundry on the couch in the basement, and a similar pile of dishes in the sink, and crumbs to wipe up and dog hair to vacuum. Ah, domesticity.

In news that's not kid- or cleaning-related, I've finished the fairy tale! That's right! I know, you expected more fanfare, right? Something like flashing lights and victory signs? Me too. It was strangely anticlimactic, but also extremely satisfying, when I completed the last stanza of the poem this morning. There's still lots (LOTS) of editing to do and fine-tuning of the meter and also two or three poems to write for that section of my manuscript -- but the poem itself is done. DONE. Feel free to skip the next line as I indulge: DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE!!!

So my manuscript, Fabulous Beast proper, and not Fabulous Beast, the chapbook, is at 69 pages. The fairy tale poem ended up being 24 pages long, and the mother/daughter poems that I'm writing as interruptions to the narrative are currently 4 pages in number, but may be 6-7 when the MS is finally complete. But holy-freakin-cow: I've actually finished something that I started.

Most of my writing life has been filled with fits and starts. It went something like this: I begin a series of poems, I run out of steam, I MAYBE get a chapbook manuscript out of whatever I've produced, I shop the chapbook manuscript two or three times, and when it's been rejected two or three times I put the manuscript away.

I'm pretty pleased with myself for writing so much and for such an extended period of time -- I'd never ever written daily (or nearly every day) for six months before I went on this sabbatical. And it is reassuring -- even though the semester is young -- that I've been able to maintain my "writing in the morning" schedule. It almost makes up for my fat ass and all of the running I haven't been doing. (Although perhaps -- when the kids nap -- I'll even get in a run today!) (Or, you know, take a nap with them because I'm exhausted from this getting-up-at-five-a.m. crap.)

I'm sure this kind of accomplishment wouldn't really be viewed as an accomplishment by someone more disciplined and talented than I -- but I'm going to crow for a little while longer. Or, at least, for the space of this post.

In the next two-three weeks, I have the following to concentrate on: (as far as my writing life goes -- my child-rearing life and my academic life have their own lists)

* Writing those "interruption" poems for the fairy tale section of the manuscript
* Writing the myth poem I have been mulling over in my head for the past two months
* Revising the first two scenes of my verse play
* Writing my report for the Sabbatical Committee (I wonder if I can just print out the pages of this blog?)

That's a lot of work to do in three weeks -- especially when one of those weeks will be filled with travel and attendance at the AWP conference in Chicago. But it's so nice to feel inspired and energized by this feeling of accomplishment. If this was the evening, and not the beginning of a day filled with sick-kiddy-wrangling, I might help myself to a glass of sparkling wine in celebration. Instead, I guess, I'll settle for Gatorade and saltines. (Cheers!)

Kickin' Thursday in its Pants (Also: Becoming 'The Enemy')

2012-02-09T07:54:00.001-05:00

I'm super-tired at the moment, but fairly content. This has been a rough week, with a lot of changes occurring during a very small time frame at work. I wasn't really expecting this to happen -- in fact, I was striving to have a calm, non-interesting semester in terms of teaching and commitments at the college, but once again I've completely abandoned my previous notions and expectations in order to thoroughly embrace something new and exciting but also potentially disastrous!

'Cause, apparently, that's how I roll.

I took on a temporary administrative position at the college that will, hopefully, help out my department and also be a good fit for me in terms of easing back into teaching and working full-time. The colleagues I've asked for advice are evenly divided as to whether this will actually happen. Some think that the job will allow me to accomplish more when I'm physically at work, so that when I return home I can emotionally/mentally "be" with my family instead of spending my evenings, weekends, and sometimes the mornings grading (which is what I end up doing when I teach a full load). This is what I'd like to think will happen. But some think that I'll be dragging just as much work home, if not more.

I guess we'll see. The damage is done now -- I'm in. I exchanged two of my classes for more office hours, which are supposed to free me up for handling student and adjunct faculty concerns, as well as duties like department scheduling and committee meetings. Today will be the first real day of this kind of work, I think. I anticipate that, at the very least, I might begin to clear off the four metric tons of paper that's been slowly accumulating on my desk over the past year.

And no matter what happens, I'm determined to remain fiercely protective of my morning writing time. So much so, apparently, that I've added an hour. A. is rising at 4:30 a.m.(ish) in order to leave the house around 5 a.m.(ish) for work these days, so I've begun to rise at that hour, too. It's nice to say goodbye to A. before he leaves -- it gives us the comforting illusion that we actually see a lot of each other during the week! Also, I've managed to get some good writing done this week.

I'm now completely finished with Part Two of Chapter X of the fairy tale. I'm sure anyone who reads this blog is happy to know that, because it means I'm one part closer to finishing the entire thing and thus, hopefully, I'LL STOP WRITING ABOUT IT COMPLETELY. I'm excited, too, because it means I'm one step closer to finishing my manuscript as a whole, which is just blow-my-mind exciting because this is the first time in my life I've written a collection of poems this long, this unified, so complete, and -- if I do say so myself -- good! (It's nice to finally have some confidence in my own work. Hopefully that confidence will hang around for a while, too.)

And it was nice to have such an uninterrupted stretch of writing time -- I managed to write the first three stanzas of the final part of Chapter X this morning. Booyah! Take that, crap-and-emotionally-exhausting week. Take that, Thursday! Take that, fairy tale poem! I will finish this poem soon. And then -- ohmygod -- move on to the play . . .

Guest Blogging at Poetry Crush & Reading in Orient

2012-02-06T06:40:00.000-05:00

The Valentine's Day issue of Poetry Crush went live yesterday, and in it the Hyacinth Girl Press authors share their favorite erotic poems. I was kind of shocked to see my selection kick things off, but pleased, too -- Herbert's the shit! (Very eloquent, I know.)

To be honest, I'd never really had a favorite erotic poem -- at least, I'd never called a poem one of my favorites because it was erotic, and I'm not sure many readers of poetry do, either. But this ended up being a fun exercise in memory and reading. I went back to my books -- opened up anthologies, searched my bookshelves for the authors and volumes I thought contained verse that might be termed "erotic" -- and eventually hit upon "Silk of a Soul" by Zbigniew Herbert.

I almost chose "Rapture" by Galway Kinnell. In the end I didn't for two reasons. One, I suspected that someone else might choose a Kinnell poem (wrongly, it turns out, but someone did choose Sharon Olds, who was another go-to on my list). Two, while I love Kinnell's poem, I found what Herbert suggests in "Silk of a Soul" more unusual, and something I wanted to write about.

It was a little freaky, though, writing something for someone else's blog. I haven't written any prose for publication, online or print, in a long time (with, of course, the exception of this blog). I wanted to do a good job on the part of the poem, on the part of J. Hope Stein, the curator/editor of Poetry Crush, and as a new representative of Hyacinth Girl Press. I think my introduction to Herbert's poem sounds . . . um, verbose . . . but (hopefully) not idiotic.

Hyacinth Girl Press is kind of awesome, and being one of their (forthcoming) authors is kinda awesome, too. The longer I become accustomed to thinking of myself as an HGP author, the more I feel like it's the right fit. Margaret Bashaar is so supportive and enthusiastic about the authors she's chosen to publish, and it's exciting to be a part of a project that's new and promising.

Over the weekend A.P. and I hauled our tails all the way to Long Island's Orient Point (the furthest point of the North Shore) for a reading in support of Poquatuck Hall. It was rather elegant and fun and, as A.P. said in the car on the way there, a good way to see how successful (or not) poems are when you read them out loud. Reading aloud is so important for poetry. I think it's important for ALL writing, really, but poetry especially. I think I'm going to make my students do that more often.

Anyway, here we are at the reading.

Not very exciting, I know, but how many action shots involving podiums can one get, really?

Oh, and I'd like to give a shout out to the student who drove all the way to Orient Point to see A.P. and I read. I was so pleased to see her -- it's so nice, so incredibly affirming, when one of your students is gracious enough to take an interest in what you do beyond the classroom. M.'s the shit!

Also, my friends K. & R. traveled out for the reading, too, and as they're not avid fans of poetry or the art that was being auctioned, I have to give them thanks for making the trek. My gracious husband A. has my gratitude too, of course, for staying at home with the doodles, one of whom had strep throat. (The other was just plain old ornery, but that's his three-year-old thang, man.)

My Morning Reading: Writing Around/With/Despite of/Because of Children

2012-02-02T07:37:00.000-05:00

This week, Bernadette Geyer and Molly Spencer both blogged about being a parent who writes . . . or being a writer who raises children . . . I'm sure we could get into a semantic argument about which designation is more appropriate, or should be more appropriate, but I don't have time . . . I have to write before the kids get up! (Har, har, har . . . crash of symbols/cricket chirps.)

I've been wanting to post something here for a while, but life/children/school and yes, my writing got in the way, and that's something Spencer speaks to in her blog post, which is kind of an answer or addendum to what Geyer posted over at She Writes. I was really, really sick last week -- not deathly so (as my tired joke about the plague would have you think), but enough to make everything other than the most basic tasks seem terribly unimportant.

Even still, because I'm neurotic whether or not I'm infected with some savage virus, I woke up early every morning to write and did actually make some progress toward finishing the fairy tale. I'm about two pages into the second section of the last chapter, and even though I'm very close to being done I'm lingering somewhat over these last stanzas. Could be nostalgia, could be sadness, could be an actual effort on my part to make sure the end of the twenty-plus page monster is readable, could be a mixture of all those things -- but whatever it is, I'm being diligent but not panicky, and I'm not subconsciously sabotaging myself with some kind of crippling writers block. This, for me, shows progress. My writing habits, which really amount more to non-writing habits, are changing, and changing for the better.

Which leads me to this hyper, profanity-ridden piece of writing advice by Chuck Wendig. It's good for a laugh -- I like his sense of humor -- and while there are some good reminders here about what constitutes good writing habits, none of it is rocket science or anything that hasn't been said before in The Writer's Chronicle or Poets & Writers. The difference is that he drops f-bombs a lot and has a knack for weirdly inventive and often funny figurative language and imagery:

Audiences can smell your inauthentic contrivances like a dead hamster in the heating duct.

You know what happens to people who tread water? They grow inevitably weary and then they drown and hermit crabs use their body as a sex playground. That’s a fact. I read it in the New York Times. If anybody knows facts, it’s them.

We’re all a little bit unhinged. Hell, I’m one broken screen door away from drinking a fifth of antifreeze and driving off a highway overpass on a child’s tricycle.

We only get one go-around on the Great Hot Wheels Track that is life, so why not manage some slick jumps and loopty-loops before your car flings off into the oblivion beneath the couch?

And so on.

Anyway, while writing this blog post I've been interrupted, already, countless times by the three-year old and, now, the six year old and her accomplice, the dog. (He sleeps in her room, and when they come down in the morning it's like a blonde invasion. Hair flying everywhere, absolute hysteria, and then things calm down for a brief moment. I'm using today's brief moment to wrap things up.) Writing a blog post is far different than writing a poem, but by now, I find both necessary. This habit of recording my writing life may be clogging up the interwebs with yet another blog about mommyhood and being a writer -- popular topics, I'm finding -- but I'm selfishly persisting . . . not because I think this particular blog has value for the greater public, but because I can see it helping me. I'd like to think, of course, that it has some value beyond myself, but there's no real way of measuring that.

Why don't I just write by hand in a journal, you ask? Good question. I used to. I do that with my poetry. (Or a legal pad, really, but same difference, right?) But I like writing the blog because it seems more focused. My diary/journal entries used to be laundry lists and gratuitous record-keeping of my mania. Those things find their way in here, as is made obvious by this post alone, but I'm attempting to keep this blog centered on three things: discussion of writing, discussion of parenting while writing, and discussion of writing while teaching (which hasn't been present much these past six months, but will probably be more prominent as the semester gets into full-swing). Also, the blog gives me the illusion of being read -- whether or not I actually have an audience -- and that forces me to focus on my prose writing in a way that I wouldn't if I was just vomiting my thoughts and feelings into my kitten-embossed bound journal.

I know, I know, you're laughing. She's actually TRYING to write well in this thing? you say. Yes, dear reader, all ONE of you, it's true. I'm trying.

Perhaps THAT should be the subtitle for this blog! I'm still trying to come up with a good one, you know.

What I Stare At When, Once Again, I've Contracted the Plague

2012-01-27T18:53:00.000-05:00

I met Danny Hamilton when I was a dweeby little undergrad. Now I'm a dweeby college professor, and he's still friends with me. Go figure. Sometime in the far-off or not-so-far-off future, we're going to collaborate. And it's going to blow your little minds.

Water Source in the Sky (1 hour painting)

The Return to Teaching

2012-01-25T07:30:00.000-05:00

I've been quiet for the past few days. (On here, that is. It's almost impossible for me to be quiet in real life.) (Shut up, A.P.)

A.P. and I postponed Poetry Friday until Monday because I was having a little Pre-Semester Freakout, and then we moved our meeting until next week because we realized how futile it would be to speak about poetry when the large, ugly shadow of course outlines and class prep loomed over our heads. And thus, once again, writing took a back seat to teaching responsibilities. But, as Vonnegut would say, so it goes . . . some times you just have to put away the poems and focus instead on the paragraph about not texting or surfing the web in class, because that paragraph is what pays the bills. (Sort of. Not just that paragraph, but you get my drift, right?)

My problem this week ended up being that I didn't put away the poem. For me, this is a good problem to have -- I'm truly not going to beat myself up too much for writing. But it made the first two mornings of the week rather chaotic. I woke up early, as planned, and wrote before the kids woke up. And then after they woke up and I had them started on breakfast, and after making sure the dog had been fed and that he'd been let outside -- I continued to write, furiously, desperately -- some might say stupidly -- in an effort to finish the stanzas I'd begun, instead of jumping into the shower right away and beginning my own preparations for school.

On Monday, a non-teaching day but a busy day nonetheless loaded with meetings, this meant that I threw a coat over my pajamas and ran my daughter to the bus stop, and then ran back inside the house and started all of my before-I-leave-for-work ministrations about an hour late. The boy was very good for me on this day. He requested another banana and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on the T.V., and he was very calm and content while I ran around like a crazy person.

On Tuesday, the day I began teaching for the first time in eight months, the earliest part of the morning went similarly except that I actually FINISHED THE FIRST PART OF CHAPTER X OF THE FAIRY TALE (yes, all caps are necessary), and I managed to get my ass in the shower, and fully dressed, before I took my daughter to the bus stop. In fact, I was so on top of things, I hustled the kids through getting dressed, and then after some militant teeth brushing ("keep brushing, little soldiers! You're not done yet!") we ended up being 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Yeah, I was that good. Or crazy. Take your pick.

It may be early days, but I'm happy that my mind didn't shift into teaching mode so completely that I forgot about my writing, which has been the case in prior semesters -- especially at the beginning of the semester, which is always such a busy time for me . . . I never seem to be as well prepared as my colleagues to teach. I didn't write much over the weekend -- a line or two on Friday night, not much more -- but in hindsight I think I needed a break. I was forcing the lines of my poem into (probably) bad places because I was desperate to finish the section -- instead of being desperate to get out the words that were in my head.

There's a definite difference in the two approaches, and I need to remember when I'm in the former mode that the poem isn't going to be good if I'm writing simply because I want to finish according to some arbitrary deadline. (Which A.P. warned me about, but what am I gonna do -- listen to that guy every time he speaks?) I think a few days off from writing gave me a little necessary space, and I think the last few stanzas I wrote (the result of Monday and Tuesday morning) were better for it.

My return to teaching was surprisingly fun and less panicky than expected. It's too early to tell the personality of my classes, but the students seem nice enough (one or two sullen faces, but that's normal for the community college crowd) and I feel pretty comfortable with what I'm teaching. Tuesdays and Thursdays I have an Introduction to Literature class and a Creative Writing class. Today and Friday I have a Freshman Composition and Short Story class. It's a good schedule, and hopefully I won't be too backlogged with grading this semester. (I purposely tried to space out my assignments. Not that this guarantees mid-semester sanity, but it helps.)

So. By now the kids have risen, and it's time to stop this post and get my butt into gear. (Also, the doggie keeps butting me with his head. Someone wants breakfast. He does not care for poetry or blogging.) Hopefully the end of the week will go smoothly and I'll get some earnest work done on Part II of the last chapter of the fairy tale.

What I Read When I Panic About the Beginning of School and the End of Sabbatical

2012-01-20T07:29:00.000-05:00

1. This excellent rumination on Roald Dahl by someone on the Silkworms Ink crew.

2. This article from Beyond The Margins by Jessica Francis Kane about writing while raising children.

3. This poem by Jane Kenyon. And since I'm on a Kenyon kick, this, too.

WRITING UPDATE:

I'm nearly finished with the first section of the last chapter (Chapter X.i.) of the fairy tale. I spent all day at the library yesterday and managed to tweak two stanzas and write another two. I believe there will be one more before the section's complete. So I'll not have, most likely, the poem finished before the beginning of school. But I'll finish it soon. It's going to take precedence over teaching during the first week, and luckily that's okay, because the first week of school is a pretty easy week. (The second week, especially if I'm preoccupied with the poem, will be the scary week.)

Yesterday I received markups from The Southern Review of my poems. Yay! That wonderful email felt like the universe apologizing for the difficulty of the day, since The Doodle had three tantrums before we even left the house yesterday morning, during which I threw a reciprocal tantrum, and I felt humbled and exhausted and emotionally spent for the rest of the day. It's amazing I managed to write anything. Mommy Meltdowns make me feel f***ing inept. Really, I suck.

SCHOOL WORK UPDATE:

Yeah. Hahahahahahahaha! That's funny! School? Syllabi? Course Outlines and Handouts? What are those?

I did manage to order my books.

Days Until Reality Sets In: 4

Focus. Focus. Focus. Breathe.

2012-01-17T12:56:00.000-05:00

This weekend, writing was a struggle. A number of fits and starts, a lot of crossed out lines, deleted lines, revised lines, cut and pasting, etc. I jumped from drafting on the notepad with a pen to typing on the computer and back again. And in between the moments of inspiration and hair-pulling, I put away (finally) our Christmas tree, packed up decorations, did the dishes, and washed load after load of laundry and then had to fold the damn stuff. This is all to say that eventually Chapter IX of the fairy tale was completed (woohoo!) along with one of those mother/daughter conversation poems that are supposed to interrupt the narrative. I'm not sure how successful either is (again, I'll wait for A.P.'s thumbs up or thumbs down, and my own distanced judgment after a few days have passed between the writing of the draft and my rereading it), but it felt really good to have been productive . . . at least, once I felt like I had been productive, and not just spinning my tires for 48 hours.

I'm afraid that my children didn't find the weekend too exciting -- for the first time since Christmas, we didn't have guests staying for the weekend or some kind of social commitment, and so we were homebodies. But Little Miss Talkalot was happy because -- and you might laugh at this -- we instituted a chore system for her. Yes, she wanted chores. Really, she wanted an allowance. But I wasn't going to just hand money over to the six year old. So we came up with a little list of mutually-agreed upon tasks that she can complete over the course of a week, and a way to account for them all. Most of her "tasks" are really just things she should be responsible for anyway, like laying out her clothes for school the night before and brushing her teeth in the morning, but this system will serve as a good checklist for her, and it'll (hopefully) cut down on My Getting-Ready-For-School Morning Tantrums, during which I morph into a harpy and start shrieking at everyone, including the dog. (When I'm stressed out, his impulse is to stick his 80+ lb frame of dense muscle and hair right in my path . . . or even preferably on my person. I swear, if he could be a lap dog, he would. That dog wants to occupy the same space your own atoms are occupying . . . which is one of the reasons I love him, really, but also makes moving about the house quickly and unimpeded very difficult.)

And I'm hoping that little changes like the Chore Checklist truly make this transition back to teaching more smooth than anticipated. Currently, I anticipate the transition being incredibly, terribly difficult. I'm still so focused on my writing, I'm so determined to finish this monster-length poem (lengthy for me, someone who rarely writes poems longer than two pages), that I just can't focus for very long on school stuff.

This is dangerous, of course, because school starts next week. Next week!

So, my goals for THIS week: (uh-oh -- I feel a checklist coming on)

1. Finish Chapter X of the fairy tale (this may not happen, considering it's a three-part-er, but a girl can dream, can't she?)
2. Finish course outlines for all four classes and send them to the department for copying
3. Order the goddamn texts for my classes ("why haven't I done this yet?" she wails)
4. Breathe

Days Until Reality Sets In: 7

p.s. Oh my god. Only seven more days?

What I Read When I Should Be Taking Down the Christmas Decorations . . .

2012-01-12T22:31:00.000-05:00

I have a slight crush on Joshua Mehigan right now, partially from his book of formal poems titled The Optimist, which is -- yes, you guessed it -- sitting on my treadmill and being read during 5 minute warm ups and cool downs -- but mostly because of this article published in Poetry Magazine last year, which I just got around to reading. (Kids in bed, husband at work = interweb skulking).

I'm ending the evening on a slightly depressed note, however. After reading Mehigan's essay, I made the mistake of scrolling through the 25 comments posted to the Poetry Foundation's website in response to it. It turns out that the same self-important assholes who troll the HuffPost and NYTimes and AOL sites also read and feel free to vomit all over the Poetry Foundation. Is nothing sacred?

And of course, I know the answer to that. No, no, nothing is sacred. I can't forget this, after all -- I'm followed around the house most of the day by a three year old who refers to me as Mommy Poopy Pants.

Poetry, Plays, and Poncy D*****rs (Good Morning!)

2012-01-12T08:14:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I managed some serious work. I finished Chapter VIII of the fairy tale, which means that I'm starting Chapter IX today, and that I'm two chapters away from finishing the entire poem. I'd shout "woohoo!" except that I'm already, slightly, mourning the end of this insane project. I've pulled my hair out for months over this poem, and now that I'm faced with the prospect of not having to write the poem . . . I feel a little lonely. Does that make sense? I'm not gonna go all Tori Amos on you and start talking about my poems like they were people, but lonely is the word I want to use. Of course, this is typical of me: thinking so far in advance about something that I'm saddened by the prospect of it ending WHILE I'M STILL IN THE PROCESS OF EFFING WRITING IT.

And I have two more chapters to go, which will be no small amount of work, particularly since the last chapter is a definite three-part-er.

Also, yesterday, I managed to pick up again, for maybe the thirty-third time this sabbatical, Plays Two by Glyn Maxwell and finish "Broken Journey," which is his verse play based on/adapted from Kurosawa's Rashomon and a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. As is the case with A.R. Ammon's A Coast of Trees, I keep misplacing the book and then wanting to reread everything because it's been so long since I actually glanced at the pages. (I have some serious clutter problems in my house. I need a sabbatical just for Conquering Clutter. Or maybe those Hoarder's people should pay me a visit.)

Anyway, I have a long list of verse drama I made for myself before I began my sabbatical, and there are two questions I want answered through reading all of it: "Why write a play in verse?" and "What makes a verse drama less a play-in-prose and more poetry?" Maxwell's "Broken Journey" answers this question pretty well. It begins with a monologue that has its clever moments, twists in the language, and does manage to stay in iambic pentameter when you examine the monologue as a whole (the first 10 lines of the play feature 4 lines that have more substitutions than iambs, so it can throw you off if you're scanning and expecting pure blank verse). But then there are other monologues, other moments in the play, notably the ones spoken by Chloe, that come across as poetry, and not just metrical speech. This was so cool to experience -- in a totally dorky way -- the moments when you're reading the play and all of a sudden you realize, "hey, I'm in the middle of a poem!"

My biggest criticism would be that there seemed to be fewer "poem" moments when there was dialogue, but this may be an invalid criticism considering the following:

1) I've read the play only once and that's simply a first impression. Further study of the dialogue may, of course, result in the discovery of more "poetry" moments
2) I suspect that creating a poem constructed from two very different voices -- and in particular, creating a lyric poem, or a lyric moment within a narrative poem -- is extremely difficult to pull off. After all, for the play to be a successful play, different characters need to have very different voices. So . . . how does one create a successful contrast between lines of dialogue while maintaining a lyric intensity and cohesiveness?

I want to be able to do the latter in my own verse drama. So I'm searching for good models. Shakespeare, of course, is one of them, but I'm looking to the Modernists and later for examples. Something with more contemporary language, and with the fragmented approach and attitudes of Modernist and post-Modernist and post-post-Modernist or whatever-the-fuck-you-want-to-label-crap-written-between-1920-and-now.

In the earlier part of my sabbatical I read books of poetry or books of criticism focused almost wholly on metrical verse. Now I'm going to move into reading verse drama as I begin to write it, and I'm totally psyched at the prospect. (I cannot, cannot, stomach writers who claim not to read while they're writing, particularly those who "don't want to be influenced." What a bunch of poncy douche-ers.)

(Er, sorry about the language. Poncy douche-ers get me all riled up.)

And late last night, just after I'd finished reading "Broken Journey" and before I went to bed, I was struck with a couple of thoughts about how to construct my own verse drama, which I dutifully jotted down and will be adding to the collection of notes I'm amassing as "evidence" of my sabbatical work. Also, I need to jot things down because, if I don't, there's a 99.9% chance I'm going to forget it. My brain forgets good ideas almost as easily as it dismisses the fluffy, insubstantial ones.

Now I'm off to begin herding my children into breakfast mode and getting-dressed-for-school mode, as well as brush-your-teeth-without-poking-hitting-or-otherwise-annoying-each-other mode and get-in-the-car-we're-late mode. It's a lot like herding cats, only with much more futile screaming, and tears. Many tears. (Not from them; from me.)

Good News! A Chapbook!

2012-01-10T11:21:00.000-05:00

I'm so, so thrilled to share this announcement that Hyacinth Girl Press, a feminist micro press, is going to publish the collection I've been referring to as my fable/"sow" poems in the upcoming year. HGP is a small, new, and energetic endeavor run by Margaret Bashaar, a poet and editor in Pittsburg, PA, and her handmade books and enthusiasm for poetry and poetry written by women are equally beautiful.

This is a fantastic way to begin the new year. Did I say earlier that I couldn't quite get my head around 2012? This helps, certainly.

And in other, slightly less thrilling announcements, I'm nearly finished with Chapter VIII (page 15!) of the fairy tale. Still haven't managed to complete any prep work for the new semester or even order my books, but I'm feeling fairly productive nonetheless. That is, I was productive, until the HGP announcement came out and now I'm all hyper and happy and jittery.

Even still, I'm going to attempt to go back to the grindstone now, because there are precious few days left free in January, and this poem ain't gonna write itself.

Sometimes Mommy's Not Too Smart

2012-01-09T12:05:00.001-05:00

My daughter woke this morning and told me she had a terrible dream, in which a boy tried to drown her and then she had a baby inside her that had to be cut out. Sadly, this mirrors some of the details from the fairy tale poem I've been working on, and now I'm worried that I've done irreparable damage to my little girl's psyche by reading her the poem, which was a little graphic but not gory-graphic. (It didn't even reach Brothers Grimm-level graphic, so I thought she'd be okay.)

In my poem, a baby wasn't cut out of someone (it was a bird -- but I suppose she made the connection), and she never even read the poem in which the protagonist remembers being nearly-drowned by a boy in her childhood (at least, I never read her the poem, and I don't think she's had a chance to read the poem on my laptop), so that part must be coincidence (right? please say it's coincidence!) . . . but the similarities between her dream and my poem seem a little too close. The last time I read the fairytale to her I wasn't even sure she understood what was going on, to be honest, because she didn't really have any questions or comments. So now I'm kinda freaked out. Because I freaked her out. (I don't remember any of her Scooby Doo videos or Disney shows having this kind of imagery, so I'm pretty sure blame lies with me.)

Of all the ways I could and probably will warp my kids, I didn't think this would be one of them. I may be really foolish for thinking she could handle the imagery -- but then, kids see such gruesome stuff today, even when you're trying to protect them from the telephone-commercials-featuring-zombies on TV, or the slasher-porn ads that pop up at 7 p.m. (just before you're putting them to bed, of course), that I thought my work was pretty tame by comparison. When Little Miss Talkalot comes home from school today we'll have to have a little pow-wow and see what she remembers from the dream and the poem and whether or not they're really connected. And based on her answer, that may be the end of our little poetry-sharing sessions while I'm working on the fairy tale. She'll have to read the end when she's 13 or 16 or 21 or 62 . . . sometime when she's not quite so impressionable, that's for sure.

And that's too bad, because I've liked having her listen and ask questions. She took the job so seriously, and listened so earnestly. It was really sweet, and such a special mother-daughter bonding moment. Welp. I guess I'll have to save the mother-daughter bonding for our trip to see Picasso at the MoMA, which I've promised her and must do sometime in the very near future (*Note to Self: Plan This Now).

The Final Countdown (Doo-Doo-Doo-Doooo, Dee Dee Deet-Deet Doooo, Doo Doo Doo Doooo, Dee Dee Deet-Deet Dooo)

2012-01-04T12:38:00.001-05:00

Welp, that was fast. Where the hell did December go?

Because I'm obsessive about things like this, here are the stats on my manuscript:

• 19 fable ("sow") poems (one poem per page)

• 15 pages of the fairy tale poem

• 7 myth poems (12 pages)

I'm close to finishing the fairy tale poem -- as far as creating the first draft, that is. It's going to need revision -- places in the verse where the lines are too much like prose, too little like poetry (found through A.P.'s valuable close reading and feedback, and my own compulsion to reread my previous work before writing more) but I'm interested in completing the tale before I go back and nit-pick (important nit-picking, but nit-picking nonetheless when compared to the narrative).

I know that once I'm finished with the first draft of the fairy tale poem I'll begin to revise my first draft of the verse play -- the first and second scenes, specifically. They need to be revised before I write the rest of the play because they were written at a time when I had only a vague (very, very vague) idea of what I was doing when it came to metrical verse . . . and for continuity's sake, I wish that the first real draft of the play be written more or less in the same time period of my life -- not in bits and pieces over years.

What I'd like to do, then, and what I see happening (maybe? with luck?) over the next few weeks is this:

• Finishing the fairy tale poem before my return to teaching

• Writing at least one more myth poem before my return to teaching

• Revising some (if not all) of the first draft of the verse play (before *ahem* my return to teaching)

Once school begins, I'll use my mornings to write, and I'll eek out as much of the verse play as I can within six weeks. Why six weeks, you might ask? Because my official report on my sabbatical is due on March 6 -- eight weeks after my return.

I realize that technically the sabbatical is over and that I should simply turn in whatever I finished writing as of December 21, or whenever classes ended in 2011, instead of racing to finish my play. (It's so awesome that I don't even know when the last day of classes were -- I totally *heart* sabbatical.) That, however, would be totally against my nature, which is determined to lead me not down the Path of Least Resistance, but down the Path of Whatever Will Drive Me More Fu**ing Crazy.

Of course, I have more serious reasons for this plan, too. My most serious and important reason is that I want to remain a writer even though I've returned to teaching. I've spent too many years letting my teaching and service career at the college overshadow my writing career -- or maybe not too many, but just enough, because all that work over those years were necessary to get me to this point, this past semester, my sabbatical, which has been so precious to me, and, I might venture, incredibly fruitful. (Wow, those were a lot of commas, huh? Too bad my prose writing didn't improve.)

Also, it would be sweet if I could turn over to the Sabbatical Committee all of the documents I outlined in my sabbatical proposal.

I have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks, though, in addition to the writing I've listed above: course outlines to prep, homework assignments and tests to create, reading and lecture writing for the new class I'm teaching (The Short Story). And there's the work for the Creative Writing Festival, which is a labor of love but also creates a lot of labor, period.

A lot of writers have been posting New Year's Resolutions on their blogs. I feel like I can't really get my head around 2012 until I've more or less put to rest what I began in 2011 -- this manuscript. Once I've finished the fairy tale poem, perhaps I'll celebrate my own little private new year: a year filled with more writing, and less nonsense.

Days Until Reality Sets In: 19

P.S. If you have the patience to watch the awesome video I linked above, I have these questions for you: Can you believe that many people ever went to a Europe concert? And just how awesome is Joey Tempest's hair and lipstick?!!! And who gave them all of those gold records?

What I Read When I Avoid Wrapping Christmas Presents

2011-12-27T06:30:00.000-05:00

Cynthia Marie Hoffman's book, Sightseer, won the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry in 2010. She speaks about the experience of creating a book of poems in this interview. She's also spoken to (emailed? typed with?) Brian Brodeur about the creation of a single poem on his blog, How A Poem Happens.

I haven't managed to get any writing done over the past few days. The closest I came was yesterday, when I sent out a bunch of emails to different publishers withdrawing a manuscript from their consideration. This was, by far, one of the strangest-feeling tasks I've ever completed. I find it bizarre requesting that someone not read and consider my work for their publication/contest. I've spent so many years doing just the opposite that the composition of those emails felt like driving a manual transmission car down the ~~wrong~~ opposite side of the road with the stick and the steering wheel on the opposite side of the vehicle (opposite meaning the side you're not accustomed to). Which, by the way, I've done before. Because I'm an idiot.

As one might gather from its title, I began this post sometime before Sunday, and never finished it. So go the holidays. Today I'm up after roughly 5 hours of sleep to squeeze some writing in before I go to Virginia with my kids. We're fitting in a whirlwind trip to see my parents, and my uncle -- who's visiting the US for the first time in 10 years -- before New Year's. Me, two kids under the age of ten, an SUV coated in cracker crumbs, and the New Jersey Turnpike. I live a glamorous life. Don't pretend you're not jealous.

P.S. Oh, and while you're reading the interview with CMH, peruse Devil's Lake. I like especially Casey Thayer's poems.

P.P.S. (12/29/11) I edited this entry because I just realized that writing after 5 hours of sleep doesn't necessarily result in cogent or coherent sentences. And honestly, I'm not sure I helped things here.

Zombie Children

2011-12-22T00:38:00.000-05:00

I'm up late. But at least I'm up late because I've been writing, and not because I've been skulking aimlessly on the interwebs, which I have a tendency to do when I'm tired and mush-brained. (Hopefully the tired-and-mush-brained-ness didn't result in tired and mushy poetry. We'll see tomorrow, when I wake up and reread tonight's work.)

I haven't had a chance to write much this week -- both of my children have had colds, probably some distant cousin of the plague I had earlier in the month. The youngest (the boy) insisted that he was too ill to go to school on Monday, and so I let him stay home and I did what I could in between multiple trips to the kitchen for snacks (apparently the plague didn't affect his appetite) and playing puzzles and turning on the TV for 10 minute intervals of Wonder Pets or Jake and the Neverland Pirates or whatever nonsense attracted his attention before he decided he was hungry again.

Then Tuesday morning the girl woke up sounding congested and looking scarily zombie-like, so I let her stay home with her brother. By noon both of them were running hysterically around the living room tackling each other and I considered crawling into the cupboard with all of our Tupperware while they demolished the house, which it was quite evident they intended to do. In between being a referee for their multiple role-playing games that inevitably ended in someone being bit, stepped on, smacked, or used as a human catapult, I managed to do a little work for the upcoming SCCC Creative Writing Festival . . . but there really wasn't enough quiet time in the house to hear myself think, let alone write poetry.

So jump to today. The kids woke up congested, but of course I sent them to school! If you're well enough to reduce Mommy to tears, you're well enough to go to school, where you can reduce your underpaid and overtaxed teacher to tears. Wednesday was, however, a Wednesday filled with appointments -- which would have been fine, had I written much during the first two days of the week -- and therefore I would consider it generally unproductive . . . had I not just written a poem at ten o'clock at night!

I'm pretty proud of myself right now, but I may be fantastically underwhelmed when I read it tomorrow. Here's hoping it's a work of genius . . . or at least salvageable.

Then I got the sudden urge to write on this blog, to record some of the chaos of the past few days. Everyone tells me I'm going to miss these days, and it's probably true, because when my children aren't being downright terrible they're being downright adorable . . . but it will be nice when I can finally speak to a friend on the phone without mass hysteria in the background, or without a small voice interrupting every other word to tell me he wants a banana/to go potty/a drink or that he doesn't like his sister/the TV show I just turned on for him/the dog/me.

It will be nice, too, when I finally finish this fairy tale. I have completed two poems for that series this week, though, so I suppose that's something. With luck, chicken soup, and some serious disinfectant for the house, everyone will be well in a day or two, I'll survive the holidays relatively unscathed, and the fairy tale will be finished early in the new year, followed shortly by the completion of the full-length collection.

That will be an awesome way to begin 2012, and I'm kinda looking forward to it. I feel like I might be ready to begin work on my play. (Only four months late! Woohoo!)

My Morning Reading, Continued (with NYU Lovefest Addendum)

2011-12-19T07:22:00.000-05:00

1. One of my friends posted this story by H.M. Patterson to Facebook. It's lovely.

2. Trolling the Poetry Foundation's site again. Found this poem by Kathleen Graber.

3. Also on the Poetry Foundation site, this poem by Anthony Hecht. Love, love, love.

Perhaps I shall write now, yes?

Addendum:

Trolling the Painted Bride Quarterly's site, and I found work by a slew of fellow female alumni:

It’s Like Riding on a Train by Nellie Bridge. Nellie's poems are quiet but powerful. She's also a really beautiful person. I'm so happy to see her work being published.

Tiny Elijah by Sarah Heller. I love this poem and I *heart* Sarah Heller. She is one of the nicest people I know.

Morning Reading by Amy Hosig. I didn't hang out with Amy as much as I did with Nellie (or have that many classes with her), but I remember her talent and her open, friendly nature and I'm happy to see her being published, too.

Envy by Andrea Luttrell. Andrea and I share a love of the same kind of music and, I think, a similar sense of humor. (Which this lovely piece doesn't really showcase, but, you know, you can't be funny all the time.) (That's right. I said I'm funny.)

Obviously, there's a theme here: Writers who retain their empathy and generosity and loveliness beyond the limits of the page (i.e. don't turn into jerkholes when they aren't writing poems or stories) rank supreme in my book. Which, you know, is a very exclusive book. Everybody wants to be in my book. (WTF am I talking about? I should go back to reading . . . or, you know, write a poem.)

Dedication, Focus, Elbow Grease, and the Conspicuous Absence of Shiny and Blue Things

2011-12-16T08:50:00.000-05:00

After several years of writing, it's comforting to know that you can change and be changed by your writing processes. It's affirmation, I guess, that some parts of you are still growing, and changing without shutting down -- unlike other parts of your being, like your skin and your hair. (Hi sunspots! Hey grey hairs! I'm old!)

Yesterday, after having a fairly successful day of writing, I was thinking about how very different my habits have become since I was given this time to write. For years -- years -- I felt an impediment that I called "writer's block" but was probably just good ol' fashioned mania. I never really slowed down long enough -- or separated myself from work, family, and outside noise for long enough -- to focus earnestly on my writing.

To be honest, I'm not even sure I did that during grad school -- the one (or most likely) time in your life you're given explicit permission by family, society, and your checkbook to focus entirely on your writing. I think was a little star-struck, by both my teachers and my peers (many of whom seemed better read and more talented than I). (Me? I? They were probably better grammarians . . .) And I lacked the maturity, despite having been out of college for several years, to be truly, truly disciplined about this part of my education. New York is both a great and a terrible place to receive your education. There are lots of distractions. (And I'm not talking about drugs and alcohol. I am easily distracted by shiny and/or blue things, and there are many of these in NYC.)

Anyway, I lacked focus. Today at our Poetry Friday Diner Breakfast, A.P. told me that -- good news! -- my Mushy Mom Brain might actually be disappearing. I find it hard to believe him, because he wasn't around when I walked into our downstairs bathroom this morning and promptly forgot what I'd walked in there to retrieve -- but he claims that he sees more focus and clarity in my writing.

It's good news to know that what I feel when I write these days is translating positively into what I write. Never, before this semester, have I sat for four consecutive hours and worked on one poem. Previous to my sabbatical, I simply jotted lines down in a journal when inspiration struck, and then later took out the journal, and typed the draft into the computer, and then spent random, short spurts of time editing and tweaking it. Of course, because I'm obsessive-compulsive about "gettin' it right", that meant I would take about four weeks, not four straight hours, to finish a poem.

Of course, I wasn't trying to write long poems, or metered poems, back then. When one is writing metered verse, not to mention ten-plus pages of it, one tends to require extended periods of time. I guess what I'm saying is that I wonder if I'll be able to write a long poem when I return to teaching. A. P. said today that the good habits I develop over sabbatical won't magically disappear when the new semester begins. I sure hope so -- it's been so . . . gratifying . . . to discover that I'm capable of doing so much more than what I'd become accustomed to writing. I would hate to go backwards, somehow, or just . . . stop . . . completely. How depressing.

I think I'll continue, at least for the spring semester, to use my early morning before-the-kids-are-awake time to write, so that I attempt to maintain this focus and heightened sense of purpose. Of course, it won't be four hours at a time, just two, and I don't know what that means for my running, which I used to do during that time, and which, this semester, has been sadly neglected (but that neglect was necessary, I suppose).

Anyway. Time to wrap up. Little Miss Talkalot is about to get off the bus. And it's Friday, which means no homework, which means I'm on instant Mom-Mom-Mom-Pay-Attention-to-Me-Hey-Do-You-Wanna-Play-UNO duty. And then we go pick up the boy, who was SUPER happy with me this morning. Hopefully his mood has improved. Also, hopefully he's forgotten that I wouldn't let him watch TV before we had to leave. (He was soooo mad! Three year old tantrums are awesome.)

I'll announce (so official!) that I managed to finish Chapter V of the fairy tale this week (which needs some tweaking, but will be toyed with once I've actually finished the fairy tale) and that I also managed to write and finish -- after having such a bad writing day on Wednesday -- an entire myth poem. So I'm ending the week on a high note. Next week: Chapters Six and Seven of the fairy tale. And perhaps more submissions to literary journals! (Lucky journals!)

Countdown to 2018 / What I Read When I Should Be Writing

2011-12-14T14:12:00.001-05:00

It's probably not healthy or wise to think about this, but lately I've been overly concerned with the thought that the next time I get to be a full-time writer will be at the butt-end of this decade. As my colleagues post end-of-semester raves and rants on Facebook, I'm forced to acknowledge that this rare moment is almost over. I am a wee-bit depressed, to say the least.

This is a completely ungrateful and sorry-for-myself attitude to have, I realize. I know that I'm ridiculously lucky to have had this opportunity at all. I'm just wallowing in a little bit of post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas, pre-final-weeks-of-sabbatical depression, methinks. It's probably time to lay off the caffeine and get back into exercise. I don't have a lot of time left to wallow, after all. Just a few more sweet weeks of writing until I return to teaching. (And really, the teaching I kinda look forward to -- it's the committee meetings and grading that I would rather not deal with.)

So, in an effort to be more cheerful and positive, let's look at things that don't suck, shall we?

1. Flatirons by David Yezzi. Rock-climbing and poetry. Rock-climbing AS poetry. He's awesomesauce. Read the Q & A, too!

2. More Yezzi -- in the online magazine, At Length, which I was super-excited to discover this week. I especially love these collaborative Telephone Project poems. In addition to Mr. Yezzi (scroll to the end), #2 features Kimiko Hahn, Aracelis Girmay, Jason Schneiderman, Marilyn Nelson, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Paula Bohince.

3. The Art of Listening by Henning Mankell, in the NY Times Sunday Opinion pages.

4. We Knew How to Love: Tuesday with Fanny Howe and Jericho Brown on the Best American Poetry blog. I'm more acquainted with Fanny Howe's name than her work, but I really liked this interview. She says good things; things that make sense to me. So, you know. Read it!

ADDENDUM:

5. Garden by H.D. (Let's just acknowledge that I'm not going to get much writing done today, okay? Maybe tonight?)

Squidginess and Brain Fog

2011-12-08T15:41:00.001-05:00

This week started promisingly enough with revision and a submission. On Monday, I revised some of the myth poems according to feedback I received from A.P. on Friday. Also, I put together a group of poems for a submission to a lit mag. Yay me, right? Wrong. Things slowed down drastically after that.

On Tuesday, I woke up with the plague . . . not in my eye this time, but in my head. A cold -- and not one of those little sniffly things, but one of those viruses that slowly pulls you down into the depths of misery over the course of the day, to the point where you can't quite remember your name or why you're wearing pajamas at 3 p.m. in the afternoon. Of course, I wasn't IN my pajamas at that point, because I attended a funeral for my friend's father in the morning, and I holed up in the library until it was time to pick up the boy, so it wasn't until about 7 p.m. that I could change into sweatpants and wallow in my misery. But any writing I did in the library (I think I managed two or three stanzas of the fairy tale) was achieved at a snail's pace. And actually, wallowing in my misery didn't really happen until 9 p.m., when the two doodles were finally tucked in bed.

Wednesday, needless to say, was a wash, despite my best efforts to fight the vile virus with cold medicine, tea, and zinc lozenges.

It's remarkable the degree to which our attitudes can be effected by our health. I felt like death these past days, in all areas of my life, but really the only thing wrong was that I had a stupid cold. Usually, I'm a pretty happy person if I can get a good day's work in somewhere between the following areas: home, health, and writing. By home, I mean that if I can manage to clean and/or organize some previously disastrous area in the house, I'm ecstatic, and by health, I mean that if I manage to get just 20 minutes of exercise per day, I feel like The Jam. (That's right. The Jam.)

I felt particularly non-jammy this past week, having done nothing to further my writing, or to rid myself of the non-fabulous "Sabbatical 45" I appear to have accrued (okay, I don't look like I've gained 45 lbs because I HAVEN'T gained 45 lbs, but I'm feeling squidgy lately, and that ain't cool). (Random Note of Minor Interest: Spell-check did not have a problem with the word squidgy.)

Plus I've been preoccupied with second-guessing myself lately, which makes me a joy . . . a joy . . . to be around. Just ask my husband, who has to take the brunt of my hemming and hawing!

Oh -- and while I'm in full-on confession/complainer mode, I might as well admit that I missed my therapy appointment over Thanksgiving week because I forgot I had it scheduled and went to Virginia early. I still haven't called M. back to ask for forgiveness, and, please, an appointment, because obviously I'm crazy and have mush-brain, which surely must be remedied by things like therapy. And then . . . because I was doped up on cold meds for the previous 24 hours, I missed an appointment on Wednesday morning and had to reschedule. It's for something ridiculous, a haircut, but dammit, if I make an appointment with someone I hate to waste their time by not showing up. It's just rude.

I called back the salon and rescheduled for tomorrow, which pushes my meeting with A.P. up to 1 p.m. if he's even available, but at least I'm somewhat back on track to normalcy. I managed to write all day today, which was awesome (yes, italics are necessary) and now I'm almost over the hump with my fairy tale. So things are looking up.

And my cold has subsided somewhat. Yay! I'd say I'm running at about 80% Sarah Power today. Of course, 100% Sarah Power is probably about 35% Normal Person Power (Normal Persons being those who have unmushy brains and aren't distracted by shiny objects) -- but whatev. I'll work with what I got.

And on top of all of that rambling, I may have some good news in the future, but I need for things to go official before I feel confident enough to post it here. (How's that for a completely underwhelming and cryptic sign-off! On. A. Roll.)

Two More Months!

2011-12-02T07:00:00.001-05:00

I'm due for my beginning-of-the-month Survey of Completed Sabbatical Work, which more often than not tends to be part of my Continued Sabbatical Freakout.

So here I am, ready to take stock of what I accomplished in November -- but surprisingly, even though this precious writing time is dwindling away, I'm significantly less freaked out than I was a month ago. I'm not finished with my Fairytale Poem -- but I've made good progress. I feel so much more sure of myself since I returned to the original storyline and began working revisions of those original lyric poems into the narrative. I realize that last sentence kinda sounds like a recipe for disaster, and I suppose it's very possible that the project could, indeed, turn out to be a disaster, but I'm confident that it won't. For now I'm confident, at least.

I finished reading Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use by Robert B. Shaw yesterday, and I would like to go on record as saying that Robert B. Shaw is the jam. The Bomb. The Shit. Whatever kind of accolade/admiration you want to bestow on him, I support it whole-heartedly. I'm a little sad that my time reading this book is over. Even though the book covers the history of blank verse up until this century and focuses solely on the nuances of that particular meter, and even though it took me forever to finish a mere 272 pages of text -- I think it has been a marvelous supplement to the study I began in Julie Sheehan's Meter and Form class this summer. It reinforced some of what I learned in that class and then augmented it further -- not least by providing a long (long) reading list of poems and poets.

I'm super-behind in my sabbatical reading -- or rather, super-behind when it comes to the books that I'd intended to read. I suppose I've still time to accomplish this, but I may just have to turn in a revised reading list to the sabbatical committee in February. I have been reading all along, but I haven't stuck to the original list as much as I thought. Sometime soon, but when I have some more time (i.e. not Right Before The Kids Are About to Wake and Get Ready for School) I'll write a post that details the work I'd outlined in my sabbatical proposal (writing and reading) and the work I've done so far. I'll try not to be too redundant -- I've already outlined my progress in writing pretty thoroughly in this blog, I think -- but the comparison might be useful when it comes time to write my sabbatical report. Also, it might give me some good perspective regarding what I can hope to accomplish during these last two months, particularly with the holiday season upon us.

So, anyway, about that recap:

At this point, I have 19/20 fable poems, six myth poems and six fairytale poems. If my approximate outline for the fairytale poem turns out to be accurate, I'll have a total of 10-15 poems for the fairytale when finished, or approximately 20-30 pages of poetry for that section. And the myths . . . I have no idea. I'm just writing them as they come. The last thing I want is for this section to seem forced. Right now, I think it's going to finish the book, and I don't want to write one of those collections that's front-loaded with the good stuff but peters out to mediocrity by the end.

The Thanksgiving week was rough in terms of productivity -- almost no new writing done. I DID, however, manage to scan my myth poems to check for any accidental, weak substitutions in the meter, and revise accordingly. Thus, I have about four myth poems that I think are more-or-less ready for submission to magazines. I'll have a better idea of what I think about these revisions once I run them by A.P. when we meet later today.

First, however, I have to meet with our campus dean at 10 a.m. It's part of the promotion process at our school -- submit application in June, submit peer review forms in September and October, and then Meet with Dean in November/December. Then he and other members of various committees meet to discuss applications in January, and then you find out the fate of your application in February. If you are deemed worthy of promotion, you begin working under your new title in the beginning of the new academic year (September). Thus it takes more than a year to be considered for promotion (not counting the three, four, or five years you have to wait out between promotions, depending on your level of advancement). It all seems a bit convoluted, does it not? But I guess that's the way they have to do it.

Wish me luck. More about the writing and the sabbatical stuff later, I suppose! Now it's time to feed my babies and clothe them (providing the dryer does its magic . . . faster, dryer, faster! The Doodle needs dry underwear, and the Girl, rather perversely for her, is insisting on wearing jeans . . . the jeans that are in the dryer.) Then it's on to feeding and clothing myself, and then the drive to daycare, then work, then the meeting with the Dean, and then -- finally -- Poem Friday can begin.

Yay Poem Friday!

Racing to the Random Deadline, Or, Slowpoke Poetry

2011-11-21T17:22:00.001-05:00

Today was good! I managed to turn in the freelance reading group guide I was a business-day behind on (if I'm not careful, they're not gonna use me anymore), AND finish my latest myth poem, AND get the oil changed in my car before our trip to Virginia tomorrow. I felt so productive I'm taking a little time-out, although this could be a bad move because there's a pile of clean laundry downstairs that's about 4 feet deep and needs to be folded. How DOES one household generate so much laundry?

Oh, AND, I'm writing in my blog while the boy takes a late-in-the-day nap and the girl does . . . wait, what is that child doing? Why is it so quiet in here? *Pause for investigation* She's playing Angry Birds while her brother naps. Phew. So anyway, where was I? Writing about writing in my blog. Oh yeah -- THERE'S another accomplishment.

(To tell you the truth, I'm feeling a little guilty about letting her play video games, and then admitting it online, but she and her brother just drove me crazy while waiting in Jiffy Lube. We need some quiet separation time. I'd turn my back for a minute to talk to the sales associate/mechanic and one of them would be scaling the candy machines while the other was trying out each consecutive chair in the waiting room. Plus, we're about to spend 15 6 hours in the car together tomorrow -- I'm sure we'll get more than enough family interaction then.)

ANYWAY, where was I? I'm hyper-excited about the manuscript again. (The mania comes in spurts.) I feel really energized when I look through it -- I've compiled all poems into one document, just to get a feeling for what the final draft will look like. On Friday I had another thoroughly enjoyable lunchtime poetry date with A.P., who insulted my looks profusely but said lovely things about my poems and the manuscript as a whole. He warned me, too, about racing to some arbitrarily-set deadline. Like, you know, the end of November.

He's right, of course. One isn't supposed to generate a whole book of poems like one can generate a reading guide of 1500 words about a book of women's popular fiction. Just because I feel like I should be finished with the book doesn't mean I will be finished. I get nervous, though, about using every inch of this sabbatical. I mean, if I'm lucky, I'll get another sabbatical in 7 years. SEVEN FREAKIN' YEARS! This kind of time to think and process and write is so invaluable, and so precious.

I feel January coming closer like a threat. It's like in the "Never-ending Stoooooo--ooor-eeee" when the Nothingness was encroaching on Fantasia. (Did I just date myself? Um . . . yup!) I want to use every single second to be as productive as possible, and to write a lot because I'll not have time like this again for a very, very long while . . .

Still, I should probably become comfortable with the thought that while I'll most likely finish the manuscript by the end of the sabbatical, it's anybody's guess as to whether or not I'll make headway with the play. Ideally, I'd finish the MS and write the first draft of the entire play in a flurry of productivity, but I know how much time I'm spending on singular line of poetry these days -- and I don't see myself changing speed anytime soon.

My Morning Reading: Now Featuring Dead Mice!

2011-11-16T06:32:00.001-05:00

I've been really unfocused this week with my writing. I bounce between continuing the fairytale and revisions of my first myth poems, which I'd like to send out to a journal soon, and an idea for a brand new myth poem that's about 3 lines old and needs nearly 30 more.

Hopefully I'll get in good work today -- yesterday I worked but it was through a fog of sleepiness (the boy was up, on and off, most of the previous night) and then I battled a period of mania due to coffee overload. (Which means that I struggled with the final two lines of a stanza for about two hours, trying to find the perfect near-rhyme. I didn't find the perfect near-rhyme, or even a half-way decent near rhyme. These are the times I need someone to slap me and say, "Walk away, Kain. Walk away." I would have been better off taking my butt and my dog out for a much-needed walk.)

Anyhoo, this morning, some reading:

1. From How A Poem Happens, this entry from Sarah Arvio, about her lovely poem "Animal".

2. Autopsychography by Fernando Pessoa. I was introduced to his poetry in grad school by the marvelous Phillis Levin. I *heart* Phillis Levin, by the way. She's the jam.

3. In this post, The Blogess writes about traveling to New York to meet the publishers of her book. It includes a dead mouse named Hamlet Von Schnitzel, Tibetan fertilizer pillows, toilet phones, and why Stephen King never writes about his vagina. Her book is available for pre-order now. I want to go to there.

Reading is a really fun way to avoid writing, y'all.

Process Recap (and a Prayer for the Poetry Gods)

2011-11-10T15:36:00.001-05:00

This has been a good, good writing week. (And yes, it feels even better to acknowledge that.) And I did manage to avoid the temptation of a Deadwood marathon, so I was able to get a lot of work done before my husband came home, and thankfully he did return, on Monday.

So, I followed through on my decision to return to my original plot for the fairytale poem. This is what the process of writing the fairytale has been like so far: (Yay, recap!)

1. Original idea sparked in Fall 2010. First poem written; narrative in nature.

I wondered if maybe that was it -- the end. Then another poem followed about the character, and then another. Soon I had about ten lyric poems written sequentially, or at the very least, begun. Then teaching and festival planning and committee nonsense happened. Writing stopped.

2. Having put to rest the Sow Poems, I turned again to the fairytale at the end of July 2011.

Based on a conversation I'd had with A.P. in the spring, I'd decided to restructure the poem to fit a more traditional narrative form. I tried lots of different stanzas used in ballads, but realized finally I wasn't writing a ballad. I was writing a fairy tale, right? They're different animals. Anyway, the Spenserian stanza is the one I settled on, but I also made the decision to bastardize the hell out of it. No rhyme scheme, except for a slant/near rhyme in the 8th & 9th to end the stanza.

3. I spent two months writing 14 Spenserian stanzas, or 1279 words of metered verse, more or less from scratch, just loosely based on the poems I'd written in 2010.

It was like throwing out all of the work I'd done in 2010. And it felt wrong.

4. Thanks to my November, and by now, recurring-and-well-anticipated-at-the-beginning-of-a-new-month Sabbatical Freakout,I decided to throw out about 10 of the Spenserian stanzas, and really give the first four a major overhaul.

I feel like this is a little dangerous, and perhaps tempting fate. I mean -- I'm halfway through the Sabbatical and I throw out two months of work? Yes, I might be crazy. And stupid. But what's done is done -- for now.

I went back to my first poems, and I redrafted some of them into the Spenserian stanzas. Other poems will remain free verse poems and be interspersed between sections of the primary fairytale. Those other poems will take the shape of a child asking her mother (who is reading the fairytale aloud, of course) questions.

This new plan, using parts of old poems and in some cases the old poems themselves, makes so much more sense to me -- intuitively. I couldn't shake the feeling, when I was writing in September and October and drifting further and further away from the original storyline I'd conceived, that I was making a grave mistake. The tale seemed to become more complex and less interesting the more I wrote -- it was losing its vitality (or what I'd self-appraised as the poem's vitality!).

So at this moment, I'm well into "Chapter Four" of the fairytale - and I can boast 17 Spenserian stanzas, or 1595 words of metered verse - and that's in more or less two weeks. Two weeks. NOT two months.

It's amazing how much easier the writing comes when you finally hit upon the right idea. Also -- it helps to have old drafts of poems you can bully into different shapes.

Of course, my hope now is that the final version or shape of this poem will sound like the best version, and the only version that should exist. I'm gonna hate myself if this thing ends up sounding artificial and forced to other people ('cause I'm probably not gonna have enough objectivity to notice for a long, long while.)

*****

That Erika Meitner article got to me, you know. I think it's a defensive reaction, although I know that my own manuscript doesn't fall squarely into any of her categories. I guess I just don't like being reminded that my ideas -- and most ideas, not just mine -- are really not that original.

Oh well! That's the risk you run when you write and attempt to share that writing with the world. You learn that your place within literature, contemporary or otherwise, is very, very small -- if you even have a place at all.

*****

Please, please, whatever god or gods watch over me, please help me finish this poem by the end of November. And the manuscript by the end of January. And please help me, miraculously, pull a 70 page draft of a stage play out of my ass by January 31 as well.

'Kay? Great. Thanks.

*Heart*

Sarah

What I Read When I Should Be Going to Bed

2011-11-09T22:36:00.001-05:00

1. This blog piece by Erika Meitner is interesting (and somewhat humbling, I imagine, for anyone who has written a book that falls somewhere in her "taxonomy" of unpublished poetry manuscripts).

2. This interview with Pedro Almodovar in BOMB magazine. I love BOMB.

3. This interview with Tobias Wolff. Have I mentioned that I love BOMB?

Fabulous by Association

2011-11-08T17:53:00.001-05:00

A.P. was nominated for this because of me. Because he's friends with someone so awesome. Just sayin'.

Laser Beams and Hot Oil. That's Right.

2011-11-04T19:42:00.000-04:00

I begin the weekend with a rare feeling of enthusiasm and optimism about my work. It's not that I usually start my weekends feeling pessimistic and ambivalent -- about life in general OR about my writing. It's just that I have absolutely nothing going on this weekend but hanging out with my kids. Since my husband's out of town, I'm going to attempt productivity in the downtime I have (early morning, nap time, those odd moments when they're playing with one another peacefully, and after they're in bed.)

After writing for the past two days, I believe I've found the happy middle ground with my accursed fairytale poem that I've been searching for, in earnest, since August. It's not time to rest on my ~~laurels~~ can, either. (I don't have laurels. I do, however, have a can. A can in desperate need of some treadmill time, too.) I am all too aware that I made a pledge in my last post to be finished with this manuscript by the end of the month. Of course, I realized today in the car that I may have overshot, and that what I really meant to say was that I'd be finished with the fairytale poem. My little epiphany involved the sudden thought that I can only handle two projects at once. (Shut up, self. Yes, you can only handle two!) My brain will only allow me to be obsessed with two different landscapes/characters/ideas at a time. It's better for me to have two things going on at the same time, too. If I find myself stumped with one project, I move to the next, and it provides a much needed mental respite. (And my brain is such a sorry specimen. It needs a lot of rest.)

Well, for the past two months, I've alternated between writing these "myth" poems and the fairytale. I need to get at least one of these completed in order to move on to my writing my play, which was, after all, half of my sabbatical project. And because I have a much more clear idea of where the fairytale is going -- I know exactly where, actually -- it just needs to be written.

And if I've finally found the way to write it -- if I've truly settled on the plot and the meter and the form -- then write it I will, and that should be possible by Nov. 30.

While this flurry of decisiveness has been happening (can decisiveness really be described with the word "flurry"?), my husband has been away helping the good people of northern Westchester get their power grid back online. (Hey there, predators! I have a rabid 84 lb dog who's very protective and sleeps in my room! And a set of nunchucks under my pillow! And a vicious robot alarm system that fries intruders with laser beams and hot oil. Then we put intruders in the Iron Maiden.) Anyway, where was I? Iron Maiden? Oh, right -- since he's been away -- AND HE WILL PROBABLY BE BACK ANY MINUTE, WHEN I LEAST SUSPECT IT -- I've found that swinging the temporarily single mother thang (very, very different from single motherhood proper, I realize well enough) is not so hard when I'm on sabbatical. Usually, during a normal semester when I'm teaching, and A. takes off for another state, or even if he's still on the Island but braving the wild urban jungle of Queens or the godforsaken wilderness of Gold Coast estates for 16 hour stretches, I find myself a frenetic ball of nerves after 7 straight days of managing The Circus by my little lonesome. (What an effing grammatical landmine that last sentence was, eh?)

This time is much more relaxed. For instance, we're going to have a Movie Night after dinner, and the kids will be allowed to stay up until it finishes, even if it's past their usual 8 o'clock bedtime. We're having a pajama party. They broke out their sleeping bags -- they are THAT excited. Excited at this point is good, because it keeps them from remembering that they miss their father. A lot.

But in the interest of full disclosure, I'm not just doing this to be a saintly, holier-than-thou Good Mother. That's only partly the case. (After all, I have to get the Good Mommy Points in sometime.) I'm well aware that if my little chicks go to sleep later than 8 tonight, there's a 75% chance that they'll sleep in tomorrow, and that is a 75% chance I'm willing to take. (The Doodle is the unpredictable one. He was up at 6:20 this morning! Wide awake and wantin' a banana. And hugs. And then to talk about Oswald. And then to tell me he didn't like me anymore. So I did not get a lot done this morning.)

Anyway, if I'm a good girl and go to bed early, I'll be able to wake up and begin writing. Hell, if I'm not too tired from kiddy wrangling by the time they finally hit the sack, maybe I'll do a little writing tonight! (Or I could just watch more of the second season of Deadwood, which my awesome bro-in law B. just loaned me.)

(I'll probably watch Deadwood.)

(Now I feel guilty. I'll write a few lines and then watch Deadwood, okay?)

I'm Learnding!

2011-11-01T16:06:00.000-04:00

Today brings me one poem closer to manuscript completion, which is, you know, a good thing. A couple of items of interest/concern, however:

1. Today I wrote some lines that actually scared me. A little. I don't want to be too dramatic about it, so maybe, instead, let's say that I was exceedingly uncomfortable with those lines. Now, I've been in enough writing classes to know that those kinds of lines are usually the ones where you're taking risks, and usually risk = good & praiseworthy & character-building if nothing else. Well, I'm not so sure that applies to me here -- in fact, I'm sure it doesn't. These lines could turn out to be perfect crap by the time I reread them tomorrow (or this evening, more likely, 'cause I'm kinda obsessive like that). And there's a good chance they are crap -- they won't just magically turn into it!

Anyway, my concern, or interest, is in the fear/uneasiness. I think that I was uneasy with what I was trying to say. (Whether or not I actually did say it is what I was debating above.) I haven't experienced this kind of reaction to my own writing before. I think. (My mushy mom-brain is quite good at erasing unpleasant experiences. I'm about three evolutionary steps from a goldfish.)

Anyway, again, I'm not sure I like the experience, to tell you the truth. Which may be a giant blinking sign from the cosmos indicating that I'm not cut out for this poetry thang.

2. What was number 2? Oh yeah -- so for a while I've been saving drafts of my poems into separate folders for each section of the manuscript, but I've also made a document where I've begun to layout or arrange the manuscript. The first section -- the sow poems -- is complete, more or less. Maybe some minor tweaking here or there. But pretty much done. The second section is reserved for the fairytale poem. The third section consists of, you guessed it, the myth poems (Wait, how could you guess? Have I mentioned the myth poems before?) and these are being added as I go along (against my better judgement, as they're all early drafts and will probably be revised intensely in the spring. Probably. I mean, it'd be nice to say they're perfect but that's most likely not the case, eh?).

So . . . right now, the document stands at 40 pages. There are about seven pages of frontmatter and section dividers, so we're really at 33 pages of poetry. That should be pretty satisfying, right? It is, for the most part. I mean, it's better than the 19 pages with which I began my sabbatical, right?

ANYWAY . . . 33 pages is good, but most book publishers require a minimum of 48 for a full-length collection. I'm a long way from 38 at this point, let alone 48. And even if I stop worrying about page requirements, which I should, because they have nothing to do with the actual content of the book, I look at the two partially-written later sections of my manuscript and know that I have a long way to go before the fairytale's narrative is complete and before I have an inkling of what I'm trying to say with these myth poems.

3. It's November. Where is my freaking play?

4. It's November. Why haven't I finished reading the blank verse book? Why haven't I read half of the things I said I was going to read? I know I've read a lot of stuff I didn't say I was going to read.

November is going to be a grueling month, I can tell. I have a slew of doctor's appointments lined up for myself and the children -- all routine, all of which could have been scheduled in September or October -- and apparently, our school district has decided it doesn't really wanna work in November, because Little Miss Talkalot's gonna be home for about half of the month between some bullshit Superintendent's Day (I soooooo wanted to write "Supernintendo Day"), Veterans' Day (totally NOT bullshit) and an equally bullshit run of THREE HALF DAYS OF PARENT/TEACHER CONFERENCES.

*Sigh*

I am hereby resolving that, while September and October were indeed productive in various ways, November is going to kick those other months in the ass.

I'm going to finish this manuscript by November 30.

Crap. Did I really just write that?

Another Victory Over Ye Olde Mighty Slushpile

2011-10-27T18:44:00.001-04:00

Three of my poems have been accepted for publication in the Spring 2012 issue of The Southern Review. I am over-the-moon-giddy-happy-happy happy.

My husband thought I'd set the house on fire from the way I came running down the stairs to tell him the news.

So please excuse this little bit of celebratory nonsense -- I don't mean to brag. I realize that this is my second acceptance since I began this blog, but this year ended an eleven-year dry spell where publication was concerned . . . so, you know, I'm kinda excited.

And, just by way of a disclaimer, I've also received ten rejections since I began writing this blog (in July). I accrued many many many many many rejections in that aforementioned dry spell, and I have a slew of submissions out there that will probably be returned with similar, small, impersonal rejection slips.

I guess that's my way of asking that you not hate me for indulging in a little interweb gloat.

(Woohoo!)

My Morning Reading

2011-10-20T07:15:00.001-04:00

1. Dare to Love by Eliana Osborn. This has a lousy title (it reminds me of an eighties rock ballad album), and I think that some of the writing feels . . . distrustful? . . . (the short, staccato sentences, namely, that infuse the writing with drama when the situation really doesn't need to be infused with drama). So why would I suggest you read it? There are also some beautiful, devastating, brave moments in this essay -- both in subject matter and in craft.

2. A Soft Wife by Ruvanee Pietersz Vilhauer. I'm totally jealous of people who are talented at both writing and some other completely different field, like quantum physics. Vilhauer is not a quantum physicist, but she's a mother and a wife who teaches psychology at a small college in New Jersey, so she still earns my envy, because she can write a story like this while doing all of that.

3. What to Eat, What to Drink, and What to Leave for Poison
By Camille T. Dungy. Courtesy of the Poetry Foundation's Poem of the Day feature.

The Necessity of Feedback

2011-10-18T11:23:00.000-04:00

On Friday I finally met with A.P., after what seemed like an eternity, to discuss poetry, and more specifically, our poems. Really, I should say that we met to discuss our poems, and that a more general discussion of poetry developed from our responses to those poems.

I have other friends who write poetry who, in turn, have other friends who write poetry also and with whom they conduct weekly or bi-weekly or monthly or yearly workshops. There was an article in Poets & Writers (this month's issue) about the importance of writing groups, but I'm sure most people missed it because this was also the issue in which they posted the oh-so-controversial MFA Program rankings. (By the way, the editorial in Slate that I've just linked to is about as bogus as the rankings themselves -- enjoy!)

Anyway, W(here)TF was I?

Ah, yes. The column in Poets and Writers by Ann Napolitano was a nice account of how the novelist has continued to maintain her friendship and writing relationships with two other female authors, one of whom is the talented and really-expensive-to-book-for-your-podunk-creative-writing-festival-but-I-won't-get-into-that-here Hannah Tinti, author of a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, The Good Thief. Napolitano and Tinti and author Helen Ellis have been meeting as a writing group for over sixteen years, and Napolitano describes in her article how her friendship and, more topically, her writing relationship with these women has changed over the course of nearly two decades.

I think it's kind of interesting how these relationships work for writers, and how they work in different ways. A.P. and I have met to share poems and give each other constructive feedback about said poems for about seven years now. And that's how long I've been working at SCCC. The fact that those two elements of my life coincide is no accident. If I hadn't taken a job at Stuffolk (Oh my god, that was a typo, but it's a hilarious one, so I'm leaving it!), I wouldn't have met A.P. and formed a friendship that has had a profound influence over my development as a writer, a thinker, and a teacher. (Yes, I know I just wrote "thinker" -- SHUT UP, A.P.)

He is the best reader of my work that I've found yet, and I would hope that I'm one of his. I try to keep in mind when we meet that I don't have to take all of his suggestions to heart, but I'm pretty sure that 90% of them end up working their way into final drafts of my poems. Sometimes just the conversation about the work is enough -- I leave his specific suggestions written on the draft, file the draft away, and revisit my poem with his comments floating somewhere in the dark and murky recesses of my head. I like this form of revision best -- working with an idea of the feedback, of what works and doesn't work so well in a poem, is best, so that the feedback-giver's hand prints aren't totally all over your poor little poem when it comes to the final draft.

Of course, we've developed our writing and reading relationship over time. We can identify what works and what doesn't work in the other's writing fairly quickly, I think, and our feedback has developed and grown more useful to one another, I suspect, because we've worked together long enough to know each other's writing history, more or less. Our comments can be specific, about a particular line or word, but they can also be broad and made in the context of what we see in each other's oeuvre, if I'm allowed to use that word. (I don't think I am, really, but hey -- it's my blog and I'll live dangerously.)

One of my writer friends, C.M.H., has at one point engaged in two writing groups simultaneously. I believe that one met more frequently than the other (something like every week vs. every month). She talks in Brian Brodeur's excellent website How A Poem Happens about her experience sharing work with two groups on a regular basis:

Having those two sets of trusted readers was invigorating, albeit a little exhausting. During the four years I met with both groups, I was fiercely productive.

I think she's so fortunate to have found so many people with whom she . . . clicked, for lack of a better word. (I guess I'm saving the "good" words -- and my brain -- for my poetry, eh?) I know that since I moved to this area roughly eight years ago, I've met a couple of people (mostly colleagues) whose writing I admire, but lucky A.P. is the only poet I've really trusted with my work. We did, at one point, try to create a writing group among our colleagues at Stuffolk (oh, it's so good!), but it was made up mostly of prose writers (oh, those mysterious prose writers!) and it proved unsuccessful -- mainly because good ol' Stuffolk keeps us running like jerks. Coordinating the schedules of 5-8 people running in different directions is hard, dude.

Also, C.M.H. was really excellent about carving out time for her writing, and not just time for the actual writing of the poems, but time for the revision of the poems via her writing groups. A.P. just reminded me that when I go back to teaching in the spring I need to guard my writing time jealously -- and that's something that I've always known I should do, but knowing and putting into practice are two completely different things. At least, on my planet, they are. But I'm going to try to persevere with this writing-daily thing once spring and my 5-course teaching load arrives . . . until I have a nervous breakdown, and then I'll just give up and turn into the rabid suburban soccer mom I'm closer and closer to becoming.

The point is, I know that I don't have time in my oh-so-glamorous life for one writing group, let alone two, but I recognize how crucial it is to have a sounding board for your ideas and your drafts. I had to cancel on A.P. for our first Friday poetry date of the semester because of Little Miss Talkalot's bout with the plague, and then I was on edge for the next week, filled with doubt and dread concerning my work because I couldn't talk to him about it. When I finally did, last week, I left feeling like all was right with the world. Of course, I should probably own up that he was super supportive and very enthusiastic about my new poems, but I do believe that even if he'd told me that he thought they were failing, I'd have the same reassured feeling, because I know we'd talk about possible reasons as to why the poems failed and how to fix that.

Much of the writing life is private, but you can't spend your whole writing life under quarantine, especially if you expect other people to read what you write. I try to practice this as much as I preach it to my students, many of whom arrive in the classroom resistant to constructive feedback or even the idea of reading someone else's work (they don't want to be "influenced", you know, that old chestnut). Eventually it would be nice, and probably healthy, to start exchanging my poems with another poet I trust (C.M.H. is one, but she's a wee bit busy lately with her new book and her adorable toddler). It would probably be best for A.P., too, if he had someone other than yours truly and her mush-melon brains dissecting his poems.

But for now, I'm pretty content and grateful, because while it's good to trust your instincts, sometimes your instincts are just plain wrong, and a good writing friend will tell you that.

p.s. Eff you, A.P.

p.p.s. Shout out to M.D. -- who shall make a more glorious appearance in this blog soon, I promise.

The Lazy Girl's Guide to Fact-Checking

2011-10-17T13:48:00.000-04:00

So I'd intended for my next post to be a little mini-essay about workshopping and having writerly friends who help you do writerly things, but I've been having a good poetry-writing day that I didn't want to interrupt, save to share with you this little gem:

Because my fairytale poem features a blacksmith, I ran to Google and attempted to do a little fact-checking.

This is what I found:

I think I might have to bypass Google and go to the college library's collection of online databases if I hope to accomplish anything other than winning a video game today, or winning at D&D, or whatever the f**k these people are doing that so wonderfully and ridiculously clutters up the interwebs.

Love, Sarah

Progress

2011-10-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

The week will end on a stronger note than it began. I've managed to finish one revision of an old poem that actually has a place in the new manuscript -- in the myth section -- and this morning I found a scrap in my old journal that made its way into being an actual poem for the fable (pig poems!) section. Of course, time will be the real test and may prove that these pieces don't belong anywhere near the MS -- the sow poem in particular, since I'd considered that section pretty much finished. But right now I'm optimistic, which is nice change from the beginning of the week and my last post, eh?

The 27th of October is mid-semester at the college, (and my sister's birthday!) which will mean that my sabbatical will be halfway over at the beginning of November. If I'd kept to the original schedule I set out for myself, the MS would have been complete in September and I'd be immersed in writing my play right now.

I can't tell if my efforts to write part -- no, most -- of the book manuscript in meter are more a matter of self-sabotage or truly a worthy challenge that will develop my skill level/craft and result in personal growth. (Wow, did THAT sentence sound like a load of crap, or what? Personal growth? I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. I sound like a guidance counselor. Wonderful.) I guess what I'm trying to say is that the professional and personal importance of the sabbatical is a pretty heavy weight on my shoulders right now -- I feel this need to know if I'm making the right decisions, because I feel like a misstep could be disastrous.

But, really, will it be disastrous? Maybe. I promised the sabbatical committee (and myself, which should be more important) a complete manuscript and a full-length play when I return to school to January. I'm frightened by the thought that if I'm only -- roughly -- halfway through the book manuscript at this point, it will likely take me another one to two months to complete the damn thing. That leaves one month to hash out a play manuscript -- 70 pages of metered verse, in dialogue.

What the eff have I done?

And to add to my self-inflicted stress, I have two independent study students from last semester who are waiting for a response for me about their final projects/manuscripts, and I just realized I haven't communicated with either in about six weeks. Yikes. Guess what I'm going to be doing later today?

Blurg.

A Morning Filled with Doubt

2011-10-10T09:32:00.000-04:00

This is not a good way to begin the week, I suspect.

Last week was a major hiccup in the writing/sabbatical process. The Doodle became sick with a fever around Monday evening -- and so he was home from school until Thursday, and I didn't get much accomplished on Tuesday and Wednesday. I struggled with revisions of old poems in between playing with Legos and completing puzzles with the boy, so there was some writing done, although honestly I don't know how productive it was. My major accomplishments ended up being 1) lit-mag research -- I found some really interesting new magazines (more on them later) 2) submissions and 3) the organization and "clean up" of my computer files (I had multiple drafts of poems saved between my laptop and my zip drive, and this clutter was a source of major confusion lately).

I had about one day of good writing -- Thursday -- and, true to form (no pun intended), I spent the entire day focused on working out a stanza to one of the "myth" poems. While I was happy and satisfied (at the time) about what I'd accomplished, that was it for my creative output. On Thursday night Little Miss Talkalot became Little Miss Virus, and so Friday was shot, because she stayed home from school and I spent the whole day worrying that she was near-death because she was actually sleeping and lying on the couch in a daze, uninterested in TV or food or pestering her little brother.

Awww . . . she's so peaceful and tucked up, right? This scared me. My daughter is never this still.

So now she's better, as is the boy, and the weekend's soccer tournament is over and the house is its usual mess, replete with dirty dishes and lots of clean laundry to fold, and I'm looking at the calendar and I'm looking at the poetry I've written so far this semester, and I feel completely overwhelmed. It doesn't seem like I've accomplished enough, in the domestic or the creative areas of my life. And I haven't even checked my email yet this morning to see what gems in the professional sphere (read: syllabus project bullshit) wait for me.

Perhaps I should just take for granted that at the beginning of each month I'm going to have a freakout because I see how quickly this time is passing by.

I need to start on my play.

I need to finish my poetry manuscript.

I need to read more.

I need to submit more.

I feel like there's so much to be done and so little that has been done.

I have so little patience with my kids when I feel this way, and I hate that, too. After a week of full-time Mom Duty, I'm worn out, and admitting this makes me feel like a highly incompetent and inadequate mother.

I suspect that I wouldn't have written everything above if I'd just been able to feel good about my writing this morning. I reread my fairytale poem, the three or four pages of metered verse that I've eked out in two months (I'm so pathetically slow!), and I'm majorly dissatisfied. It feels too much like prose, not enough like poetry. So I went back to my original drafts and looked at them -- the lyric sequence -- and while there are things I like, I can see glaring problems. For instance, I like the way that I feel like I can breathe when I read the first drafts. There's a good amount of white space on the page in my lyric poems, because I'm writing in two-line stanzas -- whereas the Spenserian stanzas in the new draft make me feel claustrophobic. I suspect that if they sounded more like poetry, and less like prose, I would feel less hemmed in by the form I've chosen.

I've been writing the "myth" poems in meter, too, and for some reason I feel much less restricted when I work on those. They're coming so much more easily.

And it's not like I'm ignoring my gut instincts and intuition on this. My problem is that I don't have any gut instincts about this poem. I feel confused and ambivalent and I don't know what the answer is. I know I want to write this thing and yet I don't know how to write it. And I loathe beginning a week in this state. My only hope is that this desperate kind of feeling will lead me to obsess about the poem all day -- even if I'm folding laundry, cleaning dishes, or wiping spilled acrylic paint from the dog's coat and our dining room table (it happened last week) -- and eventually, by nightfall or by tomorrow morning at the latest, when I attempt once again to use my brief morning solitude to write, I'll settle on some kind of solution.

This Needed a Title, So Here it Is: Interweb Show and Tell

2011-10-03T07:40:00.001-04:00

I hate to be a Debbie Downer so early on a Monday morning, but this article by Ann Larson on contingent faculty and the money machine of academia is really fantastic, albeit grim.

So . . . no writing done during "quiet time" this morning, but there's still the rest of the day left . . . although I do have a committee meeting this morning. (It's for the committee that's charged with developing and overseeing the creative writing curriculum and emphasis, so it's probably in my best interest to be there, if I want for the college to regard my field seriously and with some modicum of respect.)

Writing in Sickness and in Health

2011-09-29T11:48:00.000-04:00

This week's writing challenge: The plague. In my eye.

Monday was productive because I spent my morning writing and then the rest of it catching up with committee work that I actually care about . . . namely, plans for the Creative Writing Festival (CWF) our college holds every year in the spring. We're going to add some nice little incentives for our panelists and workshop leaders, and the idea is that we'll attract more attention that way. Additionally, we made plans to streamline our operations (again). Every year this monster runs a little more smoothly -- and I'm hopeful that having a little more time and flexibility in my schedule this fall will allow us to really run this year without any of the headaches that usually afflict us.

Tuesday was good because in addition to a little more CWF planning, I managed to write for another full five hours. I took a step away from the fairytale and worked on two new poems for the myth section of the manuscript, and began a third, too. That was a REALLY good day. I feel like the manuscript is finally beginning to take shape -- or, actually, physically manifest the shape I'd already envisioned in my head. That might be a more accurate way to phrase it.

Productivity for the week was challenged, however, by fate and the school district. The Pancake has two days off this week, today and tomorrow, because of Rosh Hashanah, and I woke up on Wednesday morning with, as I stated above, the plague. In my eye.

I suspect that somewhere between administering to The Doodle's cold and our lovely dog camping out on our bed during the day, I managed to contract some horrible kind of bacteria not only inside my eye, but on the skin/eyelid covering it. I've got conjunctivitis and cellulitis, and let me tell you, I LOOK GOOD right now. Not only has this illness hurt my considerable vanity (I really hate looking like a leper), but it's kinda hard to read or write with an eye covered in goop.

So Wednesday was a wash. This morning I saved some face by writing from 6:00 to 10:30, but that block of time was broken up, of course, by my responsibilities to feed my children. (Admittedly, I have shirked my responsibility to dress them for the day, and we are all still in our pajamas. But that shall be remedied shortly.)

Tomorrow, if my eye and my vanity permit me to inhabit the world of the living, I shall spend a Mother/Daughter day with The Pancake that we were originally going to do today. So there will be, most likely, only a small amount of work accomplished tomorrow. But I feel that while the first month of this sabbatical has had a bumpy beginning, with a lot of stops and starts, the two complete poems (one three pages long, the other two) + the 117 lines/13 stanzas of the long fairytale poem -- all written in meter -- signify a huge accomplishment for someone who, in the past, could barely finish two or three poems a year.

So yeah, I'm patting myself on the back. I need to sustain this feeling for a while. It will help me be more upbeat and relaxed as I direct my attention to a house that is disorderly-on-the-brink-of-catastrophic, and my two lovely children, who, while granting Mommy the time to write, have cheerfully trashed the living room and basement.

Literary Mama

2011-09-25T10:07:00.000-04:00

I'm a little late to the table, I think, but I've just discovered the site "Literary Mama", and in particular, this book review, which in itself is a really lovely meditation on the difficulty of balancing work and raising children.

SimPATico . . . it's just fun to say

2011-09-23T13:33:00.000-04:00

This was a good writing AND reading week. It didn't begin that way, but I persevered. Persistence (i.e. bull-headness) = winning! (Shut up, Charlie Sheen.)

I've managed to "complete" (yes, I'm using the quotation marks again, deal with it) another poem for the third section of the manuscript, and I made some more headway with the second strophe of the fairy tale poem. I submitted my chapbook MS to one publisher and I have plans to complete another submission this afternoon. Also, I've now read almost half of the Blank Verse book by Shaw (which really isn't difficult, it's just that I wrote more than I read this week) and continued reading David Yezzi's excellent collection of formal poetry, Azores, on the treadmill. (Yes, on the treadmill. I am nothing if not a consummate multi-tasker . . . which, I agree, isn't really ideal for an art form that requires tranquility and peaceful moments of reflection, but when you're a working mother of two and trying to capitalize on very spare moment you have to yourself . . . well, you get the picture.)

I've just eased off of a five-hour writing jag, give or take a few minutes, and while it feels really good to have done that I'm a little tired and also, apparently, wired by the process. Some writers talk about how they "must" write -- like they'd die if they didn't -- but I'm not of that stock. I simply find the rush that comes with writing, and being incredibly, minutely involved with your writing, to the point where almost every one of your senses is attuned to the writing, and you don't really perceive anything else around you -- really gratifying, and to some extent, addictive. Admittedly, the rush experienced via writing is a smaller rush than say, a runner's high, or, from what I've heard, crack cocaine -- but it's a rush nonetheless, people.

Also, I'm a sucker for productivity. Chalk it up to the work ethic bestowed on me by my father, who came from good old Mid-West Methodist stock -- but I feel enormous satisfaction when I have something to show for my hours of writing. This is why I'll (most likely) never throw away a draft of a poem if I can help it, because there's a very tender and vulnerable part of me that needs to see, concretely, just how I spent my time during the day. The blog is ideal for this purpose -- it's very cathartic and I may keep it up long past the sabbatical -- although I'm not sure it's that helpful for readers, which is why I'm making a conscious effort to not only chronicle my work habits, but to talk about the problems or concerns that I run into along the way. Then, perhaps, this blog will be less like internet vomit, and a little more like a something writers want to read when they find themselves lacking . . . simpatico . . . in their own lives.

Is that the best word? Simpatico? I guess that's why I read other writers' blogs. Because it's reassuring to know there's someone out there who shares the same struggles.

(Also, I'm awfully nosy.)

Changing Direction Mid-Creation (or: Why Writing Long Poems is a Terrible, Terrible Idea)

2011-09-20T11:17:00.001-04:00

This morning I managed to finish another stanza. Yippee! At this rate, I'll be finished with the poem in the year that I retire.

Part of my sluggishness over the past few days is a direct result of changing a major plot element of the poem. Perhaps I should explain first that I had, more or less, mapped out the course of the poem/fairytale according to 1) fits of inspiration and 2) guidance from the last few pages of a text titled The Classic Fairytales, edited by Maria Tatar. The last entry in this anthology is taken from Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale. This essay is, crudely but very admiringly put, The Shit. Propp analyzed 100 Russian fairy tales and managed to come up with a list of 31 "functions" -- or events/details/characteristics -- that fairy tales possess. "Propp's Thirty-One Functions" was extremely useful in helping me shape the plot line of my own fairytale. Most important was the following:

3. The sequence of functions is always identical.

As for groupings, it is necessary to say first of all that by no means do all tales give evidence of all functions. But this is no way changes the law of sequence. The absence of certain functions does not change the order of the rest.

In other words, take what you want, but don't f**k with the order. I'm trying to keep this in mind as I write the actual fairy tale in verse, but as I've just discovered, sometimes your characters -- or rather, your development of the characters -- demand significant changes to what you originally conceived as the arc of your narrative. In short, and perhaps more eloquently: What I thought was gonna work just wasn't gonna work.

So . . . I was struck with a moment of panic, as is par for the course whenever there's a hitch in my giddyup. (Thanks for THAT expression, Dad!)

The panic petered off into a slow and steady hum of disquietude over the weekend, and then manifest itself in another fit of housecleaning and closet organizing yesterday (with pen and paper nearby, so I could still claim that time as "writing", of course). And then this morning I took the one-day-at-a-time approach, as my lovely therapist M.B. keeps reminding to me to do with all aspects of my life. And blammo! A stanza appeared. It felt good to realize I just have to figure out what she (my protagonist) is going to do next -- not necessarily three strophes from now. I just need to shape the thing stanza by stanza, or really line by line, and then just keep the old plot outline for nostalgia's sake or in case I get desperate and need a reminder of where I was heading with this project in the first place.

Also, it's important to note that this change in direction also forces me (I think) to ditch completely some of the lyric poems I'd written back when the project was a lyric sequence. Because of the change in plot, some of those images and lines I loved and thought just lovely will have to go the way of the dodo. Who said that line about "murdering your darlings"? (Answer: Arthur Quiller-Couch. Thank goodness for Google and About.com!) Anyway, I suspect a portion of my panic/disquietude/sophomore-strophe-slump was due to this realization -- I was mourning, in some small part, my loss of these poems that, you know, I kinda liked.

Of course, I have A.P. to thank for most of this, because he's the dude who suggested taking the lyric poems of the second section of the MS and reworking them into a long poem. Thanks for the torture, JERK! And more sincerely, thank you, because I have an overwhelming feeling that this process is good for me, that I've learned more about poetry and my own writing process since embarking on this project than I ever did before. And, for all of my complaining, this is fun after all. A weird kind of masochistic fun, and I am totally outing myself as the dork I truly am, but fun nonetheless.

P.S. I'll give you a dollar if you can come up with a good tag line for this blog, because I sure as hell can't.

More Good News

2011-09-19T06:38:00.009-04:00

I discovered this morning that Fabulous Beast, my chapbook MS/the first section of the full-length MS I'm working on currently, was a semi-finalist in the Black Lawrence Review's Black River Chapbook Competition. Semi-finalists were announced on August 11 on their blog, and while I've been reading their blog periodically, I sure missed that one.

Russell Swenson won the competition for his chapbook Santa Ana, which is described as a "compelling and enigmatic narrative". I'm looking forward to reading it, because, as you may have guessed, I dig on some narrative poetry, and even more especially, narratives told through lyric poetry.

So! I shall exit the interwebs now and use this wonderful quiet time to work on that second part of the MS. (Little J has not surfaced from his bedroom yet. I think his Birthday Weekend Extravaganza wore him out.)

High Fiving A Million Angels!

2011-09-13T13:42:00.001-04:00

I've had a good writing day. I managed to write for five nearly-solid hours (give or take an interruption or two) -- and I "finished" three stanzas of the fairytale poem. (I feel like the word "finished" should always be in quotation marks when used to talk about the state of one's writing.)

Compared to my work over the month of August, that's like fitting three days into one! It's nice to be able to finally appreciate the sabbatical. Days like this would not occur without a semester off from teaching. Or they might occur, but there would be only one -- maybe two -- of these days that actually happened over the course of three or four months.

That makes me sad, briefly, and then I shake off the sadness, force myself to remember that the spring semester and my eventual return to teaching is a long way off, and that perhaps my writing life will look somewhat different after having experienced this grace period.

Today, that's what the sabbatical feels like -- a grace. A blessing, if you're religious (I'm not, although more of these moments might turn me around). Now I know why my colleagues said, "Congratulations" when I was awarded one last year. I was like, I'm still working -- it's not like I won the lottery. But today, I'm feeling fairly appreciative, a little more humble, and definitely upbeat about what I've done with my time today. I hope -- I really hope -- that my poor attitude at the end of last semester was just the result of burnout, and that I return to teaching rested, and still appreciative, and with more patience for the less engaging (read: administrative) parts of faculty life.

It feels good to post something positive on the blog. This needs to be more than a record of my hysterical anxiety and fluctuating inferiority complex, right? A day of good work even erases the sting of the two rejection letters I received last week.

And so: This.

Patience

2011-09-06T17:22:00.000-04:00

It's kind of amazing how a couple of hours, or a stretch of them, can change one's perspective. This is probably a good concept to remember in my everyday interactions with people, and particularly when I'm having a bad day, but most especially when I'm writing.

I was having a bad writing day on Friday. I ended my morning writing session in a funk because I spent the bulk of the time revising my fairytale poem -- the one paltry strophe of it. I wish I could recognize my uphill battles when I'm engaged in them -- while the three lines I finally settled on are keepers (for now), the rest of my scribbling felt less necessary and more like a waste of time.

But then on Monday I tried again -- and purposely ignored the "finished" strophe. I went immediately to the second strophe and tried to remember that, at this point, I just have to tell the story. I have to get this out. The goal of this sabbatical is to produce work. I can't spend days agonizing over the best word choice -- not at this point. When the spring semester begins, and I have less time to myself and fewer quiet moments, I can work on editing.

I took that attitude this morning, too, and managed to push out (sounds a lot like birth, doesn't it?) another stanza. So there's some progress.

Last night I began reading "Blank Verse: A Guide to Its History and Use" by Robert B. Shaw, which sounds like a magnificently dry read, I know, but he's actually one of the most readable authors I've come across on this subject.

Last week, during my lovely hurricane evacuation to Virginia (it really was lovely -- after the storm left the area, the weather was gorgeous), I finished Robert Hass's "Time and Materials," which is fabulous. Such good writing. He may have been partially responsible for my bad writing fit, during which I despaired of ever writing anything like what I found in that book -- but, you know, I'll forgive him because I *heart* his poems. This week he has a book of essays coming out. If I didn't have such a backlog of books filled with essays to read, I'd probably order it.

Tomorrow is the first day of school, and then, hopefully, my sabbatical will TRULY begin -- although honestly, I feel like next week will be the time it really sinks in. There's been so much going on this summer, and especially over the past two weeks, and I think that once we settle into some kind of schedule, (we = the kids, me, and my husband, who's been working 16 hour days doing storm repair for over a week now) I'll feel more like I'm on sabbatical and less like a distracted housewife.

Obstacles and Inconveniences

2011-08-31T12:05:00.000-04:00

"I really am your gift. I am not just a little person who needs to be "raised" and taught, and taken to activities....I came to the people in my life to bring a message: slow down. Feel. Be. Over and over again. When you do, you will notice immediately, that I am not an obstacle to your work, or inconvenience to your daily life. Instead, you will come to appreciate my honesty, humor, presence and love."-- Bruce Scott

A "Facebook Friend"/acquaintance posted this the other day. It's one of those daily affirmation kind of posts that makes my blood curdle, but I read it anyway . . . mostly because the woman who posted it is a woman who is homeschooling her children and definitely following the beat of her own drummer, which I admire. Also, I have a lot of (hopefully polite) curiosity about her life, which is so different from my own. I may not always agree with the parenting techniques she espouses, but I respect her interest and concern and her intellectual curiosity.

This excerpt, however, touched a nerve. And maybe that's what she intended for it to do -- in her Facebook posts, she seems fairly open-minded, but she's not above preaching her truths. She seems to want to motivate people to do what is right, and right by kids. Anyway, when I began reading the post, I actually liked the first part: "I came to the people in my life to bring a message: slow down. Feel. Be. Over and over again." I recognize that it's a little preposterous for this grown man to appropriate the voice of children everywhere. And what's being expressed is cheesy and sentimental and more than a little new age-y, but I liked being reminded that *I* really need to slow down. That I need to take more time to observe, and listen, and feel more connected to what's going on around me. If you want to be a writer, this is essential.

I took exception, however, to the line "I am not an obstacle to your work, or inconvenience to your daily life." I bridled. I know that this was a defensive reaction. One, I didn't like the author of the piece assuming that I see my children as obstacles or inconveniences. Two . . . he was partially right when he made that assumption, and I didn't like being called out.

The thing is, I would never NAME my children as obstacles and inconveniences. (That's just rude and callous, and who would actually do that, anyway? Who with good sense, and an awareness of how the rest of the world might perceive such a comment?) That line -- and in fact, the rest of the article, which I found via Google, reposted on another blog -- seems designed to shame parents into acting in a particular way. But more thoughts on that later. I want to address the obstacle/inconvenience language.

My children, themselves, their physical and emotional and intellectual selves, are not obstacles. But my relationship with my children requires maintenance, my role as parent mandates very specific actions, and my very desire to do right by them pushes me to put their desires before my own interests -- on the whole. That maintenance, those actions, and those desires that they have (not necessities, just the things they want to do), create obstacles and inconveniences.

All of the relationships in our lives, those with our children and those with our spouses and parents and siblings and friends and coworkers, create obstacles and inconveniences. The demands of one relationship will often interfere with the development or progress of another relationship, and I would call this interference an inconvenience or obstacle. It happens to friendships when new romances enter the picture. It happens to marriages when children enter the picture. It happens to the relationship one has with one's art when both spouses and children enter the picture, certainly. To create art, any type of art, one needs time alone. Relationships, while crucial and essential to one's happiness and satisfaction with life, interfere with, or are obstacles to, the time one can spend in one's own head. And that time inside one's head results in art that is -- to the artist if no one else -- essential and crucial as well.

It's a strange thing, how another person's confidence in their own beliefs can inspire us to be insecure about our own. I listen to the conviction in the voices of others and I lose some of my own -- voice AND conviction, that is. The more I attempt to juggle children and being married and my academic career and my writing career, the more I doubt whether or not it's "right" to be this ambitious. I doubt whether or not I'm actually successful at creating art, which is my goal, and then I wonder if the time and sanity I sacrifice is worth it. I often feel irritated when my writing life is inconvenienced or stymied by the demands of parenthood, but the demands of my bouncing, loud, alternately happy and devastated-by-some-action-of-the-sibling children usually win out despite my irritation.

I guess the quote above, Mr. Scott's appraisal of my perspective, annoys me because it's an obstacle to my search for balance. It makes me doubt that what I'm doing -- as a writer, as a mother, as a working mother who also attempts to write -- is the right course of action.

For example, I've been writing this while my little boy and my little girl have painted gifts for their daycare teachers, played board games, played on the computer, watched some TV, run laps around the ground floor of my parents' house, and generally created havoc and mayhem. Throughout it all they've peppered me with requests for food or random questions, and interrupted my train of thought numerous times.

You might ask why I attempted to write this when they're active and awake. I've wondered about that myself -- several times this morning in fact! Actually, I do try to write when they're asleep -- in the mornings, and sometimes at night (but usually I'm too wiped out to think straight by the time night falls). I make earnest attempts to be "present" in their lives, physically and mentally. But I also fail miserably quite frequently. I have a hard time being invested in our 13th game of UNO. My children often have to repeat themselves when I attempt to steal a few minutes to work on a poem. Some mornings, I just want to write. And on those mornings, usually, they just want to be in my face. They want attention, and I want to direct my attention elsewhere.

They usually win. Not always, because I'm no saint -- but usually. Most times, I will stop what I'm doing to satisfy their requests or just hang out and hug them. I do that because my relationship with them requires it, because I want to have a good relationship with them.

But I think it's ridiculous to imagine that you won't be road-blocked or inconvenienced at some point by your children, or that you shouldn't mind when it happens. I think it's okay to be irritated by it, or even a little angry. The key is to just shrug off whatever irritation you have, extinguish any anger as best you can, and then move on. Get the cup of juice, the bag of crackers, pick up the UNO cards, and just play. At some point they'll take a nap, or draw a picture, or become absorbed in a game of make-believe restaurant/doctor's office/school, and you can sneak out the legal pad or open the laptop and begin again.

My children are not obstacles and inconveniences in and of themselves, but they create obstacles and inconveniences in my writing life. Likewise, my dedication to my writing life creates obstacles and inconveniences for them quite frequently. The trick, I suppose, is to not let one aspect of one's life inconvenience or stymy the others too greatly.

The Anxiety of Planning

2011-08-23T08:06:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I worked myself into a frenetic, worried mess. I spent my writing hour(s) doing more reading than writing, which in itself was okay -- I was reading critical essays about fairytales, and taking notes and thinking about how my own fairytale poem should be shaped. But then, after the quiet period of the morning was up -- the boy and the girl having decided between themselves at some point that this would be The Day of Fighting and Not Listening -- I attempted to write out a schedule for my sabbatical.

The results were rather disastrous. That is, to my apparently fragile psyche they were disastrous. If you look at it from the standpoint of my house and the kitchen cabinets I gutted and cleaned throughout the entire afternoon, the results were fabulous! (More overwhelming stress, please! I'll have this house whipped into shape in no time!)

I went kind of bat-shit crazy on the inside. This sabbatical scares me. I think I've voiced that as a joke before, but I'm just going to own up to it and voice it as a real concern now. I think the prospect of finishing things scares me. I think the responsibility of having four months of time to write scares me. That time frame seems both exceedingly long and ridiculously short for what I've obligated myself (via my sabbatical proposal) to accomplish.

In a conversation A.P. and I had several semesters ago, when he was engaged in his own sabbatical project(s), he spoke about how the word sabbatical comes the Greek language and the word "Sabbath" and indicates a period of rest. He pointed out the irony in the academic sabbatical: at the end of it, once you return to teaching, administration requires a heap of paperwork proving how industriously you've spent your time away from the college. You need to account for how you spent your days. So really, how restful ARE sabbaticals? They are "rests" only in that you don't have to grade papers or attend to the worries of students -- you attend to your own.

A.P., being the prolific writer that he is, threw several reams of paper at our sabbatical committee. I know that I won't be able to do this. I'm okay with that. In fact, I know that I'll be able to justify every minute spent, so the dealing-with-red-tape part of the sabbatical isn't really my problem. My problem is myself. (Both A.P. and my husband would roll their eyes and say something about the obvious if they were reading this now.)

I'm scared of letting myself down, which I've done time and time again when it comes to my writing. I suppose I have a huge problem with failure. (I'm going to have to watch myself, then, around the kids. I'd hate to be one of those parents who can't let their children trip and stumble every once in a while. But I've always been harder on myself than others, so let's hope the odds are in favor of the girl and the boy.)

And I also have a HUGE problem with getting ahead of myself. For instance, as part of my Mad Hatter planning session yesterday morning ("Clean cup, clean cup, move down!"), I took note of two book contest deadlines -- both of which I REALLY want to submit the MS to -- and thought I'd use those dates as ways to give myself goals for finishing the poetry MS.

This, to paraphrase Ron Burgandy, was a bad idea.

It was a bad idea because it forced me to think about the MS as a finished product, while I haven't even written the third section yet. The first section is a year old, and I only JUST finished editing those poems this spring, to the point where I decided I wasn't going to touch them anymore. If I think about my own work habits and what feels natural to me as a writer, how could I POSSIBLY think of entering a book contest this same semester? The best I can and SHOULD hope for is that I have a complete first draft with a minimum of 60 poems by the end of the semester.

The more legitimate fear is that I'll spend too much time on the poetry MS this semester and not enough time composing my play, which was supposed to be the primary purpose of my sabbatical. I was supposed to be finishing my poetry MS at this point in the summer, in my original plan. But that was back before I decided that the last two sections of the book would be written, more or less, in metered verse, and before I realized that writing in metered verse slows my already-suffering pace to a mind-numbing, limping measure.

In theory, I still think it's okay. It's wise, I've decided, to get more practice writing in meter by writing POEMS before I attempt a full-length play. I'm still in training, so to speak (poor, poor abused little poetry manuscript!), and I should have a better handle on it before I try to write 90 pages of the stuff that other people are supposed to act out (90 pages, approximately).

But part of what also scared me yesterday was this juggling act I'm engaged in as a working mother. The girl is attending elementary school in our town, less than a mile away, and the boy attends daycare over 20 miles away, near the campus where I teach. Ordinarily, the location of the daycare is really convenient because it means I can get there really quickly during the day if need be. For my sabbatical, however, it's not so convenient. Up until yesterday, I'd been pretty set on the following: putting girl on bus, driving boy to daycare, driving self to college library or other locale and writing until it's time to pick up the boy. That doesn't sound intimidating, does it? But now let's look at it from the way I had it mapped out yesterday, shall we?

Monday:

• Up at 6:00 a.m.
• Coffee for Husband/Self
• Make bed; change into running clothes
• Exercise at 6:15 a.m.
o Run 45 minutes
• Shower: 7:15
• Wake Girl (Boy will already be up) at 7:30 a.m.; everyone dress
• Feed kids at 7:45 a.m.; feed dog
• Eat breakfast
• Give kids vitamins; take meds (yay for meds!)
• Check calendar for the day
• Lisbeth on the bus (check for lunch, homework, water bottle)
• Empty the dishwasher
• Load of laundry (wash or fold)
• Josh to school by 9:20 a.m.
• School library or Selden library by 9:30/9:40 a.m.

• Work from 9:45 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

• Pick up Boy at 4:30 p.m.
• Pick up Girl at 5:00 p.m.
• Snack and change Girl into Karate uniform
• Karate at 5:45 p.m.
• Dinner at 7:00 p.m.
• Bath at 7:30/7:45 p.m.
• Bed at 8:00 p.m.

Before *I* go to bed:

• Find/layout everyone's clothes for next day
• Check the calendar
• Dishes in dishwasher/turn on dishwasher
• Water bottles for next day
• Make Girl’s lunch for next day
• Prep coffee maker for next day

This list seems pretty detailed, no? One might call it finicky, or, less nicely, anal, right? There's probably something that needs to be included here that I've left out. And I NEED to have all items in here, because if it's not written down and ready to be checked off, I'll probably forget it. That's where five years of having kids has left my mind: unable to function without a checklist.

I laid out every day of the week like this, and promptly had my Mommy Meltdown. (Also, because the Boy and Girl kept staging cage-fighting reenactments in the living room.) Looking at five -- no, SIX -- days of this (Saturday comes with a soccer schedule for the Girl) raised my blood pressure and made me feel like I was squeezing myself back into the hectic, no-room-for-error mania of a typical teaching semester. The last thing I want is for this semester to look like a typical teaching semester. Those blow, because I haven't figured out a way to balance all of my responsibilities and not come out of the four months without sacrificing my sanity, and the sanity of others (my poor husband's, my students', my colleagues', my kids'). (My kids are probably least affected, because I make a conscious effort to keep it that way. There are usually a few Mommy Meltdowns scattered through the semester, though, and they occur in the mornings when I'm trying to corral everyone into the car.)

This was supposed to be, in my Grand Plan, the Semester of Little Stress. After enduring my f***ing crazy self yesterday, I've decided that it shall, indeed, be the Semester of Little Stress. I'm going to keep the morning checklists, because they do, after all, need to exist so that the children get to their schools fully clothed, well-fed, and with the proper accessories for their day. But I'm going to try to be a little more flexible with MY day.

For instance, I may drive home and work here until the Girl gets off the bus or until she needs to be picked up from school. That will entail more gas and more time spent commuting, but I suspect it may be a more relaxed way to live: the Girl won't have to attend aftercare at the elementary school, and the Boy won't be stuck at daycare for eight hour stretches. (At least until the Spring . . . but I won't think about that right now.) This sabbatical should be their sabbatical, too, right? They should get to see more of me because I have this respite from teaching, right? And our home life should be a little less hectic?

This is a long post. I hope it's coherent. At the very least, it's a record of my official Sabbatical Freakout. I'm guessing that everyone who takes one has one, and at least I'm getting mine over and done with.

I HOPE I'm done with it. Seriously, my house may benefit from the hysteria-induced cleaning, but I need to get some writing -- poetry writing -- DONE.

One Strophe Down. 657,896 to go . . .

2011-08-18T09:14:00.000-04:00

At least, that's what it feels like.

So today I finished ("finished") revising the last stanza of the first strophe/chapter of the middle section of my manuscript. At first I struggled to find the right form for this fairytale written in verse, and as I came to the end of the first strophe I had a sense that I've found it, and it's nice to have that sense of confirmation. But it also occurred to me, as I finished the strophe, that I might need to work diligently on word choice throughout the whole poem. The language needs to be simple -- like that you would write for a child -- but not so simple that an adult reading the poem will feel like it's boring, and a waste of his or her time. There's a balance between the child and adult extremes that I need to strike for this poem, and I don't think I've found it yet.

It occurs to me NOW, however, that I should keep this idea or notion on the back burner until I have actually finished the long poem. I'm never going to get anywhere with this manuscript and this sabbatical if I'm constantly revising. I need to finish the damn thing first and THEN revise. So . . . tomorrow I begin strophe/chapter 2.

Earlier this week I sent out six submissions to literary magazines -- all "Sow" poems. It amazes me how much time has to go into submission prep. I think you could make a full-time job out of sending manuscripts to publishers if you were so inclined. Perhaps if I win the lottery I'll hire someone to do all of my submitting for me -- it's so mind-numbing and tedious.

You know what's also tedious? Jokes that end in "chicken-butt". But that's my two-year old for you. I have to admit that I'll be happy when school starts again, because it will give our lives a little more structure, and it will give me a chance to compartmentalize my writing life and my family life, which doesn't really happen during the summer.

When I write during the summer, moments are stolen -- and sometimes not very successfully. These mornings in August, for instance, have consisted of about 30 to 45 minutes of alone time after my husband goes to work. (I find it mind-blowing how long it takes to really get going with my writing, by the way. I'm probably only two or three lines into the poem by the time I reach the 45 minute mark.)

Then the boy wakes up, and he demands his banana and juice and Disney Jr. (Like myself, he's a creature comforted by routine.) Then there's another 30 to 45 minutes of quiet time punctuated by his occasional interruption (asking for more food, more juice, or just coming in to climb on me and talk) until his sister wakes up. Once she's up, it's anyone's call as to whether I'll get more writing time. That's not her fault, either. She's pretty low-energy first thing in the morning (which is not true of the rest of the day!), and thus willing to let me steal a few more minutes of writing time while they both watch TV. But then her brother will notice that she's up, and he'll begin to pester her, which will lead to retaliation, which will lead to someone in tears, which will lead to me yelling and sometimes in tears myself, which is why I shouldn't really push my luck.

Which is why I'll stop here.

This Week: Our Heroine Continues Her Valiant Efforts To Defeat The Mighty Slush Pile

2011-08-15T17:50:00.000-04:00

There's nothing quite like receiving a response back from a literary magazine to motivate you into sending out more work, regardless of whether or not that letter holds an acceptance or a rejection. Every time I receive back a slim envelope (usually with a printed -- or worse, xeroxed -- rejection slip), it's a reminder that my work isn't out there. And when I check the excel spreadsheet that I keep as a kind of submission log, I'm reminded further that I REALLY don't have any work out there.

There's no envelope sitting unopened on an editor's desk. There's no manuscript filed in a cabinet, waiting for some poor graduate student to swing by and slog through the unsolicited submissions. There's nothing but the sound of the air-conditioner rifling through the pages on my desk, and the electrical current humming through my laptop. (Actually, you can't really hear the electrical current humming through my laptop. That was, as we say, a bit of purple prose. I think I'd have a larger problem on my hands than a lack of publication if I could actually hear the electricity entering the inside of my computer.)

I've been really, really, bad about submitting to magazines since I began to take being a writer, and being a writer in the world, seriously. I've actually read more literary magazines in the past 10 years than the number I've submitted to. (How grammatically effed up is THAT sentence? Or the one before it?) Of course, I feel a bizarre mixture of shame and pride in that fact. (Obviously, not in the sentences. Those just inspire shame.)

I'm proud, for instance, that I actually READ literary magazines. I'm tired of writers who expect an audience without taking the time to BE an audience member themselves. The world of poetry -- at least, American poetry -- is especially guilty of this. There's plenty of good writing being written and published, in both major and minor literary magazines. We just don't take time to read each other's work anymore. Maybe it's that we don't have enough time -- because we have jobs and careers and kids and complicated family lives and complex personality issues that we need to explore through intense psychoanalysis. Whatever the reason, it's a shame.

Anyway, back to my point. (I may have one.) So I've read a lot of magazines, and it's good that I've read them, but that reading doesn't get me very far as a writer if that's ALL I do. If you want to be published, you need to submit your work. Plain and simple. Not necessarily to as many magazines as possible -- I'm not of the opinion that says you should just open up the Writer's Market and start working your way through the alphabet, magazine by magazine, letter by letter. Despite the fact that I just argued for reading more, there ARE a lot of crap magazines, filled with bad writing, and you don't want a poem that you're proud of ending up poorly edited and printed next to a lot of flat, uninspired, cliche-ridden light verse.

But SOMETHING must be submitted. To magazines that you read, and enjoy, and respect.

I can chalk up my lack of submissions to any number of life changes I've readily adopted and sometimes hazarded (is this a word?) and endured, but when it comes down to it, those life changes aren't really to blame. My utter lack of desire to pay attention to this area of my writing life is to blame. (Because, you know, if I'm not sending out poems, they can't be rejected, right?) I'm glad that I spent MORE time trying to improve my writing over the past decade, but perhaps a wee bit more time and discipline could have been applied to the submission process.

Recently, very recently, as in this-morning-recently, I've been trying to "fix" this part of my life (if we can ever really fix our lives, even parts of them). I'm going to use this sabbatical to send out -- dare I give myself this goal? -- ALL of the poems I consider fit for publication (even the ones that don't have a manuscript to call home) over the next four months.

And then, next spring and summer, when I go back to teaching and I find that I haven't any time to send out submissions, I'll find my mailbox inundated with SASEs holding, most likely, xeroxed rejection slips. Or, if I try to view rejection positively, proof -- good, hard evidence -- that I tried.

And hopefully those little pieces of evidence will light a fire under my ass and get me to try again!

Another Morning, Another Two Hours, Another Lonely Stanza

2011-08-11T08:51:00.000-04:00

The headline for this post sums up this morning's work pretty succinctly. I managed to work out that first stanza, and to come to terms with what will be a fairly bastardized version of the Spenserian stanza. It will have Spenser's stanza shape, and the heptameter last line, along with a slant rhyme -- I'm going to admit that I just don't like true/exact rhyme but that I'm fairly in love with what happens, sonically, when there's internal- and end- slant rhyme. So yeah. That's my deal. Or this poem's deal, anyway . . . until tomorrow, when, most likely, I will reread my work and despair, OR when I struggle with the second stanza and feel myself straining under the weight of this ridiculous challenge I've given myself.

I am, however, still fairly buzzing with good feeling over my little "win" of an acceptance from yesterday. I feel lighter for it -- more optimistic. It may be a small thing to some people, but it feels overwhelmingly affirming, to me, to have a poem accepted on its merits alone, and not because of my graduate school connections, or my small group of writing friends, although I love and appreciate both, and I feel so lucky to have had the publication credits I was granted through them.

There's just something uplifting about a triumph won from the slush pile.

Good News and Happiness

2011-08-10T16:24:00.001-04:00

Two of my poems have been accepted for future publication in The Gettysburg Review.

Booyah!

(Booyah may be a decidedly un-literary exclamation, but it satisfies nonetheless.)

How Does Anyone Do This?

2011-08-10T09:17:00.000-04:00

I've just spent approximately two hours working on one stanza of my wretched poem. It didn't start off wretched -- I feel, very keenly, that my first (free verse) draft was far more successful than my formal verse attempts have been. And yet I continue to try to force this thing.

Two weeks ago I began trying to rewrite the second section of my poetry manuscript in formal verse. I'm writing something that approximates a fairytale, and is narrative in nature. So I thought I'd try Edmund Spenser's Spenserian stanza, which is written in iambic hexameter and ends with an "Alexandrine" line (an iambic heptameter line, which employs a caesura, and forms a couplet). This is according to Lewis Turco's Book of Forms, which I'm kind of regarding like my bible right now, and trolling every so often for options regarding form and also to just make sure I'm on the right track.

As you'll see from my first post, I thought it went well. And then a day or so later I reread my attempt and felt dismay -- the language seemed flat. There were some moments I liked, but overall the poem just wasn't working for me. So I tried to rewrite it as a ballad stanza (4 beats/3 beats/4/3), and then it seemed too sparse. There was more music in my free verse version, honestly.

So this morning I tried to go back to the Spenserian stanza -- because I'm stubborn, obstinately so, and because Turco called "The Faery Queen" one of the most "unreadable" poems in the English language, and I liked that challenge. Spenser tried to write a moral allegory, and I'm attempting to write an allegory as well, while creating a kind of criticism or comment about the genre of "fairy tale".

And now I've just reread this post and all of this agonizing seems a little foolish to me. After all, why? Will the reader care that I've spent so much time agonizing over the form? Probably not.

But I can't help but feel that the longer line is the right line for the poem, and that if I'm going to be writing in verse, I should pick the form that is appropriate, and MEANINGFUL, to the subject matter. While I'm not trying to rewrite "The Faery Queen" by any stretch of the imagination, I want my adoption of Spenser's form -- or whatever form I choose, ultimately -- to indicate or parallel the poem's purpose: to comment on society, indirectly, and artfully.

And so, for now, I'll continue hammering away at my poor poem. Hopefully I don't render it unrecognizable in the process.

Some Thoughts on Revision and Ambition and the Purpose of this Blog

2011-07-29T19:41:00.000-04:00

This morning I revised the first stanza of the poem I've been working on all week. That's right folks, all week. And it took me an hour to "finish" with the revision, and I didn't even actually finish it (pushing aside all discussion of whether or not one is truly finished with a poem). I had to change the rhyme in the couplet at the end of the stanza, and even though I'm using slant rhyme, it totally stumped me. So now the first and third stanzas are hanging out all sloppy and unfinished. Which is NOT how I like them. (Shut up, Penna.)

At this rate I should be finished with my manuscript in the year 2030. In the words of Charlie Brown, good f**kin' grief.

This all sounds like griping, I know, but if you were a fly on the wall during any of my TRUE gripe sessions with Penna, WELL, let's just say you would feel mighty sorry for him. This is nothing! He WOULD tell you, however, that I am notoriously slow with my writing. (Notorious in, you know, all the right circles . . . Good lord, I sound like a douche.)

I like revision, though. I find the initiation of a poem -- the part that most writers thrive on, I think, and feel exhilarated by -- to be the most torturous part. You wouldn't know it to look at my house or the ambiguous stacks of paper on my desk at work, but I LOVE putting things in order. Give me the material and I'm gold.

Honestly, this is probably a good indicator that I'm not much of a creative writer. A writer, maybe; a deft manipulator of words is different than a person who can take those words in new directions. But I will chug on, despite the warnings that the bridge ahead is out . . . this new manuscript may end up being a disaster, but for once, I'm going to ride this disaster to the bitter end. I'm tired of my projects ending up half-finished because I ran out of faith in my poems or myself or both.

And this time, I do have to finish the project. My sabbatical -- which I begin this fall -- is based on the completion of a collection of poems and a full-length (70-100 minutes) verse drama. Because I'm an idiot. An enthusiastic, well-meaning idiot, but an idiot nonetheless.

Ambition has always thrived in me. This isn't, necessarily, a good thing. It means that I tend to excel at making plans -- there's lots of stuff I want to do, many tasks I wish to undertake, many travels I wish to embark on, blah blah blah. But ambition does not equal staying power, and I tend to either run out of steam or, as I mentioned above, self-esteem. Some of this is because I haven't exactly excelled in my field. The last poem I had published, in May of this year, was the first to be published in 11 years. That's a long effin' time, and not only is that lack of validation detrimental to the way I see myself as a writer, but it's dangerous where my job is concerned, too, because I need publication in order to keep my tenure and be promoted.

And really, my lack of publication is due to a combination of many factors, but a LARGE part of it results from the way I neglected to submit my work regularly to magazines over those 11 years. If you're not submitting anything, of course you aren't being published! I suppose my self-esteem would be far worse if I'd tripled or quadrupled my output in both writing and submissions over the past decade, and STILL didn't have the publications to show for it, and perhaps that's part of why I didn't submit my work all that often. But I feel deep down that I might have had SOMETHING published if I'd put a little more effort into getting my work out there.

And so. There you have it. My sabbatical this fall begins now, with this past week, and I'm going to keep this blog during the sabbatical as a way of recording my process so that I have something I can put into my report for the committee come January 2011. (A trick I totally stole from Penna -- although you'll notice, dear reader, how incredibly eloquent and much more serious and thoughtful he is on HIS blog. By comparison, this blog sounds like it was written by someone who stuck a sharpened pencil in her ear).

This means my audience will remain small, if an audience for such meanderings exists at all. Who else out there is a whiny, wannabe poet and academic with two children and a dissolving sense of sanity?

Working on the MS

2011-07-26T22:38:00.000-04:00

Not every post will be a essay-ish in nature, I think. Today, for instance, I'm happy to report that I began the day with writing. I worked on my manuscript for about an hour. Then the boy woke up, and the dog took that as a sign he should burst into the girl's room and wake HER up, and then we were all up and no more writing was to be done.

It was really wonderful, though, to sit down and have direction for once. I began with a poem that I'd drafted earlier in the year and set about trying to put it into meter. I was able to complete the first stanza -- an 8-line stanza in iambic hexameter with the last two lines being a rhyming couplet. So far . . . good. Not great, but it was something. It wasn't too difficult to wrestle the words I'd already written into the new form, which is a good sign, I think. And when I was finished with that first stanza, I wanted to work on the second stanza. That, too, is a good sign.

I want (read: need) to stay excited about this manuscript and its poems if I expect anyone else to be excited about it, too.

In other news, I couldn't get my act together enough this morning to run, but I'm in a mood to forgive myself since I managed to write. I met with a student today (a Spring Semester Independent Study that spilled over to the Summer -- yes, I find students who are Just Like Me with this write/rewrite/procrastinate crap!) and the rest of the day was filled with lots of errands and the picking up of the children.

When I picked up the boy, his teacher told me she'd found him lying down on the stack of circle-time mats. This isn't a typical move for him, so she took his temperature -- and he has a fever. Who gets ill at the end of July? I thought this crazy heat had killed all of the germs. Anyway, he's complaining of a sore throat, so I guess that tomorrow we're visiting the doctor!

And now, I may do some dishes before going to bed. Or I may leave them in the sink until tomorrow morning. Take that, Fly Lady!

A Note on Interruptions

2011-07-25T23:33:00.000-04:00

I've made one or two attempts to write today. During the first attempt, I was interrupted by one of my children asking for something. Or he or she might have been telling me something -- my memory does not serve me well on most occasions, and certainly will not oblige today. Anyway, I was interrupted. I closed the laptop and shrugged off the irritation and helped him or her acquire whatever snack he or she desired (usually, they want a snack).

The second time occurred after we'd been out of the house shopping. Shopping is an excellent way to interrupt oneself when one knows she should be getting work done, but the shopping was necessary and the children needed to be fed on something other than Nilla wafers, yogurt, and dry cereal. (I fed them pizza at Costco. The thrifty, homemaking part of me that does NOT get as much airtime as she'd like loves that I can feed three of us for under $5. And it doesn't come with a toy that clutters up the house. Bonus!)

Sidebar: Did I say the shopping was necessary? I had four items on my list that were necessary. FOUR. I came home with about five times that number in bulk goods that will take, no doubt, months-if-not-years to use because I neglected to remember what we had stashed in our supply closet. There is nothing that will make an aspiring poet feel less like a poet than a trip to one of these wholesale places. It's difficult to feel like you worry about the important things in life when you're excited about seeing a Polish Pottery display in the middle of Costco. I walked out of that store with a lingering sense of shame -- but I suppose most people feel shame when they exit a place like Costco with a cart loaded with impulse items like t-shirt bras and jojaba body wash.

Of course, since I began writing this entry I've been interrupted so many times I've lost count. The phone, the girl (asking about waking up the boy from his nap -- you know she's bored), the preparation of dinner . . . my own impulsive decision to listen to M.I.A. instead of reveling in 5 seconds of quiet.

And yet more interruptions. Rain on the grill, potatoes in the oven, more wine for my glass, potatoes out of the oven, children at the table, chicken off the grill.

And now I'm going to attempt finishing this entry -- or at least this beginning of an entry -- while my children finish dinner. The boy is complaining that he has a stomach ache. He's eaten all of his potatoes and nothing else -- that's why. He sits with his head in his hand and looks alternately woeful, gaze aimed at his plate, and then impish, when he sneaks a look at the television in the living room, where his father has decamped. He will eat his dinner, but not without asking every other bite if he can "look in the candy bowl now."

My son at dinnertime is the incarnation of my work ethic as a poet. I will do a multitude of small mundane tasks, because they are infinitely easier than writing, and in particular, writing well. It has always been easier for me to come up with ideas for writing projects than to do the writing itself. This blog -- which I've had for years but only just actively begun to use -- is easier than the act of writing poetry, too. I can do this while listening to my son repeat endlessly that he's done and that he wants "to look in the candy bowl now." (Not that it will be a good and cohesive piece of writing, mind you.)

I cannot write a poem when my children are in the room. I have tried -- I still try, because I'm stupid and will repeat my mistakes endlessly, it seems. I actually yelled at my daughter the other day because she interrupted my train of thought while I was working on a poem. I quickly apologized, of course, but I'd exposed myself, yet again, as the complete lunatic I am.

And now, I will go give my children a bath.