mimsy and outgrabe

Since abandoning Effbook and InstaTimeSuck, I've been waaaaay out of the poetry-world drama loop. This has been a very good thing. Of course, sometimes I have twinges of Fear of Missing Out, but they are really, and somewhat surprisingly, few and far between. Also somewhat surprisingly, I've discovered that I like minding my own business. I did catch wind, however, of " that poem " published in The Nation in late July from fellow poetry bloggers, who have been more or less my one way of staying connected, however loosely, to the poetry world at-large (which is, ya know, still fairly small). I'm not going to rehash all of that here, but I thought that Kristy Bowen wrote a good meditation on crafting persona poems as a result, and so I'm sharing it here. August has begun its now-typical delivery of multiple rejections, as most of the awards and contests to which I submitted my manuscript earlier in the year (and one proposal to a conference-of-which-...

Writing here last week about "weird blotches of language" prompted me, this week, to revisit those pieces and shape them into something looking more like poetry. Next step: have them sounding more like poetry.  It's good to have some drafts of poems building, albeit slowly. It's been too long a time since I've done this, really. Exhibit A: How I torment my teenager I've been looking a little bit at submitting, too, but just the MS because I don't really have enough individual poems to send out (and I'm trying not to simultaneously submit -- for some reason I can't exactly remember, I made that decision a few months ago . . . ).  Of course, for the past two years, I've more or less thought, "this is the last year I send out Fabulous Beast," and then I come across some publisher or contest and think, "hey, it's worth a try." But I'm doubting more and more that it's worth a try. I have a good num...

This week classes began for the spring semester at Stuffolk. It wasn't a bad week. I'm cautiously optimistic about the semester. My students seem engaged and respectful, which would be marked change from at least two of my classes last semester. I have a ton of prep still to do, mostly in making sure the Blackboard course spaces are aligned with the new semester and that my handouts and rubrics and all that junk have been updated. Our HUM 121 students making a very unofficial Sol LeWitt. Today I have the privilege of being the "Mystery Reader" at my youngest's preschool in the morning (those kids are the cutest, so it really will be the highlight of my week), followed with a day of writing letters of recommendation for three students. I am behind on lots of different tasks, but there's absolutely nothing I could have done differently. I've been working my ass off for the past few weeks; like, hyper-focused on work. My hope, my aim, is to sacrific...

Sometimes -- okay, most of the time -- these things (submission & publication statistics) can be depressing. They are helpful, however, when you're trying gain an unbiased, more or less accurate perspective of where you stand -- or if you stand, period -- in the writing world.  For instance, in 2017 I submitted my book manuscript to 41 contests and small publishers and garnered zero acceptances. Yes, that's depressing  -- particularly because of the rejection of a little book I love and believe in, but also because of the amount of money I spent on entry fees. Out of those rejections, however, I managed to gain some acknowledgments or recognition. The manuscript was a semi-finalist in five different competitions and a finalist in three others. (Making a total of eight semi-finalist and five finalist nods since I first began submitting the book.) And for more on the topic of spending $$ for a chance to publish, please read Rachel Mennies' excellent article ...

Still working on that damn sonnet. I suspect I'm the last person who should be writing in the sonnet form, simply because I lose track of my arguments so damn quickly. Also, I stop caring about making the argument. That combination isn't great for someone working in a form that is, quite often, rhetorical. Nor is it good for someone who is about to teach rhetoric in the fall.  Anyway, as more proof that I'm the world's slowest writer, I've spent each of my mornings this week reworking the sonnet at a rate of two lines per day. It's not great nor is it extremely productive, but at least it's consistent writing practice.  I was very close to shutting everything down this summer -- no more blog, no more submissions, no more participation in the shit-show that is publishing in the U.S. (Not that I have any kind of international publication chances; it's just that publishing here seems fraught with more nonsense than in other countries.) I'm...

You know what's awesome? I'm now eligible for old-lady poetry awards. That's right. Not that there are a ton of over-40 awards, but when they come around, I could totally throw my purple hat in the ring. * A quick internet search has corrected me. I would throw my RED hat in the ring. Also, I don't recommend doing that internet search. The results are so saccharine you'll have to bleach your eyes. I took one for the team, ya'll. * Anyway, I'm still working on submitting my full-length to lots of places (i.e. just throwing my hard-earned money at the universe, essentially) AND today is the last day of classes/office hours before Spring Break, so I'm looking forward to my micro-sabbatical next week. * If it happens. My dad's health is a little precarious at the moment, and we might have to take a quick trip south to help out. * I plan on working on "Accountability Partners" -- my play that is not my verse play ...

I'm going to begin my blog again as a companion to the writing and submitting work I am kind-of sort-of doing right now  ... in an effort to move me out of the kind-of sort-of zone and more solidly into the definitely-and-making-lots-of-progress zone.  Because my writing life is some kind of pie chart or line graph, obv. In January I mapped out a plan for revising the first act of my verse play and moving -- finally -- into Act II. That original map has itself been revised over the past few weeks. This is a result of that "kind-of sort-of" progress: painstakingly slow, but happening, nonetheless. I'm adding new scenes about five lines at a time (i.e. five lines per day, when those days of writing occur). It's a rather pathetic pace, I know, but at this point I'm encouraged that I have a pace.  Frankly, sometimes I'm amazed that I have a pulse, let alone a pace. Work feels less intrusive to my writing time than it did last semester. I wrote so...

One week of school completed, and I'm all sorts of in-the-weeds again. Not panicking especially yet, but that's because I'm deluding myself into thinking I have control by paying attention to my little list-making phone app (Wunderlist) and occasionally running (three times last week!) and then also kind-of sort-of staying on top of the laundry situation in my household. Yesterday I turned 38. I don't think this is especially significant except that it means I'm still eligible to have my manuscript rejected for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, because under 40 is still considered "younger," and I haven't had a book published yet. Also, they haven't published anything that looks or sounds remotely like my own work in  . . . maybe forever? . . . and yet I'll probably continue to send my MS in each year until I get the book published by someone else or I turn 40.  I really, really hope it's not the latter, but  . . . you know. OHMYG...

I really should expect by now that with Good News comes News I'm Not Quite as Excited About. I received my first rejection from the contest circuit for the full-length ms of Fabulous Beast , and I'm not going to pretend I'm overjoyed about it. It put a depressing final note on yesterday, which was filled with conferences and grading and a really deep kind of exhaustion, as I didn't sleep very much the night before. My eyes were red and swollen and I'm actually thankful to the three or so students that stood me up, because it bought me more time during the day to grade and get myself organized for the week.  I was leaving the office, still really tired but feeling a little satisfied, knowing that I'd managed to get a good number of things done, and then I received the email form rejection. I don't mind the email rejection -- a true child of the information age, I definitely prefer the speed with which I can find out that a journal or book doesn't wa...

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 ...

Finally, as of this past weekend, I am finished revising, and proofreading, the fairy tale. No more numbers to report, unless it's to say that this week I sent out copies of the final version of my complete manuscript to four different first-book contests, and submitted individual poems to three literary journals. There is such relief in having come this far, and real satisfaction, too. It feels strange to be the only one of my writer-friends who has gone through the process of writing and working towards a book manuscript at least three separate times, since my early twenties, and have nothing to show for it. I never managed to finish a collection. I didn't even have a complete manuscript that failed the contest circuit and had to be squirreled away and mourned over and forgotten -- I always lost faith in my work before I could reach that point. To have managed to come this far: to have completed the work, to have the final product, and to actually still like it -- th...

RE: Fairy Tale Poem Stanzas revised Saturday: 1 Stanzas revised Sunday: 6 Stanzas revised Monday: 8 Stanzas revised (total): 44 Stanzas that need revision: 45 Submissions prepared this morning: 1 Loads of laundry folded and put away last night: A gazillion (I'm pretty sure that's accurate)

Well. My family and I survived the week of the Leadership Academy conference, but it feels like we did so just barely. It ended on Friday at noon -- and Friday around 8 a.m., just as I was sitting down to begin our final day, a migraine hit. Those visual disturbances called "floaters" arrived first, so I scrounged up 2 Tylenol and 2 Advil from colleagues at my table, shoved them into my face, and hoped for the best. It turns out the best did happen, and I had a minor and manageable headache for about an hour, and then I felt better. It was a huge stroke of luck -- I was afraid I'd be laid up in my car, unable to drive anywhere, unable to get my kids, unable to finish the conference  . . . but luckily, none of that happened. Crisis averted. The Leadership Academy was long and required a lot of attention and energy, but I guess I can admit that it was not without some worth. I can't totally buy into every facet of what they preached, but if anything I came away fr...

June is a slow month for blogging, I guess. Actually, it's a slow month for everything. My house is still disaster-ish. My article research is underway, as is the revision of the fairy tale poem, but I'm making progress very slowly. And this week has featured a special hiccup in the form of pink eye (both the boy and I contracted it). It's kind of amazing when and where inspiration hits and a poem demands to be written. Take, for instance, yesterday. The boy was supposed to go to daycare -- his last full week -- and I was going to go into the office for a meeting and to take care of a slew of little tasks that need attention before the end of the month. But then the boy woke up with goopy-eye, which prevents him from going to school, and I woke up with . . . a poem forming.  I began the poem after my husband left for work and while I still had a silent house to myself. I finished drafting about 12 lines, the first strophe of the poem, when the house awoke -- girl,...

Rebecca Lindenburg lost her husband, the poet Craig Arnold, in 2009 when he went hiking in Japan. Here she writes about Arnold and his work very eloquently. I read Arnold's Shells when it first came out (the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series), and I liked it, but I haven't yet read Made Flesh . I think I might do that this summer. *** When I attended college as an undergraduate, my parents paid my tuition. My father asked that, in return, I treat college like a full-time job -- give it forty hours a week, and then whatever I did with the rest of the week's hours was my own business. I never formally accounted for those hours, but his request stuck with me ... and shaped my attitude towards school and studying. So I think it's unsurprising that I find this article from The Washington Post depressing, but I know its truth too well -- my own students would probably bring these survey results far lower than they currently are. Too many of them work full-...

Once again, the blog isn't getting much attention. The rest of my life is, however. I'm using spring break as a way to kind of tune-up areas of my life that have been a little neglected as of late. I'm getting more sleep, and I'm running again (in anticipation of a 10K in June, no less.) I spent yesterday at the office taking care of creative writing festival tasks, and today will be filled with a mixture of grading, more festival business, and getting the truck inspected. I've been writing, well, minimally. Yesterday morning's writing time was spent putting together and then sending out submissions to literary journals, so I'm not beating myself up too much, because submissions are a necessary part of my writing life as well. I'd planned to spend this week revising my fairy tale poem, but like most of my best intentions, that was a bit too ambitious. I need to have my head clear of these tasks that are screaming for my attention right now . . . and I...

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 ...

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...

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 purpl...

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 ...