Sturgeon's Law

Okay, it was a somewhat halfway success, in that my ability to recite it is still quite shaky, but I memorized "Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens as my fourth poem for September. That brings the total to "Ozymandias" by Shelley, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" by Wright, "Song of the Powers" by Mason, and that. I'm going to continue to branch out and memorize a greater range of poems in the coming months. I'll keep you posted here should I get one by heart.

So if you're going to be at AWP, I hope we bump into each other. And if I should be involved in something, let me know...

In case you couldn't tell from the previous post, I started moving into my room yesterday, and it's a pleasure. A couple minor issues, but I'll put up some pictures once I get my computer hooked back up down there, which is this evening's task right after I post this.

Also, I've successfully memorized Dave Mason's "Song of the Powers." It's a little shaky, but I can get through the whole thing. It'll be a long shot for me to get my fourth poem by this weekend, especially since I'm not sure what it's going to be, but I'll just carry it right on into October. I like having poems memorized. Thanks for the spur to do that, Deborah!

Me likey the big room with new carpet and new drywall and new paint and all my stuffs starting to go into it.

When I was trying to learn where and how I might publish poems, one thing I did was read poets I liked, look at the journals they published in, and send to those journals. At first, this didn't work all that well because (A) I was looking at poets who were much more prominent and accomplished than I was, so the journals were often very hard to get into, (B) many of the poets wrote work I admired but that was quite unlike even my better poems, and (C) I didn't carefully consider what sort of poem got picked up by what journal.

But it did work sometimes. My very first poem publication, in Pivot, came because I looked at where some of the rhyming/metrical poets I liked had published work. The first publication I remember feeling excited about, 32 Poems, came about because poets I knew both online and personally talked about the journal and published there--"A Starlit Night," still one of my two favorite B. H. Fairchild poems, had been published there, for example. The first I knew of Bat City Review was seeing Larissa Szporluk's "Cuckoo" on Verse Daily and loving it.

And as I sporadically started to earn more publications, I also noticed that certain people, some names I already knew and some not, mostly relative contemporaries, continued to turn up in the same journals where I was appearing (in the same issue or a different one), so it became a simple matter to follow them around and learn about more journals and send my work where it seemed appropriate.

Edited to add: I cut a big chunk of this post off at the end because there were several things that annoyed me about it, including some really unclear writing. The above is the gist of it.

• The computer switch went swimmingly, and it's delightful how much faster the new one is. Startup took 5-10 minutes on the old computer, about 1 on this one. Word scans and opens files almost instantly. I keep having to go back and get other files I forgot on the old one, but that's no big deal as I have a switch on there that lets me use the same keyboard, monitor, etc.
• I have not yet met my goal of memorizing Dave Mason's "Song of the Powers," but that's mainly because I've hardly looked at it. I'll read through it this evening and probably have it memorized by tomorrow.
• Looks like I may make it to AWP after all. Hurray! And thanks, John...
• A good publication is coming my way. I can feel it.
  
• Why the hell exactly is it that I still have the dream where I'm in college and I haven't been going to class and it's near the end of the semester and I'm in danger of not graduating? I'm 30, I graduated 9 years ago, and there wasn't really that much chance of it not happening at any point. Can't my subconscious come up with a more creative way of expressing current anxiety by now?
  

I bought a new computer not too long ago. I don't think I mentioned it here--must have been one of those weeks when I actually had a lot to post about. Anyway, I thought I would be able to break it in gradually because this computer I'm working on now isn't terrible, just aging. However, it turns out that my computer has picked the past two weeks to start going to hell--it's become extremely buggy and slow. Therefore, I'm going to be switching over all my business and writing and Internet stuff to the new computer this evening. I hope.

"Love and Smoke" by Hadara Bar-Nadav (Beloit Poetry Journal)
"Boss Crashes the Party" by Noah Falck (Word for/Word)

I've been talking with a financial/investment adviser about various things I need to do with my money, and it reminded me that managing personal finances is one of the very few things left in my life that feels like homework. I don't hate it, exactly, and I maintain a basic level of it, but the big things like Roth IRAs and tax returns feel incredibly draining, and I avoid them even if they're sitting right there and I have time to deal with them (taxes aren't quite as big a deal because there's a set deadline I have to meet). It's good that I'm talking to the financial planner because at least these things will get done, but it's bad because I still have to do all this work that I think comes naturally to him and is the exact opposite to me.

I went to the River Styx reading series last night, at which Charles Harper Webb and Chelsea Rathburn read. Webb has a very engaging reading style that suits his poems. As someone who tries with intermittent success to be a little better than another somber, sonorous poetry reader, I appreciated how well he did for the most part.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that Chelsea remembered me from our brief meeting at West Chester two years ago. I also liked how unobtrusive yet effective the rhymes and meter are in her poems. I'd be listening, and then I'd start to follow iambs and think it was blank verse, and then I'd realize she was rhyming too. Lovely effect.

As always when my poems start to get sprawling, I'm nervous about this one.

Dear The Editors:

Thank you very much for your recent rejection of my work sent for your September open reading period. I'm glad that, as you wrote, you "found much to admire" in my selection, in fact so much that you signed your admiring letter as an unnamed unit.

However, that's just what many presses would do. I'm doubly grateful that you found so much to admire so quickly, given that I mailed my 10 pages on Monday and received your reply on Saturday. Mailing time being what it is, I have to guess you found much to admire in just a single day in possession of the manuscript, which is impressive indeed.

Finally, I'm touched that you found so much to admire in my manuscript that you weren't actually sure whether it was fiction or poetry, but you nonetheless suggested that I enter my book into your poetry and/or fiction prize competitions for $25 each. I want you to know that I found much to admire in your suggestion that I enter your contest(s). Not to toot my own horn too much, but I managed to find as much to admire about it as you did about my poems, but in even less time!

Thank you for finding much to admire.

Sincerely,
A Writer

I've successfully memorized the Wright poem below. So far in My Month of Poetry Memorization, I've tripled the amount of poems I have by heart. Next up, David Mason's "Song of the Powers." This is a great poem to hear Dave recite, and I'd like to have something truly contemporary. I was going to try Larissa Szporluk's "Cuckoo," but that one has me a little intimidated. I may take that on as the fourth of the month.

While I'm thinking of it, let me throw it open to the floor: what do you think would be good poems to memorize for recitation?

Poetry is marginal, poetry is fragmented, poetry doesn't matter, poetry is dying. Good goddamn thing too. Where else in the arts do you get to do virtually whatever you want without having to worry about selling out and going mainstream because you really need/want the cash? What do sellouts get in poetry? A $5,000 prize? Tenure? Non-sellouts have those things too, and my job still pays more than yours. Any kind of serious money doesn't roll in until retirement age, and even then only one poet in 10,000 gets it. You want to sell out, get an MBA or a JD. You want to sell out as an artist and get something for it, be a musician or painter. If you're a halfway decent writer, there are dozens of journals that will publish whatever kind of poetry is yours, so figure out what kind is yours and write the hell out of it. And please shut the fuck up when you feel that impulse to insult the kind that isn't yours, or bitch about how someone else has a bigger piece of pie. The pie is neither good nor big.

It's funny that I continue to write poetry despite the fact that very few of the alleged perks of the poetry world really interest me. I don't want to teach, and I'm less and less inclined to seek an MFA after I got to hear work by some of the people who got into schools ahead of me the last couple of years. I've never applied for a grant, and I don't have a month free for your writer's colony, thank you. I only like conferences because I get to meet people I've known online, and occasionally completely new people I keep track of. And though I joke from time to time that I write poetry to impress women, that's a sadly hit-or-miss affair at best. I write poetry and I publish and I edit because these things let me believe for a short time that I can create something beautiful or moving, by myself or in collaboration with other writers/editors, and share it with people to make them a little happier. When I start cranking out, I dunno, bad Harry Potter knockoffs, you'll know I started following other motivations. Though I'd still need to be making people happy.

Memorize!

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

--James Wright

Since I said I would, here are pictures of the progress on my room. Trust me, it's a lot. Drywall and carpet to go.





Really amazed by some of the touching and eloquent 9/11 writings elsewhere. The things I think about are inadequate to this situation.

One thing about St. Louis versus Colorado Springs is that there are a lot more insects and other creepy-crawlies here. They have lightning bugs, which I don't recall ever seeing in Colorado, and cicadas, and house centipedes, and a different brand of cricket, and definitely more of whatever bitey things ate my left leg up the last couple evenings. I can't say I'm enthusiastic about this development. Well, the lightning bugs are pretty cool.

Updated pictures of the work on my living space once I get my digital camera dock working again.

The bar (so to speak) for paying me to read poetry at your event has now been raised to two (2) free beers. And something of similar quality to Schlafly Hefeweizen--no Miller Lite or Icehouse here, dammit. Actually, that's the first time I've been "paid" anything for reading. Usually I run a deficit by buying the beers myself.

Went to the first Observable Reading of the season this evening, and got to hear Tony Trigilio and Allison Funk read. It was nice to meet Tony after corresponding with him, publishing him, playing in fantasy baseball leagues with him, etc. I also got to add another mark on the list of people I knew first from poetry blogs whom I've now met in real life when I met Jonathan Mayhew. And I met someone in St. Louis who knew me from my blog, which is definitely odd. Hello, Eric, if you read it again.

Tomorrow I'm going to be part of the Art Outside reading also organized by Aaron Belz. Won't you come out? It's between 5 and 7 at the Schlafly Bottleworks. I'm very excited to be part of this.

Well, I've memorized "Ozymandias" now, though it was the easiest one I'll do: basically I didn't know from "Whose frown" through "and the heart that fed," which is only 4+ lines. But I can run through the whole thing now. The next one up will be somewhat more difficult, since it's not one I previously had (nearly) recitable: James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio." I definitely wanted to do a Wright poem, and there were several that came close, particularly "Saint Judas" and "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota."

Imagine working in a little cubicle. Not so hard to imagine, right? A few of you are working in a little cubicle right now, most likely. Well, "working." But now imagine that you also spend your entertainment time and your resting time in that cubicle. Your writing and your music and your games are at the same desk, and you have to keep the sound of all of the above within the cubicle. You go to sleep at night five feet from your computer, and when your cellphone alarm on the desk goes off in the morning, rolling out of bed leaves you in your office chair. Well, that's what I've been doing for over a month now, and I expect I'll be doing it for at least another two weeks. My work productivity is shockingly not down a whole lot, but my poetry productivity and blogging productivity are both shit right now, and my morale is getting there.

The first poem I'm going to learn by heart for Deborah's Month o' Memorization is Shelley's "Ozymandias"--it's my first poem love, but I realized I can't quite recite it (I get bogged down in the middle). So I'll report back once I've gotten it.

So it looks like Wikipedia is taking an important first step in losing the essence of what makes it good and noble, the extremely equal level of user power, while not gaining the thing that sets a real encyclopedia apart from the Wiki version: articles written primarily by experts in the field rather than hobbyists (and occasionally utter cranks). And it's only going to exacerbate one of the biggest problems I have with Wikipedia, what I referred to in a previous post as "little administrator fiefdoms," and will almost by necessity decrease turnaround speed for changes. Is better quality control enough of a payoff?

To summarize, "The Foundation" is proposing implementation of an edit-approval system for Wikipedia, meaning that a select class of people would end up making the decisions on suggested edits instead of the edit-this-page system that exists now. And if Simon is correct here, it's a lot farther along than proposal. (Edited to add: one of the big points the pro-proposal people seem to be making about it is that all logged-in users could see proposed changes immediately, which makes the whole thing seem pretty odd, and I'm not sure is something I'd be touting.) I'm not wholly up to speed on the thing, obviously, but it doesn't make me feel better about Wikipedia, which I'm skeptical at best about anyway. I'd personally prefer complete liberty or rigorous peer review, not this watery combo. Thank you to Simon for bringing this to my attention.