Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 45

National Poetry Month - diving in? Some stuff to do

Ready to dive into National Poetry Month on Monday? I'm pondering how to celebrate it. A poem-a-day? Special poetry hour every day? A poetry book giveaway? I did the poem-a-day challenge with a workshop group for four years in a row, and got a number of good poems out of the exercise. This year, I'm thoughtful about my Poetry Month and trying to write a new poem a day. There are many ways to celebrate, including giving your own poetry book away. Here's a list of stuff to do, from various sites:

30 Ways to Celebrate - Poets.org

The Big Poetry Book Giveaway

Free April issues of Poetry Magazine for your book club

The famous NaPoWriMo - poem-a-day challenge

You can add your site to NaPoWriMo and take the challenge in company.

I thought revising a poem a day would make sense for me. I have about two inches' worth of poem drafts that have never made it to a second or fourteenth round, but might have some gems to dig for. So I signed up for NaPoWriMo on this blog -- but they may be recycled poems! I'll never tell. (And will remove them after the month so they aren't "published".)

Do you have some ideas? Please post here so we can all have a range of choices.

I'm also having a five-day GIVEAWAY of Earth Lessons for Kindle on Amazon! Starting April 1.

Blurbery & Other Invisible Literary Forms

Writer and blogger Dan Coffey had a marvelous idea: why not blog a lot of blurbs on books he picked up at AWP. In Dan's blog series Sublurbia, that's exactly what he did, and the array is fascinating. Some of my favorite phrases from these blurbs:

"a wedding that is also an articulate division"
"this book unfurls like a ready-made litany of misspelled youth" (that's misspelled, not misspent)
"how autobiographies can be and not be"
"celebrating our slutty embodiment in a studied poetry"

But this is truly my favorite:

"In this book Ezra Pound goes in drag as H.D.’s sister"

Here's my blurb on Mary Biddinger's wonderful book, Saint Monica. I may never be asked to blurb again if I can't come up with something more colorful and/or inscrutable.

In Kevin Jackson's wonderfully odd book, Invisible Forms , he has a chapter on the blurb as a literary form. In it he says, "the poet Marianne Moore was also generous with her blurbing -- so much so that an entire section of her Collected Prose is given over to a gathering of copy for other writers' dust jackets ... she may well be the supreme mistressof several blurbish sub-genres, including the blurb tepid:

"I find him prepossessing." (On John Ashbery.)

And the blurb bizarre:

"His absence of affectation is one of the rarest things on earth. Towards a Better Life is a book to annotate. Un-stodgy he!" (On Kenneth Burke)

Kevin Jackson also cites the popular, cute one-liner option:

Kevin Jackson is a recovering werewolf.

If you have a stack of books to blurb or review, feel free to steal from all the above sources.

Time-Travel -- and Talk to Whom?

If you could time-travel, who would be your choice for a cozy chat? Being a novelist, mine would probably be Jane Austen, but as a poet, I'd have to have a talk and ramble with Emily Dickinson! With both dogs along, of course, her great big shaggy Carlo, and my dainty, shaggy little Nissa.

In my magical realism novel, The Renaissance Club, characters have those engaging conversation -- though they don't get to choose. A mysterious guide through Italy does the choosing, and some startling revelations are the result. Annoyance and disbelief also factor into the encounters. Here's an excerpt. Let me know if this is the kind of chat you'd like to have with someone from history.

<!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:Palatino; panose-1:2 0 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:3 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:none; font-size:12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt; font-family:Palatino; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; layout-grid-mode:line;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} @page WordSection1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.WordSection1 {page:WordSection1;} </style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>The guide said, “The Renaissance was also a militant statement, a way that Rome responded to the Protestants. The name of this church, Santa Maria della Vittoria, or Mary of Victory, celebrate Rome’s victory in a battle with Protestant troops. Ironically, this church, dedicated to a battle, wound up enshrining the most feminine of Bernini's works. I think you’ll agree that this sculpture of Teresa is the most feminine and motherly of saints.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>At this, May felt a shock and then a welter of feelings. No sooner had they surfaced than Teresa's eyes opened. The marble saint turned her head and looked at May--<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Palatino; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"></span></span>quite a feat, with her head upside down.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Before May could register disbelief, the saint waved at her and then waved away the angel, who obligingly retreated. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Teresa sat up and rearranged her habit, covering her feet.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“So you want to have a child,” she said to May. “Well, I wish I had it as easy. Just one child would be simple. They don't call us Mother Superiors for nothing. I have more girls to look out for than a great-great-great-great grandmother!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Teresa raised a hand whose elegance was at odds with her long-nosed,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>peasant face. She scratched her nose, and then gave May another little wave that oddly reminded May of Queen Elizabeth. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“But I'm not going to become a nun!” May said.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Teresa sighed so loudly she ruffled lace collars in the sculpted gallery of people above her little stage. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You are way literal, aren’t you, dear?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>May retorted, “Why do you sound like a teenager? You’re a peculiar hallucination.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Teresa smiled at her. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You’re entirely without the gift of metaphor, aren’t you? Things stand in for other things, you see. Don’t take everything at face value. Look at me. I’m a metaphor, aren’t I?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“What for?” asked May.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“For your doubts. Your fears. You want to have a child because you’re so lonely. You’re very young, younger than most of my nuns.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“I'm twenty-six!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Oh, that is an advanced age. They must have excellent food in your century. You are I are nearly the same age. Look at me. I look like an elder.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Yes, but you live in a medieval convent. You eat, what, moldy bread?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>Teresa smiled. Color came into her sculpted face. She pushed her draped veil behind her ears, which May saw were rather large in proportion to her head.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Maybe the mold keeps us healthy. We don’t have penicillin yet, you know.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You're just jet-lag,” May said, rudely. “God, I'm not even having this conversation!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Oh, yes, you are. You're having what we call an extended epiphany. We’re outside time. Now don’t argue with me, I know my spiritual states and stages. I wrote a catalog of them, remember? Even God talks to Himself.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“That is a peculiar statement. So are we all just God talking to Himself?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>May pressed the heels of her palms to her eyes. I shouldn't have had the linguine, she thought. The clams tasted<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Palatino; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¾</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“I am not a clam. Take your hands off your eyes and behave yourself.”<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">      </span>The authority in the saint’s voice reached May. “I’m sorry.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Ssshhh!” hissed Darren next to her.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You should be sorry, speaking to a mother that way. You need to think about why you want to be a mother, and what it means. It’s the loneliest job in the world, unless you come to see that to feel loved you have to give it. Look for the mother within. And stop being so literal.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“I am not literal!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“May, be quiet!” Darren hissed.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You are way literal! Becoming pregnant is only one way to be a mother. There are more profound ways, you know. Dear child<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Palatino; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¾</span></span>allow me this liberty because you seem so very young<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Palatino; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;">¾</span></span>things stand in for other things. It’s how life works. So be a mother without being a mother!”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“But how can I have a child without having a child? My husband won’t consider adopting.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>The saint raised her eyes to heaven. “Dear girl, motherhood is a lifelong career of opening your heart to need. Whether you have a human being in your charge or simply human beings in your life, the truth is that love is what mothering is all about, and you can’t do it unless you find it within.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“I don’t want to find it within, unless it’s within my womb.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You are exasperatingly stubborn. A baby is just a prod from God to make you learn the self-sacrifice that He wants from all of us toward each other! Don’t you see? Just skip the step of birthing and start treating everyone as your child.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>May watched her recline again, as if about to go to sleep, or bliss, or wherever saints went when they weren’t talking to you.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“I’m stuck,” May said. “Just stuck. I can’t figure out anything.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Oh, really?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“Yes, --<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Palatino; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"></span></span> “ </div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>But with a blink, the saint was again imprisoned in her stone ecstasy. May found herself being poked by her husband.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">            </span>“You were talking to yourself--<span style="font-family: Symbol; mso-ascii-font-family: Palatino; mso-char-type: symbol; mso-hansi-font-family: Palatino; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"><span style="mso-char-type: symbol; mso-symbol-font-family: Symbol;"></span></span>loudly!” Darren said.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><br /><br /><br />

Facebook Hacking Alert

I've read reports from more than one person of a Facebook account hack that seems particularly hard to quell. Some mischief-maker reports you aren't a real person, FB suspends your account and you have to pass some sort of test of identifying photos of friends to get reinstated. And the worst part is the hacker can do it again -- even if you change your passwords! Disturbing hole in the Facebook security -- or is it a glitch? Signs point NOT to Facebook itself, but to someone with too many skills and too little ambition in life. Could it be an inside-Facebook troublemaker? Spread the word. Be prepared to give your cell number to reinstate and even then it may not hold.

It's very disturbing to someone who uses Facebook to connect with friends, fellow poets and writers, even business contacts. I remember reading in the news of the threat that Facebook itself could be hacked. When we depend on it as our marketplace, it's disturbing to feel that it's so vulnerable. The public square in Athens had to be knocked down to disappear. It would have taken an army. Now it only takes one nasty-minded sourpuss to bring down the whole square, at least for the person hacked.

Of course, if Facebook is vulnerable, their audience will migrate and their stock will plummet. So the best minds that created this place have a vested interest in stopping such attacks on individuals. We'll see if this gets bigger or gets stopped.

Still Not Attending AWP - My Own Writer's Retreat

The beautiful thing about having missed AWP is that I can keep going today, after AWP is over! Looking for more poems about writing, today I pulled out Turtle Island, Gary Snyder's Pulitzer Prize winning poetry book. He read at AWP Denver in 2009, a brilliantly quiet and understated reading of concentration and polished intensity. Here's one of his. Do you have a favorite poem about writing?

As For Poets

As for poets
The Earth Poets
Who write small poems,
Need help from no man.

The Air Poets
Play out the swiftest gales
And sometimes loll in the eddies.
Poem after poem,
Curling back on the same thrust.

At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
And propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn at absolute zero
Fossil love pumped backup

The first
Water Poet
Stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
Left millions of tiny
Different tracks
Criss-crossing through the mud.

With the Sun and Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky-
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.

Sympathetically Not-Attending AWP from Afar

To celebrate this huge convention of writers, I'm giving myself a couple days of writerly retreat, reading, studying,  writing, and listening. Here's my favorite poem on writing, Stanley Kunitz' perfect and transcendent The Round, which captures the ecstasy that keeps us moving the words forward. Kunitz used a perfect contrast as the center of his poem's strategy in conveying this state universal to writers. He puts us writers in "the steamy old stinkpile" to which we must retreat to capture the sublime, suggesting that digging deep into the subconscious is what releases

Also investigated flarf, a new and anti-poetry poetry movement. Listened to a reading by flarfist Sharon Mesmer of a poem taken mostly from online texts and using the words in a hilarious, absurdist, pop cultured rant. The reading and a discussion of it on Jacket.

We are all at AWP, in that we are together in this crazy adventure on a raft in a wildly heaving ocean that we call writing.

On Not Going to AWP (Associated Writing Programs annual conference)

It's all razzmatazz in the metaphor and slowslide down a jetlagged wall, the grunge and flash, the hugging, seeing, seen through windowpanes, and rapt, unwrapped, slapping silences after the end of the poem or the most absurd statement. And that's why I will miss it -- again.

Mostly I don't go to conferences and workshops. I loved the AWP I went to and swore never again. I made so many friends I still have and met ones I only had virtually before. And they always have it somewhere in deadest winter. Why not Hawaii? After receiving tons of kind invitations I have to decline I remembered why I'm not going. I have nothing to sell, only things to get published and write. Those things require silence and time.

For those of us staying home at our own private AWP's, here's a NON-AWP party Julie Brooks Barbour started on Facebook. Come on over and join in!

The Next Big Thing - with Sarah Sarai and Barbara Ellen Sorensen

I did my NBT self-interview below, on the topic of my novel-in-progress, The Renaissance Club. Here's TNBT from poet Sarah Sarai on her blog My 3,000 Loving Arms. The Next Big Thing asks the author to answer ten questions about his or her current writing project -- could be poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.

Ren Powell tagged me, and I tagged Sarah and also Barbara Ellen Sorensen. Enjoy their interviews@ And stay tuned for more NBT blogs!

Non-Contest Poetry Book Publishers & AWP

In case any of you missed the fact that I maintain a list of publishers of poetry books that read outside of contests, here's the link to my web page: Non-contest-poetry-book-publishers. If you have any additions, subtractions, or corrections, please email me or leave a reply here.

And now ... drumroll ... for those of us again this year NOT going to AWP ... I am SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED to discover that our cordial and wacky hostess of "Not Attending AWP" Party, Ms. Meg Pokrass, has up and decided that she IS going to AWP this year. Video forthcoming. Explanations, Meg. I'm waiting ...

Let me then be the first to make my commitment to AWP Seattle 2014, and to announce that I am even contemplating proposing a panel. But it will probably be on a topic we can all actually understand, such as Women and Spirituality in Poetry, and thus is likely to be rejected in favor of topics like Writing Masculinities or The Poem of Creation is Uninterrupted. (Actual panel titles.)

Really, I should call my panel Bookfair Concessions, Bar, & Lounge. That's sure to get in.

Bloghopping

Always cruising around to find good zines to send work to, good blogs to inspire and entertain me, I have recently enjoyed new work in the Manhattan-based BigCityLit. BigCityLit offers a profusion of categories, some of which I still don't get, but here's their basic on submitting:

Individual Works: The New York edition accepts unsolicited submissions of individual poems for upcoming themes listed below and on the Home Page, whereby suggested themes are not intended to be restrictive or preclusive of other individual submissions, and for the Big City, Little (details appear on that page) and Twelve features on an ongoing basis. The key for Twelve is risk; it is of equal interest to us whether the gambit succeeds or fails well. There is no specific length limitation for that section, nor are contributions limited to a single piece. We encourage multi-part poem cycles, for instance.

I find especially creative their notes on formatting, and applaud their font choice: Palatino 14 point.

The Next Big Thing blogging meme, a self-interview on the topic of your next big project, has some great, creative responses. A sampling:



 

Kaaren Kitchell
Susan Elbe
Susan Rich

My favorite question in this interview: Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition? Interesting especially to see which actors poets would choose to play in their poems! I can see the poem as mini-movie, with short video and still images accompanying the words, music ... It's a good dream.