Still Pinioned Under the Boulder, Bob

We finally got Issue Four of Chickenpinata online.  We’re always a little more behind on things than we’d like, but this time (computer issues aside–don’t get me started on that) I had problems with several of the people that we sent acceptances to.

There were three who did not respond when we sent the congratulations announcement–we always send an e-mail acceptance and ask for the poet to confirm that the poem was still available to be published.  This time three people did not respond.  And this was really irritating because I’d already created their pages in the program and set up the links.  And while it’s not hard work, I’m slow at it, so I was disappointed that I had invested the time, only to have to withdraw their poems from the issue.

More than disappointed, I’m really puzzled.  I realize Chickenpinata is a small venue, but a publication is a publication, right?  Why go to the effort to submit work to a journal if you don’t care if it gets accepted or not?  If these three people had their poems accepted elsewhere, why not just let us know?  We’ve had people withdraw submissions from us before, and sure it’s a little irksome, but it’s no big deal.  It just doesn’t make any sense to me, not to respond to a journal they sent work to, and that wanted that work.

Whatever, I guess.  People are weird.

As for my own writing… I need to get back to it.  I don’t have anything really to write about lately, though.  I need to think of an organizing theme, or a “gimmick,” now that I have to start on book 2.

Someone, please!  Send me an idea!  I’m feeling all empty-ish and blah.

 

Under a Rock

In case you wonder where I’ve been, I’ve been under the oppressive boulder of registration, which has pretty much consumed my attention for the last two weeks.  You know how bad it’s been?  I completely forgot to go to my writing group this week.  I didn’t even think about it until yesterday.   Dreadful.

Thursday night I was down in Columbus at the First Thursday Reading Series; I was the featured reader.  It was really pretty neat because there was an open-mic reading before me, and eight readers signed up, and each person read a couple of poems, so I got to hear poems by my Georgia Poetry Society friends Keith Badowski, Ron Self (who had also prepared an absolutely lovely dinner in my honor), Elsie Austen (who contributed the world’s best dinner rolls to that dinner), and Jo Middlebrooks, among others.

Afterwards, I read for about 20-25 minutes, and tried, valiantly (but not successfully), to make that little small-talk-between-poems that is so essential but so ghastly hard.  It might have been less difficult if I had chosen which poems I was going to read beforehand, but I just hadn’t gotten around to it–inexcusable, really, and I’m sorry about that.  (I hope my audience didn’t think too badly of me for it).  So that made me a little bit flustered.

But I did read a wide variety of poems (including several from La Petite Mort).  Here’s the set list, in no particular order:

• On Mathematics Hall
• Excavation
• Night Orchard
• Moth Walk
• Dystopic Love Poem
• Providence
• You Never Listen
• It Took You Half an Hour to Remember the Words “Wine Cooler”
• Solstice
• Imputation
• Ex Somnium
• Melon Stand, South of Many
• Bayous and Barstools
• Decidedly Unbridled Foolish Pleasure
• Old Kook
• Besame Mucho

Speaking of La Petite Mort, I really need to get with the program on that.  As in, photos, blurbs, and addresses.  *Sigh*

And Now a Word from She Who Is Soon-to-be Published

I’ve been thinking about cover art and blurbs and such, and I can’t tell you how stressful that is.  I’m beginning to think writing the book was waaaaay easier than all the stuff that comes after.

Karen says I ought to hold a contest and have my students come up with possible cover art.  Which I could do, and maybe give like a giftcard or something to the winner.  However, there’s a little part of me (alright, a BIG part of me) that thinks that rates a 10 on the Gouda Scale.  But what are my options, otherwise?  I can’t take a photo to save my life, and let’s not go into my painting skills.

And then there’s the whole “author picture” thing.  That’s a debacle in waiting.  I’m about as photogenic as roadkill.  (And no, this is NOT a call from my devoted friends to protest otherwise, well-meaning and lying as you would be.)  Ugh.  I don’t even want to think how obnoxious getting a professional-looking photo will be.  It’s not like I can ask Chris to take it.  He takes ghastlier pictures than I do.  Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

And Goddess save me, I have to find people to blurb my book?  If there’s one thing I despise (but secretly crave it anyway) is affirmation and notice from others about my writing.  The thought of approaching anyone and asking them to read La Petite Mort and say how great it is, fills me with absolute blood-freezing dread.  I go out of my way to be unnoticed, quiet, fade-into-the-woodworky.  Asking someone to read my book and hoping they’ll like it enough to say some kind words is like a nightmare to me.  I think I’d rather extract every last tooth from my mouth, sans Novacaine.  I don’t even know who to ask.  Who even really wants to blurb a book?  Isn’t it kind of phony anyway?

Ugh.

I know what you’re thinking.  You’re thinking I’m the most ungrateful, idiotic, ridiculous person in the world, who just got her book accepted and ought to be hella grateful, and instead, here is she is bitching about it.  You’re damn right I’m bitching about it.  I am grateful–I’m not a complete moron–but is it wrong to be just a little freaked out about the extra associated crap that goes with the acceptance of the book?  The pictures, the blurbs, feeling like a big bleah-head??

(Not that feeling like a big bleah-head is new for me.  I feel like that quite often.)

OMG!!! Finishing Line Is Taking La Petite Mort!

Alright, I’ve been hella down in the dumps lately, like, nauseatingly so.

So, imagine how awesome it was to get an e-mail from Finishing Line Press today telling me that they’ll publish my chapbook La Petite Mort!!!! This is completely out-of-the blue too, because I had entered it in their New Women’s Voices contest, got the standard “Thanks, we’re going to publish this amazing writer, and you’re not her” note, and didn’t give it another thought.  I guess they also choose to publish a select number of non-winners.

But I am dizzily happy, crazy amazed, and thrilled!  Tomorrow I will worry about withdrawing it from the other contests I have it in.  But tonight I’m going to bask in the knowledge that I finally have a real, live book to my name.

Apologia

I didn’t mean to be having a pity party, and I’m sorry I came across that way, but I have been feeling like I’m sort of at a blah place in my writing, and it’s not just about that one crappy poem that was getting me down.  And it’s not even been about lack of success with the chapbooks or poems being rejected. Unfortunately, I do feel like I’m not growing as a poet, at least, not lately.

Though, I came across a folder of “juvenalia” writing, from about 1993 to 2000, that was hilariously bad.  When I was younger, I loved to learn obscure words–I poured over dictionaries to find new words that I would then populate my poems with.  This is not the best way to write, by any stretch of the imagination–because one or two might be ok in a poem, but when there are 10 crazy words (or more) in there, you wind up with a completely unclear vocabulary lesson.  Boring!   With a few exceptions, everything in that folder is dreadful.  

And, in comparison, the writing I do now is so much better.  But I want to like what I’m writing, and lately I’m just not.  So if I’m sounding like I’m sitting here feeling sorry for myself, I apologize.  I feel like I need a “reboot.”  

I wish I could go to another writer’s conference.  I need some of that momentum and energy–CVWC was only 3 weeks ago, but it seems much longer than that.

What’s the Point?

I don’t think anything I’m writing is worthwhile.  I don’t feel like I’m growing as a poet.  I’ve just… had it.

When Good Poems Go Bad

I’ve been working on this poem that just isn’t going well.   Going well?  Try, not going at all.

Well, let me back up.  As I said in my last post, this poem, called “The Art of Loss,” was to be the bridge poem between the real and the imaginary in this chapbook collection I’m trying to get together for a contest with a deadline on the 15th.  All of the poems in this collection have something to do with animals.

The speaker is addressing an artist whose beautiful, jungle art, populated with jaguars and orangutans, has been replaced with abstract, muddy-colored images that the speaker doesn’t understand.  And the artist herself is mute in the poem, with the exception of producing these images that are so contrary to her earlier works.

What I was trying to do was comment on how the loss of imagination affects artists, how something as personal and communicative as art can suddenly become unknowable, how, as I said in an e-mail to Bob, “the painting of things becomes the painting of no things.”  But in what I’ve written so far, it has become the “poem of no things.”  

It’s just not working.  I’m on revision 12, and I can’t seem to do anything to make it better.  Each time I work on it, it’s gets progressively worse–almost as muddy as the paintings that the artist does.  And it’s a pity, because I really liked the early drafts of the poem–or at least, I thought there was a good kernal of poetry in it.  After I gave it to Bob and he commented on it, I realized that it’s basically crap and I should just abandon it.  Maybe it’s one of those things I’ll come back to in 5 years and have some amazing epiphany about it.  But it’s frustrating because I REALLY needed this poem to work now.

Now, I’ll have to choose something else to replace it, which wouldn’t be as big a deal except for the pesky fact that the title of the collection came from a line in “The Art of Loss.”  So now I’m title-less, as well as a poem short.  

Maybe the real problem is that the collection desperately needs focus, and I thought this poem could provide it.   I don’t know.  I’m just really disheartened.

And, while I’m at it, I’m disheartened about the fact that I keep sending these various chapbooks out and no one wants them.  (Got another rejection today.)  Maybe my poems are just bad.  I’ve said to Karen and Bob both that none of my poems go together–they don’t resonate with each other or speak to each other or do any of the things that collections are supposed to do.  

I’m just really, really disheartened today.

About My Painting, I Guess You Could Say I’m a Decent Poet

NuNu, Acryic on panel, 6″ x 6″

I painted that for Chris.  It is not, what you’d call, a “good likeness.” (Of NuNu, that is, not Chris.  If it were a painting of Chris, it would be horrid.  Being as he’s a husband, not a tuxedo cat.) 

Poppies, Acrylic on panel, 5″ x 5″

Named Poppies in honor of The Wizard of Oz, this one I painted for Lisa Verigin, since we both like musicals.  But she doesn’t know I made this for her (yet).  The scan is kind of blurred, and I think that’s because the paint has a lot of texture (this thing took forever to dry).

 

Firecat, Acrylic on Panel, 5″ x 5″

Chris compressed the file for me, so the picture was smaller. This one too has a lot of texture, so the image isn’t as clear as it could be.  I’m not sure who I’ll give this to.  Probably depends on if anyone wants it!

I was thinking I would maybe give it to Suzan Manuel, a friend from my first day in graduate school at Nazi State University.  She likes cats.  Even hideous ones.

You see, way back in March I had promised that I would “make something” for Suzan, Lisa, Chris, my sister Kirsten, and my FB friend Greg Butterfield.  So, these pictures are the result (although I don’t have anything yet for Greg).  

Here’s the last one:

Sunset Over Cross Lake, Acrylic on panel, 5″ x 5″.

This was the first painting I experimented with “liquid metal,” a kind of acrylic paint that is very beautiful, but doesn’t mix too well.  It has more of the consistency of tempera than acrylic, and it comes in a little pot, not a tube, which is inconvenient.  But I liked the effect, and I employed some of this liquid metal in the other pictures I’ve scanned (as well as some others that are drying).

Anyway….

In news poetic, I’m working on an ekphrastic poem that is kicking my ass, and except that one of the lines in the poem is the title of the collection I’m working on, and the poem is therefore pivotal to the collection, I’d just as soon toss it and come back to it much later.  I suppose I could still toss the poem, and come up with a new title for the collection, but I hate to do that, because I love the title… Oh well, it doesn’t have to be decided tonight.

CVWC Recap

Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, I was at the Chattahoochee Valley Writers Conference in Columbus, whose focus is both to celebrate the literary heritage in the area (i.e. Nunnaly Johnson and Carson McCullers), and to engage and develop the literary talent of the future.  I’ve attended all three years, not only because I have several friends who live there, but also because I find workshops to be energizing and creatively rejuvenating.  I long for the days of the Sewanee Writers Conference and the Kenyon Writers Workshop, which were both extended retreats, but these days I have neither the money or the time (off from work) to go to such things, so I have to make do with CVWC and other little minicons when I can.

Jill McCorkle was the keynote speaker on Friday night.  She was just as pleasant and delightful as she was when I met her at Sewanee, but I confess to being disappointed that she read her prepared speech instead of partially extemporizing (because she’s pretty funny), or honestly, just reading her fiction.

It was amazing–sometimes I was really engaged in what she was reading, about memory being fluid and the importance of reconnecting to your emotional core, and then other times her damn monotone zonked me right out.   CVWC was incredibly lucky to get her–she sort of squeezed us in because an old high school friend of hers was on the steering committee, but she was really on her way to some other literary festival to promote her books–and she stayed through the dinner afterwards, although I wasn’t at her table.

Of the dinner at one of Columbus’s “finer dining establishments” (finer my ass), I will say only that it was awful, and that I complained bitterly on the evaluation.  Although, to be fair, the company I was sitting with was great.

Saturday, I attended four workshops:  one of family history and genealogy which really isn’t my thing, but the other things being offered were of even less interest to me; Nick Norwood’s poetry workshop, which was better than his one last year, but again, he really didn’t say anything at all about my poem, and there was hardly any discussion about it at all (less than the one I sent last year, and there was 2 words about it last year), unlike on EVERYONE ELSE’S who got at least several comments both from him and from the class–that kind of pissed me off, but whatever; Clela Reed’s poetry workshop which was nice because for one thing, there weren’t a cast of thousands in it, and for another, she let us do some writing and this morning I turned it into a poem; and last, but not least, Karen McElmurray’s memoir workshop, which was a delight at all points.

I had met Karen the night before when Linda (with whom I was staying) and I picked her up and drove her around Columbus.  I don’t care what anyone (Chris) says, Columbus is not an armpit–it is a lovely town that I wouldn’t mind living in.  We looked around the historic district, Linda stopping at all the historic marker signs so we could read them, and it was just a nice drive.  Afterwards, we attended the keynote address, and then we went to the horrid restaurant, but I got to sit with Karen M.   She seemed like a really open and generous person, and fundamentally positive about things, though hearing her talk about the subject of her memoir Surrendered Child–having to give up her baby that she had at 16 to adoption–you know that she has had a difficult life.  I would have bought it at the book fair at the end of the conference, but she asked me to get her second novel instead, The Motel of the Stars, and write a review of it on Amazon when I’m finished.  I told her I would.

We also went to the same sessions while she was waiting for hers, which was the last of the day.  And in her session about memoir, she offered us lots of book titles to check out, opportunities to read aloud some texts she brought with her, and gave us some directed writing to do.  She also said that if we develop what we started in her class, she would be happy to read it.  This is always a generous offer, because as all writers know, if you’re reading someone else’s work, you’re not writing your own.  Maybe she wouldn’t make this offer if she weren’t on leave this year–but I might return to what I started in there.  I’m always interested in memoirs, even if I don’t have the attention span to really write one.  (Hence, maybe this is why many of my poems are narrative, but more on that later.)  Karen was just such a nice person.  I would like to cultivate that acquaintance and make a new friend.

I also bought Clela’s book Dancing on the Rim, which I had been meaning to get since she debuted it at the July GPS meeting.

I was glad I went, although the drive back in torrential rain was at best, annoying, and at worst, terrifying.  And then when I got home, Chris had gone out to a party, and didn’t return until midnight, when I was long asleep.

The Animals Are Lining Up, 2 by 2

The rain has been relatively incessant the last week (with the exception of yesterday afternoon’s obnoxious burst of sun) that I’ve been thinking of writing some rain-related poems.  The problem with that is, somehow all the connotations of rain are cliché, and I’m not sure how I can write about it in a fresh way.

The rain we had today was like a rain back home in Louisiana–a gullywasher, where the rain doesn’t fall so much as spill from a dam in the heavens, and the skylights in my sunroom reminded me of a windshield when you go through an automatic car wash.  In a word, it was awesome.

The downside, of course, is the flooding, and the idiotic Atlanta drivers in their assinine SUVs who think it’s fine to barrel through huge lakes in the street, sending up 10 foot walls of water that deluge your windshield and blind you.  I’d rather not have to drive in that.

Ah, well, I suppose this is a pointless post.   Maybe I will have something writing-related to tell you tomorrow.  Though, as I think about it, I did get a rejection for both of my chapbooks today, which, while unsurprising, still sucked.   Another $20 down the drain.  *Sigh*