Sandra Beasley's Blog, page 26

Odds & Ends

A few carryovers from 2010:

Though I've shared the full-length interview I filmed with Poets & Writers for their 40th Anniversary, I'd never linked to the amalgamate video that they showed at their big gala dinner, which I got to attend this past March. The P&W folks just posted it a few weeks ago, so it is linked below. To be sitting in the ballroom of Manhattan's Capitale and see my face pop up alongside the talking heads of A. M Homes, Roxana Robinson, Jonathan Franzen, Peter Straub...to look over at the neighboring table and see Tom Wolfe (in his white ice-cream suit) watching the screen on which I was yapping away...holy hell. One of the highlights of my life.



Also, Square Books just announced their list of 2010 Bestselling Books, and I Was the Jukebox snuck intot he mix--spot #100, to be exact. For a poetry book to clamber its way up among the Barry Hannahs and the Curtis Wilkies is kind of miraculous. I love those guys. I love that town.

I go to New York tomorrow to meet the publicist who has been assigned by Crown. She works on books by Frances Mayes! I vote that if my memoir merits a sequel, it be something like "How I Survived Eating Pasta in Every Town of Italy." The research would be brutal, sure, but somehow I would summon the strength to carry on.

Kauai Diaries

A typical shoreline in Kauai. And by typical, I mean "extraordinary."
The hurricanes of '82 and '92 liberated roosters from the farms. They now roam free, cawing at all hours, the prettiest pests you have ever seen.
The Kilauea Lighthouse, which had a nearby farmer's market that yielded a fantastic meal of roasted Opa with chives, island rainbow chard and hen-of-the-woods mushrooms sauteed with local ginger and garlic, and slices of fresh pineapple...
The incredible Napali coast! Just one of the waterfalls.
And another, nested within a shoreline cave.
One of my oldest friends, who helped me land in Hawai'i for New Year's Eve: "Eric, if only we could feature your glorious individually-toed shoes..."
"Did you really just do that?"
"Yes, you really just did that."
The beach at the St. Regis hotel in Princeville...by day.
The beach at the St. Regis...by dusk. Made the mile-and-a-half walk home worth it!
O, Kauai. May I someday return to you with a love in hand. In the meantime I am grateful, grateful, grateful.

Happy New Year, Nick Demske

I'm in Hawaii. Specifically, I'm in a Bali Hai Villa on the island of Kauai. It's a long story. No, actually, the story is a short one: I have amazing and generous friends. In this surreally lackadaisical and sunny setting, where palm trees sway and roosters run wild (liberated from farms by the hurricanes of '82 and '92), I'm trying to keep a vague handle on life at home. In DC, there is ice on the ground and first-pass proofs of DKTBG are waiting to be returned by January 11.

Must... maintain... writerly... discipline. Must stay on top of emails. Must continue to arrange spring readings. Must try, and fail, to tan. So as a symbolic gesture I brought along my copy of the latest Poets & Writers, "The Inspiration Issue." Yesterday, while watching a light rain fall and sipping a pineapple cocktail, I turned to the 6th Annual Debut Poets Roundup.

As Kevin Larimer's intro mentions, the roundup has a familiar rhythm by now: always a poet whose book got picked up on a first send-out, a poet whose MS was chosen after decades of submitting, one poet who focuses on craft, one who treats verse as play, and so on. I always read the feature with a mix of nostalgia, envy, and nausea. I remember the bridesmaid years. Trying different styles, different niches, ordering and re-ordering, waiting for that first big break, watching as others got theirs: God, how awful it was. And yet, how liberating--but appreciated only in hindsight.

Anyway, one of this year's profiled poets is Nick Demske. I've never met him. To be honest, never heard of him before. Age: 27. Residence: Racine, Wisconsin. Graduate Degree: MA in library and information science from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Job: "I mostly shelve books and do other menial circulation tasks at the Racine Public Library." Award: Winner of the 2010 Fence Modern Poetry Series, selected by Joyelle McSweeney. Publisher: Fence Books.

These roundup profiles are not long or substantial texts. Yet there is something about his Q&A on inspiration and advice that is so winning, so poignant, and so simple and honest, that it makes my whole heart smile; it makes me fall in love with poetry all over again. There is importance to this thing we do--and how it affects the lives we live--and I can see it in his answers.

So I'm going to re-type his P&W profile here (with the caveat: go buy a copy of the magazine!), and I'm sure as heck gonna track down his book to read.

NICK DEMSKE
Book: NICK DEMSKE

Time Spent Writing the Book: Two Years.

Number of Contests Entered: "About ten. I feel lucky the number is so small."

Sample: "In every sumo, there's a little bulimic awaiting a glorious purge." ("Tragic Songstress")

Source of Inspiration: "My mother died of breast cancer before I was half done with the manuscript. That was a big inspiration. The book is, in part, about bad form. The most blatant way that's enacted in the book is through the form of the poems: They're all loose sonnets--love poems, but their content actively resists the form. Words are cut in half to meet rhyme schemes. The line lengths themselves are so long that the book has to be printed sideways--in landscape, rather than portrait orientation. On many levels, the book is many repetitions of forms that are inappropriate for their contents. My mother dying, my lovely mother dying, was largely the inspiration for this. She had a spirit like wildfire, which could brighten anyone she came in contact with. She was smart, insightful; she loved the natural world and she lived the healthiest life of anyone I have ever met. And yet here she was, incoherent, unable to get off the toilet independently, her very own piss a biohazard. She eventually drowned in fluid in her own lungs. The form--her invalid body--was an inappropriate match for her content, that wildfire, her beautiful spirit. It was after this I realized that, in general, the human body is bad form for the human spirit. Bad form. Bad form."

Advice: "Any advice I give in terms of writing could only be the same advice I would give in the more general terms of life: Enjoy yourself, treat people well, don't take writing too seriously, don't take writing too lightly, make friends and loved ones and spend lots of time enjoying that community. Keep your priorities straight."

The photo shows Demske leaning against an anonymous brick wall, in a plain navy t-shirt and a knit green & turquoise cap with Heidi-yarned tassels on either side. Bright smile. He looks a little incredulous at this whole turn of events.

Here's to new authors, new books, new hometowns, new hopes.

Here's to the staff at Poets & Writers for continuing to put out a great magazine, even in an age when magazines feel imperiled.

Here's to 2011, dreams and all.

And here's to you, Nick Demske!

Apply! (Also: Fitch on Franzen) (Also: List-age)

Thanks to Leslie Pietrzyk for a reminder to spread the word about the Jenny McKean Moore FREE Community Workshop, which will be led by Tilar J. Mazzeo in the coming spring semester at George Washington University. Mazzeo, an associate professor at Colby College, is the author of the New York Times bestselling biography The Widow Clicquot and The Secret of Chanel No. 5.

Here's some boilerplate info on the workshop, courtesy of Leslie's blog:


Jenny McKean Moore Applications Due 1/10/11

Come and take part in a semester-long workshop in creative non-fiction—the art of using the strategies of fiction to tell true stories about history, place, and biography. To apply, you do NOT need academic qualifications or publications. The class will be a craft-based workshop that focuses on different approaches to writing biography and autobiography, and it will combine readings, writing exercises, and peer-review of the writing of participants. There are no fees to participate in the class, but you will be responsible for the costs of some photocopies. Students at Consortium schools (including GWU) are not eligible. The Workshop is not open to those who have participated in more than one Jenny McKean Moore Free Community Workshop.

The deadline to apply for the spring session—Tuesdays, 6-8 PM, January 18-April 19, 2011—is Monday, January 10, 2011.

To apply, please submit a letter of interest and a detailed personal narrative in which you describe your writing projects, your goals for the seminar, and how you hope to benefit from the workshop. A 5-10 page work sample may also be included. Include your name, address, home/work telephone numbers, and email address.

All applicants will be contacted by email by January 14.

Send your applications (by Monday, January 10, 2011) to
JMM Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Department of English
The George Washington University
801 22nd Street NW (Suite 760)
Washington, DC 20052

Personal testimony: I took a JMM workshop with poet Dana Roeser, the 2005-2006 resident, and had an incredible experience. Many key poems from Theories of Falling were conceived in that class--including the leadoff poem, "Cherry Tomatoes," "You," and "Drink"--and made connections with fellow DC poets that sustain me to this day. Having graduated from American University with my MFA in 2004, that was my first year of withdrawal from the structured feedback of university-workshops. This is a vital opportunity and a gift to the community--take advantage of it!

*

Through some random blog-hopping I came upon Janet Fitch's blog. I'm always delighted to find a high-profile author making the time to write online. But in particular, Fitch's entries are substantial and insightful. Check out one September entry, reviewing a Los Angeles reading and Q&A featuring Jonathan Franzen. An excerpt:

The selection he read was funny and mean… his tools for understanding where we are in America in our time are the satirist's… and whether this is my favorite kind of writing (it isn't) or not, the suppleness of the prose and the precision won my admiration.

Then afterwards, he settled down to an interesting, awkward conversation with Meghan Daum, author (Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House) and columnist with the LA Times.

I would not have wanted to change places with her. He is a difficult interviewee–though I don't think he means to be, he just very clearly struggles to speak with precision, authenticity and honesty, and is embarrassed and uncomfortable with anything that would tempt another writer to cozy up to an audience or be a "good boy" for the interviewer–the very trait that caused his Oprah troubles to begin with.

We are not used to seeing difficult, authentic, often awkwardly honest writers on the national stage. We expect prominent writers to be performing seals to a certain degree, dealing with interviews and audiences with the confidence and aplomb of pitchmen selling miracle floorwaxes at the County Fair. So to see someone struggling to be honest and authentic, rather than charming and appealing, is a lot like catching an appearance of Hailey's Comet.

Find the rest of the post here.

*

I was so happy to see I Was the Jukebox show up on a few more end-of-year lists, including one at The Millions (thanks Danielle!) and on the blog of Brian Spears, poetry editor for The Rumpus. And you can never go wrong with a thumbs-up from the Literary Mojito Society.

Miami! New York! Dallas! Germany! Pondering a heckuvalotta travel in 2011. Announcements soon~

New York, New York

Drive to the city through Saturday's sunrise--my dad behind the wheel, my mother with her cooler of sodas and berries, my sister asleep in the backseat beside me. Check into the St. Giles, up by Lexington & 39th, with its view of the Chrysler building. Gawk at the fossils and geodes of Astro Gallery. Follow the storylines of window displays at Macy's, Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue (which for once really is on Fifth Avenue). Prowl the holiday shops in Bryant Park, watch the ice skaters. Drink margaritas made with hunks of watermelon and split the marinated-eggplant and lentil entree at Toloache. The Lion King, complete with an elephant clambering down the theater aisle. The Abstract Expressionism exhibit at MOMA. More walking Fifth Avenue, this time with a bag of roasted chestnuts in hand. Rockefeller Plaza. "A Tuba Christmas." Convince my mother to try a martini at the Algonquin Hotel. Break the news to my dad that I'll be in Mississippi come December 25. Max out on the luxury of a television in the room: watch The Town, then Inception. Snack on hunks of Zabar's sesame-coated baguette, purchased at Grand Central Station and slathered in harissa and balsamic vinegar. Take my mother up to Crown's office and introduce her to my editor, then the head of publicity. Watch as my mother deftly finagles a copy of a Frances Mayes book instead of the tome with a pink breast-cancer ribbon embossed on the cover that they are trying to give her. Head down to Union Square's farmer's market. Slivers of upstate apples. Tea to sniff. A bouquet of dried blooms to brighten my studio in the coming weeks, when I won't be in one place long enough to buy fresh flowers. The long drive home, sun blazing through the windshield as we race down the turnpike, my sister once more curled up and asleep in the backseat beside me. There's never time to make these trips. There's always time.

Great Writers of DC

As I write this I am listening to the Schubert Ensemble of London play Dohnanyi's Piano Quintet #1. Sipping Pumpkin Spice coffee. Watching, through the glass doors of my balcony, the first snows flurry sideways over the neighborhood of Woodley Park. Everyone's chimneys have come to life.

Last night I heard Dana Gioia read at the Phillips Collection. He was clearly delighted to get to be a poet again, instead of having to shoulder the burden of being an Official Government Representative. I've always had a soft spot for Gioia's work. He started a lot of great programs during his tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts--including Poetry Out Loud, The Big Read, and Operation Homecoming.

It's easy to make the snarky presumption that those who come to poetry from successful business backgrounds (like Gioia, who most famously worked for Jell-o) prize polish over aesthetic grace. I don't think that's true; I think you can be savvy without being a sell-out. Ron Slate spent years in corporate communications, and his work in The Incentive of the Maggot and The Great Wave is incredible--supple, engaging, philosophically bold.

The strongest poem we heard from Gioia last night was "The Angel with the Broken Wing," which first appeared in the September 2010 issue of POETRY.

THE ANGEL WITH THE BROKEN WING

I am the Angel with the Broken Wing,
The one large statue in this quiet room.
The staff finds me too fierce, and so they shut
Faith's ardor in this air-conditioned tomb.

The docents praise my elegant design
Above the chatter of the gallery.
Perhaps I am a masterpiece of sorts—
The perfect emblem of futility.

Mendoza carved me for a country church.
(His name's forgotten now except by me.)
I stood beside a gilded altar where
The hopeless offered God their misery.

I heard their women whispering at my feet—
Prayers for the lost, the dying, and the dead.
Their candles stretched my shadow up the wall,
And I became the hunger that they fed.

I broke my left wing in the Revolution
(Even a saint can savor irony)
When troops were sent to vandalize the chapel.
They hit me once—almost apologetically.

For even the godless feel something in a church,
A twinge of hope, fear? Who knows what it is?
A trembling unaccounted by their laws,
An ancient memory they can't dismiss.

There are so many things I must tell God!
The howling of the dammed can't reach so high.
But I stand like a dead thing nailed to a perch,
A crippled saint against a painted sky.

-Dana Gioia

I was a little dismayed by his answer to the final question of the night, though. Someone asked if he had written about Washington, DC. No, he said. [Long pause.] But he might once he got back to California. To paraphrase, he said that DC is a bad place for poets. His theory is that our job is to be hyper-attuned to the world around us, and in a city so obsessed with political power ("60,000 alpha males, and 30,000 women who want to be alpha males"), our aesthetic antennae are overwhelmed by the static of constant wheeling and dealing.

"In a capital city this great--and it is the greatest in the world, I think--no great writer has come out of Washington. Now, you have to ask yourself, why is that?"

Ouch. Sterling Brown? Edward P. Jones? Ann Beattie? George Pelecanos? I suspect he realized mid-comment that he may have been a little harsh. He clarified; there's no writer to DC as Faulkner was to Oxford, Mississippi, he said. Aw, to have Oxford used as the contrast. Salt in the wound!

He clarified again; it isn't that there isn't great writing going on now, he said, it's just that all that energy goes into journalism.

I like it when someone says something strong enough to be agreed OR disagreed with. That's why I think an essay like "Can Poetry Matter?" is valuable, even if I take issue with some of its premises and conclusions. But honest opinion is a double-edged sword, and last night, sitting in the audience of the Phillips, I felt cut in two.

No great writer has come out of Washington?

Cover-age

I have water again! Laundry! Clean dishes! And that's all we'll say about that. 

Thanks to Kristin Berkey-Abbott for including I Was the Jukebox in her year-end list of "Favorite Poetry Books of 2010." Kristin was kind enough to say the book offers "poems that animate the inanimate, from sand to eggplants to jukeboxes, poems that took my breath away, so unique was the approach of this volume." I'm proud to be listed alongside fellow Norton-folk Beth Ann Fennelly and Kimiko Hahn. 
My friend Bernie Geyer is leading workshops at the Writer's Center in early 2011. So if you have some downtime and want to treat yourself, I highly recommend working with her. She's smart, practical, fun, and savvy about moving your writing forward on both the craft and professional levels. A rundown of her classes can be found here. 
Now, as promised...meet the cover of Don't Kill the Birthday Girl:


Crown has done a great job. I've gotten a sneak peek at the innards--the font choices for headers and body text, the formatting--and the pages, while easy on the eye, have such exuberance in their design. And yep, it's up on Amazon too. 

2010 has held travel and adventure and personal earthquakes, heartache and heart renewal. I've lived five years in one. Somehow, amidst it all, this book came to be. In the coming months you'll see shifts in my website and blog, as I open the doors a little wider and welcome the communities of memoirists and those affected by food allergies. 

This Chick will always Dig Poetry, first and foremost. But here's to change...

Dry

If I've been quiet, it's because I am experiencing the grim reality of DC's public utilities: 72 straight hours of no water (an intensification of a week's worth of low pressure and brief outages), and WASA doesn't seem to be treating it as any real kind of emergency. We've had a steady stream of workmen, each starting from scratch on their level of info, each progressively more shocked at how long we've been waiting.


When a WASA truck pulled up in front of our building last night, an email went out to everyone saying, in essence, "Anybody home--go outside! Surround 'em!" As I stood by with my fellow seventh-floor residents, the guy pleaded into his phone, "Look, you gotta do something for these people. They look like they want to stab me right now."


It would be comical if it weren't gross. I've lived in the city long enough that I can survive the occasional dry spell. You buy a jug for the kitchen, a jug for the bathroom, you put your hair in a ponytail and you deal. But this is somewhat frightening, to be so at the mercy of the system and to have the system just not give a damn. Many of the building's residents have fled to other homes, which I'll be doing soon. But, oh, how I wanted to be able to nest after so many weeks on the road.


In brighter news, I sent off edits for the book. We're at the stage of making changes only to the hard copy of Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, and the next time I see the text it should be as a bound galley. Hooray! I'm going to share the cover art tomorrow, since I'd prefer it not get conflated with the post in which I bitch & moan about being grimy.


This, on the other hand, can overcome even the grimiest of moods:

The Shackles of Meat

Day four of waking up and going to sleep in the same bed, for the first time in over six weeks: home sweet home. I am slowly weaning myself off the last of the Thanksgiving leftovers. One lone slice of turkey waits in my fridge, with its bed of quinoa and a handful of spicy salad greens; one peanut-butter cookie is left, wrapped in tinfoil. Then it's back to the off-the-road diet.

A trio of poets came over last night, including one we needed to toast for his recent NEA fellowship, and a few loved ones. Given the perpetual email/phone-tag associated with getting together in DC, it was nothing short of a miracle to have a half-dozen people gather around a table with no fuss. I used to live in a dramatic two-story apartment in Dupont Circle, and one of the hard things about leaving was feeling like I was giving up the ability to host. But with enough candles lit, a few extra folding chairs, and a pot of apple cider on the stove warming with cinnamon and spiced rum, this place has the potential for its own (little) parties. It's sappy, but it's true: what matters is the intimacy and good nature of the people at hand. And hey, my headboard makes an excellent coat rack.

Being in one place has given me back the luxury of reading, and so I wolfed down the July/August, October, and December issues of POETRY. Though the July/August issue includes some good poems (I was pleasantly riled up by this one by Arthur Vogelsang), anytime your "Letters to the Editor" are from Stephen Burt, Terrance Hayes, and Daisy Fried, the prose is where it's at. There's a potent "The View From Here" portfolio in which people from fields outside literary academia reflect on the power of poetry within their lives. The standouts are by cartoonist Lynda Barry ("Poetry Is a Dumb-Ass Spider")  and Burundi Parliamentarian Etienne Ndayishimiye ("Dust and Stones," translated by David Shook); plus, there is probably someone in your life who loves sports, is trying to love poetry for your sake, and would welcome seeing the contribution from basketball coach John Wooden ("The Great Scorer"). Michael Dirda's long review of Michael Donaghy's Collected Poems and The Shape of the Dance: Essays, Interviews and Digressions was a truly thoughtful look at Donaghy's legacy, and illuminated his appeal in a way I had never fully understood before. I hope Dirda, whose work usually turns up in places like The Washington Post and The American Scholar, visits these pages again.

Also in the July/August issue, Robert Pinsky's "Death and the Powers: A Robot Pageant" was...well, it wasn't my favorite. This futuristic robot-themed libretto was written in conjunction with composer Tod Machover, who is at MIT's Media Lab; I gave up when Simon proclaimed "Yes come to the light from the meat!" It was as if Ray Bradbury had dropped acid. I did appreciate the revelation, in the follow-up Q&A, that Robert Pinsky wrote for Broderbund Software in the mid-'80s. I suspect his work was limited to Mindwheel, but I'd love to think the former Poet Laureate gave us those ACME-Detective-Acency dialogues in Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Or that he's the mastermind behind Myst. (Admittedly, storylines were less extensive for Lode Runner and Mavis Bacon Teaches Typing.)

Anyway, Pinsky says he's drafting an adaptation/translation project in blank verse for the Shakespeare Theatre Company, here in DC. I'd be interested to see that, when the time comes. I do admire his work, but this piece--a strange mix of satire and melodrama, in which the literal trade of flesh for machinery symbolizes our larger surrender of humanity, with Greek-chorus cameos by the United Way and the Untied Nations--just wasn't doing it for me.

The editors consistently do a great job with their Q&As; the questions are usually insightful, and do not pander. The brand-new December issue is entirely devoted to them, an annual feature, and I really got into the dialogues with Michael Robbins, Jane Hirshfield, and Sine Queryas. That has nothing to so with which poems I liked best--I think my favorite was Charles Baxter's "Please Marry Me," which is exciting since Baxter's usually a fiction writer. And in the case of Robbins, it's not as if we're simpatico in worldview: his tone and politics can veer toward the grating. ("Whole Foods, that union-busting paragon of "new age" liberalism, is a metonym for an entire parascientific culture that makes light of transcendent experience." Oh. Good to know!) But so often poem-specific Q&As feel like nothing more than a defense or decoding of the text at hand, and all three authors escape that. Queryas makes some lovely points about the nature of elegy and asking questions in poems.

All right all right all right, back to work. Getting dressed would be a good first step.

R&R

New York City was lovely but oof, oof, the return trip was brutal! I left my friend Carly's Brooklyn apartment at noon. Once you added up the walk to the subway, the transit to Penn Station, boarding the BoltBus, holiday/rush hour traffic, metro-ing from the DC bus drop, and walking home from Cleveland Park...well, it was eight hours later. All the while hauling a suitcase that has no rolling wheels. Time for a little R&R.

But one of the advantages of sticking around an extra day to hear my friend Erika Meitner read at louderARTS's Bar 13--and she did a fantastic job--was that I also got to have an marketing session with the folks at Crown. There will be news on the DKTBG front soon, including the unveiling of the cover and a book trailer. In the meantime I've got 210 pages of copyediting to do between now and Monday.

Congratulations are in order on two fronts:

1) The amazing DC foodwriter Tim Carman (longtime reporter and "Young and Hungry" blogger for the Washington City Paper) is making the jump to the Washington Post. Yay, Tim! Some of my favorite essays of his include a tribute to the handcraft of dim sum, an investigation on how not to hire a chef, and an ode to intelligent drinking.

...also, of course, there's a lot of buzz in the poetry world right now over the announcement of the latest round of NEA Fellowship winners. I'm particularly thrilled to see Jericho Brown, Blas Falconer, Anna Journey, Joshua Mehigan, Thorpe Moeckel, and Allison Titus make the cut.

Are you feeling generous because of the holidays? Check out Todd Boss's MOTION POEMS project ("Where big poems meet the big screen"), here , and consider contributing to the cause of supporting artists and videographers in their creative work devoted to the interpretation/promotion of poetry.
& Have a fabulous Thanksgiving! My cousins will be frying not one but two turkeys--one Cajun-spiced and one, er, classic. As classic as a deep-fried bird can be.