A Little Something for NaPoWriMo

Since it's National Poetry Writing Month (and they say April is the cruelest month. Could that have been an April fool's joke?) I, along with poets across the nation, have been attempting to turn out a poem a day.
Well, I was at work the other day, and since I was so incredibly busy I spent the better part of a couple of minutes staring at my shoes. I finally announced to my coworker that my shoes look like catfish. (They do! I'm not even kidding!). Then I said I could probably write a poem about that. She dared me to. So, here it is, dedicated to her, and still, a little bit, in the works (In the actual format, the poem is one block stanza, not broken apart. I'm not sure why blogger can't understand these things...):

     Doc Martens at the corner of Second and Second
                                                ~For M Rad

My shoes are two catfish skimming suburban algae—pave dust, polyester

fibers too small for my eye to see—they gobble it up:
mud and birch mold, chewed-up gum

and a spilled latte. They drink it in with relish, slipping

from crack to crack or cobble to cobble
without missing a beat, hungry

for the next piece of wanton waste. And their eyes—dumb
oversized eyes wide open—staring straight up
at the blue or gray or fuchsia sweeping over,
never darting to safety when it rains, always eyes up
and open. They don’t need to search for purchase,
catfish, do they? Big sucker mouths and whiskers
like hands out telling them all they need to know,
never worried that they don’t dress up in anything
but silt-stitched grayscale scales zipped
across their back and sides. Their eyes on every sunrise, sunset,
every scroll of clouds unrolled across the water’s back.
If my eyes are down on them admiring their hunger
what do they know I’m missing
that’s going on over my head?

 

On my Twenty-Fifth Birthday

     On my Twenty-Fifth Birthday

This year, I want to lose something.

Not a pound

     or a bad habit

(though I would,

 really),

but something of moderate significance:

my car

     my cell phone

          a notebook of poems finished but never read.

I want to feel an absence; to not quite know

what is in it. To look

at the drive way

     or the bookshelf

knowing I could fill it if I wanted,

knowing there was something I once

wanted more.

I am told I will not be young forever. Already, I feel

the old woman in my skin telling me

what I should do, what I should

not say.

I feel her wrinkled cheeks

inside my cheeks when I wake in the morning.

I see her softening skin in the puddles

when I walk, and she smiles

when I smile. Sometimes I lace my fingers

through the surface to touch her hand.

 

I do not want to lose the old woman. I want

to lose something she thinks

she already knows.

So Begins the Sleeplessness

I didn't do so well with keeping up on my residency experience this time around. I will use the fact that everyone including me got some form of illness or another. I will fill in the bulk of my experience later but, as is my tradition, I wanted to put up my residency summary. I will put more up later. Have a great day, everybody!

Residency Summary: Awake in the Depths

I am still amazed by how things come together at the residencies. This time, it feel into line with what my semester had begun to teach me—the idea of depth. This past semester, I started to understand how to let my poems and my imagination take me into things I didn’t think I knew. The farther I went, the more things made sense. This residency, several of the faculty members turned to depth in their craft talks in different ways. The most important, to me, was Claire Davis’ suggestion to turn to depth instead of trying to always move forward with story. Sometimes, when writing something and it isn’t going anywhere, I need to write vertically. Starting out small and distant, I need to zoom in and take in anything and everything that might be around me. For a poem, it might be geography, proper names of things, a deeper realization of the character I am presenting, thoughts, actions, spaces. I need to plumb the strata of the moment in order to discover more and present more in a poem, or a moment in a novel. Sometimes writing simply needs the writer to stop and open her eyes.

A similar topic came up in Ben Percy’s craft talk. He said to “notice what you notice” about things around us. When something is interesting, we tend to look at it longer. But what do we notice about it? Something common or uncommon, something we could show the reader that he may not have noticed before? His talk melded well with Debra Gwartney’s talk on specificity. When writing, it is not necessary to be specific about everything. The reader will think, at first, that something is important, and then realize that nothing is. The most important thing is to be aware of the character’s perception. When there is a moment when specifics are called for, then I need to be behind the character’s eyes, aware of his or her emotional state and surroundings. Human beings almost never notice things logically, and I have an opportunity to show the quirky or strange things I or my character would see when deep in thought, or thoroughly enmeshed in a moment.

How is this depth achieved? Marvin Bell and Cristina Garcia suggested a chaotic creative life is best for a writer. Shaking up my routine, reminding myself that I am not, and should not be predictable,  and “becoming peripatetic” as Jack Driscoll said are all ways to get beyond the conscious mind and sink deeply into the subconscious. When I sit down to write, I must start too early and write too long in order to allow the wonder and strangeness of my mind out onto the page. It is only then that the poem can truly get past the conscious mind and make connections of its own—connections I could never have predicted or attempted to make on my own.

The most effective way to call things from our mind, whether strange or obvious, is to think. Kwame admonished us as poets to spend time in thought. And not to think only about politics or the social structure of our world, though those things are important, but to think deeply about other common things: love, family, an encounter with a stranger. Poets are looked up to in many parts of the world as thinkers. We have opinions and ideas, but too many writers stay to the simpler, shallower end of the writing pool, afraid of what people may think of what they have to say. As writers, we can’t do this. We have a responsibility to come to the page, to ponder what we are putting on the page, and to offer these writings to those who are reading them without apology. “I have to think of what is urgent,” Kwame said. We don’t write to make people like us, we write to make people think; to deepen their awareness of the world and what surrounds them.

I have often been encouraged to dive deep into writing, and I thought I had been—spending as much time as I thought I could and writing anything and everything that came to my mind. I realize now I have to actively awaken my mind by reaching deeply into it. I have to be a writer every day by taking the time to think more deeply about the events going on around me, my emotions, my actions. I realize that I am responsible for what I write. I am an influence on those who will read my writing, and I want to wake those people up to the world whether I am showing them what the world is made of, or what it is becoming.

 

Back in the Saddle Again

Well, if the road to we all know where is paved with good intentions, I'm in a heap of trouble at the moment, since this didn't get put up yesterday. However, I spent some quality time on Sunday evening (which made my monday morning less than quality and more coffee) sketching in my travel stories I wanted to tell for the benefit of all of you back home.

For anyone who may have forgotten, I'm deep into my MFA studies at Pacific University. I'm beginning my fourth semester which will focus mostly on the compilation and revision of the thesis manuscript--so far as I know. I still don't know what goes in to the thesis semester. I suppose, like everything else, I'll figure it out as we go.

I left Kalispell around 7:45 on Saturday night. So, yes, this post is delayed. I like to keep this blog running while I'm away to keep everybody back home in the loop while I'm staying up too late, getting up too early, and hanging out with some of the most fantastic, most gracious, and most talented writers in the country. (Most of them fit in to all three categories.)

So then, the getting here.

I got to the Whitefish Amtrak Station at 8:20pm Saturday. Shaunna and Lexi dropped me off. We had a nice chat on some of our favorite book series along the way. I had Mary Helen Stefaniak's book, "The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia" in my backpack to read in the lobby while I waited for the train. I had planned to finish up the worksheeps for my workshop group on the train and then hopefully relax for a bit before we got to Portland. I went into the train station and the guy behind the counter let me know the train was running late, and would be in somewhere around ten p.m. So I sat down with my book and read while another person, then a mom and her two daughters, then four older people, then a group of five guys came in. Pretty soon the little train station was packed.
When the train finally pulled in, I headed for the last three cars of the train. (The Empire Builder Amtrak train stops in Spokane, gets split in half, three cars get put on a new engine to head toward Oregon, the rest of the train goes to Seattle). The conductor stopped me before I got to the doorway and told us all to form a line. The train was going to be full, so he was assigning seats. He called for families and people traveling together first, then those traveling alone. I was among the first of the 'loners', and he handed me a ticket for seat number thirty. I figured it was probably an aisle seat, but I was hoping for an aisle seat with some space to do my work.
I got on the train, stowed my suitcase and climbed the stairs. I looked up at the numbers just below the luggage rack to track down number thirty, and there it was, directly across from the stairs...with an older gentleman slumbering in the seat beside it. I stowed my backpack in the luggage rack after rescuing my book again, and set my bookbag on the floor gently. I sat down and leaned into the aisle a bit so I could read for a while, since I didn't want to reach over his head and turn on the reading light for fear that the motion or the light would wake him.
Fifteen minutes later, he woke up, stood, and asked me to excuse him. He left his backpack and his water and headed up toward the lounge car. They had just announced that the snack bar was closing in about ten minutes. I didn't unpack my homework. He'd been forced to step over me, and I had to pick up my book bag to let him by. So I turned on the light and waited until he came back to settle in with my worksheets.
After about an hour, I was checking the forward door every five minutes or so. No sign of him. After two hours, I tucked my book under my winter coat. I used the coat as a blanket and dozed, checking every ten minutes or so to see if he was coming back and I needed to move. By morning, there was still no sign of him, all his things still in my seat. Of course, all the most interesting and imaginative possibilities were coming to mind: He jumped off the train, he was thrown off the train, he got off for a smoke and we left without him, he had a heart attack in the lounge car and they offloaded him at some stop, he had a heart attack in the lounge car and was still down there...Or met a friend. Or sat down somewhere else. Or....there was....a bomb in his backpack?
Thoughts of all sorts crowding worksheets out of my mind, I scooted as far toward the aisle as I could get (not much further than I already was) and stared out the window willing PDX to appear. The guy behind me was sneezing, sighing, and snorting every two to five minutes like clockwork. The conductor came on the PA system to tell us we were a half hour out. Then fifteen minutes. Then ten. Five minutes to PDX (the train station), the gentleman appeared with a young girl who looked like she was his granddaughter, and asked if he could retrieve his things. The little girl was holding a cup of coffee and telling him the drink smelled like him. Then they walked off together. So much for getting homework done on the train.
I disembarked and headed into the train station, intent on finding my way to a Tri-met ticket station. Portland has a light rail train that goes all over the city. My cousin also calls it the MAX. Unkyl had me get on the train once to go and meet some family. I didn't remember much about it except it would prevent my family from driving clear into downtown Portland to take me from the train to the airport. So, I looked for an information desk to give me some directions. The itenerary I'd printed off the internet instructed me to walk out of Union Station and head south. Problem was, there were no indicators in the building to tell me which way south might be, and nothing on my directions to tell me right, left, ahead, or behind. Apparently, Union Station is not equipped with an information desk, and the man at the ticket counter looked quite surly. So I decided to act as if the Tri-Met map was on the north wall, since the map had an N in the corner and an arrow pointing up. (I can see my father, all the rangers, and all the FCFers shaking their heads in despair. Sorry, guys, I know my directions by the mountain ranges at home, the sun was behind the clouds, I had no analogue watch, and there are no trees with moss on them by the station.)
If the map was, in fact, on the north wall, it'd mean I needed to go 'round to the other side of the building. But when I tried that, there was a fence to the right a ways, and to the left was a high staircase and a skybridge with no indication of a light rail track. So, I decided I'd wander up ahead and see what happened. I came upon the greyhound station a few feet away and thought I'd go back to the train station to track someone down for directions, but the light to cross the street was red and I didn't want to wait for it. I turned back around and, lo and behold, a Tri-Met ticket station!
Now, when I say 'ticket station' I really mean vending-machine-like independend kiosk with no human attendant and, apparently, inadequate instructions. I pressed the button for an Adult 18-25 (or whatever the age range), a two hour ticket, and that I wanted to pay. I tried to put in $5, and nothing happened. I tried again. Nothing. I turned it around. Nothing. I flipped it over, nothing. I tried it the first way again. Nothing. By this time, there's a line behind me.
"Hey, what's going on? What are you doing?"
"Didn't you press the button?"
"Put your money in, come on"
That, and a rather intense guy giving me dirty looks.
That was the moment one of the trains pulled in and a guy got off to see what was happening. Apparently he worked for Tri-Met. He pressed all the buttons again and tried to insert my cash. Nothing. He looked at me, looked at the line, and said "tell you what." He opened his wallet, dug around, and pulled out a ticket. He had me validate it. "You look like an honest citizen, and you really tried hard to pay for it, so here you go." I was floored. I thanked him and two guys behind me asked if he was giving those out.
"No, she tried to pay for it and it didn't work. Just that one, sorry guys."
He started walking away, and the younger guy behind me whipped open his own wallet and pulled out a card.
"See this? It says Active Duty. I FOUGHT FOR YOU!"
His friend said "He doesn't care, man", and they walked away. I walked around to the front of the kiosk, thoroughly embarrased, and there was a nice older lady standing there who asked me what happened. I told her I was from Montana where my town just barely got a bus route. I confessed I had no idea what I was doing, so she told me to get on the train she was waiting for, then swap trains. I told her my directions said to get off at the Rose Quarter. She told me I should absolutely not do that, and to wait to get off until the convention center, which she considered safer. I deferred to her good judgement and we got to talking. She's from Tillamook. I asked her where she was from originally and she told me she was from California. She'd lived there with her first husband. Then she laughed and told me that always sounded dubious--she'd only been married twice.
She told me about her son--how he likes to travel, how he's a freelance/self-employed/sometimes contracted graphic designer, how he helped design an international Hershey bar wrapper for one of their bigger candy bars and it got an award. "He always puts that on his resume".
We chatted until it was time for me to swap trains. She told me "Get on this one, and don't get off it until they throw you off. The final stop is the airport."
I grabbed all my stuff and made a beeline for a seat. After I sat down, a rough voice asked me "You know where Target is?"
I turned to see this guy in a fluffy red coat and jeans who looked almost as rough as his voice. He looked like he had two black eyes, and I wasn't sure if he was like our transients back home, just came off a night shift, a bender, who knows. I told him I had no idea and he closed his eyes. After he fell asleep I glanced that way and realized he had the word "Bunk" tattoed on his left eyelid, and "Dope" tattooed on the right. Twenty minutes later, we pulled into the second to last stop. I looked up, and there was Target in all its overgrown red-and-khakhi splendor.
"Hey," I said, "there's Target".
He kept snoring. I left him alone.
I felt bad that he missed his stop, and I wondered if he would need another fare. I thought about the seat on the train I had all to myself, the great guy who gave me a ticket, and the lady who had showed up to be my traveling companion, and figured I ought to do something. So I fished out the $5 I was going to use to buy my MAX ticket, said a little prayer, and left it on the seat in front of him. My hope was that if he needed a fare, or if someone else was getting on who needed a little something, it'd make the difference like all the things that had happened for me.
I got off the train and made it into the airport as fast as I could. I found the check-in to catch the Pacific shuttle and told the lady my name, and that I was on the next shuttle.
"Oh. You're early".
"Yep, I know. I figured I might be."
"Well, we'll just put you on this shuttle. It's parked out there. Tell the driver not to leave until I call him".
So I ran outside, across the roadway, and made it to the shuttle! With catching that shuttle, I made it to the hotel two hours sooner than I thought I would.
On the drive, Phil, Mags and I chatted about Bigfoot, wine, seafood, bike riding, karaoke, my bank, Phil's farm, and how most Led Zeppelin songs are about the Lord of the Rings. When we pulled in to the hotel, Mary Helen turned around and told us we were better than listening to talk radio. I hadn't noticed that almost no one else in the bus was talking. Apparently everyone had been listening to us.
Chris and I met up and headed for our room. Cynthia showed up a couple of hours later, and the posse was complete!

So, there's my travel story. I'll get some school stuff up here, hopefully tomorrow, although it's the bonfire on the beach tomorrow night if it's not dumping rain. So, we'll see!

Have a great night all

~Mariquita

Putting it together...again.

It's a little hard to wrap my head around my homework today. My thoughts are with a friend who took his own life last week, and with his family and friends. Still, I spent a few hours and scraped together the last of my residency reviews. Hopefully they came together a little better than I think they did.

Same as last year, I'm putting up the short essay of what I came away with from this residency straight out of the residency reviews. I can hardly wait for January, to see everyone and to keep hearing from all of these amazing writers who keep changing my writing more than I ever imagined anyone could.

Without further ado, the essay: (Any grammar police, please forgive me...)

                   Residency Review: The Joy of Remaking

My last two semesters, I struggled a great deal with revision. I’ve been hearing writer after writer talking about how a poet can’t just copyedit a piece and call it good. We have to enter into a process of re-envisioning, working the poem over and over, expanding it more and more until it refuses to encompass any more. Then we can condense it and condense it until we squeeze out all the extra bits in, and only the essential pieces remain. It’s been a frustration for me, because even though I have had a few very successful revisions, most of them consist of moving a few lines around or taking out a word or an image to tighten a line and letting it be. Even though I feel I know infinitely more about revision than I ever did before I started this program, I still feel as if, when I approach my own work, there’s nothing more for me to open up.

This residency, it seems like the theme of revision kept coming up again and again. Claire Davis admitted her frustrations, and her dedication, by telling us she revised three hundred plus pages at least three times. And then she showed us where she finds small spaces to open up—spaces of abstraction which may or may not be good enough or right for the piece can be cracked open and spill over into pages and pages of new opportunity. Or, a character may become narrow and need to be squeezed out. Charles Johnson admitted to throwing out thousands of pages and trying on persona after persona until, finally, the voice and motivation came out right.

Then Aimee Nezukumatathil came out and dropped the haibun form right in front of me. That little prose poem, which usually makes me so nervous, with its accompanying haiku seemed, suddenly, to be the answer to a poem I’ve been struggling with for a year and a half. Ellen Bass warned us to watch out for moments in a poem when emotion is too easy, and to re-orient the speaker’s vision toward the things that triggered the speaker’s emotion, instead of writing down the feelings themselves. Joe Millar, with Dorianne and Ellen’s help, gave me new perspective on line breaks—showing me how to rethink and re-shape a poem with a simple syllabic exercise. Peter Sears, with the help of Richard Hugo, showed me that I can use perfect meter in a piece without it becoming obvious or monotonous by working it into the sentence structure instead of into the line.

Armed with these and other tools, such as Mary Helen Stefaniak’s declaration that eavesdropping is a perfectly acceptable form of research (which I’ve always employed, but will do so now without guilt) and Mike Myer’s admonition to always start in place in order to get the reader’s feet on the ground, I feel like I’m a little better prepared to re-envision my pieces. To give them a little more life, and, when they’re bursting with it, start to whittle them back down. Do I believe I’ve solved all my revision problems? Does a writer ever? But I do feel as if this residency and these writers have given me more confidence, a better understanding of the problems that will come up in my writing, and a few more things to toss into my toolbox to help along the way.

Thanks to all who follow these posts. I hope they're interesting for you.

~Hannah Mae

Notes notes notes, and more notes. And then, some more notes!

Yep, I'm done for. This morning, not only did I sleep in, despite my alarm going off and apparently being dismissed, (which I did not wake up for), but I got two text messages. One was from one of my friends about travel arrangements. The other was from one of my fellow MFAers, letting me know there was a problem with my novel. I spent 45 minutes fretting about how I was going to explain the problem with my novel, until I realized not only do I not have a novel, the text message about said novel never existed, and I had, in fact, dreamed the second text message AND the 45 minutes of fretting about it. ...I got up and went for coffee...

Coffee and blueberry muffin in hand (coffee from the bistro, muffin from Maggie's [priorities, y'know]), I headed off to Leslie Miller's craft talk about Agency in the poem. I really like Leslie's attention to the scientific in her poetry, and it translated into her talk. She explained how a story is appreciated by a reader. Literally how. She said that a story or a poem is almost like a computer program, and the language we use must be constructed in such a way that the program will run in the reader's mind without a 'glitch', if you will. In order to do this, we must make effective use of 'stealth words'--pronouns and other connective language--. Leslie quoted a study that said content vocabulary makes up 90% of our language, but connective language, words of relationship and/or power dynamic, is employed 55% of the time in speech and writing. She showed us examples where the 'agency', the delivery/point of view/perspective, moved throughout the poem and made it both complex and interesting. I felt like the talk was useful both for poetry and prose. In our workshop after, we agreed that we didn't like the idea of theory to explain something so complex and that, yes, it did seem mostly like it could be reduced to being called just point of view. But I feel that there's a difference of point of view and perspective. The story being told from a certain perspective, or a wandering perspective, gives a better chance for the direction and focus of the story to change, because we're standing behind the narrator's eye, looking at the subject through their eye as they see it (and by 'as they see it', I don't just mean we see it through their opinion, but we actually get to see it as it physically enters the narrator's 'vision', at the moment it does so). This was the idea that I came away with, anyway.

Today was also the last workshops of the residency :( We ran a little late, and a few of us stayed a little later than that, but the poems were good, the feedback and suggestions were great. I feel really blessed to have been in such an engaged, intelligent, and compassionate group. Not that nobody got their pieces taken apart, we all had at least one piece that got shredded, but it was a gentle shredding :) At least it was from where I was sitting. Now I just can't believe I will only have one more round of workshops here. Where in the heck does the time go? A year and a half ago I was sobbing over the impossibility of submitting my application, and thinking of how long two years would be.

After lunch, there was a talk about historical novels by Charles Johnson. While I thought it was going to be a how-to or advice, it wound up being more of a summary of his personal experience while writing his novels Middle Passage and Dreamer. It was a very engaging talk though. I enjoyed it. He seems to be a very gracious man. And, as I had just so happened to have Middle Passage on my bookshelf left over from an American Novel class at UM, I asked him to sign it. I discovered that (while it's only 20 years old) the book I bought from the Book Exchange in Zoo Town is a first edition, published from an imprint that no longer exists. Guess I'll hang on to the book, especially now that it's been autographed.

I had my meeting with Peter today to get the nuts and bolts of the study plan squared away. The way it sounds, I more or less have free reign over my study plan. He said I didn't even have to send any poems to him until the essay is done if I didn't want to. (I'm going to, but I still found it interesting). It was a fun meeting, though. He's only half serious all of the time, so a fair part of the meeting was spent observing and commenting on the activity going on the university center, like the conference services people who were hauling around these long metal poles, and turning around suddenly without looking so that they almost clocked a sum total of about 14 people who were innocently sitting or walking by. Thankfully, our meeting took place without incident.

I attended the graduate readings as well. One of the girls was the aforementioned MFAer who, it turns out, did not actually send me a text message. The presentation was absolutely incredible. I don't recall having been that engaged in any of the grad presentations I've attended for this program so far.

The faculty reading tonight was shorter than usual, but it was really fun. There were three teriffic writers, Mags, Peter, and Mary Helen Stefaniak. After we listened to the reading, my friend hung back to go pick up a book, so the other two of us headed back to the room. When she got back, I found out she'd bought Mary Helen's book for me, because she just really thinks I will like it. I swear, she is one of THE sweetest people I know.

I've been trying all night to revamp my study plan, but it's 12:30 again, it's not done, it's 1:30 at home, and judging by my inability to rise this morning, I'm thinking I won't be finishing tonight. Still, I'm a little closer. Maybe in the morning tomorrow or something, hey?

Ok, that's it for tonight from the Grove. Hope this finds you all healthy, wealthy, and wise! Or at least well-rested and cheerful.

Good night!

Slacker: an offensive term for a young educated person who is regarded as being disaffected or apathetic, and underachieving (slang)

Good Evening, World,

Here, where I sit on the fourth floor of the dorm room, it sounds like the crickets are singing. And if I try hard enough, I can convince myself that it really is crickets, and not the fluorescent light above my head buzzing like a ticked off horsefly...Thank goodness I never had to live in the dorms in Zoo Town. I would've gone postal.

Today was the day! For two big things, really. All of you out there who know me know that I can be ridiculously overcommitted, to the point of completely wearing myself out. ("No!" You say. "Not you!" ...right? :P ) So today I did not oversleep as much as I planned, and I almost did not miss the first craft talk of the day. Instead of making it my ambition to go to every single one of these things, I have made it my ambition to skip one each residency, on principle. Well, today I skipped the long form prose talk (which, afterward, my workshop leader said had incredible insights and was invaluable for poets as well as the prose writers. My only consolation was it didn't look like anyone else in my workshop had attended either), AND the Get a Job Teaching at the College Level talk. Two! I was so proud and terribly disappointed in me.
The other big thing to happen was (drumroll please):
Student and Advisor pairings!! *ta-da!*

The events I did attend were:
Workshop, which was wonderful, although we were running a skosh bit behind and wound up staying in our room a half hour late in order to get everyone's poems done. But we got them done, and it was a very good two hours.
Lunch, where I was seated with Craig Lesley, my roommate, and a couple of other poetry friends. Since we got in so late, my workshop mates and myself didn't even have to stand in line. We got right in, got food, got seats. Bam! done. That's the way to do it!
A conversation by the Quad, which involved a couple of friends and it was a very nice hour and a half long stretch of talking about things like faith and facing difficulty, which sounds like a strange thing to suddenly get in to discussing at a school residency, but I thought it was a very good discussion, and it was with some great people.
The Poetry Publishing Panel, (nice alliteration, hey?) The insights from the group were really great. There were four members of the panel, all at different phases of their writing and publishing careers. Some of the main points were: Don't start too early (which was never really clarified...I'm not sure when it's too early, and when it's not.). Remember that editors are people too, meaning a bunch of them have boxes of submissions sitting in their living room, and their personal lives may be affecting their choices. (If they've just had a fight, they're probably not going to appreciate a poem about how sweet marriage is). As always, be persistent. Beware of vanity presses that charge an arm and a leg to pop you right into print.
Leslie Miller, my advisor from last semester, dropped in a helpful breakdown of presses or places to find presses/journals/web-based publications, etc. for various ambitions. If you want to get a great resume, start ___________. If you want to just pad your resume with a bunch of publications regardless of prestige, start ___________. If you want to get in on meeting some other poets, or if you want to submit to theme publications, or if you want to get in to some new hip trendy publication, start _________. (If you want the actual info, message me and I can get you some of the stuff off the handout.)
Marvin Bell reminded us that publishing a poem is not a mark for or against it. And to remember to cherish rejection letters.
Everyone made sure to remind us to keep records of where the submissions are sent and when, to withdraw simultaneous submissions, to keep the best rejection letters, and so forth. They advised sending out to about 30 places at a time, just to have things out and keep yourself in the spirit, since it can be quite discouraging.
After the presentation, I dragged myself back to the room and just about fell asleep on the couch. A bunch of the poetry girls were going to head for dinner, but once I got the idea of the size of the crowd, and the thought of trying to pry my eyelids open to stay awake through dinner, I decided I'd stay in and rest a little bit. I do feel bad, and I think it would have been fun to go. Although, I heard the restaurant was not well suited to such a crowd, and so those who went were sort of relegated to conversations only with those immediately near them.
The reading was not the best I've ever been to tonight. Marvin Bell was, of course, Marvelous, but the other two readers didn't seem to have as much craft supporting their pieces as I had expected, and I was a little bit disappointed.
The Pacific literary Journal, Silk Road, had its release party tonight. I went along, had a cookie, and stood under a tree whilst people milled around in front of me. From that I managed a conversation with the assistant director of the program (who is SUCH a sweetheart and she's so amazing. They all are. I really admire them!), a first semester student who I've been running into everywhere, and the novelist Bonnie Jo Campbell who is also a real sweetheart, and quite fun to talk to.

I was (you'll never believe this) on the verge of trying about a half inch of white wine. It took me 45 minutes to decide to have some. I stepped out of the tree I kept finding myself standing deeper in, down to the girl who was serving the wine. I asked her if she had the tiniest bit of white, she said yes, but she needed to see my I.D. ...EVERY blasted event we've been to on this campus that has wine, I have left my ID in the room. EVERY time. *eyeroll* Ah well, I didn't need it anyways, right? It was still fun.
I came back with my roommates and we talked about the upcoming meetings with our advisors. None of us really knows what it is we're planning on doing. We all have ideas, but the farther we get, the harder they seem to be to explain. I'm going to have a lot of explaining to do about why I can't explain...

Ok, ok, I was trying to build a little tension there. I've been assigned Peter Sears :) He's such a wonderful fellow, and I've had him in workshop twice now. It will be interesting to see what a semester studying with him is like :)

And with that, I'm going to hit the hay, because it's 1:30 my time, and I'm planning on being at the a.m. craft talk. With coffee. And some form of food. Because this not eating thing, although it doesn't bother me at home, is not working in the mornings here (yes, I still eat lunch and something for dinner, please don't assume I'm not actually eating). So I shall see you all soon, possibly some of you tomorrow, and for you out there, stalking me, who wish you were here, cheers to you! I miss your weird ability to be standing in front of me wherever I go.