tick, tock, tick, tock February 23, 2009

…still waiting to hear from other schools. Minnesota’s website says they’re mailing notices today. I’ve already heard that Alabama rejection notes have gone out. My returned postcard from UT-Austin said decisions will be made late February/early March. Acceptances have already gone up on the boards for Alabama, Minnesota, Vanderbilt, and ASU. The rest of the schools – no idea what their schedules are like. No idea where I fit into their schemes.

I was doing good there for a while – of course, happy with my one acceptance, then mentally distracted by Valentine’s Day, then AWP. But now, now’s the time! C’mon, people! Tell me what you know.

Honestly, I would be OK if I get rejected from every other school I applied to. Sure, it would damage the ego a little bit, but then it would make the decision making process a lot easier. I could go ahead and plan my moving date and get on with life. But now I’m starting to get a little worried – what if I have to make A LOT of decisions, quickly? What if I get waitlisted somewhere really awesome, and then have to wait even longer just to make sure it’s not a possibility, too? what if, what if, what if…

This time last year, I was rushing home to the mailbox almost every day. Eating lots of chocolate. Losing my brain. I’m trying to keep my cool. I’ve been going to the gym more and getting home later. I still eat chocolate – thanks to those damn Girl Scouts! – but it’s not about filling a void right now. I think. I went to Trader Joe’s yesterday and stocked up on fruits and veggies just in case my needs kick up again.

In other news, my writers’ group this weekend was great. I was motivated last month to start writing a fiction piece, mainly because the poetry is stifled by this whole application process, and I was bored. I kept working on it over three weeks, and punched out around 8 pages in third draft form. This was the second piece of fiction I’ve ever written. The last one was 6 years ago. I submitted my new story to my group, a little uneasy. It wasn’t finished, and I’m so used to being the oddball in there. I’m one of a few poets and the rest of them are fiction writers. Not to mention, I think I probably talk the most (and dish the most constructive criticism) in the group, so I was waiting for the arrows to fly in my direction! But it went really well. They liked it. They really liked it. They actually wanted to read more, and are eager to hear how I finish it. Their criticisms were in the places where I expected it, because I was still working out those parts. The only negative thing from the whole experience is that I’ve realized what I have here. No longer is this little piece of fiction little. It’s working itself into a novella. I’ve dived in too far. I wasn’t ready for this! I’m going to school for poetry! I can’t be all things at once!

Sigh. OK. Things could be worse. At least I’ve got time on my side. Or do I?

i have not been writing April 4, 2008

unless you count all the emails back and forth, back and forth between people I will be visiting in the coming weeks. oh and I wrote a silly thing for the magazine at work about what albums I’ve been listening to. by the way, get the new R.E.M. album (out as of last Tuesday). and Jamie Lidell (out April 29). everything else I think is already noted on my sidebar.

Last week though I did have a great time meeting with my neighbor Coleen to go over poems and her short story. this was our first time hanging out without other neighbors around. we decided on the neutral place of Common Market. before we had been thinking of coffee or just sitting on one of our couches, but we were like, wait a minute. there are places with beer. places where the beer is endless – rows upon rows of imported beer in a refrigerated section. and this is where you should go on first dates. or first dates with writers. or women. and so we sat out on the patio at CM and commenced with the beer, cigarettes, and writing talk. guys, I must tell you - I am such a lightweight when it comes to beer. liquor and wine are better friends to me. they are like old cousins. but I tell you that the excitement of workshopping for the first time in four years brought out the Irish in me and I drank five beers on an empty stomach. and close to 2 packs of cigarettes. we were ON FIRE. and people kept calling us or sitting with us and we kept blowing them off and then Scott showed up with his friends and ordered a pitcher. one look at me and he started laughing, and had to point out to everyone what a rarity it was to find his girlfriend drunk on a Wednesday, much less out in public. it was 11:30 p.m. by this point. usually when I am whining to brush our teeth. that’s when I realized that I had not eaten since noon. Coleen hadn’t either. so she called the Penguin on speed dial and we ordered grease takeout. then brought it back to the market and chowed down before trolloping home. I am writing about this a week later because that’s how much fun I had. on a Wednesday.

and then last night I also went out with people for Linnea’s birthday. I ate a veggie plate and had a Baker & Ginger and smoked 3 cigarettes and went to bed at midnight.  Wednesday is becoming my new Thursday, and Thursday is becoming my new Friday. except for that whole getting up early the next day.

so I guess this is to say that I have been socializing. more is better.

and my free cable TV went out last month and it’s become one of the best things. I do not pay for cable, just network TV. but I had become hooked on the free cable that showed up when I rearranged my furniture 6 months ago. I watched Bravo almost every day, folks. and Food Network. it became a ritual to me, for no good reason. Sure I love Top Chef and I hate that I’m missing this new season but really this is all preparing me for grad school and perhaps a lifetime of better media consumption so I am thankful. I’m still on with network TV, though. the only thing I care to watch on network TV is Jeopardy!, Saturday morning PBS cooking shows, and Wednesday night Top Model, the latter which I’ve missed the past two weeks so I guess it doesn’t matter that much.

oh, and I started painting again. for the first time in four years. this is my new painting (in progress):

questions March 13, 2008

Do you ever find someone who writes/paints/looks/(enter your art form here) like you – but you’ve never heard of them? (or you haven’t studied their work?) Or even had someone say, have you studied so-and-so because you sound a lot like them? Does it weird you out? I’ve had this happen A LOT in the past year.

Maybe I’ve been living under a rock for too long, and I’ve never had my hands in just one discipline long enough to cover all the bases. I started writing poetry only a few years ago, and even after I started writing it took me a while to realize, HEY you should READ MORE POETRY. (duh!) So now that I read more (continuously catching up), I’m finding which camp I’m in (but let’s not get too segregated) and then finding people who either have strong similarities in subject matter or strong similarities in style to the way I’ve been writing. Yet it’s all new to me.

I believe that we all have a subconscious where things get dumped in and at some point it all comes together like Fright Night and that’s how we make wonderful casseroles. But don’t you have to already have the food in your fridge for this to happen? What if you never picked up celery at the grocery store but someone eats your casserole and swears that it has celery in it? This analogy is falling apart so I’ll just put it this way… 

I can’t figure out if this is a good thing – that my instincts are putting me in the same boat as other people (respected, talented, accomplished people,) and that maybe we’re all onto something – or that this is a bad thing, as in I shouldn’t be in this boat, or that people will think that I purposely tried to copy these people even though I’ve never heard of them before, or that it’s all been said and done and GET OUT. And then I’m like, OK, should I start taking in what they are doing and learn from it? or should I stay as far away from it as I can so I can continue to follow my natural discourse? Or should I study them until I can make myself different? I don’t know. I’m even too embarrassed to name names. And I should say that I rarely try to write like anyone, and usually my favorite writers have a very different style or context than my own. I just write, and try to follow universal or instinctual rules of thumb about craft, and come out with what I’ve got.

poetry reading – Steve Gehrke…and me January 10, 2008

Last night I attended the MFA readings at Queens, which featured poet Steve Gehrke, the author of Michelangelo’s Seizure, winner of the National Poetry Series and quite possibly one of the coolest poetry book titles ever, in my personal opinion.

Steve was one of those poets who in person reads his poems like he’s in a marathon – fast and barely taking breaths from beginning to end. At first, this was distracting. I took a big breath for him to ease the pressure and nervously looked around at other people who were leaning forward and squinting as if someone had sucked the air right out of them. But after a little bit, it was kind of like sitting in the passenger seat of a fast moving car, with your head out the window and your hair smacking you in the face, catching glimpses of signs and other landmarks on the road as you zoom by. He had some phrases and images in there that just really hit me with a “pow!” that may have been more like a tap if it were just read silently while reclined on the couch. But I’m yet to know that for sure, since as soon as I got home I had to bury my head in some freelance paper work, while Scott selfishly broke in my brand new copy of Michelangelo’s Seizure for me. Jerk

I’m a little (ok a lot) jealous about Gehrke and this book. You see, that title should belong to my first manuscript. Not because I’ve already written a poem with that title (because I haven’t), but because it’s the kind of poem I imagine myself writing, or that I hope to write one day. If the personal must weave its way into everything I write, then it would seem only natural that I would write a poem with this subject matter because 1) I’ve had minor seizures on and off since I was five years old, 2) I have been a visual artist most of my life (longer than I’ve been a poet, that’s for sure), 3) Michelangelo is one of my favorite painters, 4) I’ve stated in MFA application essays and in other mediums that if I were to tackle a “research project,” it would be “to read the biographies of visual artists to write dramatic narratives or tie their own narratives into my own.” Lame, lame, lame, I know. But I’ll read this book anyway and hope for the best and that my subconcious doesn’t try to steal everything. And I’m a firm believer that just becaues someone else has written about something, doesn’t mean that you can’t. It just makes it harder.

I am a couple steps ahead (or is it behind?). I do already have a few poems that separately deal with art and seizures, although I’m sure that I’ll erase them from all memory down the road.

(This is where I take a big gulp and consider coming back here later to delete all of this)

two poems by me…

(Oops you’re too late… she did indeed delete these!) 

a definition of poetry January 9, 2008

Looks like Reginald Shepherd is joining the crew over at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog. In his entry on translation, he offers his definition of poetry. Thought this would be good for anyone out there who toils with this idea, as a writer, a reader, or perhaps a teacher of poetry:

“What distinguishes a poem from a story or an essay or a letter or an op-ed column isn’t its subject matter (any number of these things can deal with the same subject) or its ideas (lots of poems, good ones even, have very little in the way of ideas), its imagery (after all, there aren’t any actual images in poems, or in stories or novels: just words, that don’t depict or resemble things) or even its emotional force or poignancy (I have much more often been brought to tears by pop songs that resonated with me than by the most moving poems). It’s the particularity of its language, the way the words interact with one another to produce rhythms and sonic patterns, what Ezra Pound called logopoeia. “

On poetry, Dylan, and ‘The Big Lebowski’ December 18, 2007

Check out this delightful Q & A with former poet laureate Robert Hass over at the Wallstreet Journal. I got a bunch of teaching ideas from it. He hits the nail on the head about what makes poetry transcend to the person who is new to it.

(Link courtesy of Poetry Hut)

Decked out December 10, 2007

Christmas has interrupted just about all poetry writing and MFA applications, but everything is OK. The holidays are always more important to me, and even with the set backs I’m still moderately on track. (Meanwhile, I’m really proud because all my Christmas shopping is complete and mostly wrapped, except for one specific gift that requires that I go to the mall, something I’ve been avoiding all season.) As far as applications, I have 4 down, 6 to go, and the remaining ones are not due until Jan. 15. I’ll be taking vacation time around New Year’s to recover from Christmas and to finish and mail everything. I also talked one of my editors out of my freelance duties for Jan. (phew!) And by the time I’m done with all the holiday cookies and casseroles I’ve been baking, I’ll have enough food to get me through the winter and hopefully keep me out of the kitchen (cooking is my ultimate procrastinating task). Then the poet will emerge again, and tackle all those ideas that have been dangling around like ornaments in her head. Jingle jangle.

journalism and poetry November 8, 2007

I started this blog mainly as a way for me to vent my daily frustrations, joys and struggles with the writing life, but I still find myself dropping these things elsewhere in conversations. Which is OK, because my friends are lovely listeners. But I really would rather keep most of this stuff here, when I can.

Example – email I just sent to April about how I missed the Sarah Silverman Show last night. NERD ALERT:

HAHA Oh man – I had to miss the show last night to re-type my 15 page senior thesis as an “expository writing sample”. Some of these apps are ridiculous. On top of 3 letters written in my behalf, my full portfolio of poetry, a CV stating all my publications, and an essay stating my goals, I have to include YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE that I can string words together into a cohesive thought process. So I re-used my research paper (it took me 4 months to research/write before, so I figured why not get another run out of it) Except that I didn’t have a digital copy of it, so I had to retype it all. It’s really weird to retype/reread something that you wrote 4 years ago. I kept thinking, Did I really write this? I seemed so much smarter back then – haha. Newspapers made me stupid.

But yeah, seriously, this is how I spend my evenings sometimes. My shining moment last night was allowing myself to watch ANTM.

Back to that paper I was retyping… I wrote this senior thesis back when I was all obsessed with journalism. It’s actually a very good paper, although the title sounds horrible: Gender Studies Among American Opinion Columnists. A quick synopses: I used the Genderlect Theory, Muted Group Theory and the many theories of Deborah Tannen to prove that women and men communicate differently in print as they do in conversation.  (Gender communication is one of my favorite nerd topics, although I go back and forth on my beliefs therein.) When I completed the paper and presentation a month before my graduation, one of my professors who graded it pulled me aside after class (we shared a cigarette on a bench together) and told me that if I ever wanted to get my doctorate degree in Communication that this paper would land me the ticket. She even told me it was “cutting edge.” Thinking about that conversation, it’s still one of those “wow” moments for me, as she had 20+ years in the business, from working in all media fields before getting her PhD.

Since then, I’ve redirected my interests so much, from Gung-ho journalist woman to desparate poet seeking freedom from the media-filled life. That’s not to say that I don’t still love journalism – I do, I do. But no longer do I care so much about putting my voice out into that forum. I certainly know now how much I love writing more than reporting. However, when reading and retyping this paper – and when speaking to the feature writing class at UNCC 2 months ago – I still see that passion in me to share media knowledge with others. I would even be happy, perhaps even more comfortable, teaching journalism or newswriting in a TA setting rather than a literature or poetry course. (That’s assuming I even get a TA position; whole nother topic there.)

Anyway, the two worlds of journalism and poetry have been heavy on my mind this week. And in a funny coincidence, the Poetry Foundation is also discussing these topics in anticipation of the Symposium on Poetry & Journalism in Chicago. I think they are taking it in a totally different direction than I would have, but it’s neat to think about these topics on the flip side from the chronology of my life. How has poetry benefited by journalism, and is journalism a good thing to find in poetry? I can’t say that I’m even there yet when it comes to my own poems, but I guess in the coming months and years I’ll find out how much my previous life is affecting my writing.

Earlier this year, I did write my first poem relating to my life in a newsroom. I haven’t received any feedback on it yet, but I’ll let you know if it ends up going anywhere. I sent it to Ecotone last month; still waiting a response. I will share a couple lines from it I was proud of:

“…she did not call the police

but my number, the one she looked up

as if a headline can save

in six words or less…”

Blackbird V.6 No. 2 November 6, 2007

The new issue of Blackbird is up – happy reading!

Neko Case speaks out on poetry November 2, 2007

“I think the fear began in about fifth grade. Right off the top they said poetry was supposed to have “form.” Even writing a tiny haiku became a wrestling match with a Claymation Cyclops for me. 
(I watched a lot of Sinbad.) We aren’t too cool for poetry; it’s the other way around. At least that’s the impression I took from public school. The fact that these feelings would remain into adulthood is ridiculous. We all have the right to poetry! How could I still think it’s for other people? Smarter people. What’s doubly confusing is I don’t have the same reservations when poetry is accompanied by music. Perhaps I feel that way because there is music all around us — it’s the wallpaper of our lives. It’s not considered precious in American culture unless a symphony is performing it. “

Read the rest of Neko Case’s article in this month’s Poetry magazine here.