Deborah Ager's Blog, page 13

What We’re Reading: Lee Upton’s Civilian Histories

It’s thrilling to have a new poem from Lee Upton in our latest issue, but of course it’s not the same as reading her work in book form, where the arc of her imagination has more space to shine in its uniqueness and rigor. These last few weeks I’ve been spending some time with Upton’s earlier poems, particularly those in her fourth book, Civilian Histories (UGA Press, 2000). There is something serious and high-minded, ancient and cosmopolitan, in that title, a sense of cultivated energy that seems particularly appropriate for this restless and far-reaching collection. These are poems of high-octane language and imagery, but that vigor also extends deeper into the turns of tone, purpose, and sensibility from one poem to the next.

Lee Upton: photo by Cece Ziolkowski

Many of these poems are tender, confessional. In “Asiatic Lily,” for instance, the title once again does much: exotic and alluring, it introduces the central image of the flower, which the speaker’s daughter brings to her after forgetting she was not supposed to pick it. It also reflects qualities of the relationship the flower comes to represent as a metaphor. As we glide and catch in the poet’s meditation, the ending explodes with the lines, “Why would I have cared // for such a small affection as the lily, why when / my life’s love brought it to me.” This revelation, at once obvious and shocking, seems to have the intoxicating power of the flower that occasions the emotional response, reversal, and final epiphany of this poem.

Other poems are narrative and surreal, reminiscent of James Tate’s most interesting work. In one, a family tree grows downward in Hell. Others still are dramatic monologues, one in the voice of a drug addict who finally accuses us, “You will never know how to feel good.” One poem takes an epigraph from Emily Dickinson and adopts Dickinson’s voice with remarkable facility.

Formally, everything seems available to Upton, from occasional rhyme and refrain to one-line stanzas and brief, italicized lines. Remarkably that range strikes me not simply as stylistic gymnastics, but as an expression of what Denise Levertov termed organic form. I found myself engaged by both the poems of unashamed, undressed emotion and those lyrics whose unsentimental imagination stemmed from more detached and distant speakers. This is a book by a teeming and elegant mind.

—Jasmine V. Bailey

32 Poems 10.1 Live and in Color

32 Poems 10.1 arrived from the printer this afternoon and the new issue (with a gorgeous Dirk Fowler cover) looks to be one our best. We’ll have it in the mail to subscribers and contributors tomorrow morning, but if you’re not already on our list, it’s not too late to secure a copy of your own. Follow this link to subscribe now, and we’ll one get into your hands while the paper is still warm.

What We’re Reading: Bruce Bond’s Blind Rain

One of the poets featured in the upcoming issue of 32 Poems  is Bruce Bond, whose 2008 Blind Rain (LSU Press) explores the tragi-magical facts of memory and departure. In our age that valorizes emotional hardiness, it is often only under the influence of good writing about loss that readers explore the fullness of their own griefs. That is the experience I had of the beautiful, careful, and surprising poems in this book. Remembering my grandmother in each touch of the poet’s hand to his subjects, I found the way I wanted to touch my memories of her.

The losses in this book are several, including a group of poems in memory of musicians. Several others recall the poet’s parents, to whom the book is dedicated. Bond, a classical and jazz musician himself, gives us a mother whose hands wear music as gloves and whose body becomes a radio. The father he paints is both the young warrior in Europe fighting for the flag and the dying man whom a petrified son finds already unreachable. The extent to which those we love give form and meaning to the universe we inhabit is trenchantly and compellingly explored in each of these poems. The poet’s voice, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, is placed and displaced in the universe by the departure of these important figures. Bond writes, “I eat, sleep, move about, / forever losing my place in the sky,” dramatizing a displacement of the self that seems also to upset the structure of the universe. That the world can seem meaningless when those who crafted that meaning depart it, forces the voice back into a one-sided dialogue, talking to the man in the hospital bed and all those already gone. Another poem ends, “as if the silence / of things were their readiness, their ears,” and we can feel, and finally understand, that the silence of the loved one amputates the self’s comprehension of the world.

Read this book for the beauty of its rhetorical observations, the surprising turns of its language and images, or if you’re having a hard time, have ever had a hard time, and want proof that it is universal, and can be beautiful.

—Jasmine V. Bailey

Introducing Jasmine V. Bailey

As we prepare to launch 32 Poems 10.1 next week, one of our editors, Jasmine V. Bailey, has been meditating on the larger projects of our contributors. A former O’Connor Fellow whose own book Alexandria is forthcoming from Carnegie Melon, Jasmine will be sharing some of the fruits of her reading with us here on the 32 Poems Blog. We want not only to promote our contributors, but also to engage in an intimate discussion of their work and our engagement with it as readers. That’s a conversation we hope all our readers will take part in. Please join me in welcoming Jasmine.

—George David Clark

32 Poems & Smartish Pace Reading

March 1, 2012

9:00 pm – 10:00 pm

LOCATION: Topics Cafe, 2122 N Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60614

COST: Free

32 Poems and Smartish Pace present contributors Aaron Belz (SP), Todd Boss (SP), Geoff Brock (32), Carolina Ebeid (32), Luke Johnson (32), Rebecca Lindenberg (SP), Erika Meitner (32), Mary Quade (SP), Natalie Shapero (32) & Eric Smith (SP) in a battle royale of heavyweight poets. Join us for drinks, verse, and a celebration of two of the nation's leading journals of poetry.

Matt O’Donnell: An Interview with the From the Fishouse Creator

I (Deborah) had the pleasure of interviewing Matt O’Donnell via email about the From the Fishouse website. I’ve always admired people who started unique web projects related to poetry— No Tell Motel, Anti-, Verse Daily, CellPoems, etc.

1. What led you to start Fishousepoems.org?

Fishouse started entirely by accident. It started as a way for me to memorize poems on my commute to work. I asked my friend Camille Dungy if she’d record for me. Honestly, at this point, I forget exactly how we came to it, but we decided it’d be cool to get a couple of recorders and send them around to other poets to do the same thing. Then we thought, well, other people will want to hear these recordings, too, so let’s post them on a website. That was 2004, and it was still a little unusual to have online recordings of poets, especially poets early in their careers.

The idea went from a personal project to public one pretty quickly. In just a couple of months, I was filling out IRS applications to set up a non-profit so that we’d be eligible for donations and grants to fund the project, and we were putting together by-laws and a board of directors.

From the start, the purpose of the Fishouse has been two-fold: to give poets early in their careers—“emerging” poets-—a platform for their work; and to give poetry fans and teachers and students the opportunity to hear poets reading their own work.

We needed a way to limit the overwhelming number of poets to choose to record, and we figured that more established poets have more outlets for their work. We had to come up with a definition of “emerging,” and Camille and I settled on poets with fewer than two books at the time of submission to Fishouse. As time has passed, of course, poets we recorded as “emerging” have now “emerged,” and so Fishouse serves as an archive in this way. Also, there are special “bonus” poets on the site, poets well outside the “emerging” definition, who I record and post when a chance arises.

2. What past experience (work or otherwise) helped you in creating the website? What did you need to learn?

If it weren’t for my day job at Bowdoin College (in the Office of Communications), I’m not sure I would have been able to get Fishouse going or maintain it if I did. Not to mention that our original web designer was a Bowdoin colleague, and without him, I don’t know who’d have created the first version of the site into a decent website (although, we have that problem now, as that volunteer designer left and we’re trying to figure out how to fund a full site redesign). The basic HTML I learned from working on the Bowdoin magazine website helped enormously. Additionally, a Bowdoin alum, who was at the time an editor at the tech site CNET and had recently written a book about digital audio, recommended the original FH recording devices to me. And, lately, there’s a big crossover in the use of social media with my day job and Fishouse’s.

3. For those who might not be familiar with the Fishouse, could you include a selection of poets you feel are representative of your editorial taste? I know this is a hard question to answer.

Well, one of the greatest things about Fishouse—and a key to its success—is that it’s not simply my editorial taste. I’ll answer in a bit more detail below about how the selection process works. In short, I don’t make all the selections, so the site isn’t limited by my aesthetic. I definitely have personal favorites, but so many favorites I can’t name them. One poem we often hold up as an example is “To Whoever Set my Truck on Fire” by Steve Scafidi. And, if you take a look at the Fishouse printed anthology, the poems we collected there are all ones that we felt represented Fishouse in its mission to highlight the connection between the poem in the air and the poem on the page and in a wide range of styles (culled just from our first two years).

4. What are your recommendations for others who may want to start an online poetry project?

Don’t!

But, if you must, you should treat it as a business. Come up with a business plan, a workflow plan, and know your goals, short and long-term. Know what else is out there doing what you might want to do, the “competition,” and figure out a way to distinguish yourself.

With so much poetry available online, I think new online projects need to be niche, need to have a well-defined focus. Fishouse concentrates on audio from poets early in their careers—“emerging poets,” who we define as poets with fewer than two published collections at the time of submission. The focus on audio from emerging poets sets Fishouse apart enough to give our brand, if you will, meaning.

One of the things I wish I’d done better is plan for the long-term future of Fishouse. Nearly eight years down the road, we don’t have a firm plan for my successor. As far as I’m concerned, Fishouse won’t truly be successful until it lives beyond me, beyond my daily involvement, and I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately working on those plans.

5. Creating book trailers and audio is becoming more commonplace. Do you have technical tips for poets, or others, who would like to create a video or record themselves reading?

I’m sure the common computer user has as much technical skill, if not more, than I do—my nine-year-old daughter seems hardwired for it. The first time she picked up a touch screen at age five, she knew exactly how to navigate it.

I’d love to learn how really edit audio at a high level. I know the basics. Just enough to get a relatively clean track. But, in order to keep posting new material on the site, keep the admin going, I haven’t had the time to study more complex audio editing. Well, that’s to say, I haven’t made the time. Because it’s just spoken word, there’s not much more I need to do to the audio than clean up some background noise, so I figure it’s better to get more voices up on the site than to spend my limited time on audio methods that aren’t absolutely necessary. Given a do-over, though, I’d learn as much as I could right from the start, when I was spending time on setting up Fishouse.

The most basic element of getting a good recording at home is to find a quiet place with little background noise and to be wary of things that make noise while you’re reading—the computer, a squeaky chair, pages turning. Sometimes, background noise provides ambiance and context, and I like it in a recording—an urban poet with the street noise in the background; Steve Scafidi’s chickens because the quietest place he could find to record was his hen house—but I find that loud floor creaks, door slams, paper rustlings, and electronic clicks are distracting.

The only other thing I’d offer for advice is to practice with the recording device to determine what settings give you the best sound, and at what distance from the microphone.

6. What is the selection process for inclusion in the Fishouse?

This is a question I’m often asked, especially because Fishouse is closed to unsolicited submissions.

The selection process began organically and grew into a system with benefits that we’d never imagined, and that process is largely responsible for our success. We ask each poet we publish to recommend two additional (emerging) poets whose work they’d like to see on Fishouse. While this method seems ripe for nepotism, it’s worked in just the opposite fashion, giving Fishouse a much wider scope and range of work than it would otherwise enjoy. We’ve published more than 200 poets, so we effectively have around 100 editors, and growing.

Fishouse doesn’t simply feature my aesthetic as editor, it features work by poets across a broad spectrum and, in this way, really represents the contemporary landscape. Because of this, we draw a wide range of listeners. It is in large part what makes Fishouse work.

From a practical standpoint, I simply don’t have time to wade through unsolicited submissions. I can barely keep up with our current system. But, even if I did have time (or say, a staff), at this point, I’m not sure I’d change anything. It’s turned out to work so well this way.

I think that poets hold Fishouse to high standards and recommend other poets who’s work they feel deserves (for lack of a better word) space on the site. If Rigoberto González feels strongly enough about a poet’s work to recommend him or her to me, I trust his judgment. He’s the editor in that case.

When choosing a group of poets to send recorders, I go through the list of recommended poets chronologically and try to pick and choose a balanced lineup of male and female writers from a variety of recommending poets, so that we get a good mix of work with each round of postings.

7. What is your advice for balancing Fishouse, your day work, and your writing?

It’s almost never in balance. I really only have early mornings to work on Fishouse, with the odd weekend day. I’m either working on Fishouse almost exclusively every morning, or not working on it at all.

And, when working on Fishouse, I’m either doing editorial or administrative work. If I’m posting new poems, I’m not giving the Board direction, not working on fundraising, or site redesign, not answering emails or communicating with constituents. Because my time is so limited, when I’m doing one of those things, I’m not doing any of the others, and it takes all of them together to make Fishouse successful. That I can’t really keep up speaks greatly to the work that we feature on the site—it remains popular, and continues to grow, even though I can’t cultivate it as it truly needs, because the strength of the material continues to draw visitors.

I basically stopped writing—no, I did stop writing—my own poems as Fishouse grew. Immersed in so much good poetry, I’ve never been more inspired to write, but I’ve never had so little time. That’s it with writers, right? Those who succeed simply make time and those who don’t use it as an excuse. That’s certainly some of my problem. After being away from it for so long, I’m afraid to face a blank page again. And, on top of that, it’s intimidating to be so close to so much good work. I’ve concluded, at this point, that it’s more important for me to work on Fishouse than it is to write my own poems. There’s enough good poetry out there, and there’s enough bad poetry already, too. Maybe one day I’ll feel a burning desire again, but right now, I’d rather spend that time on Fishouse.

However, just doing that is becoming increasingly difficult. As my daily job at Bowdoin includes more and more social media work, it becomes less 9:00-5:00 and more around the clock, seven days a week. I lose many mornings now to day job duties that I didn’t have even just a year or so ago.

So Fishouse and the day job, on top of family life, and outside pursuits, definitely make it a juggling act. But, it’s not juggling chainsaws, and I try to keep that in perspective.

Matt O'Donnell: An Interview with the From the Fishouse Creator

I (Deborah) had the pleasure of interviewing Matt O'Donnell via email about the From the Fishouse website. I've always admired people who started unique web projects related to poetry— No Tell Motel, Anti-, Verse Daily, CellPoems, etc.

1. What led you to start Fishousepoems.org?

Fishouse started entirely by accident. It started as a way for me to memorize poems on my commute to work. I asked my friend Camille Dungy if she'd record for me. Honestly, at this point, I forget exactly how we came to it, but we decided it'd be cool to get a couple of recorders and send them around to other poets to do the same thing. Then we thought, well, other people will want to hear these recordings, too, so let's post them on a website. That was 2004, and it was still a little unusual to have online recordings of poets, especially poets early in their careers.

The idea went from a personal project to public one pretty quickly. In just a couple of months, I was filling out IRS applications to set up a non-profit so that we'd be eligible for donations and grants to fund the project, and we were putting together by-laws and a board of directors.

From the start, the purpose of the Fishouse has been two-fold: to give poets early in their careers—"emerging" poets-—a platform for their work; and to give poetry fans and teachers and students the opportunity to hear poets reading their own work.

We needed a way to limit the overwhelming number of poets to choose to record, and we figured that more established poets have more outlets for their work. We had to come up with a definition of "emerging," and Camille and I settled on poets with fewer than two books at the time of submission to Fishouse. As time has passed, of course, poets we recorded as "emerging" have now "emerged," and so Fishouse serves as an archive in this way. Also, there are special "bonus" poets on the site, poets well outside the "emerging" definition, who I record and post when a chance arises.

2. What past experience (work or otherwise) helped you in creating the website? What did you need to learn?

If it weren't for my day job at Bowdoin College (in the Office of Communications), I'm not sure I would have been able to get Fishouse going or maintain it if I did. Not to mention that our original web designer was a Bowdoin colleague, and without him, I don't know who'd have created the first version of the site into a decent website (although, we have that problem now, as that volunteer designer left and we're trying to figure out how to fund a full site redesign). The basic HTML I learned from working on the Bowdoin magazine website helped enormously. Additionally, a Bowdoin alum, who was at the time an editor at the tech site CNET and had recently written a book about digital audio, recommended the original FH recording devices to me. And, lately, there's a big crossover in the use of social media with my day job and Fishouse's.

3. For those who might not be familiar with the Fishouse, could you include a selection of poets you feel are representative of your editorial taste? I know this is a hard question to answer.

Well, one of the greatest things about Fishouse—and a key to its success—is that it's not simply my editorial taste. I'll answer in a bit more detail below about how the selection process works. In short, I don't make all the selections, so the site isn't limited by my aesthetic. I definitely have personal favorites, but so many favorites I can't name them. One poem we often hold up as an example is "To Whoever Set my Truck on Fire" by Steve Scafidi. And, if you take a look at the Fishouse printed anthology, the poems we collected there are all ones that we felt represented Fishouse in its mission to highlight the connection between the poem in the air and the poem on the page and in a wide range of styles (culled just from our first two years).

4. What are your recommendations for others who may want to start an online poetry project?

Don't!

But, if you must, you should treat it as a business. Come up with a business plan, a workflow plan, and know your goals, short and long-term. Know what else is out there doing what you might want to do, the "competition," and figure out a way to distinguish yourself.

With so much poetry available online, I think new online projects need to be niche, need to have a well-defined focus. Fishouse concentrates on audio from poets early in their careers—"emerging poets," who we define as poets with fewer than two published collections at the time of submission. The focus on audio from emerging poets sets Fishouse apart enough to give our brand, if you will, meaning.

One of the things I wish I'd done better is plan for the long-term future of Fishouse. Nearly eight years down the road, we don't have a firm plan for my successor. As far as I'm concerned, Fishouse won't truly be successful until it lives beyond me, beyond my daily involvement, and I've been spending a lot of my time lately working on those plans.

5. Creating book trailers and audio is becoming more commonplace. Do you have technical tips for poets, or others, who would like to create a video or record themselves reading?

I'm sure the common computer user has as much technical skill, if not more, than I do—my nine-year-old daughter seems hardwired for it. The first time she picked up a touch screen at age five, she knew exactly how to navigate it.

I'd love to learn how really edit audio at a high level. I know the basics. Just enough to get a relatively clean track. But, in order to keep posting new material on the site, keep the admin going, I haven't had the time to study more complex audio editing. Well, that's to say, I haven't made the time. Because it's just spoken word, there's not much more I need to do to the audio than clean up some background noise, so I figure it's better to get more voices up on the site than to spend my limited time on audio methods that aren't absolutely necessary. Given a do-over, though, I'd learn as much as I could right from the start, when I was spending time on setting up Fishouse.

The most basic element of getting a good recording at home is to find a quiet place with little background noise and to be wary of things that make noise while you're reading—the computer, a squeaky chair, pages turning. Sometimes, background noise provides ambiance and context, and I like it in a recording—an urban poet with the street noise in the background; Steve Scafidi's chickens because the quietest place he could find to record was his hen house—but I find that loud floor creaks, door slams, paper rustlings, and electronic clicks are distracting.

The only other thing I'd offer for advice is to practice with the recording device to determine what settings give you the best sound, and at what distance from the microphone.

6. What is the selection process for inclusion in the Fishouse?

This is a question I'm often asked, especially because Fishouse is closed to unsolicited submissions.

The selection process began organically and grew into a system with benefits that we'd never imagined, and that process is largely responsible for our success. We ask each poet we publish to recommend two additional (emerging) poets whose work they'd like to see on Fishouse. While this method seems ripe for nepotism, it's worked in just the opposite fashion, giving Fishouse a much wider scope and range of work than it would otherwise enjoy. We've published more than 200 poets, so we effectively have around 100 editors, and growing.

Fishouse doesn't simply feature my aesthetic as editor, it features work by poets across a broad spectrum and, in this way, really represents the contemporary landscape. Because of this, we draw a wide range of listeners. It is in large part what makes Fishouse work.

From a practical standpoint, I simply don't have time to wade through unsolicited submissions. I can barely keep up with our current system. But, even if I did have time (or say, a staff), at this point, I'm not sure I'd change anything. It's turned out to work so well this way.

I think that poets hold Fishouse to high standards and recommend other poets who's work they feel deserves (for lack of a better word) space on the site. If Rigoberto González feels strongly enough about a poet's work to recommend him or her to me, I trust his judgment. He's the editor in that case.

When choosing a group of poets to send recorders, I go through the list of recommended poets chronologically and try to pick and choose a balanced lineup of male and female writers from a variety of recommending poets, so that we get a good mix of work with each round of postings.

7. What is your advice for balancing Fishouse, your day work, and your writing?

It's almost never in balance. I really only have early mornings to work on Fishouse, with the odd weekend day. I'm either working on Fishouse almost exclusively every morning, or not working on it at all.

And, when working on Fishouse, I'm either doing editorial or administrative work. If I'm posting new poems, I'm not giving the Board direction, not working on fundraising, or site redesign, not answering emails or communicating with constituents. Because my time is so limited, when I'm doing one of those things, I'm not doing any of the others, and it takes all of them together to make Fishouse successful. That I can't really keep up speaks greatly to the work that we feature on the site—it remains popular, and continues to grow, even though I can't cultivate it as it truly needs, because the strength of the material continues to draw visitors.

I basically stopped writing—no, I did stop writing—my own poems as Fishouse grew. Immersed in so much good poetry, I've never been more inspired to write, but I've never had so little time. That's it with writers, right? Those who succeed simply make time and those who don't use it as an excuse. That's certainly some of my problem. After being away from it for so long, I'm afraid to face a blank page again. And, on top of that, it's intimidating to be so close to so much good work. I've concluded, at this point, that it's more important for me to work on Fishouse than it is to write my own poems. There's enough good poetry out there, and there's enough bad poetry already, too. Maybe one day I'll feel a burning desire again, but right now, I'd rather spend that time on Fishouse.

However, just doing that is becoming increasingly difficult. As my daily job at Bowdoin includes more and more social media work, it becomes less 9:00-5:00 and more around the clock, seven days a week. I lose many mornings now to day job duties that I didn't have even just a year or so ago.

So Fishouse and the day job, on top of family life, and outside pursuits, definitely make it a juggling act. But, it's not juggling chainsaws, and I try to keep that in perspective.

Meet George David Clark, New Editor

Dear Readers,

My relationship with 32 Poems Magazine began some time ago when a poet friend slipped an issue into my hand and demanded I stop what I was doing to read the lyric he had just come across. The poems I found those pages stood out for their sonic complexity and the freshness of their idiom. Unlike the other journals I read, 32 Poems, in its unique focus on the short lyric, maintained a consistent and compelling identity. The poems one found there seemed strategically chosen, its poets part of a community, not linked by school or aesthetic but by special attention to the language. Eventually I sent work to the journal myself. My poems were promptly rejected, but through those rejections I met John Poch whose thoughtful comments made it clear that he not only read submissions sympathetically, but possessed a unique talent for identifying how they fell short of their own aspirations. A balance of eclecticism and rigorous standards of craft is one of the things that make 32 Poems so special. Working more closely with the journal these last two years, I have come to appreciate how John's fundamental generosity of attention has supported the work of his poets, and, issue after issue, gathered some of the most exciting poetry being written today. The loyal readership and enviable reputation 32 Poems enjoys is, above all, a testament to the power of a passionate editor.

I do not take lightly the benchmarks that John Poch and Deborah Ager have set at 32 Poems, but I am also excited about the magazine's future. 32 Poems will continue to host a wide variety of styles and schools with excellence and compression as common denominators. To the magazine's many longtime readers, I pledge my commitment to finding and encouraging poets who reinvent the language rather than just giving us more of the same, poets previously unpublished and those whose work we have admired for many years. 32 Poems has always had that attitude, and that is precisely why readers like myself have long looked forward to its arrival each semester in our mailboxes.

George David Clark

Bidding Goodbye to John Poch; Hello to George David Clark

Dear Poetry Readers,

After almost ten years of editing 32 Poems Magazine with Deborah Ager, I am stepping down. It is no small step for me, yet I do believe it is, as well, a step in the right direction. First, I want to thank all the poets who submitted work to the magazine during my tenure. I owe gratitude to not only the poets whose poems were accepted but also those poets who sent in work that just somehow wasn't a fit. What a blessing to realize the great diversity of American poetry in our midst. I have been acting as some kind of magazine editor for more than 15 years now (Chattahoochee Review and American Literary Review, as well), and it is time for me to pay more attention to my own writing and, more importantly, to devote closer attention to Auden, Bishop, Larkin, Eliot, Shakespeare, Dante, and my other favorites.

I wish the best to George David Clark, who is taking over my duties. He is a discriminating reader who I believe will make the magazine better than I have made it. I will stay on in an advising/contributing editor capacity, but after this December, I won't be choosing the poems any more. It has been an honor and a pleasure. Even if so many of our poets and poems hadn't won Best New Poets and Best American Poets and NEAs and Guggenheims and MacArthurs and published books with 32 POEMS on the acknowledgments page, I would still believe that we were publishing the best poems in America.

And finally, I thank Deborah Ager who has made 32 Poems Magazine a constant pleasure for all of us.

I know it's old fashioned and probably a small sacrifice, but please subscribe. And tell your friends they ought to. It's poetry.

John Poch

Confession Tuesday: The New Guy

I just agreed to be blog editor for 32 Magazine, and so here starts a new venture for me.

I confess that I am quite nervous about this new position I am taking on with 32 Poems. I confess that I am afraid I'll mess it up somehow, whatever "it" is.

I confess I don't have an MFA, nor am I moving to get one. I may even be against getting an MFA, at least for me. But that might be a racket.

I confess the lack of an MFA makes me feel somehow unworthy of opportunities. But that is not what I am committed to. I am committed to opportunities and possibilities for everyone.

I confess I hated poetry once. I felt like I didn't understand it, at all, and that poets were inferior somehow for writing it.

I confess I do not believe "William Shaksper" of Stratford-on-Avon was a poet. I believe the Earl of Oxford Edward Devere was. This is my own opinion.

I confess knew putting quotes in that previous confession was superfluous. I was having fun with another Tuesday confession Kelli Russell Agodon had.

I confess I do not know how to end this post. I will end it here.