Kelli Russell Agodon's Blog

I hate that I find this entertaining...



http://www.abbeyroad.com/crossing





Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Dear Reader,



I confess three-day weekends mess me up and I didn't confess yesterday because I thought it was Monday.



I confess I try not to be handcuffed to time, but in this culture, we kind of have to be.  If not handcuffed, then at tied together with a friendship bracelet.



I confess I have 3 (THREE!) writing dates this week.  1 on this side of the water, 2 on the other (Annette Spaulding-Convy & Ronda Broatch today, Martha Silano tomorrow at a cafe, and Susan Rich in her adorable town and writing studio on Friday).  This makes me feel rich with friendship.



I confess I still have more notes to post about the Skagit Poetry Festival and will do so before I disappear out on my paddleboard this summer.



I confess I also want to write my own post on beauty.  I have a lot to say.



I confess I'm off to my first writing retreat of the week, so I will end here.



Happy Spring.



Amen.





 Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

C. Dale Young closed up his blog yesterday.  You can read the last post here.



When someone ends his or her blog, I always think to myself "should I stop blogging also?"



Blogging has always been a weird thing for me, yet something I've been thankful I've done.  I have had moments of feeling "online shy" and deleting my blog account without saving what I had written (bad decision).  But since 2006, I've been at this address.



Six years goes by quickly.  One reason I have a blog is that when I go to writer's website, I like to not see cobwebs and a blog offers me this--oh look, the writer is alive in the world and writing, connecting.



Still, keeping up a blog requires some work and definitely time.



I'll C. Dale's blog a lot, but thankfully, I still plan on being connected.  Now with Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In, blogging is kind of old school... and wordy.



Talking to my friend Jeannine Hall Gailey last night, she said that people may prefer the quick connection--she used a great term I don't remember, something like fast socializing, I had to ask her what she meant-- and she said "like Facebook or Twitter" -- where you can connect with someone with just a quick read.



Like a soundbite?  I wondered.



Maybe we can call it short talk.  Jeannine said she was talky.  I can be talky too.  Sometimes 140 characters doesn't cut it for me.  So we will both be keeping our blogs, that is the answer.



That said, I did want to let you know that one thing about my blog is that it prefers lazy summers.  I will post throughout the summer, but it will be less words, more images.  It may even be less posts or forgotten confessions.  You may notice that my number of posts is directly related to the Northwest forecast--more clouds / more posts, less clouds, less posts.



I live under a grey cloudy blanket all year so when the sun comes out, I must go out and will be much less connected online.  But as someone who loves the school schedule, I will meet you back here in September.  Have a great summer, as I wrote in everyone's yearbook.





Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Here's what's going on in the Poetry Blogosphere these days--







C. Dale Young will get you update on what he's calling "Beauty-gate" in the poetry world.



January O'Neil is confessing for Confession Tuesday



Collin Kelley has a new list of poets on Twitter!



Martha Silano has a wonderful post on working with one of my favorite poets, Heather McHugh.



Laura E. Davis is talking about Marginalized Writers vs. Marginalized Voices



Susan Rich shares a new book for writers by Midge Raymond called Everyday Writing.



Eduardo Corral gets you up-to-date with his life here with his "Bits" post.



Mary Biddinger finds a K and thanks Verse Daily.



Reb Livingston will get you connected with the Bibliomancy Oracle.



Jeannine Hall Gailey gives you a quick update on the Skagit River Poetry Festival.



My good friend Nancy Canyon who is both a writer and visual artist, has a blog to check out here.  It's called How to Mend.



Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

As a creative person who enjoys eating out, I have to make choices.



Time or money. Time or money.  The question haunts me.



In the end, I try to choose time as much as I can, but I do have to choose money sometimes (especially after terrible decisions that involve coffee and a laptop).



I'm working on my third manuscript tonight and trying to remain hopeful that everything will work out.



This is my creative life-- put it all in a bag and shake.  Hope nothing gets forgotten.  Try for the best, accept good enough.  Then work harder.



I am a working writer, a practicing human.





I wish I knew who drew this.  I see "Ryan" in the skulls... 


Either way, when you sit down to write know that I've been writing too.



Either way, promise me this will all work out.



Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Nikki Giovanni, Patrick Lane, Tony Hoagland




Nikki Giovanni
One of the first panels I went to was with Tony Hoagland, Patrick Lane (a Canadian poet) and Nikki Giovanni.



Nikki was a beautiful ray of sunshine.  When someone's cellphone went off and the audience was scolded for not remembering to turn them off, she said, "That's okay, cellphones and children don't bother me."



Her first point was the importance of archiving in the arts.



I completely relate to this, which is why I take a ridiculous amount of notes and the occasional photo at poetry festivals.  They are a one-time deal.  We are living the history of the writing today.  It's actually pretty magical and amazing if you think about it.  How we romanticize or imagine what it would have been like to hear Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Anne Sexton, Frank O'Hara in person. We have that opportunity right now with our living poets.  And I want to remember what they said and how it was.



Her are some quotes from Nikki Giovanni on archiving:



"Anytime you can, record it...At some point in time, we'll want to return to it."

"The arts has to have an archive."



~



In extending and sharing poetry with others, Tony Hoagland had this to say:



"We are lost, American culture is in f-ing shambles...we have false gods. We live in a highly competitive environment. One thing we can do about it --we have poetry--in our small way, we can bring poems."



He talked about how he (and others) bring poems to dinner parties to share them.  He said it's up to us to spread poetry into the other groups.



~

Patrick Lane talked about how after a poet died (and I hope I'm getting this story right) , the wife of the poet had her family and her husband's friends each memorize 5 of his poems.  That way, each of them had "5 of his poems alive inside them."  And they could share them with others.  By doing that, she felt she was keeping him (and his work) alive and in the world.



Patrick suggested starting with your "own tribe" in sharing poems.  Share a poem with someone you know.



My friend Ronda Broatch, did this for Lent this year.  Each day she shared a poem with someone new.



I will admit, I am probably the worst at sharing poems.  But after hearing this talk, I think I'll try to do so more.



I heard Robert Pinsky recently say that everyone should have a file or folder or notebook that is titled ANTHOLOGY.  Every time you read a poem you love (or like a lot) put it in this file (and date it!)  After a while you'll have an anthology of your life and likes and favorite poems.



~



I'll post more about the Skagit Poetry Festival in the upcoming days.  I have many more pages of notes.



Also, thank you so much to all who wrote words of kindness after my laptop disaster.  As I wrote to my good friend Nancy, "This is why God invented Visa cards..."



And it was interesting to hear how some of you also had similar accidents with your laptops and computers-- yes, please keep the liquid away from your laptop.  



Yes, it totally sucks.  Yes, I hate spending the money I don't have.  But this is life in all it's glory and I am truly thankful:



1) I was able to save all my work including the new manuscript I'm working on (Thank you Apple store for rescuing my hard drive)



2)  it was only a computer I poured coffee on



3)  and for having a Visa card set aside for these types of writerly emergencies.







~





Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Tony read this at the Skagit River Poetry Festival.  The "Dear Abby" part of this poem, blew me away.





Hard Rain



After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall

played softly by an accordion quartet

through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,

I understood there's nothing

we can't pluck the stinger from,



nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.

Even serenity can become something horrible

if you make a commercial about it

using smiling, white-haired people



quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes

in the Everglades, where the swamp has been

drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course

with electrified alligator barriers.



You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy

I heard the therapist say on television

                                                         to the teenage murderer,

About all those people you killed—

You just have to be the best person you can be,



one day at a time—



and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,

because the level of deep feeling has been touched,

and they want to believe that

the power of Forgiveness is greater

than the power of Consequence, or History.



Dear Abby:

My father is a businessman who travels.

Each time he returns from one of his trips,

his shoes and trousers

                                   are covered with blood-

but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;

Should I say something?

                                                       Signed, America.



I used to think I was not part of this,

that I could mind my own business and get along,



but that was just another song

that had been taught to me since birth—



whose words I was humming under my breath,

as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.



"Hard Rain" by Tony Hoagland from  Hard Rain: A Chapbook . 



Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Last Week- this was my motto unfortunately...


Dear Reader,



It's been a week of poetry festivals or small breakdowns and the science of liquid and electricity.  It's been a pheasant that squawks at 6 am and 6 pm, the wild turkeys have been removed from a small town, I shouldn't touch other people's phones, and even though coffee hurt me, I still love it.



Yes, as you can see a lot has been going on.



So here's the last week of confessions.  Hold on to your wig, folks, it was a someone windy ride.  To the confessional--





The Problem with Bad Decisions--



I confess I made an $1800 mistake.  While the rest of you made good decisions last week, I decided that I would bring my metal pot of coffee to my friend Annette's house while we finished up the edits of Crab Creek Review.





For a brief moment, as I grabbed my laptop (a MacBook pro) I thought--I shouldn't put my laptop so close to the coffee in case it spills.  Can you see where this is going?



But I had done it before. I had done it a few times, loaded up the sturdy metal pot of coffee, my laptop, books, and papers, and all has been well in my part of the world.  But not last Wednesday.  Last Wednesday there was a tip in the earth and the coffee pot began to spill all over my laptop unbeknownst to me.  Unbeknownst to me, when I arrived at Annette's house and took my bag with my laptop out it was quite wet as was my laptop.



If you have ever seen a laptop dripping with coffee, it is not artistic or pretty or fascinating.  It is sad sad sad.



One bad decision = a dead laptop.  $1200 to fix it.  $1800 for a new one.  (Insert tears and curse words here.)



I chose the new one.



At Annette's we tried to fix the damage, at one point we had a bag of rice and a little screwdriver, we had my laptop upside down watching the dripping the coffee leave its electronic body.  I kept saying, "I think I'm going to cry."  Annette said, "Well, at least you didn't pour scolding coffee on a baby..."  And it was true.  No one died from this mistake.  No one lost an arm or was scarred for life.  No animals were hurt in my poor choices, no people, I will not have to say to the anyone in the waiting room: I'm sorry, but he didn't make it.



In the end, the only thing hurt from my mistake was my pocketbook and my pride.  Two things that will refill again.



But it was a reminder to me, when you get those little thoughts in your head that *maybe* what you're doing isn't the best idea and you could do something similar that might take a bit more time -- don't half-ass it.  Do it right.  When you hear that little voice saying, "You know, this probably isn't the best idea" - Listen.



~



Why You Shouldn't Be Texting During a Poetry Reading--



I confess I need to learn to keep my hands to myself...



So, I'm sitting next to Jeannine Hall Gailey on Friday night at the Skagit Valley Poetry Reading and she is texting her husband Glenn, who is texting back, "Should u b texting right now?"



I am tired and getting bored of Poet X who is reading poems about his childhood.  I look over at Jeannine's new Microsoft phone and see the texting in process.  As she responds to Glenn's "Should u be texting now?"  She writes "i did" and I reach over and add "sexy stuff." Then I press send.  Ha!  I've amused myself and Glenn will be amused with this funny text.



As I look at Jeannine and smile, I see her Facebook newsfeed come up.  Well, that's weird.



As it turns out, I did not text "i did sexy stuff" to Glenn, but posted it on Facebook as her status.  Holy Inappropriate Status, Batman!



Because Jeannine is just as unfamiliar with her phone as I am, it took a few minutes to figure this out and to realize this was not a private text to her husband and in the meantime, Jeannine's status is beginning to get "Likes."



I think Jeannine's exact words were "Get it off!" and "My grandmother is on Facebook!"



Poet X began to read poems about an abusive father while I was trying to hold in my nervous laughter while sitting in the audience trying to delete "i did sexy stuff" from Jeannine's status.  2 more "Likes."  At this point, I pretend to be crying over his poems because I'm acting like such an arse.



Finally after not being able to delete it from her phone, I have Jeannine sign into my Facebook app on my iPhone where I know where the delete button is.  By the time we got it off, Jeannine had about 5 Likes, a few from people she didn't know (and people I think she should defriend immediately for liking that bizarre status).



She was also very concerned that despite her status said "i did sexy stuff" - it was also lacking capitalization and punctuation.  This is what I like about my writer friends, they are more embarrassed by lack of punctuation and capitalization, then content--though I know in a million years that would *never* be Jeannine's status...well, unless I was the one who was holding her phone.



Oh and "i did sexy stuff" became our motto for the weekend.  And I am still laughing about it. (Sorry, J9!)



~



Tony Hoagland's Wine



I confess that is not a metaphor.



On Sunday morning, I took a 3 hour workshop with Tony Hoagland.  He introduced me to a new poet, Judith Taylor who wrote the book Curios.  All morning we wrote sentences in similar styles to poetsL Frank O'Hara, Louise Gluck, Spencer Reese.



I had told myself I was not going to share anything because I hate sharing at random workshops, but the way the workshop was set up was we had to go around and each say a sentence we wrote based on the directions we gave us.  When no one before me said "Pass" - I knew this was part of the deal.



Lana Hechtman Ayers had the best sentence I've ever heard, but I won't put it here in case she wants to use it in a poem.  Mine got some laughter, which made me pleased.



After the workshop, Tony walks up to Lana with an opened bottle of wine (I'm guessing he started it but couldn't bring it on the plane) and says it was for having the best line of the day.  Lana said she doesn't drink wine, so as runner-up for best line, the wine was given to me.  Awesome.



My line?  Actually a couplet:



I come from a town with too many trampolines.

Women are always jumping from husband to husband to wife.



I have never won wine at a poetry workshop.  I hope this is a good sign of what's to come and may it never come anywhere near my laptop.



Amen.







Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Bob Hicok, Lorraine Healy & my knee




So I've just returned from the Skagit Poetry Festival.



I always return inspired and ready to live my life as a poet to the best of my ability...or something like that.



The Skagit Festival is rarely recorded, so it's a one-time deal.  If you miss it, you miss it.  If you don't take notes, then you have what you have in your memory.  I have a terrible memory so I take massive amounts of notes (and direct quotes) because I know when I get home, I'll have forgotten everything.



This is good for you as I tend to post these notes and quotes here, so even if you didn't make Skagit this year, you can at least get a taste of it.  (And if you do ever get the chance to come--do!  It's amazing and only every other spring.  So 2014 will be the next one.)



The first session I went to was Poems as Weapons, Poems as Prayers with Bob Hicok and Lorraine Healy.  Immediately when I began I knew I wanted to be somewhere else and that I should have gone with my first choice on Visual Art.  However, I told myself--you are where you are, so there's a reason you're here (philosophical Dr. Seuss talk).



Neither poet was entirely clear what "poems as weapons" were.  Lorraine had political poetry she read and Bob read some poems from his book--all which were fantastic.



Some quotes I wrote down from the talk was:



"First do no harm" --both Bob and Lorraine agreed this was the #1 rule when teaching.



Regarding writing poetry--

"As a shy person, I can be larger socially in poems..."  Bob Hicok



He talked about how he can speak for others.



He read his poem "Constitution 3.0" that considers the idea that "Corporations are people now."  It's hilariously funny and poignant.



After the reading I ran into Elizabeth Austen and we were able to spend some time together, in my mind, that is why I was meant to be at the reading.



This session was the one I took the least amount of notes because they mostly read poems.  I like poems (obviously), but when I have the chance to hear the thoughts, process, and ideas behind a poet, I enjoy that.  I also think it ended 20 minutes early, which was weird.



Tomorrow for Confession Tuesday, I'll post some more plus how I made an $1800 mistake.



More soon!







Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com

Check out Superstition Review to see my poem (and others)!  They are a wonderful magazine with some really incredible writing and interviews.



Click here for my poem.



By the way, I'm just back from the Skagit River Poetry Festival and I'll have all the lowdown on the poets and events.



I'm really good at taking notes and getting quotes, so more of that coming soon!

Kelli Russell Agodon
www.agodon.com