Sturgeon's Law

Leaving here for Miami at 5 AM tomorrow. Expect no posts until Sunday or Monday. Have a good one!

Anti- likes you. It's going to be super awesome, and the submissions are already rolling in from excellent poets. But right now it needs you to send it some poems. Won't you?

Brent tagged me do to a fun do-and-don't list for beginning poets. Here are some from me.

Do:
1. Read as much contemporary poetry as you can. Canonical poetry is important as well for a grounding, of course, but know what people are doing now so you don't reinvent the wheel and so you can get a better handle on what you like and why. Use anthologies and journals to find individual poets you enjoy, then get their books.
2. Learn all the tools of the craft (diction, syntax, rhetoric, rhythm, rhyme, line, figurative language, image, etc.) no matter what kind of poet you think you want to be. Develop a sense of how they work together in the poetry of others, then in your poetry.
3. Read your poems aloud as you write them. It's the fundamental basis of poetry, it helps a ton in finding weak spots, and it'll also start you down the road of being able to read your poetry instead of sounding like you're strangling or dying of boredom onstage.
4. Find someone you can trust to look at your early drafts and provide feedback, both positive and negative. It's important to be able to run things past a knowledgeable eye other than your own. And your first drafts definitely need revision.

Don't:
1. Waste your time trying to work out a "voice" or a "poetics." Those things, for what they're worth, will find you as you learn to write what you want to write and are good at writing.
2. Start trying to publish your work shortly after you start writing. Wait at least 50 poems. And when you start sending out work, have some standards about where you send.
3. Neglect the better aspects of living for the sake of poetry. First of all, poetry's not worth wasting your life for, and second, you can get lots of material from the actual life part of life.
4. Believe the hype from anyone, including yourself.

I don't tag people for things like this, but if you read it, I'd probably be interested in seeing yours.

I'm having a lot of trouble walking today, both from overall muscle soreness and from the blister on the fourth toe of my right foot that bled through the sock yesterday. I also definitely tweaked my left triceps. And now I'm trying to break in new basketball shoes in time for Wednesday.

I'm playing in a local basketball game (featuring a couple other poets also) this afternoon. It's going to be strenuous but definitely good for me, better than my daily workout and maybe even the thing I need to get my mind in the right place to stop all the bad eating.

This time next week I'll be in Miami for my company's first-ever annual business meeting. I'm looking forward to visiting Miami for the first time, though I can't imagine I'll be eating healthy there. I hope the weather's okay here for the takeoff and return.

The first poem to make heavy use of my St. Louis experience so far.



Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

...for the slow week before Thanksgiving.

"Design for the Costume of a Minor Divinity" by Kathy Fagan (Pilot)
"Honeymoon" by Rebecca Hoogs (The Laurel Review)

Oh, work is slow around the holidays. Very, very slow.

• I forgot I had a photo coming out in Unpleasant Event Schedule. I submitted it at the same time as I sent poetry because Daniel considers photos and I had some interesting ones. That photo is the back door from the office of the bar I used to hang out at in C Springs. I don't take my camera with me enough places anymore.
• Tonight is a River Styx reading with Adrian Matejka and Jim Tomlinson. I've met Adrian and enjoy his work. Don't know Jim Tomlinson.
• I received Best New Poets 2007 today. Journals with multiple poems selected: Black Warrior Review and The Eleventh Muse. Take that, Virginia Quarterly Review! Congratulations also to Erin for her poem in there.
  
• This year the Dustbooks Directory of Poetry Publishers features forewords by Virgil Suarez and Lyn Lifshin. How, uh, appropriate. Suarez writes "If I had to give a younger poet advice, it would be . . . publish everywhere you can and where your work will be welcomed." Um, everywhere you can? Really? Lifshin contributes a defensive account of her poetry career, including sending a manuscript of over 300 pages to a publisher.
  
• I've been trimming down my blogroll. If I've removed you, sorry about that, it's nothing personal. I just dislike vast link lists, and I don't want to be listing more blogs than I can reasonably visit.
  

Last night, we went to Harrah's as part of a birthday celebration, and I actually sat down and played poker in a casino for the first time. I lost my entire buy-in, but I actually would have finished about even if it weren't for one hand where I got all my money in when I was a better than 5 to 1 favorite, but the other guy drew out on me. I didn't play terribly, just middlingly, but the session was a good reminder that I have too many holes in my game to play seriously. It was also good to get the first time out of the way, because I know I won't be as jittery when I go play again, most likely in a couple months when I feel like I can afford to lose that amount again. Overall, it was a necessary, valuable, and intense experience that was at least half fun.

I dreamed that we were all living in a post-apocalyptic world based on poetry. Almost the entire world was ice plain, with only a small channel of ocean around the equator. The poets were broken up into two feuding factions, one group living on the northern ice and one on the southern. My companion and I, living in some kind of fur tent or hovel or igloo, read in the little propaganda newspaper that there was great anger because [poet's name redacted] had been recruited to move across the channel and was now writing verses for what the paper referred to as "The Antarctic Ulcer." At that point in the dream, my dream self knew it was a dream and thought it would be funny to tell [poet] about it when I woke up--I later dream woke up in the dream and tried to tell [poet] about it. Anyway, still in the dream, I walked out of my house/whatever and found that I lived right on the separating channel, which was narrow enough for me to jump across and full of little icebergs I easily could have traversed if it weren't forbidden. I could see [poet]'s new home directly across the way but couldn't get there or shout across.

When I woke up, I actually laughed aloud for dreaming of poetry as two literally polarized wastelands, vast and empty.

So I was writing a shopping list for this weekend's Target binge, and my writer-brain realized that the first four items could all be read as being (or beginning with) verbs instead of just nouns:

1. Hamper
2. Track pants
3. Ice bucket
4. Wire rack for bathroom

Sadly, it no longer works after that. But now you have a better idea of just how glamorous I am.

"With their natural predators, the screenwriters, out of the literary ecosystem, poet herds thrive and proliferate, soon overrunning their native habitats and exhausting their food supply. Before long, having any unlocked windows in one's house becomes an invitation to poets to bust in, which they unfailingly do, spouting some goofy-ass nonsense while grabbing whatever is in the fridge. All are shot on sight, of course, creating an unwelcome sanitation problem. Heartened, God gives us one more chance."

"Why is there a Father's Day and a Mother's Day, but no Children's Day?"

Because every motherfucking day is Children's Day, Johnny.

While we're at it:

• Class is the foremost inequity. The others are subsets.
  
• Treat the root cause, not the symptoms. Build a foundation before you shingle the roof.
  
• It's possible for justice on large scale to be an injustice on a small scale, and vice versa.
• It's even more likely for whatever happens to be a nasty inseparable mix of both.
• When I was younger, I always hated how speculative fiction was willing to ghettoize itself. Even more, I hated how mainstream fiction ghettoized it.
• Poets are for the most part terrible, terrible statisticians.
  

Update bullets for a lazy Wednesday.

• Websites on my do-not-visit list for having audio/video autoplay when I arrive: Web Del Sol and ESPN.com. In danger: Slate. Don't do it!
• Actually, I've been slashing and burning my bookmarks and links because I was wasting too much time on websites during the day. So I cut most of them out and put three books on the table next to my desk so I can pull a few pages out of them when I would previously have clicked on, say, The Onion AV Club. Right now it's Tony Hoagland's prose, Italo Calvino, and a back issue of The Literary Review. I may add a couple more.
• Have you heard of gooey butter cake? Well, it's an evil, evil thing, as if you couldn't tell from the name.
• I'm looking into getting a new car. I bought my current car, a Saturn L-300, from my stepmom, and it's been great. Sadly, she's not selling her Lexus now.
• I've gone crazy sending manuscripts to contests and open reading periods the last two months. My brain is starting to scatter.
• I can't recommend a Charles Schwab Investor Checking Account strongly enough, at least so far. Gotta love that 4% interest on a checking account, and they've been super professional about all the startup stuff. Unlike, say, US Bank.
  

Anti- now has its own Duotrope page. If you send work (and please do), you can also record your response time so others will be able to see that I tend to get back to people pretty damn fast. Thanks a bunch...

Edited to add: fixed the damn link, and also the Easy Edit button reappeared at some point in the last few months after who knows how many months of absence.

"Kenny Roebuck's Knuckle Curve" by David Bottoms (The Kenyon Review)
"The Idiot's Guide to Faking Your Own Death and Moving to Mexico" by Jason Bredle (Columbia Poetry Review)

I'm hoping Erin (or any other WashU readers I may have) can clue me in about the parking situation there. I tried to go to the Thomas Sayers Ellis reading last night, but after getting lost on the way (my own fault), I found that all the campus parking I drove past appeared to be permit-only. I didn't want to compound being late by getting a ticket, so I went home. Are there visitor lots somewhere, or nearby off-campus parking, or is it possible to park somewhere that's permit parking without high risk of a ticket? Thanks in advance...

Yes, we're evidently in one again, as I received word today that my poem "You Throw the Ball, You Hit the Ball, You Catch the Ball" (title stolen from Bull Durham, incidentally) will appear in the next issue of Backwards City Review.

I also received my lovely contributor copies of Crab Creek Review today. Haven't done more than skim through yet, but noticed several poems with sibling themes, including mine.

You can see the beginnings of my new project right here. Please send me some poems to consider for the first issue of Anti-, which I'm aiming to have ready in early 2008, or for featured writer status thereafter (depending on editorial whim). The guidelines are here. Also, please spread the word to other writers and readers. I'm planning on doing a lot of fun things with this journal as it evolves.

Thank you a bunch for the web development efforts, A. D.!

I found out today that my poems "Without Glasses" and "Phoenix, Colorado" will be coming out in diode in January. Those are two poems I have a great fondness for, and I've been trying to find homes for them for some time now, so I'm happy I finally found such a great place. Just look at that first issue! And read it, of course...

Here are the last seven journals I've sent work to: jubilat, Rattle, Controlled Burn, Backwards City Review, Ploughshares, Redivider, and DIAGRAM. What do they all have in common? Editors, take note!