Mary Biddinger's Blog, page 27

Move it or _______ it.

So far this has been the summer wherein I repeatedly lose--or almost lose--various things (keys, phone every five minutes, important paperwork, books, outdoor cat) and scare the shit out of myself, and then find the various things again, and it's like Christmas morning. I can speculate that this is the universe teaching me:

1). To be more careful with where I throw things.

2). To be more appreciative of the things I toss on my counter.

3). To be more organized.

4). To think a little more about what it means to lose something.

Anyway, it's rather disconcerting. Normally I'm not a person who freaks out about her keys all of the time, etc.

Perhaps all of this losing/finding is to blame for the utter poem drought around here, since April. I've written one poem since 5/1. It was just fine, too. Perhaps this is due to having the kids home from school, and doing a lot of reading other people's poems. It makes the most sense for me to consider May and June to be poem hiatus months (officially, not just by default) this year, and to pick up like a bat out of hell on 7/1. Or thereabouts.

In not-lost news, I am getting some exciting nominations for The Saint Monica Library Project. And holy cats, I am selling a lot of books, too. I need to chill and stop checking the Amazon sales rank so obsessively, but I'm just so excited. If only I could translate that energy into new poems, I'd be all set.

Right now I am officially "out of the office" until August, with the exception of my work at the Press. We celebrated on Sunday by going to the beach without the kids, and I spent a lot of time just staring at the sky. Then a monster thunderstorm rolled into town, but I don't think I caused it with all my cloud-gazing. Or maybe I did. You never know.

The Saint Monica Library Project.

[We interrupt the usual musings for an important public service announcement.]

Saint Monica isn't the patron saint of libraries, but libraries were a saving grace to Mary Biddinger. That's why she is donating four copies of SAINT MONICA to libraries in need, along with a lifetime subscription to Barn Owl Review for each library. Ideally, several of these libraries would be in rural areas, like the setting of the book.

To nominate a library in need, send links + a brief rationale (300 words or fewer) to mb at marybiddinger dot com by 7/5/11. The four libraries will be selected by Mary in consultation with the Barn Owl Review editors, and announced here and elsewhere.

Note: while the book does contain some adult themes, it's not "blasphemous" in a way that would be unwelcome at libraries. Please share this call for nominations, and support your local library whenever you can. Thanks!

---

Throughout my life, libraries have been a church for me. There's nowhere that I feel more peaceful and safe, and reverent. Working in libraries helped feed me in undergrad, and the cramped confines of a study carrell eased me through the panic of studying for doctoral exams. I plan to donate copies of Saint Monica to my various alma mater institutions, and to libraries in Northeast Ohio, but I'd really like to broaden my scope, and to reach readers in places like the town where the book takes place (and beyond). To make this a more enduring commitment, I will also donate lifetime subscriptions to Barn Owl Review to these four libraries, in the hope that there's somebody like me back in the day, checking the magazine rack obsessively for new journals to arrive. Thank you so much for sharing this, and for nominating, and for supporting your local library.

~MB

Tumbleweeding.

Sometimes I just don't like epigraphs. But I also don't wear jewelry, so what do I know. I've noticed an epigraph-y trend in some of the manuscripts I've read this year. As in: a lot of epigraphs. I have a brief description of Saint Monica (the original saint) in Saint Monica, but it's not an epigraph, it's more like a preliminary note. I used to wear jewelry, sometimes a lot of it. I'm not sure what happened. And I do believe at one point I had some epigraphs in a book manuscript, but then I took them out and renamed it Prairie Fever.

Is an epigraph more like a charm bracelet, or an epi-pen? Or maybe it's the opposite of an epi-pen. Yikes.

My paper clip bins are all teeming with paper clips of yesteryear, which means only one thing: I've cleaned my English department office because I'll be away from it for a while. In the next few weeks I'm making the transition to being home with the kids most of the time, with a few exceptions (Press work, etc), until August. So far I've been surprised by how busy I am, despite not teaching. My house is probably about 25% cleaner, too. I'd like to raise that percentage a little.

The sleeping...wow. Not having to wake up at 5:30 every morning? Awesome. However, I have noticed that by sleeping until 7:30, I somehow lose several hours of daytime. How is this possible? To compensate, I occasionally stay up until 1:00 am reading. Must discontinue that. Anyway, that's how things have been going so far this summer.

I am incredibly happy that Saint Monica is selling like a little hotcake. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has bought a copy. You RULE! The only other tidbit is that I have an interview up at Midwestern Gothic. Do you know about this journal? It's really cool. The first-ever litmag I've read as an e-book, too, which was scary for about 1/18th of a second, and then it was really, really awesome.

Okay, back to counting epigraphs, maybe writing some of my own.

Underpinnings.

Wow, I sure am making up for my poetic binge of April. I haven't written a new poem since 4/30. I was thinking I'd welcome June with a bang, and write a new poem on the first day, but it simply didn't happen, and it hasn't happened. I've been reading more than writing. As always, reading makes me want to write differently. That is, if/when I ever write again. Ha ha.

The next two weeks are a flurry of having to tie up a number of loose ends, before my childcare disappears completely and I am On Vacation for the rest of the summer.

I am still in kind of a tizzy over Saint Monica being here and all. I help my authors with this stuff all of the time (review copies! press releases!) but it feels different doing it for your own book.

I send many, many thanks to Sandy Longhorn for her thoughtful review of Saint Monica. I'm usually kind of terrified to read what people have to say about my poems, but the experience of reading this response may have cured me. I feel like I learned something about my own poems through Sandy's thoughts on them.

In a silly way I keep asking myself questions about the book, in anticipation of other people asking me. For example:

Saint Monica is a fairly lengthy/substantial chapbook. Why didn't you make it into a full-length collection?

How much of Saint Monica is true? Is Monica you, or someone you knew?

Will you ever write Saint Monica poems again, or is she a closed book?

If Saint Monica is a cautionary tale, what is the message that you are trying to convey?

I guess today I will answer that last one, there. If I had to boil the book down to thematic elements, I would say that it's about the way that girls--especially girls of a certain milieu--were taught two things: a) to submit to a higher power, whether that power is God or your best friend's older brother, and b) that there is a connection between domination, pain, sexuality, and obligation. The book also tries to make the case for some kind of mentorship, whether it's having a best friend who knows more about the world than you do, or having a patron saint who somehow keeps you from tumbling into ravines, or being bound with tape and tossed into the trunk of a car.

Until my most recent project, I wrote constantly about violence. I also wrote, or tried to write, about the difficult task of determining your own moral bearings in a world that imposes so many rules upon us, including senseless ones. Although Saint Monica is in many ways focused upon the adolescent experience, I hope that it is useful in showing how often our adult decisions relate to mistakes we did or did not make when younger. It's a book about alternate possibilities, with the hope that readers recognize that they exist. It also has a pretty decent classic rock soundtrack, but that's unrelated.

[Thankfully, the poems themselves are a lot more interesting than this analysis. Saint Monica blesses you if you made it through both paragraphs.]

In related news, if you missed it earlier, Nick Ripatrazone has some fantastic commentary on one of the poems in Saint Monica here, at The Fine Delight, as well as an interview with me about the book, where I talk about Catholicism, and many other things.

I promise you that I will write a poem again some time soon, perhaps by the end of this week.

Saint Monica on the loose.

Yeah, so nothing's new here in Akron, OH. Nothing at all. Nope. I'm just busy reading manuscripts and getting ready for the Barn Owl Review reading period to open on 6/1, now using Submishmash. Doing a little yard work, having a few cookouts. Yep, that's it.

Oh, ha ha. I am very funny. The news is that Saint Monica is finally here. Hot off the press, and should be shipping very soon. And it looks great! I have such a hard time meeting and interacting with my own books because much of my business is spent proofing books, and so the prospect of my own work in print is a little terrifying.

Imagine my relief when the book arrived and looked spectacular. Technically Saint Monica is a chapbook, but it weighs in at 42 pages, so it's a bit more on the bookish side. Of course I am biased, but I think it would be nice for a creative writing or lit class, especially one interested in both lineated poems and prose poems.

If you'd like to get a copy, here's some info:

Directly from Black Lawrence Press, ships by June 1st.

From Amazon (to be "released" officially very soon, as it is now in print).

At Powells (on backorder, but that should be remedied soon).

If you're a journal interested in a review copy, you can contact Black Lawrence Press directly.

Okay, now back to the reading and paperwork and other miscellany. Thank you for considering Saint Monica as an addition to your summer reading list! I am so glad she is here.

_______ in the time of _______ .

So there's pretty much nobody on campus, except for the summer school students, and there aren't many of them. This afternoon I did some mild jaywalking, mild being the type where you stand at the crosswalk like an idiot because you aren't paying attention, and then you're like, oh, there aren't any cars, and then start walking.

Only today some strange man decided to yell at me when I jaywalked. His was the only vehicle on the road, stopped at the intersection. He yelled, "Nobody's going to ticket you for jaywalking" and drove past me. But then he slowed down again and leaned out of his window and yelled "...because you're a goddess."

Usually when strangers speak to me I pretend I don't hear them or can't speak English, and that's what I did here, but I keep wondering what am I the goddess of. Please let it be bees, or cake. We had ice cream cake for my birthday and it was awfully good.

Now I am reading a lot of poetry manuscripts for the Akron prize, and getting ready to read lots of poems for Barn Owl Review (submissions open June 1st, via Submishmash). I am pretty damn busy for someone without summer classes and with only a few weeks left of work before the kids are home on break and it's all swimming pool and public library.

My new hobby is purging the house of items such as empty cardboard boxes and baby toys. I need to find a good place to recycle cardboard in Akron. Yes, this is the most fascinating thing I have ever said on this blog. Perhaps of greater interest is the fact that my first box of Saint Monica is said to be shipping out today. That means another box to recycle.

Yesterday, in a flurry of procrastination, I revised a bunch of poems and sent them to journals. I haven't written a poem yet in May, after writing one a day for all of April. I think it's about time. Only not just now. Etc.

That's a wrap.

So long, academic year 2010-2011. I'm not teaching again until the Fall. It's like an enchanted forest on campus right now. It's super quiet, and I believe I may be the only one still here. Perhaps I will scream and see if anyone notices.

I am doing administrative work and reading manuscripts for the Akron Poetry Prize until the end of June, and then I'm pretty much home full time with the kids until school starts in August. I'm pretty much home full time with the kids in June, too. I am going to have to "get creative."

I have an interview here at the Best American Poetry blog with Nin Andrews, who is one of my favorite people on earth. Thank you for taking a peek.

There are about 200+ books in my office that need to be shelved, and many stacks of paper to recycle. Somebody should invent a sort of office thresher that can do both of these tasks at once.

We've had some nice weather lately (yesterday, today). I hope it stays this way for a while.

___ is for ________.

Raymond is unusually excited about Mother's Day this year, and I have no idea why. Maybe because I've been so busy with grading and administrative meetings and visiting writers, or maybe they're making crafts for moms at preschool, but whatever the reason, he's talking about it constantly. Tonight he asked, Mama, can we pray that Mother's Day gets here quickly?

I hope he's not incredibly disappointed. Somehow I think he isn't going to be, though.

May is here, and classes are over (I don't want them to be over!), and (figurative) little birds are leaving the nest, but new birds are arriving. Being a professor is really weird because you are always there, in pretty much the same office, but the students change and then change even more. And then you write a blog post about it. And another. And another.

So it looks like I won't be teaching a summer class after all, as enrollment is back down. I am thinking about making a separate blog about having a lean summer and putting the creativity to alternate use.

In the meantime, I'm making slow progress on the to-do list, and watching Ray count down to Mother's Day. Today he made me two versions of the same picture: one on a standard piece of paper he took from my printer, and one on a smaller piece of paper. To be PORTABLE. Wow...

Putting the cart inside the cart.

To continue the theme of my last post, April has been a month of many poems, and very little blogging. I've attempted numerous NAPO and NAPO-eque exercises in the past, but this is the only one where I stuck with it 100%, and where most of the daily entries were actually full poems. Having a project seems to help. I'm glad that May will be here soon, but I might keep writing a poem a day for as long as I can.

I do have a few things to report, such as my poem "A Genesis" being picked as a Verse Daily web weekly feature. You can read the poem here at Waccamaw. Thanks, Verse Daily folks, and Waccamaw. The poem is from O Holy Insurgency, forthcoming in 2012 from Black Lawrence Press.

Here's a poem and a little interview for National Poetry Month over at the BLP Blog.

Also, I got to recommend five recent poetry books over at the 32 Poems blog.

And somebody is selling a used copy of Saint Monica on Amazon for $367.02 plus shipping. It will be out very soon. I promise!

In the good news department, I seem to be strepless, and my summer class now has enough students to remain afloat. It's been an anxious few weeks, but things are (hopefully) looking up.

I encountered the above items the other day, and just had to catch them in the act.

Happy weekend to all, carts included.

holy / unholy / holy

I'm not completely sure what makes this April so much different from last April, but this April I haven't been blogging much, and last April I was blogging fairly much, and this April I am writing many poems, and last April I was writing no poems for a goodly chunk of the month, so what gives? I am sure there is no connection whatsoever. But I'll take it.

So far I've written a poem a day this April. If I knew the date of today offhand, I'd tell you how many poems that adds up to. Minus the one for today, which isn't written yet. I am writing at the same time every day, right after I put my kids to bed. I'm exhausted, but sometimes that's good, in the way that I can say Meh. This image is kooky but I will leave it. Without serious fatigue, I might revise something away.

Today is my second day off antibiotics. I was on various antibiotics for almost three weeks. I am hoping that I am able to stay healthy this time. I hate right now because I am constantly thinking I am getting sick again. Like, there's a bird in the tree outside my window, and there was a bird in the tree outside my window last time I got sick, so I must be sick. Or bird-sick.

Beyond dodging germs, I have a bit of exciting news to report. Saint Monica will be released very soon! I just approved the final version of the whole cover, and the pages look amazing, and I am super excited and feeling so lucky to have two books released this year (M&W was released in January, but that seems like a long time ago).

I can't wait to meet Monica in person. I almost mistyped in prison. Oh dear. Here she comes.