Mary Biddinger's Blog, page 29

Rough drafts [and the people who do not love them].

Don't tell anybody, but my closets are disastrous, and my files of poems are even more disorganized. With my closets, sometimes I toss stuff (boots, etc) in there and just turn my back and slam the door and hope for the best. Mind you, that is very much not my standard operating procedure for anything else in my life. Sure, my office(s) are messy, but that's because I have a shitload of work, not because I'm sloppy.

So here I am with a landslide of poems that are 65% rough drafts (as in, some came out more finished or are revised, so I have sent them out) and I need to at least get them their immunizations and have their claws trimmed (cancel that) and ready them for the showroom. But it's just so daunting. There are so many of them. What if they overpower me? There's so much revising to do, which means that I got something wrong the first time around.

And then I find something like the above, which was waiting on the counter at the post office this morning, and it all seems so incredibly worthwhile.

We went away but then we came back.

Yeah, so we took our act to Washington, and now we're back. The snow didn't go anywhere. See that street up there? It's not covered with ice, is it? Sigh.

Between not having any readings or signings of my own work, and Panel Struck Down By Act of God, this AWP was all about celebrating other people's books. I felt like I went to this AWP as an editor rather than as a poet. I'm not sure that I feel completely comfortable that way. Okay, I know I don't, but as someone who tends to prefer promoting others over herself, I did like that part just fine.

And of course there was The Monkey & the Wrench, which sold out of our regular copies so we had to start selling the comps I'd brought. It was such a busy bookfair. I had flashbacks to being a barista in Ann Arbor. No downtime at the table whatsoever, which meant not being able to sneak over to signings, and subsequently missing a lot of friends. Such a bummer!

I arrived a day late and missed probably like a third of the people I wanted to see. I couldn't go to or stay at some of the offsites and parties due to claustrophobia. But otherwise it was a very fine AWP.

We did get to do some sightseeing, and that was one of my favorite parts. I always kick myself when I don't get to go to at least one museum, etc.

It's hard to believe it's all over.

Let's do it again next year.

Preemptive looting...

...and I haven't even left Ohio yet.

Bring it on.

Little House on the Tundra

Yeah, so there's been this certain weather situation. Water pouring from the sky, ice falling from the sky, snow eddying around in little freeznadoes. I know that a lot of folks have it worse than we do right now. I'm so thankful to have electricity (I have been charging everything constantly, just in case).

My shoulders are aching from smashing up ice and shoveling it, even though I was only able to make discernible progress on my front walk and steps, and back walk. The driveway is a lost cause. I think it may be a Chicago thing, but I always have to have my front stoop and walk cleared off. I remember the old ladies of the west side always clearing off their stoops. It's a courtesy thing.

The kids have had two snow days in a row. The university has also been closed for two days in a row. Yesterday we made a Funfetti cake to keep busy. Cabin fever aplenty.

So here's where we are. Right now 90% sure that we'll be leaving tomorrow for DC. Had been planning to be arriving there about now, but with the situation pictured above (that's my street), we are not going to chance it.

Other folks on my panel have suffered similar problems, and unrelated ones, and ultimately we are going to have to cancel our panel on geography and religion. It would be really nice if the AWP folks would let us do it next year.

Here's an excerpt from my paper.

AWP Panel Struck Down By Act of God;

Or, Two Jews, a Catholic, a Buddhist, a Mennonite Sufi Shaman, and a ________ walk into an AWP Panel: Geography's Influence on Writers Writing Religion and Culture.

A Snuff Film Starring Your Childhood Home: Urban Devastation, Crumbling Steeples, and Midwestern Poetry as Testimony by Mary Biddinger

I was a strange sort of transplant. Chicago childhood. Michigan adolescence and coming of age. Obsession with Detroit (literary, historical, photographic). I drove around Detroit's neighborhoods in a Jeep and took pictures of houses, though the best shot was of the 14-story mural of Barry Sanders on the side of the Cadillac Tower. I wrote a hundred poems about Detroit. Moved back to Chicago. Picked up where I had left off.

So this is how you become so indelibly tainted with a harrowing landscape that you find yourself getting angry in a museum.

Your anger isn't just because of the economic injustices that created a Detroit of the kind we see today.

It's because the people in the gallery are beginning to touch the photographs. They are running their tongues along the information cards. Some of them are pulling out mirrors and tossing their hair around a little bit. Pretty soon it will be a room full of naked bodies, but not because the museum-goers wish to be reborn into the frames.

What I mean to say is that it becomes borderline pornographic.

Of course we all, in some way, want to help.

--- * ---

So we're leaving tomorrow, and hopefully we will arrive in DC by late evening. I will spend some time at the Barn Owl Review + University of Akron Press table, which is A11. I also hope to make it in time to check out the Cleveland State University Poetry Center offsite reading at Asylum, 7-9 pm, knockout lineup.

At table A11 we will have BOR 4 for you to come marvel at (and purchase! please! it's our best issue yet!), and copies of all the new UA Press titles, including The Monkey and the Wrench.

Unrelated news:

I have an interview at The Fine Delight. Oh, and a really awesome profile here, also by Nick Ripatrazone.

Safe travels to all going to AWP, or anywhere else, for that matter.

Hope to see some of you soon!

Into the wild blue wherever.

I don't know anything at all about Washington, DC, except that in a week I'll be going there. I didn't have one of those junior high trips to DC. My parents took me to Paris instead of DC. My friends and I road-tripped to Toronto instead of DC. The other day I realized that my dad only recently went to DC for the first time (a business trip).

I think I am a complete freak of Americanness! Or un-Americanness?

Today was a day of headaches. I hope they go away soon.

I love my classes this semester. Like, I am sad when it's a non-teaching day. I have so many talented and fun students who are generally awesome people.

Talking about The Endarkenment in my undergrad poetry workshop tomorrow. Yeah!

After a big scare, BOR 4 is finally on its way from the printer. Whew.

If the snow would melt and my sinuses would disappear, the world would be a completely happy place.

Washington, DC. I guess I'm on my way-ish.

[discipline & publish]

For whatever reason, I almost always pack up all of my work on Friday and bring it home with me, even on weekends when the kids are home the whole time. So then on Sunday night and Monday morning I'm all eff this, why did I bring this home. But for once, I am glad I brought it all home this weekend, because now I'm sick. And who doesn't want to annotate and edit a fever away, right? Or feverishly plan an AWP table schedule? Or cough all over somebody's thesis?

I am not taking any chances this time and I am not going to work. I will not repeat Lungtastrophy 2010. Oh no. And yesterday's football games certainly did not provide me with a shot of penicillin (or similar).

The not-writing is starting to really bother me.

But I've been understanding a lot more about my current project thanks to an interview I'm doing for The Fine Delight. I'll let you know when it's posted.

Sent in the final edits for Saint Monica. Subsequently fell in love with the poems all over again, if that's possible to do with your own poems.

BOR 4 is at the printer. Hooray! It might just be the best issue ever.

Still basking in the afterglow of The Monkey and the Wrench being released. It's a paperback, and also my first e-book. I don't have an e-reader, but some of my friends think it's cool. Thank you to all the folks who have bought a copy. We'll be giving out a mini-galley (to treasure! to bring home for the kids / cats!) at AWP.

I'm in AWP disbelief. Maybe because it's been less than a year since the last AWP.

I think that's about it for now. Thera-Flu, here I come.

For your calendar.

Reading poems from O Holy Insurgency as well as some coin operated poems that will thrill the spare change out of you.

Wingspannery.

You can barely see it, but some nice spider stretched a web from one angel wing to the other. Sometimes it's the little things that charm me. I had to make it b&w for fun. I'm trying to figure out what it means, but I have no idea.

First teaching day of 2011 for me, and two poetry workshops (advanced undergrad, and grad). Aside from having classes eight hours apart, I'm happy with the schedule, and feeling the usual giddy things I feel with a new class. I don't ever think I'll stop loving this.

Speaking of love, and labors thereof, Barn Owl Review 4 is off to the printer. This has to be my favorite issue so far, and my favorite cover. It occurred to me a few minutes ago that this is the third document I've dispatched to the printer in the past four weeks or so. Whew.

I have a lot of things simmering right now. Will rewrite, and then subsequently shorten, the to-do list now.

And then everything was pretty much the same...

...only, you know, emptier.

I feel like it's a little wrong for me to like this photo so much. I took it, after all. That's gross. But the parking lot is the real star.

So back on the chain gang, and all that. I succeeded in not doing work over break, for the most part, aside from BOR work. Hence, I had many nasty little tidbits awaiting me when I returned to my office(s) this week. Today I had some uninterrupted hours to get things done, and actually felt as if I managed time effectively.

Now, to add writing poem to that time management.

My shoulders hurt and I don't have very many ideas in my head.

I have a lot of projects right now. But The Monkey and the Wrench is alive (and almost officially on shelves), and BOR 4 is in pages, and we have a really kickass new interview with David Dodd Lee over on BOR Online, thanks to Nick Sturm. Now that I've progressed my web design skills past 1999, we'll have a lot more content rocking over there at BOR.

So that's 2011 so far, in a nutshell. I imagine next week it will get a bit more hectic.

For now, I will just enjoy the cracks in the parking lot.

[Re]calculating route.

Yeah, so I had very cleverly, in my mind, named this The Year of the Lung, because everyone in Northeast Ohio quit smoking this year, and then I got my ass kicked by pneumonia. However, this week's bout of family stomach flu has made me think of this year in general health terms, not just lung-terms, so I'll be all 1980's confessional-ish and call it The Year of the Body. Or not. Anyway, 2010, it had some good stuff, and it had some bad stuff. Exactly what the sages predicted!

One of the ways that 2011 will be different: I now have a real, legit GPS for my car. No more faulty Google maps, shitty Blackberry GPS telling me to drive into buildings in Pittsburgh, finding myself lost on country roads that look exactly like country roads in other states in other decades. And so on. The only other time I've been in the presence of such a fine GPS device was when driving to New York with Jeannine. So of course I was instantly terrified. What if I broke it by looking at it? What if it yelled at me in some Southie accent? Drove me down a ravine?

But it's my friend, and I think it's going to really keep me on track. The only thing that makes me uncomfortable is that it's all grassy on the GPS, and here we have snow. But it's melting, so that takes care of that. And what will terrify me now? What will be my new reason for white-knuckling all the way to ___?

I think my only real resolution is to try to be healthier. I found out this year that while I can survive on 5 hours of sleep and diet pepsi and granola bars, maybe I shouldn't. It's really hard to get everything done when not healthy.

Kids off to their dad's in an hour and fifteen minutes (not that I'm counting, of course), then a cozy dinner for two who have survived 2010 and look forward to not getting lost on the way to 2011.