Sturgeon's Law

"Dedicatory Letter" by Andrew Kozma (Pebble Lake Review)
"Angel Shark" by Hailey Leithauser (The American Poetry Journal)

Today wasn't an especially good day. I did, however, finish a workable draft. Here it is.

I like to make lists as a way of focusing myself. I like to make these lists 13 items long as a way of flouting common superstition about unlucky numbers. (I've long claimed 13 as my favorite number.) I'm going to start doing more lists of this sort here. The first one will even be poetry-relevant.

13 Things You Can Do to Have a Better Chance of Publication in The Eleventh Muse
(in no particular order)

1. Write a persona poem or a dramatic monologue.
2. Write a poem using an omniscient (or limited) third-person narrator.
3. Write a poem about something that didn't or won't happen.
4. Write a poem that says what you can't.
5. Use specialized terminology consistently through a poem--science is especially good, but there are near-infinite areas of jargon you could potentially mine.
6. Write a poem that uses humor while addressing a topic seriously.
7. Energize every phrase and line to varying degrees. Write with controlled wildness.
8. Use repetition, rhyme, and other rhetorical devices; know why you used each.
9. Juxtapose two or more things that are not only unlike but unexpected, and make them work together in the end.
10. Ensure that your poem uses form, whatever you may take that word to mean.
11. If you have a philosophy, make sure the poem sells it. Make the intangible tangible.
12. Use beauty as a means, not an end.
13. Put a door on the house, but don't give a tour.

I recently signed up to play at Full Contact Poker, Daniel Negreanu's site. Tonight, in my first ever tournament there, I won $58 for a $5 buy-in. Made one horrendous misplay. Otherwise, did pretty well...

I'm updating the poetry "Recommended Reading" section a little bit, and I've added a couple more poems to the ongoing "Best of . . ." feature.

"The Girl Who Became a Tom Waits Song" by Annalynn Hammond (DIAGRAM)
"You Can See How the Waves" by Michael Milligan (AGNI)

I'm also adding a "classic" poems section (many of which are contemporary, but whose original journal publication I cannot easily find). It also contains, for the (relatively) many of you who find this site via Google, a link to the text of T. R. Hummer's "Where You Go When She Sleeps."

Finally, I've updated Aaron Anstett's page and am working on a Jake York page. And now off to actually do something with my poetry.

Well, my time and blog readership are both down somewhat for the holidays. Nonetheless, I'll cobble together some thoughts about poetry in between bouts of apartment-cleaning and before I take off for the gym.

I keep a notebook by my bed for when I'm drifting off or have just woken up and have a good writing idea I don't want to forget but also am not feeling like getting out of bed to record. This has largely been beneficial, but it also results in the occasional puzzlement when I can't read what I wrote in the dark and/or I don't remember what the hell I was thinking. For example, I was looking at that notebook yesterday, and it contains a scratching that appears to say "knight quills." Well, I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that, and in fact I'm not sure the "knight" is correct. So now I have a weird phrase that is going to bug me, that makes no apparent sense, and that I can't even recall the context for.

Yay, I got an ISSN for The Eleventh Muse. It only took ten months and two separate requests!

Crap, it's gym time already. That's what I get for trying to stay in shape during the holidays.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow...

• So the places I know I'm applying for an MFA are places where I have some sort of existing social network: Vanderbilt, Wyoming, Colorado State, and at least one place in St. Louis (WashU, UMSL, or what-have-you). I'd also like to apply to a couple other places where I don't necessarily know people. What places would those of you with such experience recommend in terms of both quality of program and quality of location? I'm thinking of such places as Arizona State, maybe Johns Hopkins or Cornell, etc. Climate-wise, I'm most partial to places like Colorado and California--humidity is my worst foe, bitter cold my second worst.
  
• Okay, I'm trying to remember a short story I read somewhere between elementary school and high school. I think it was by a speculative fiction author. In it, a man, I think a scientist working on weapons systems for the government, gets a visit from an anti-war type stranger who subsequently gives a gun to the man's retarded son in order to illustrate the dangers of the whole weapon-development-for-government thing. This is probably at best a very loose paraphrase. Anyway, my vague recollection has not helped me Google this story. Does it sound familiar to anyone? Anyone know the author and/or title? Am I close on the plot?
  
• Hey, Lyle: I'm working on your "poem that contradicts itself at least twice" exercise now. I'll post a decent draft once I have one, though the poem right now is second in line. I was having a hard time thinking of what to write about for the concept, but then I realized that something else I had jotted in my notebook fit the self-contradiction concept nicely.
  
• The brag: I took the computerized GRE today. 720 verbal, 800 quantitative. The verbal is about what I expected, as there were a couple analogies I really didn't like any of the choices for. The quantitative is a big surprise, as I felt in the dark on a couple questions and nearly ran out of time, entering my last answer with five seconds left. We'll see how my analytical writing portion gets graded in a couple weeks.
  

As you may be able to tell from the time-stamp, it's late. I'm just back from the Writers Harvest "after-party" (read: beer-drinking at a hole-in-the-wall bar), and since I'm still a bit wired, I thought I'd report on the reading before I head bedward.

It was a blast. Raised money and food for a good cause, tons of people I knew (including a couple people I was really hoping would show up), and none of the readers were duds. I even managed to hold my own. I also got one of the best comments ever on my portion of the reading. Paraphrased: "When you were pacing around at the beginning, I thought you were going to pull out a gun and start shooting random audience members." All right, a gimmick!

Bedtime now. GREs on Friday. Woooooo!

Now's your last chance to fly in from wherever it is you read this site from so you can see me read for about ten minutes as part of Care and Share's Writers Harvest benefit reading, tomorrow at 7 PM, at the Smokebrush. Or if by some tiny chance you live in Colorado Springs but didn't already know about it, consider yourself informed.

This is the second one I've had break in about four months, and I have no idea why this one broke. Dammit, time to send things off for warranty repairs...

Okay, the pains-in-the-ass aren't more than 1% of my clients, but when I do get them, they sure are fun.

Paraphrased e-mail conversation from recently:

Client: "I don't like the resume you wrote. I want you to add this job I had as a bartender, I want the paragraph about my job duties to be all in bullet point form, and I want only one duty per sentence so no one gets confused. I also want you to go over this new page of duties I wrote up about my last job and didn't include on either my old resume or in the questionnaire form I sent at the beginning of this process."

Me: "You aren't looking for a bartending job, so it's not a good idea to include the fact that you were a bartender for 10 years. Putting everything into bullet points tends to minimize the impact of the key accomplishments we already have bulleted. Reading a long list where each sentence is exactly one duty in exactly the same format will get tedious for the reader very quickly. I strongly recommend against all these changes. We [the company I'm subcontracting for, not the royal we] trust that you're the expert at knowing what you did at your job, and we hope you trust us to be the experts at our job, which is making you look as good as possible on paper."

Client: "Well, okay. What about these new job duties I sent you?"

[Insert time for review]

Me: "What you've sent me is a very detailed account of everything I've just summarized on your resume--that is, you haven't given me any new duties, just a step-by-step account of every single thing you did to accomplish the duties already listed. Adding this material will push your resume to two pages, which isn't a good idea for someone who has only one relevant job and four years of relevant experience in the field the resume is targeting. However, if you feel any of these items are particularly critical to convey on the resume, please let me know which specific items, and I'll happily add them. I just feel we should avoid making the same mistakes that were made on your previous resume, which presumably wasn't working, or you wouldn't have had any reason to come to us in the first place."

Client: "Don't waste my time responding to my messages instead of making the changes I want. I'm a busy professional. I'm not going to tell you what I want to add because I'm not going to write the resume myself. You're the resume writer. I paid $300 for this resume. And why haven't you added that bartender job? I had management duties!"

Me: [Refers client to parent company.]

The ones with funny follow-up from the company are the best. In this case, the company response included this sentence: "As a rule, once we educate a client, if they ask us to go counter to our guidelines we should attempt to meet their needs." Translation: "Just do the stupid thing the client wants instead of giving them the best resume. You know that!" Sadly, I do indeed know that.

Some other day I'll tell you the one about the client who threatened to sue me and who later demanded that the writer to whom my company reassigned his resume watch a video he had on resumes, because he used to run a national executive recruiting company (he managed to misspell both "executive" and "national" at various points).

I just learned that my poem "Clockwork" has been accepted by The American Poetry Journal. It's been a nice week for me 'n' my poetry.

P.S. My home thermometer here says 2 degrees. Can't wait for those negative numbers in a couple hours...

Yeah, probably best to edit this out...

...and congratulate Amanda on her big news.

I just found out I had a poem accepted by Bat City Review. If you don't know the journal but want to find out why I'm excited to be published there, just check out that link. Additionally, my long journal-acceptance drought is now over.

I'm off to the Poetry West holiday party now--how appropriate. Got most of my resume work done. Excellent, Smithers.

1 cup peanut butter
1 cup sugar
1 raw egg
1 tablespoon vanilla

Mix all ingredients in bowl until thoroughly combined. Form "dough" into quasi-spheres ~1 inch in diameter. Place spheres on cooking sheet. Press each down lightly with a fork. Cook at 325 for 12-13 minutes. Eat. Get fat.

Off now to make these for the Poetry West holiday party.

Of the 1.8 million results that are found when you Google "bad shaved head," my site currently ranks third.

"Call Vanderbilt and get them to send my transcript to my Interfolio account for MFA applications." I did, however, get myself signed up for the GRE, and I downloaded a GRE practice program.

Speaking of Vanderbilt, it's a good time right now in Vanderbilt sports. The football team miraculously beat Tennessee for the first time in 23 years, and the basketball team is undefeated and threatening to break into the top 25.