Sturgeon's Law

Anti- Featured Poet #37

2010-02-07T00:24:00.002-06:00

Just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, Anti-'s newest Featured Poet is Rob MacDonald. If you can figure out the secret code, the poems actually predict the Super Bowl winner!

Two draft and trunkless legs of stone

2010-02-06T12:13:00.001-06:00

Yes, the title of this draft, as you may well be aware, comes from "Ozymandias," what I would answer asked my "favorite" poem. I'm not quite sure yet that it fits the subject matter, but no matter. That's what drafts are for.

Revisiting the Classics

2010-02-04T15:19:00.002-06:00

I recently finished rereading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in at least a decade. I read it at least a dozen times between the ages of 10 and approximately 21, but I stopped reading it after that because I had so much other reading to catch up on and so much less time to do it. I was also a little worried that I'd find myself liking it less. However, I decided to go back to the series last month, and I plowed right through them again.

It's still highly enjoyable world-building, mythologizing stuff, and I was well prepared for the little foibles I didn't used to think about, like the fact that three-quarters of the time Tolkien writes an action scene, his viewpoint character gets knocked out early on so he can summarize it after the fact. I also found new things to enjoy, like Tolkien's immense attention to detail at the level of scene, particularly how a natural landscape is put together. Finally, he had some damn good figurative language I didn't even remember, such as near the end, after the main climax, when he writes of the celebrating masses "Their joy was like swords..."

It wasn't quite as great an experience because of that you-can't-go-home-again aspect of your childhood favorites, but it was still completely worthwhile. I've already started rereading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which I also probably read into the double digits, then stopped). In much less nostalgic news, I'm also tackling Gravity's Rainbow for the first time.

Ugh

2010-02-02T15:38:00.001-06:00

I just found out I have to convert this blog from Blogger to WordPress by March because Blogger is discontinuing FTP support and wants to charge me to host my files on their servers. Uh, why would I do that exactly? Fortunately, I already have WordPress installed on my site, but I'm going to have to figure out a bunch of stuff I don't want to waste time on. Still, WordPress is way better than Blogger, and this will give me a chance to go through my archives and dump useless old content, which can only be a positive.

Fun weekend for Anti- submissions

2010-01-31T21:17:00.003-06:00

Wow, this was some weekend for Anti-. I got to add a second name to the Anti- blacklist after a guy (the only three people I've ever told not to send work to me at either journal I've edited were guys, what a shock) was verbally abusive simply because I rejected him. And also, the first guy on the Anti- blacklist sent me another submission, then was verbally abusive when I pointed out that I had asked him not to send work again last year because he was verbally abusive when I asked him not to ignore our guidelines about how often to submit or lie about when he had last sent work, as if I don't have e-mail records. So now their messages go straight to the trash folder. Congratulations, guys!

In much happier news, I accepted several excellent poems that you will be seeing in upcoming features and issues. Here's a preview of some of the poets soon to have features:

Rob MacDonald
Erika Meitner
John Cotter & Shafer Hall
Marcus Wicker
Martha Silano
Clayton Michaels
Soham Patel
Stefi Weisburd

A Good News Bit

2010-01-28T11:52:00.002-06:00

I'm happy to say Front Porch has picked up five(!) poems, which takes a big bite out of the current manuscript. It's some of the weirder, wackier stuff too, which is especially nice since that side had been lagging a little.

The Month of No Bad Eating

2010-01-27T16:01:00.002-06:00

I posted on Facebook, but I can't remember if I posted on the blog, that January was to be a month of no restaurants, no junk food, no desserts, and no drinking alcohol. I bloated on all of the above during the holidays, and I badly needed a detox. So how has the month gone?

Restaurants Days: 0
Dessert Days: 2 (One was at my girlfriend's dad's birthday, and my girlfriend's mom likes that I'm a big fan of her food, so eating a piece of chocolate cake there wasn't a hard decision)
Junk Food Days: 0
Drinking Days: 2 (Game night with friends is more fun with a cocktail, sorry)

Without a doubt, I've felt better the last 2-3 weeks playing basketball. It could be partially a placebo effect, of course, but I have to call this month a success. Maybe I should implement a modified version of the plan, with a little wiggle room, going forward.

Poetry Fame

2010-01-27T13:05:00.002-06:00

Of people who will read this post, more will know my name than will have heard of John Ashbery.

If all the people of the United States (or, indeed, the world!) were surveyed as to whether they had heard of me or of John Ashbery, the difference between us would be statistically insignificant.

Therefore, I am as well known as John Ashbery.

QED.

Repeat as needed with Billy Collins, Kay Ryan, or whomever. Or make your own post and substitute yourself in for me. The applications are endless.

Poem Genesis

2010-01-26T17:19:00.002-06:00

There seems to be a lot of fascination out there about how a poem goes from concept to completion, as it were. At readings, poets give explanatory intros, longer than the poems themselves, that include how and where and why they wrote each poem. Interviews often come back to these questions, more than just a craft primer, of what-were-you-thinking-when or where-do-you-get-your-ideas.

I certainly don't begrudge others their interest in those questions, though I only tend to find them interesting when the person doing the answering is especially funny and engaging. I think a lot of my disinterest is because I suspect my answer on the genesis of most of my poems would be similar:

"I had these two funny statements or ideas or facts--probably at least one of them was something not literally true that works in an interesting way when treated as if it is--and I realized there was a vague connection between those two things so they could be in the same poem. I wrote the connective tissue between the two things and figured out what they added up to. Then I rewrote the poem about 30 times, often losing what I had thought was the original point, as well as one or both of the initial lines. Then I had it rejected about 20 times."

It's not exactly compelling stuff, right? I mean, let's look at a couple poems from Torched Verse Ends that are online:

"Sturgeon's Law": My blog was already named when I wrote this poem, and I like the gist of Sturgeon's Law. I came across the facts in stanza 2 and used them to achieve the wrongheaded conclusion reached there at about the same time I realized the percent thing went with Sturgeon's Law. Then I found/made up a bunch of real and fake factoids, all misapplied. Stanza 1 came from a cartoon I wrote. My resume writing accounted for most of stanza 3. Snopes and my brain filled in the rest.

"Deathmatch Mode": I had a vivid dream wherein myself and three friends were repeatedly killed in various horror movie scenarios. It stayed with me after I woke up, but as I toyed with it, I realized the horror movie is really not my milieu at all. However, it took little effort to transfer the scenario over to video games, especially because I had been playing (I think) Unreal Tournament, which (at least the way I was playing it) is basically kill-kill-kill-die-respawn-kill-repeat-until-bored. I also realized the poem was turning into a loose proto-sonnet.

Are those explanations either interesting or useful? Do they enhance your appreciation of the poems in question, which should be the main point? I dunno...

Anti- Featured Poet #36

2010-01-24T01:27:00.001-06:00

Your newest Anti- Featured Poet is Kathleen Winter.

"Penumbra’s a conundrum..."

Hippocratic Draft

2010-01-23T22:46:00.003-06:00

I threw something and broke a pen earlier today while working on this poem, when I couldn't find my stress ball. Anyway, this title is of course stolen from Hippocrates (though not his namesake Oath). I have resolved the Adobe issues on my computer now. I think.

How I got this way

2010-01-21T20:19:00.003-06:00

In first grade, I write a story about being a cheetah policeman who will give them speeding tickets for running too fast. In third grade, I write a story about a deer who is smarter than the hunter, but the hunter ends up shooting the deer anyway.

In sixth grade, I run for class vice president, attempt to ad lib a speech to the student body, and bomb horribly. It will take me another ten years to get over my fear of public speaking and to learn to prepare at least the gist of my remarks in advance.

In ninth grade, the chair of the English department, who dislikes me because I didn't try hard in her class in seventh grade, puts me in the stupid class and refuses to switch me to the advanced class. We watch a lot of movies.

In eleventh grade, I read Ozymandias and first have the experience of loving a poem, not counting Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, etc.

In twelfth grade, I write notes for my fantasy novel during AP calculus and copy my friend's homework every week. I end up with a 5 on the AP exam anyway.

Mr. Couchman, my AP English teacher, has us read poems by Albert Goldbarth and Sherod Santos. He writes poetry as well and dreams of being published in The New Yorker. One of our favorite pasttimes in class, which he indulges us in, is writing fake excuse notes in futile attempts to get out of his highly detail-oriented tests.

After one of our mock AP tests includes writing about May Swenson's "The Centaur," he half-jokingly suggests that you will always do well on the AP test writing about sex. On the real AP test, one of the essays is on a passage from Sarah Orne Jewett's "The White Heron" that features a girl climbing a tall tree sticky with sap. I write about sex. I get a 5 on the exam.

Going into college, I think I will channel my storytelling into computer game design and writing science fiction on the side. I turn out not to have the patience for the hardcore aspects of software development and wash out of the computer science major.

I start taking fiction workshops. The professor was at Iowa at the same time as Flannery O'Connor. One of his rules is "no genre writing." I spend the next two years writing genre stories disguised as "literary" stories.

In my first poetry workshop, my poems are bad. One of them is about finding a great featureless gray wall that symbolizes death. However, they are far from the worst--one freshman reads a long poem about how his family moved to an apartment complex that didn't allow pets, so he had to give up his cat. He cries while reading the poem. I learn that, even if something is terribly sad because it happened to you, it may make for a plain terrible poem.

Kate Daniels, teacher of my first poetry workshop, recommends Mark Jarman as my advisor. For the first time, there are people pushing my creative writing development. Mark Jarman also repeatedly tells me I need to speak up more in class.

More to come in the future as I think of it...

Joshua Beckman poem

2010-01-19T15:11:00.003-06:00

["The canals. The liquor coming through..."]

The canals. The liquor coming through
the straw. The canals the land and
the bridge and the landing by the bridge
destroyed. The liquor. The little anger
growing inside the friends. The canal.
The pile of wood up against the bank.
The liquor. The friends. A little
anger growing inside them. The canal.
The jets. The wood in piles along
the bank. The dead. The jets. Liquor
through a straw. Speaking. A little anger
grows inside them. The jets. The dead.
The bank. The sky. The friends. The jets.
The dead. A little anger grows inside them.

--Joshua Beckman

New diode

2010-01-17T10:26:00.002-06:00

You should go peruse the new issue of diode. There's an absolutely fantastic lineup I can't wait to explore. I have two poems in it as well. The contributors:

Shurooq Amin
Rae Armantrout
Cynthia Arrieu-King
Andrea Cohen
Adam Fieled
Arpine Konyalian Grenier
Mihail Gălăţanu, trans. Adam J. Sorkin and Petru Iamandi
Lesley Jenike
Christine Klocek-Lim
Rustin Larson
Jeffrey Ethan Lee
Bobbi Lurie
Rob MacDonald
Erika Meitner
Simon Perchik
Catherine Pierce
Nate Pritts
Doug Ramspeck
Susan Rich
Steven D. Schroeder
Ravi Shankar
Franz Wright

I mean, damn, right? Go read it!

AWP Reading

2010-01-16T13:50:00.002-06:00

I slightly jumped the gun when I originally posted this reading, as it hadn't been finalized yet. My apologies to the organizers. Anyway, it's now officially up on the AWP offsite events page, so I can let you know about it here too!

Friday, April 9, 7:00PM-9:00PM
Meadowlark Poetry Marathon
Location: 2701 Larimer St., Denver 80205
Cost: Free
Website: http://www.meadowlarkbar.com
Poetry readings followed by disco dance party! Feat. Rachel Loden, Kate Greenstreet, Aaron Belz, Amy King, Arielle Greenberg, Daniel Borzutsky, Amy Guth, Ana Bozicevic, Susan Schultz, Peter Davis, Chad Parmenter, Katie Degentesh, Geoffrey Gatza, Janet Holmes, Tony Trigilio, Julie Dill, Tony Robinson, Ben and Sandra Doller, Steven D. Schroeder, Reb Livingston, and others.

That's a great group of readers, and I'm excited to be a part of it. I hope to see you there.

This is Draft to Say

2010-01-15T13:54:00.002-06:00

This title is stolen from "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams" by Kenneth Koch. Sort of a double theft. Please pardon the lower-than-usual quality of the image file--I'm having some problems with Acrobat on my new computer, so I used a free converter program. Sigh...

The B-Sides

2010-01-13T10:44:00.002-06:00

W. F. Roby has begun a new column called "The B-Sides" at readwritepoem, and his first subject is Curtis L. Crisler's "They will say" from Anti- Issue #5. Congratulations to Curtis for the well-deserved notice, and thank you to W. F. for starting this interesting new column.

When You Know the Editor

2010-01-12T18:12:00.003-06:00

It's always kind of funny to me how awkward many of us seem to be when we approach an editor we know some but not that closely. I've had poets I know timidly e-mail me a query about whether I want them to submit work (The answer is yes! Send it!), and I've had poets I've met in person and am on a first-name basis with address their letters to Anti- "Dear Editors." In fact, I just did that same thing on a submission to an anthology being edited by two people I know (I bet you can guess the anthology if you're reading this on my blog...) because I wasn't sure if they were the only editors or if they'd be screening everything.

I also had a submission to a journal where I know the editor quite well bounced by a screener because I addressed the editor in a casual manner but wasn't very specific, so the screener thought I didn't really know him and was trying to BS my way onto the editor's desk. I hesitate to send work directly to editors I know unless they specifically suggest it. [Edited to add: by this I mean e-mailing it directly to them in contravention of stated submission guidelines, not addressing the letter to them. This is what I get for not proofreading.]

And whenever I do get specific in a submission letter to an editor I know, I worry about seeming weird or overly forward. No wonder Brandi referred to AWP as "Awkward Writers and Poets"! Aside from Eduardo, who (usually) doesn't send work to journals whose editors he knows, how do you approach it [Edited to add: "it" being addressing an editor you sort of know, not choosing whether to send work where you know an editor]? Doesn't it seem in a way like a fine line to walk? I mean, even without the questions of can you be objective and will it hurt a friendship (of course not / it damn well shouldn't).

Edited to add: obviously I did a shit job writing this in the first place. I'm not really asking "Do you or don't you send work to places where you know the editor," which is frankly a discussion that bores me. I'm saying "Given that most of us do this, don't you find there's a certain amusing awkwardness to that interaction, and what do you do about it?"

Journal Transience

2010-01-10T19:24:00.001-06:00

I was looking at the acknowledgments page of Torched Verse Ends, and by my count at least five of the journals I placed individual poems in are already defunct (Cranky, Diner, three candles, Unloved Mail Order Bride, and Unpleasant Event Schedule). Plus, the journal I edited for a good portion of time while I was producing the poems, The Eleventh Muse, is either defunct or might as well be. Beyond that, a ton of the journals that were generally prominent and well regarded when I first started trying to publish poetry are gone too: Chelsea, Grand Street, Partisan Review, Ontario Review, etc. And now many university reviews are in danger: New England Review, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, etc. Is there a lesson in that impermanence, especially considering that we're clearly publishing in the age of obsolescence for the print book? I don't know. Maybe it's just that if you're really a writer, you enjoy that publication when it happens, but then consider it over and move right on to writing your next thing. Maybe something actually deep that I haven't thought of yet. What do you think?

I See London, I See Draft

2010-01-06T15:15:00.002-06:00

This title is (re-)stolen from Calvin and Hobbes. Overly obsessive readers may recall a previous poem that used this title, which was less of a fit there. The new title of that old poem is "Get Your Fucking Shinebox" (from Goodfellas) which makes me much happier for that piece.

I think it's pretty weird that a lot of adults look back fondly on a childhood game called "Smear the Queer." Not quite as weird as the fact that we still have a major sports team named the Redskins, but nonetheless...

The File Transfer Dance

2010-01-05T18:59:00.003-06:00

I had to buy a new computer because something (I think the motherboard) on my current one is getting squirrely about recognizing the USB ports, which as you might imagine is a bit of a problem when you have a USB keyboard and mouse. It arrived last week (thank you, big pre-Christmas sale), and now I have the task of figuring out what-all applications and data I need to transfer over. I'm going to keep the current desktop for use with my slower games for now, so only the business applications and higher-end games need to go over. Here's the list so far, in no particular order:

Microsoft Office
Adobe Acrobat
All my creative writing
Several thousand resume documents
Several thousand mp3s
Fallout 3
Bioshock
The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
TurboTax 2009 (plus my old returns)
Firefox and Thunderbird (yes, I can download these)
My e-mail inbox and Internet favorites

Hmm, not as bad as I thought at first.

13 Post-Apocalyptic Entertainments

2010-01-03T22:27:00.002-06:00

I have a real soft spot for post-apocalyptic movies, books, roleplaying games, computer games, and so on. In fact, I think my third manuscript (which I intend to start this year) will revolve around the theme in some way. I like the familiar tropes such as abandoned cities and struggle for basic resources (even in otherwise inferior pieces like I Am Legend or Terminator: Salvation) as well as the works that turn the conventions on their ear. I'm ashamed that The Road is still on my to-read list, where it's been since before it came out. As you might imagine, I'm pretty interested in the upcoming Book of Eli. Here are 13 works with post-apocalyptic settings that I like.

1. The Road Warrior

2. The Fallout series. PC games.

3. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller

4. Children of Men (The movie--haven't read the book)

5. The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher

6. Modern Life by Matthea Harvey

7. Car Wars (Strategy combat board game)

8. Twilight 2000 (Pen-and-paper RPG)

9. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

10. "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison

11. Twelve Monkeys (I guess technically a lot of this is pre-apocalypse, but it fits so well)

12. The Postman (I realized I couldn't call this list "13 Excellent Post-Apocalyptic Entertainments" because I knew I was going to recommend The Postman, which is one of only two movies I can think of offhand that I believe are actively bad but enjoy the hell out of anyway--Con Air is the other)

13. Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe. Video game.

Any other favorites? In particular, any post-apocalyptic poetry you know of?

Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)

2009-12-30T15:39:00.002-06:00

Rachel Wetzsteon was one of the first contemporary poets I read in college, because she appears in the Rebel Angels anthology, co-edited by my professor and advisor Mark Jarman. Today comes sad news that Rachel Wetzsteon has committed suicide.

This is one of the first poems I read by Rachel Wetzsteon.

from "Three Songs"

III.

How did you feel when you entered the church?
Left in the lurch!
What did they say when you brought back the ring?
Poor jilted thing!
Why did they laugh when they looked up its make?
It was a fake!

How did you spend your time out of town?
Tracking him down.
How did he look when you raided his room?
Pale as a groom.
What were the words the coroner used?
Vilely abused.

How many mourners can fill a hall?
Room for them all.
What are the songs the organist plays?
Dolorous lays.
What do you drop as you head for the bier?
Never a tear.

Have the embalmers earned their pay?
Pink hides the gray.
How does he look who did not survive?
Almost alive.
What does the crowd remark upon?
That he is gone!

How do you feel among these men?
Jilted again.
What do his benefactors sense?
Wasted expense!
Where is the world's most wanted dun?
Still on the run.

Plausible Draftability

2009-12-29T23:03:00.002-06:00

Yay, I finished the third Mary-challenge draft with time to spare. The title is stolen from Orwell's 1984, of course. Perhaps a bit on the nose, but still.

Nice Christmas Present

2009-12-27T21:08:00.005-06:00

On Christmas Eve, I found out that Torched Verse Ends was reviewed in the latest edition of Galatea Resurrects. Thanks to Kristin Berkey-Abbott for the lovely kind review.