Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 47

New Blog Site! Come on over

I'm happy to pour the champagne and toss the balloons to announce that I'm blogging now (still a Rocket Kid!) over at my new author site.

Here's the blog.

Come and talk to me. There will be all the same topics and any you'd like to start! Comments, as usual, are welcome and can well start a new topic.

Today I blogged about writer's routines, an endlessly fascinating topic. See you there!

Seasons of poetry

In Northern California we have funny pseudo-seasons. Warm and bright November days that fool you into summer feelings, roses that act as if they’re going to make bouquets more, and this year winter will take a vacation. And then at nightfall, the temp falls, and suddenly you’re in wool and looking at stars like icicles and wondering whether you should just stay home until February.

I find myself writing less and less as the season and earth contracts during fall and winter. The shorter days, the angle of light, the chill, are not my sources of inspiration. I’m an expansionist, if I feel the sun’s touch on my shoulder, I go where it wants to lead me. Mine are mostly spring and summer poems, I find. My inspiration leads me to want to expand my being to include the world in fresh new ways, to incorporate it into myself imaginatively and explore it from within. I think as a writer I have a season of dormancy. Maybe a good time to tell tales, write prose, but poetry for me waits for the new buds. Anticipating their pop and fragrance.

How about you — are you a seasonal poet or writer? Curious.

Poetry E-Book Publishing: Wherefore Art Thou?

As the e-book has come barreling down the publishing highway, poets have been left mostly in the dust. Why haven't poetry e-books emerged on Kindles, Nooks, et al? Several forces are at work, the small size of poetry book publishers being one factor, but perhaps the most troublesome is being the pesky technical problem of not being able to control line breaks in e-book formats. A thought-provoking article about it appeared a year ago or so in Publishers Weekly. "Diverging Roads: Poetry and E-Books." The problem of line breaks shifting around when the reader of an e-book changes the font size has been an insuperable problem for many poetry book publishers and poets.

A few, however, have boldly gone where most poets don't want to go and allowed the e-book to change the line breaks. Diane Lockward's wonderful e-chapbook , Twelve for the Record, (Amazon-Kindle edition) is one of the poetry e-book groundbreakers.  But while the article said that Graywolf Press and Coffee House press had planned to have poetry e-books out by Fall of 2011, they have yet to produce them. Where are the poetry houses in this new e-publishing field? Way back in the stretch it seems. Time to gain some ground?

New poems that come in series

Have you ever stumbled on a vein of mineral wealth in your work, a place that has been compressing inside until you open up the seam and it bulges with images and sounds? I've rarely written series poems based on emotional content, though certainly like all poets, my work proceeds in tonal phases. But recently I found an image so striking that it opened up such a seam and I could only work it through side tunnels, one poem at a time, so much was there.

I always enjoy series poems, and especially when they're strong enough to power an entire book. But I never made room for them, or time perhaps. Or conscious awareness of the veins of feeling compressed and "cooked" till ready to gleam. I hope it continues. I'd like to hear about your series poems, if you've experienced this.

How to Become an Artist

I spent some hours yesterday writing an artistic biography of my father, who was a painter. I found myself writing that I learned about art standing near his easel and watching him paint. It was the silent choreography of creativity. He would stand back, leaning forward, hip thrust out, as he considered his next move, like a chess player. Then he'd move decisively forward, closing in on the canvas, brush scumbling furiously in a small area. Then he'd move back again to consider what had just happened. This could go on for hours. The concentration was palpable, like music in the room. The way ideas flowed out of him was transporting. I wanted that, to be engaged in something like that. And I began first to draw, then to write. It's an indelible memory.

New Poem in Goblin Fruit

I'm very happy that my poem "Kingdom" appearing in the current issue of the fascinating zine Goblin Fruit. They publish poetry "of the fantastical, poetry that treats mythic, surreal, fantasy and folkloric themes, or approaches other themes in a fantastical way." Fun to be part of this imaginative venture!

Election Madness + Poetry/All the News You Need

Election Madness has seized us again, with the first of the debates between candidates for president. Do we really think any one person in any one office can make a very big difference in our lives? The entire system of our democracy, with its checks and balances, is designed to prevent it. True, there has been an alarming power grab at the top in the last few decades. It created deep divisions in our country. It's the worst of time in America in many ways. But also the best: the Internet is creating a unified world, melding East and West in ways unthinkable only a few years ago. Medical advances increase health and wealth that is spreading around the globe. Where is power? No one understands, least of all those who think they wield it. That's the first humbling lesson someone who steps into the Oval Office learns. They all talk about it and pray about it.

Poetry is, by contrast, a deeper and longer lasting power to touch, change, and heal us. Few word of presidents are quoted as often as Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Whitman, or Shakespeare.

I'm getting all the news I need through election day from those sources, and tuning in only occasionally to the bogus news. The news that doesn't stay news. I wouldn't be a journalist today.

Here's a useful site, if you want to evaluate what kinds of rejections you're getting and what they really mean. Rejection Wiki can show you samples of standard or personal rejections notes from 100+ literary journals. Read, contribute your own rejection notices to expand the knowledge base.

Emily Takes the Stage

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. I reviewed it on Goodreads, which made me laugh. Date finished reading: Never. One to five stars: 10,000. Bookshelf: my iPhone, so I'm never without a Dickinson poem, should the need arise. I'm tempted to only quote Dickinson in a review of this luminary of solitude, this pristine custodian of her own periodic deaths, and this mystically crowned priestess of Nature's God. When my inspiration flags, a Dickinson poem restores zest and also humility. If I had to pick a favorite poet, Emily Dickinson is it. My homage to her:



Emily Takes the Stage
The Day that I was crowned
Was like the other Days --
Until the Coronation came --
And then -- 'twas Otherwise --
Like the Beach Blanket Babylon lady who carries a city on her head, some women walk to the soul’s well, balancing with both hands the water for their thirsty village, but you balanced on your slender necka galaxy-wide diadem.It dropped jewels everywhere,in field and town, in school and parlor,in letter and note. Children, maids,and innocents pounced onthose green, glinting stones.Unlike the Babylon lady, you didn’t need props to hold up your crown.You only needed to lighten it by strewing and sewing into packetsyour wit and gems.

August poem

Sharing this poem which will appear in my forthcoming collection Gods of Water and Air. I'm not entirely sure from which publisher it will be forthcoming, as I've had some publishing mishaps you can read about earlier in this blog. But it will forthcome. Here's a poem that originally appeared in Pilgrimage:


Anvil of Light

In a forgotten valley studded with runic oaks,             at mid-August, on an anvil of light            my breath and two swallows rise and fall.
Nearing to the remembered place,             a wail of distant insects             riffles the distance like notes in a weird scale.            Solitude comes to an intersection
And a figure-eight of melody             startles up out of the grass.Involuntary, this godward thing called praise.            It lights on a weed tip             and its wings radiate out.
The wind’s tides roll through dry weeds, on and on,            a Greek chorus of Why, Why, Why. A mockingbird's tail flicks.             The silent ring of the lupine bells.
Still, I don’t know where I am             until I watch a pencil-tick crawl up a poppy's thighand black-spotted wings sprout
from my back. I flap away            to a dry height from which I can see             the question’s shape. Here            is really nowhere. Are you nowhere too?
How can anyone ever trap matter in words?Or ever make ideas as apple-fine as this air?

The Future of Publishing and Mine in It

Since hearing that Kitsune Books, the publisher of Gods of Water and Air, my third poetry collection, was ending business operations on December 31, I've researched small press publishing to try and understand what had happened and what to do. I had picked Kitsune partly because they were a rare combination, a press publishing both poetry and prose, and I have a novel to publish. What I've found shocked me, even though I had a picture of the tenuous nature of publishing, especially small publishing companies.

Print publishing, as we all know, is becoming an endangered species, as the sale of e-books now is increasing while print sales remain flat. And poetry publishing is very endangered -- yet poetry itself is flourishing in some ways. As an American art form, poetry is abandoning its academic and literary roots  and becoming, by way of slam, rap, rock, and readings, a folk art. Poetry performance is thriving; the printed word is dying. It's becoming a younger art, a pop culture and social phenomenon.

Like Kitsune Books, most poetry presses in America are operations as fragile as the health or will of its often sole operator. That means a press's entire catalog and backlist of books is vulnerable to sudden disappearance.

Do you ever think to ask a press that's offering you a publishing contract about their gross sales or net profit margin? How many full-time staff members? Or average sales are for a poetry book? I sure didn't ask such questions, not with my last three publishers. And because I remained ignorant, I had unpleasant surprises. Not that they were bad experiences, but that I was unprepared to face how frail these companies are, how they may even be hobbyist ventures, and what little resemblance most of them bear to conventional book publishing and the expectations an author might reasonably have in that context. I have lived and am learning. Who knows, I might start a press myself one day.

What I've learned is: poetry is an endangered species; poetry has never been as popular in the last 25 years; contemporary poetry bears little resemblance to anything in print; poetry is an almost all-volunteer effort; poetry has migrated into other cultural forms. All these are true. Yet something else is happening. Poets are starting self-publishing collectives, publishing e-books, publishing spoken-word CDs, reading on the radio, forming Facebook communities, printing broadsides, making book trailer videos, appearing on Youtube, even showering cities with printed poems. Poetry will never die. Print and bookstores may.