mimsy and outgrabe

Good god. It's been a while. Welp! Today is the first day of the new semester. We're supposed to get a lot of snow tonight, too. So that should make the beginning of classes go smoothly. At the very least, I can say that my family is 80% healthy. Maybe 75%. At least, healthy enough that my children can go to school and/or the babysitter and I can go teach. I feel like I'm JUST beginning to get my life back from babyland. Vampire Baby, as of last week, is finally sleeping for most, if not all, of the night . . . AND if she wakes up around 5 or 6 in the morning, most of the time I can convince her to go back to sleep! IT ONLY TOOK 10 MONTHS. This means that last week, after realizing I'd slept for more than 5 hours, uninterrupted, I woke up early and managed to work on both my verse play and interview questions I'd been sent by the curator of a lovely blog about chapbooks, Speaking of Marvels .  It took me nearly two months to answer those questions ...

Brevity magazine publishes, besides "concise, literary nonfiction," a number of brief essays on the craft of writing. I liked what Terry Tempest Williams had to say in "On Writing as an Act of Living." I'll probably share this interview with my ENG 101 students, who have to complete a service learning project during the semester. Also, bits of it resonate with the part of me that's still determined to write the "Poetry of Witness" essay, like this: Story bypasses rhetoric and pierces the heart. To tell a story is to create an action in the mind of the listener or reader. It is the same with bearing witness — be it watching a community of prairie dogs or witnessing the miles and miles of swirling oil from the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010. To bear witness is not a passive act, but an act of conscience and consequence that has the power to alter our collective consciousness. As writers, we are often changed by the story we...

While there is, of course, plenty of room for improvement, and while I could certainly use a little more discipline here and there (particularly when it comes to idly staring at effbook when I could/should be getting to work in the mornings), I feel as though I've traveled miles when it comes to my work habits as a writer. I'm not even sure I had what could be called habits as a writer, for decades -- if I had any, they were bad habits -- despite having attended graduate school for writing, despite having some brief luck with publishing a poem or two, despite naming myself a writer even though I certainly didn't, by my definition, act like one. Since the inception of this blog -- since the summer before my sabbatical -- I've developed the habit of waking and making some movement toward my writing -- be it through the act of writing itself (working on poems, or writing a post here), or reading (which, as my students will tell you, because I beat it into their head...

Welp, I spent this weekend going to the pediatric dentist and soccer games and then nursing a "vicious case of the sniffles" (A.'s charming and ü bersympathetic way of describing my head cold). Somewhere in there, though, I managed to do a tiny amount of laundry AND prepare the final onslaught of September submissions to magazines and book publishers.  I'm really hoping something good comes out of all of this submission-preparing, or -- when all of these magazines and book publishers start sending out their rejections around the same time -- I'm going to have a very depressing couple of months. Perhaps the advent of Vampire Baby will dull the feeling of rejection, though -- he/she seems to be amplifying all of my current emotions, however, so I fear that I may not take the rejection well and will end up burying my face in several tons of ice cream and/or candy featuring Red No. 40, at which point I'll blow up all Titanic-size and give myself a ...

This audio recording from Sylvia Plath is awesome for a couple of reasons.  One -- listen to Natasha Trethewey read her poems before you listen to this. Just for a moment, which is what I did. I like Trethewey's poems on the page -- but she begins reading in that sing-songy poet voice and I have to click off the recording. I just can't listen to it. The poem stops making sense and all I can hear is that infernal rise and dip of the Poet Voice. (Boo!) In "Fever, 103" Plath reads her poem like she's auditioning for the part of Malificent in Disney's Sleeping Beauty -- her voice is domineering and full of that faux-British radio/movie speech that Americans adopted in the 30s and 40s and gave up, I don't know, maybe 5 or so years after this was recorded. (It sounds a little antiquated even for the 60s.) Even still, her performance of the piece is fiery and powerful and puts so many contemporary poets and their readings to shame. Two -- The dra...

Writing and anything related to writing crawls to a standstill during the last days of school. I'm still getting up early, but unfortunately the quiet time by myself has been spent doing other things, so I haven't made much progress.  Or actually, I guess I've made some . Somewhere in the madness of the week-long events of the SCCC Creative Writing Festival , I found time to revise one or two lines a day of the fairy tale. And I read the first six scenes of Walcott's The Ghost Dance (very good, and I think better than Walker , the first play in the book, which feels -- dare I say it -- a little clunky compared to Ghost Dance .) Also I gave up (for now) losing more precious minutes searching the stacks of paper around my house for the pages A. kindly wrote feedback on, the first half of the fairytale, up to Chapter Five, and instead I printed out the entire fairy tale in a double-spaced format (47 pages like that! That shit is long !) so that I can methodicall...