Birthing a Manuscript

For the past several months, I've been working on a manuscript of between 60 and 70 pages to enter into contests and send to publishers. In poetry biz, having a book is like a having a passport; you can't get far from home without it. Furthermore, I've started to see my poems as related pieces meant to be presented together -- and I want people to read them. That seems obvious, but it is not always the case!

From what I understand, this desire to publish is not uncommon; nor is the practice straightforward. Since my first submission to a book contest was postmarked today, I thought I'd take this opportunity to talk a bit about process.

Like most things in my life, my process started with lists: I listed every single poem of mine that I thought was possibly publishable in a manuscript. I did this three or four times over two months, reconsidering work based on ongoing revisions and relationships to other poems. Once I had settled on 74 or so pages of poetry, I printed them out. I grouped poems together that felt connected (or interestingly disconnected) and made several stacks. In the process, I weeded out about ten pages (mostly due to redundancy).

Then I did what you see in the image: I wrote the titles of the final contenders on little bits of paper (recycled!) and sorted them on the keyboard tray of my desk. I used tape to hold them in place. This method allowed me to easily play with different orders without shuffling piles of paper all over my office floor. Clean up only involved sliding the tray back under my desktop!

After I'd settled on an order and on my sections (Part I through Part IV), I started to build the manuscript in a Word document, which allowed me to see the poems all together. Again, I found myself cutting (and sometimes pasting) poems based on the new experience of seeing them formally back to back.

My next step was giving my draft away to be read. Two generous and wonderful friends took a copy of the manuscript from me for about a week each, and each spent a few hours with me, giving me helpful feedback about placement, poem choice, and title. After each reading, I fine tuned: a word here, a section order there, cutting a stanza, adding a bridge poem.

After formatting a Table of Contents and an Acknowledgments page (four drafts in), I took the plunge. As I type this, my baby passes from postal basket to basket, making its way out of Bryn Mawr to its first contest. My little Moses, who will find you and give you a chance? Fingers are crossed!

I'm sure other poets have found more efficient (or perhaps more colorful) ways to build a book; if you know of any, please share!

Rich's Wild Patience

Last week I finished one of my many "night stand" books (though they technically sit on a shelf cleverly built into my headboard), Adrienne Rich's A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. For those who have read and enjoyed Diving into the Wreck and/or The Dream of a Common Language, Patience is an indispensable addition to the Rich collection.

Here are some of Rich's words, out of context, pulled from poems throughout:

• "...I turn again, slip my arm / under the pillow turned for relief, / your breathing traces my shoulder. Two women sleeping / together have more than their sleep to defend." ("The Images")
• "Anger and tenderness: the spider's genius / to spin and weave in the same action / from her own body, anywhere-- / even from a broken web." ("Integrity)
• "The world as it is: not as her users boast / damaged beyond reclamation by their using / Ourselves as we are in these painful motions // of staying cognizant: some part of us always / out beyond ourselves / knowing knowing knowing" ("The Spirit of Place")
• "it is meant to be in silence that this happens" ("Frame")
• "When language fails us, when we fail each other / there is no exorcism." ("Rift")
• "Unborn sisters, / look back on us with mercy" ("Turning the Wheel")

For those who have not read this era of Rich's writing before, I hope these samples provide a useful tour (though superficial) of Rich's concerns and her artful turn of phrase.

I have heard from many students and friends that Rich is difficult, particularly on first read. She demands a curious, critical, and open reader, which none of us is all the time. I have put down her poems in the past when my mind was too dull with exhaustion or distraction, knowing I needed to return when I could give them more of my attention. So much of Rich's poetry is about the need to pay attention in life, to interrogate assumptions, to make decisions and bear witness with a critical mind. It is only fair that her poetry require the same quality of attention from her readers. It strikes me that reading Rich's poetry is practice for living the kind of life she models in her work. Surely my eyes, my mind, my body moves differently after living a bit in her words.

What I hope the sampled lines above reveal is that Rich can be prosaic in her poetry -- not in the dull sense of the word, but in the straightforward sense of it. In Patience, Rich gives us her characteristically tight, passionate poetry, but she also offers quite a few footholds to her reader. I often feel she is saying here, this is what I am trying to say. Read the poem again now. And I do. And I never regret it.

Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler

Yesterday I had the strangely delightful opportunity to proctor a PSAT exam for a single student at a local school. She was accommodated with 50% extended time and reading assistance, which meant that I had five blocks of 38 or 45 minutes during which I might be asked to read a question, passage, or set of directions aloud. Otherwise, I could quietly read and mind the time.

I am so grateful that the book my fingers found in my canvas bag (I'd brought a few) was Patricia Smith's Blood Dazzler. It's getting a lot of attention because it's been nominated for the prestigious National Book Award, and I've been toting it around since I bought it at the Dodge Poetry Festival after hearing her read. When I say read, I mean recite. Patricia Smith told her poems to us without the page, seemingly making eye contact with everyone in the tent. The experience of her poetry aloud is transformative. It's no surprise she's also a poetry slam champion.

Blood Dazzler is a collection of poems about Hurricane Katrina. Some of the poems are in Katrina's voice, others in the voices of survivors, pets, rescuers, evacuees, and the deceased.
As the back of her book says, it is "[a] storm's-eye view of the devastation that forever changed New Orleans and America." Smith follows the progression of the storm through newspaper clippings, emails between FEMA officers, imagined inner dialogues, television broadcasts, and more. Although each poem stands alone, the collection is poetry of witness at its best: it tells a story, it brings the reader in, and it shimmers with fine craftmanship. I could not stop reading her aloud to guests last night. I imagine this might be an issue for a while to come. This is a book that needs to be heard, to be read.

Let's say you notice this one the next time you're in the bookstore, and you're not sure whether to take the plunge. Turn to p.25 and read "What to Tweak" or to p.50 to read "34." Or open to any page -- it's that good.

On Odes and Evolving Forms

It's often said that the best way to keep the old forms alive is to mess with them, to break them. Sonnets can break out of rhyme, villanelles can fudge the repeated phrases, haiku can concern themselves with more than nature, and so on. I agree, even as I also treasure the pure forms, that breaking the rules from time to time helps keep form relevant. This is how poetry evolves, building on the before as it creates itself anew.

John Drury's Poetry Dictionary does quite a thorough job defining and redefining poetic forms. I turned to it a few days ago to see how Drury defined an ode, as I was feeling a little self-conscious about the free verse odes I wrote recently after a friend noted that odes are, of course, typically quite a bit longer than my twelve-line pieces. Drury's definition is helpful, noting that an ode is a "song or lyric, often passionate, expansive, exuberant, rhapsodic" (195). He then goes on to discuss the evolution of the ode: Pindaric or choral odes, Horatian odes, Cowleyan or irregular odes, and Neruda's elemental odes. I wondered how Sharon Olds would categorize her odes to hymens, composting toilets, and the like; I suppose they, too, are elemental, "passionate and rhapsodic about the ordinary," even if composting toilets aren't quite ordinary to most people (198). I then wondered whether an ode can still be an ode if its expansiveness, exuberance, and passion are tight, focused, and small -- regardless of its subject. Surely an ode can be small as long as its heart is still big, right? I should think so. Perhaps resizing it can help the ode to stay alive in the years to come as readers continue to expect quick reads and bite-sized inspiration.

Mine Connections

For the last three summers, I've taught at Bryn Mawr College's summer program for high school girls, Writing for College. Each summer, we teach Diane Gilliam Fisher's beautiful Kettle Bottom, a personal favorite and a masterpiece in poetry. Fisher's poems tell the story of a West Virginia mine town through a diverse array of voices and dialects. She explores the perspectives of children, wives, and the miners themselves with dignity and seemingly simple poetics, but her collection of poems is far from simple. Every summer, I experience anew Fisher's gift for narrative that subtly but steadily pulls me into her concerns and characters, and I delight in facilitating students' experiences of it. The epigraph to her collection comes from Muriel Rukeyser:

What do you want--a cliff over a city?
A foreland, sloped to sea and overgrown with roses?
These people live here.

Saturday night I flipped through my first issue of American Poet, and I was drawn in to Marilyn Hacker's essay on H.D., Gwendolyn Brooks, and Muriel Rukeyser, "Three American Women Poets in the First Century of World Wars." At the end of the essay, as is the case in all of American Poet's essays, there is a poem by each of the featured poets (including the author herself). The Brooks poem, "the rites for Cousin Vit," is probably my favorite poem of hers, and the Rukeyser, "Gauley Bridge," is my first true introduction to her poetry. I read it with a quality of attention that I wish I brought to more of my life. How removed she is through it, how cold many of her observations. Then, the final stanza, in which she asserts herself and simultaneously calls upon her readers to pay attention to their own reading of these descriptions. It is the same stanza quoted above. How appropriate that Fisher brings Rukeyser into her Kettle Bottom; the women share a concern in their poems for the devastation of mining towns, but even more remarkably, they share a gift for unraveling a reader's judgment of the places and people they evoke. We become a part of their poems when we give them our attention, which they skillfully command. I can't wait to find more Rukeyser to read.

On another note, The New Verse News has published another of my poems today, "Driving the Slow Way to Buxton, NC." There have been some interesting poems there of late; check them out.

Being Open at Open Mic

Last night I attended a wonderful reading at Milkboy Coffee in Bryn Mawr. The reading was sponsored by the Mad Poets Society and featured Nathalie Anderson and my friend, J.C. Todd. Their readings were both excellent; I was particularly excited by hearing more of J.C.'s work. Her book, What Space This Body, is one of my favorites of the year, and she read some of my favorite selections from it ("Moon Blown Free," "Men Kissing," and "Pissing"). She also read some of her translations of exciting Latvian poets in New European Poets, as well as some newer work that is still in process. It was delightful in every way. I wish I could read with such a sharp, smiling presence as hers.

Nathalie Anderson read a variety of material, but mostly from a collection of poems written about her time in Kyoto. What I remember most are delicious poems about the food she ate there, as well as her remarkable ability to balance several books and pieces of paper at once in front of the mic. Hers was also a powerful presence.

When it was time for the open mic after the reading, the poets read works responding in some way to J.C. and to Nathalie: poems that answered J.C.'s dedication of "Men Kissing" to Sarah Palin, or poems that added to the feast of Nathalie's food poems. I only brought two poems with me, and they didn't necessarily respond to either poet's work. I brought them because they are fresh for me, easy enough to read, and upbeat. By all accounts, they were well received, but I wish I had thought about how to connect with the other readers. Other poets, I noticed, brought a pile of poems from which they chose appropriate responses to the night's readings. I love the ways in which poets and poems dialogue; in the future, I hope I am able to more skillfully enter the open mic conversation. It takes flexibility, and, well, openness!

The Gift

Today I finished reading The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde. The Gift has been my trusty gym mate for months, gracefully entertaining me as I sweat my mind out in 30, 40, and 50 minute aerobic sessions. It has been stimulating and inspiring for both intellect and heart. Hyde tells an important story about gifts, those that are tangible and those that are inherent. He also illuminates the ways in which the culture of giving and receiving (and nurturing) gifts rubs up against capitalism. The strange roles that wars, religion, and individual leaders and artists have played in this often uncomfortable tension shed an appreciated fresh light on history.

There is much to be distraught about in this book, but Hyde somehow leaves the reader feeling hopeful and even empowered. The greatest solution to the inevitable discord between art as profit and art as gift that Hyde offers is, not surprisingly, a compromise: when art enters the marketplace, that market should funnel funds back into the arts. The prime example Hyde offers of this actually happening in our times is the Music Performance Fund. Once upon a time, the American Federation of Musicians (yay union!) bargained with the recording industry that a small percentage of profits from recorded albums would go into a fund to augment the income of performing musicians. The fund still exists, and many of the "free" and inexpensive concerts held at schools and other public venues across the U.S. and Canada are supported by this fund. Makes sense, right? The profit from art partly supports more art. If only this were more often true.

After I finished reading my book, I still had 20 minutes left to my workout, so I thought about my life as a practicing poet and writer. The poetry market, I internally whined, simply doesn't work like this for the individual. However, when we enter contests with contest fees, aren't we supporting one of our own, the one who will win the $1000 -- or whatever the prize is? Yes, perhaps so. And when publications start making a profit big enough to run these contests with low or no fees (see Narrative Magazine's free contest for young writers here), isn't that similarly supporting individual writers? Of course it is.

Maybe there is more hope for writers that I thought. Our renegade gift economy interacts necessarily with the larger capitalistic monster, but not to the total detriment of its core. There still is difficulty, it seems, in making a living purely as a writer -- at least for most of us.