mimsy and outgrabe

A. and I spent two really quick days (really more like one) in Venice, Italy and then spent most of today traveling to the medieval city of Erice, which is in Sicily. Me! In Venice! Yay! In Erice! Yay! So far: Italian food is just as amazing as everyone believes, in Europe a glass of water is still more difficult to come by than alcohol, Alitalia DID lose my luggage and I've yet to hear what happened to it, AND I've written two poems on two different flights (and they might be crap poems, but at least I was writing). Also, the view from the hotel is fucking amazing. And no, my photos don't really do it justice. Also also, I'm running on very little sleep. The Bread Loaf Sicily Writers Conference seems great so far -- everyone who is a part of its inner workings is friendly and helpful and down to earth. Tonight the entire program convenes together for a big dinner, and then tomorrow craft talks and workshops begin. I wanted to get *something* written ...

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-...

This past spring, while working on the sketchbook with M.S., the bulk of my writing came out initially like prose -- not like I would normally write my prose, but more prose-like. Not lineated. Not metric, or at least, not intentionally so. And now that we've moved on, M.S. and I, and finished the sketchbook and begun working on ostensibly different projects, the writing is still "coming" out in these strange blocks: without lines, often without much punctuation. Not stream of consciousness but definitely speedier, less deliberate thought. I don't know if that's interesting. I'm just kind of logging this observation here, in the off chance it turns out to be a useful reflection later on.  I've also been gathering my feet under me and looking ahead to these next eight weeks of "down-time" before the new semester begins. M.S. and I have begun tooling around with a new collaboration, something I'm working on during my morning writing s...

"STOP MAKING 'ART' AND START MAKING YOUR WORK. This is at the top of the list for a reason -- namely, because it's so easy to make things that look like art, act like art, get sold like art, yet in the end aren't really art, but are phantoms, mere commodities or quantifiable, digestible sound bites. And unfortunately, you'll be encouraged to do this. In general, these are the things that art schools and the art world push you to make because they're legible and can be spoken of in ways that make sense to everyone: collectors and curators alike. This "art" has the correct visual markers and can slip easily into exhibitions and catalogue entries. At first, it seems really exciting to play this game, and it could get you a lot of mileage if you play it right, but in the end, these are really boring things that don't have a lot of depth to them. Try to resist this approach, because it's unsatisfying in the long run. Be prepared to be unpopul...

The writing is slow-going but it's chugging along. Since the new year I've written maybe two or three things I consider poems and generated a lot of scribbling in my notebook, which is kind of a big deal for a girl who hasn't worked on much of anything for the past few months. It feels even more strange and auspicious because those poems are something separate and apart from my verse play project, which -- as readers of this blog well know -- has kind of consumed my attention for the past few years. I'm not putting aside the play, either -- I'm still working on it. I'm just being flexible with my writing schedule, allowing that some mornings I'm moved to write about things other than these characters and this conflict and this particular time period. And at least I've been consistent and, well, persistent -- so far, I've kept up my writing routine of approximately 45 brief minutes every morning, in the wee hours before anyone else in the house ...

Where did Day 1 go, you might ask? Read on. (If you're not asking, see you some other time!) Last semester I managed to carve out time during the morning to read and write, and that was going swimmingly for about, oh, the month of September, until the inevitable grading and committee-work creep took over, and then I didn't write much at all. There were occasional two-hour spans of time during October, November and December as part of a program I organized at Stuffolk through our faculty union -- and these sessions were good and productive, but I spent most of that time sending out submissions or writing things for the college, and not doing any genuine creative work -- or creative work that I found, well, satisfying. And, as you know, that's not great. Particularly if I would like to keep calling myself a writer. But -- in the moments in between papers, or driving from one campus to another for yet another meeting -- I thought back to the last two times I ma...

Get yer minds out of the gutter, folks! "It" refers to one's self, one's consciousness, the essential voice that one shares with the world when one publishes a poem, or an essay, or an article -- or an essay on poetry printed in a journal, such as this one by my friend Stephanos Papadopoulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books last week. I love this essay. It's beautifully written, introduces me to poets I was not familiar with previously, and speaks to an issue that's timely and relevant. Also, and more importantly, I think it does what an essay should do, which is similar to a function of poetry: to raise a question that weighs on the mind of the writer, to reflect on that question, to explore that question. It may or may not answer that question, but you follow the writer's process as he or she thinks . (This idea -- of the essay as a mode of thinking -- is the most difficult to teach in Freshman Comp.) Of course, as I said above, the author i...