Rachel Dacus's Blog, page 56

Places That Verb Your World - Around the World

I'm happy to be a pin on the literary map of one of the more exciting journals online, Fringe. Here's my Mt. Diablo pin-drop verse. Just scroll down on the left side of the world map to read my lines.

Fringe is always coming up with interesting ideas, genres, and literary work. Disclaimer: I do interviews for Fringe. Still, I'm entitled to my opinion, and it's that you should check out Fringe. Their Maps issue is fun and their blog is full of surprises and delights.

In other news, I've been at work on my novel, which means a delightful mental sojourn in Northern Italy. Today I've been visiting the Hermitage in Assisi, where Saint Francis lived and preached to the birds. How lucky to get to take breaks in Italy! I'll have to set my next book somewhere fun. Maybe southern Italy! A little research will be required, however.

Double rainbow

In the po-biz, some days you get the lowering clouds and some days, the double rainbow. The trick is to keep sending them out, no matter how discouraging it can be. I've been circulating a manuscript for over two years now, and as it goes out, it evolves, especially if an editor made comments in the process of rejecting it.

Yesterday I went walking after the storm had abated in the early evening, to find myself arched by an enormous, perfectly formed and brilliant double rainbow. I thought of the way one or two acceptances after a long, difficult season of submitting, can restore your faith in your own writing. That faith (and the concomitant persistence) is the key to improving your work. Nice to get such a picturesque reminder!

Acceptance and Rejection - The Coin

The two-sided coin buys you into the game of publishing, but really it's more like a 17-sided coin, with only one reverse: 17 turn-downs for every acceptance.

With that as my best average, I'm pleased to have had my poem "The Pearl" accepted recently by Indiana University Northwest's Spirits magazine, for their Spring 2011 issue.

And for that lovely news, I paid with the usual 17 rejection notes, some of them very pleasing for a rejection letter. Some were "please try again" letters, some let me know which poem they liked best. I always appreciate a little feedback on a rejection, as it makes me feel they really considered the work, and it made it to an editor with some decision-making power, not just the first round of (student) readers.

New poetry presses - non-contest + Bly/Rumi reading

Find new non-contest poetry presses to submit your manuscript to! Several new entries on my page of poetry book publishers that read outside of contests. It seems as though more presses are accepting unsolicited submissions, though some charge a reading fee. But I think the tide of all-contest-poetry-publishing may be turning back to a more diverse way of finding new books and supporting presses. I don't mind a reading fee, especially if you're promised some feedback (Kore Press does this), and even if not, as long as my fee supports a press that publishes work I admire. And if it doesn't, I should ask myself why I'm submitting there!

A hilarious Robert Bly reading of Rumi on praise and catastrophe. (Thanks, Marian Haddad, for the link.)

For a bit gentler Rumi reading, here's Coleman Barks and music, with a poem, appropriately right now, that takes water as a theme.

Get well soon, Coleman Barks!

A Thousand Cranes for Japan

It's hard not to get whiplash this week, switching between disasters in Japan and the revolution in Libya. My heart still sends up many prayers to suffering Japan. Japan has a tradition of making paper cranes for luck, a tradition that found its way into one of my poems. Here's to recovery in Japan:

At the Thousand Cranes Auto Repair

The women were making and the men waiting
in the room provided. Folding a square piece of gold,
the Japanese woman looked up from behind
her sunglasses and said: A thousand paper cranes.
For a party. For luck. The men's eyes
fuzzed and snapped: NO TALKING to strangers
during auto repair. A woman with a fan of years
on her forehead moved across the space
to sit beside the folder, pleating the room.
Another question launched the tale
of the last thousand cranes, made at a dying
grandmother's bedside. (Hers? Mine?
This woman might appear someday at your bed—
for luck, she would say) Everyone was listening
openly now. Their necks leaned in parallel.
Feet dropping down, they flew on story currents
and watched being after being take shape
and rise from luck-bending, blind invention's
darting, dark skinned fingers.

-- Rachel Dacus
(originally published in Stirring)

Ghost Hours

Ghost Hours

1. Spring Forward
The government's at it again, tampering time.
We stagger behind, wishing Salvador Dali minutes
would lag instead of leap. April, the month of taxes
and poetry, trails us like an urchin, asking for thanks
while we are thanked by the government
with jet-lag and loss of easeful dark.
Do you really expect us to pump
the big-top minutes in this shell game
with lifespan, this unsought forward-swap?
And where do the authorities keep
my acrobat hour? My purse's emptiness
holds shadows and stars.

2. Stashed
Perhaps Congress has stashed the saved time
in a teak box inlaid with mother-of-pearl roses
and lined in dawn-like blue satin.
Or perhaps they use a big penny jar
shaped like a trumpeting elephant.
The lock in his triumphant, raised trunk.
Too many of us must have keys,
for every fall we find it looted
like the empty bank I once saw hung with a For Sale sign.
The silver-hinged vault lay open
for deposits of dust. Ghost hours
must have danced in that mouth at midnight.
I won't put my overtime
in anything so mawed
or keep my memories under its picked lock.

3. Fall Back
When skeletons dance
and red devil leaves seesaw,
the clock spins backwards. Spring
forward, fall back, I repeat to timepieces
whose hands I wring.
The powers-that-save have conjured
the phantom hour. It imps my night, keeps
afternoons whirring like hummingbirds.
I see now why we must hoard every spark
of light against night's snip-end and hold life
by the tail – the dark dot
of the question mark.


-- first appeared in The Atlanta Review

Starting the day literary

I have a friend who closets herself in her study for two hours each morning before work in order to write. I don't ask her what "writing" includes. Does it mean dreaming as she looks out the window at the deer grazing in her yard, or preparing batches of poems to submit, or writing a book review, or shuffling through the pages of a file labeled "Poems in Progress," or lying back on the couch sinking into that state between dreaming and creating? For me, "writing time" includes all those things, and ever since I heard that my friend rose early in order to carve this silent, solitary space out of her busy day, I have tried to start my day in the dreamspace of creativity and even the po-biz parts of it that are necessarily attached to being a published writer.

When I tell friends that my grant writing goes better if I've worked first on a poem, they always laugh, as though poems and proposals were separate planets in the solar system of the mind. Of course, for me, writing can even include brisk walking, or taking a long shower, or reading. It's a state of mind and time. And of course it also occurs in the pockets of the rest of the day, the slack tide moments when your mind doesn't have to focus on much (while washing dishes, for example), and you can return to that poetic problem you've been chewing on.

In case your writing time includes po-biz, here's a handy list of March contest deadlines: http://www.madpoetry.org/contests/mar...

Have a creative day!

Every Morning

Because it's that kind of day ...


Every Morning I Try


to pronounce a divine name perfectly, knowing
I can't really say its swallow-swing
or enunciate the syllables a mockingbird
loops in medleys, can't whisper vowels

of an airplane's rhyming trail.
Names like that must be repeated
as a flower lets pollen fly. I should mimic
the closed bud's wise pause.

My human mouth can hardly shape
the million-zinnia alpha letter, let alone
the final plosive dazzle –
but I can hum the consonants
of this green-button day –

and add several bandaged overtones
to the morning-setting moon,
echo two doves speaking
to my dog, who rolls and rolls
on the name's final Ah.
Since I cannot make that pure sound,

I will get down on the grass and roll with him,
then give the next being I meet
a courteous consonant
dangling an ocean vowel.


First appeared in The Cortland Review

Twice As Much

I woke up feeling that today will allow a great deal of creative thought -- thanks to some mysterious force, the laws of which we haven't yet discovered. This poem, which originally appeared in Eclectic Journal, is my ode to those unknown, expansive forces.

Twice As Much Starlight

The universe, say surprised astronomers, has twice as much accumulated starlight as can be explained by all the known stars and galaxies. -- Newspaper article, 1998.

This can only mean
a hidden conflagration
burns in the cosmic whirl.
Where can it live, this occult fire --
not at the center
galaxies are escaping.
Not at the frontiers of space
where new suns are pioneered.
So where does the pure pulse
of light beat,
how does it race out of nowhere,
like a night light
the void itself switches on?
Leave it to science to find evidence
that deep in the spin
of atoms is a tiny sun, a heart
of radiance. Let the measuring mind
find the measureless through theoretical
mathematics, I only know
I have lived through days
when there is twice as much love
as people around me to explain it.

The inevitable process

We've had two family members with dementia, possibly Alzheimer's, in the last few years. My father died a year and a half ago from it, and his wife now has it. Having been appointed her conservator, I feel as if I've now acquired a new, ninety-year-old child. Her well-being is my responsibility. While she dazes off into the eternal present, I pay bills and handle legal matters, locate doctors and confer with geriatric specialists. Thank God my brother is co-conservator and can share all this! I wrote a lot of poems about my father's condition and how it was to lose him inch by inch. This morning, I'm thoughtful about losing her the same way. Here's one of the poems that made me change my attitude toward the whole adventure. (Included in the wonderful anthology Beyond Forgetting):

At the Easel with Alzheimer's


My father is painting in the basement: blue,
green, yellow. The cinderblock wall's white-
wash is tanned with dust and the ocean view
obscured by a flapping sheet of vinyl. It fights

the wind. He says he's inspired to blue. My phone call
came to his studio and I was greeted: I know you.
You're the pharmacist, right? The pall
on his memory has not dimmed his bad taste

in jokes or how at the easel he's always affable
over the scribble of boar's bristle, the give
of canvas to brush. I skip over laughable
lapses, as when he asks me where I live

and then pretends he was kidding. Name-
dropping, his mind grows patches, nicks
and spores like the salt on his aluminum
windows that will eventually make them stick.

Painting down there, his panes always closed
to keep it warm and dry, not a hint of sea
outside. What are you working on? His nose
nearly on the canvas, he can only say,

It's getting better, going somewhere. It's green,
blue, and not as grim as it sounds. His brain
grows lacy and colors squirm like the skeins
of yarn above the basement washing machine.

I'm frightened of how much he forgets,
this new breeze that unzips our history,
but I say, Don't fight the wind. Be a net.
Catch the world by letting the knots slip.