Looking back over the past year, I realize it's been a good one. I've had more publications this year than I've ever had in one calendar year, my chapbook was accepted, and I started writing book reviews for various publications. I can attribute this success to one thing: getting over my fear of being rejected by editors.
Sometime in the Spring, I started sending out more than one or two submissions at a time. I've always been petrified of rejections, mostly because I've let myself take an editor's opinion too seriously (after all, it's only one opinion). What really inspired me was team teaching an advanced creative writing course with a colleague and requiring our students to submit work to 5-10 journals by the semester's end. I figured, if these students could do it at the beginning of their careers, why couldn't I? By that time I'd been out of school for over 10 years and had a very short list of publications to my name.
It worked. Now, at the end of the year, I try to have at least 12 submissions out to journals at a time. Once one or two come back, rejected or accepted (the former is the case more often than not), poems go out again. Keeping the door revolving has been good for me: it reminds me that I can't hold on to poems until they're perfect and I can't be too touchy about the decisions of editors.
It's also helped me in another way: to see any rejected poem from an editor's point of view, and to make any revisions that I think are necessary before submitting a poem again. I've even taken this so far as to revise and reorganize my first full-length collection after sending an earlier version to 6 contests and presses. I think it's stronger now; I will probably revise it again after sending it to a few more places.
I love revision. I still hate rejection, but making those notices into learning experiences has helped me immensely. For 2012, I want to study line and syntax in poetry so that I can make my line breaks more interesting and effective. I want to be more courageous and I want to feel uncomfortable in the first drafts of my own poems. I hope I can make these things happen, even if they don't happen until 2013 or after. I want to keep learning and growing, because that's what matters, after all.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Friday, September 30, 2011
The Mind's Muddy River: a review of The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch never takes me anywhere I don’t want to go. In her poems, I’m willing to follow her to a Luxor bathhouse or to a lunch at Berghoff’s with her mother, and, in The Glimpse Traveler, Boruch’s first memoir, I follow her on a road trip to California with a young woman named Frances, who is searching for people who knew her husband, Ned, and with Woody, who had once been involved with a friend of our narrator’s (who leaves the narrative halfway through, on his way to Oregon). This is the early 1970’s, after Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and we meet young men and women who still live in the mind frame of that time, though it is slowly moving forward, into a new decade.
We don’t just follow characters in this memoir, but we follow memory, associations, and the wonderful images I associate with Boruch’s poems. She lets us see California, the ocean’s “immense heart beating as usual, those mountains beginning just a shade east of the highway and rearing into cliffs or sometimes they gently rose” (134). Boruch the poet, now writing in prose, is ever with us, offering us snapshots of what she sees, offering us glimpses of memories.
The Glimpse Traveler is a book composed of brief chapters preserving each moment. Through the construction and sequence of short chapters, we start to get the idea that this is how memory reveals itself: not through long narratives, but through moments we piece together and string into a narrative. This is first and foremost what I love about the book: that it gives the reader a different way to think about memory. She also offers a narrative of landscape and the history of America, through hitchhiking from Illinois to California, and through the memories she associates with this experience.
Boruch is a natural storyteller. At the end of each chapter, she ends with a moment of suspense so that the next chapter beckons. She keeps the voice of the narrator youthful (she is 20 years old when this experience takes place) through the language and lingo she uses, as well as the moments of innocence. For all the forward thinking offered us through the many people our narrator meets, it is not the current culture that tells us who we are, but our memories, our pasts, what firmly roots us to this earth.
“The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness,” says Annie Dillard in her essay, “Seeing,” and Boruch never dams the river of her mind. So much of this trip is not just a physical journey for the narrator, but also a psychological one. We get to know Boruch through the flashbacks and associations that occur with each person she meets and each experience she has in California. The nuns at her Catholic school, a cave exploration almost turned deadly, advice from her mother, all surface during this trip, and Boruch the storyteller doesn’t keep them at bay. How much of our childhood, our past, our perspective, goes with us when we venture into the world? This is who we have been, who we might remain.
Through this exploration of memory, with Boruch we follow Frances, the reason for this trip out West. And here we have another example of the importance of memory and what happens to memory over time. At the outset of the book, we see a quick glimpse of Ned through Boruch’s memory: a curly red-head, a hippie, but someone “on the far edge of that grid” (6). Ned has passed away in a car accident in Colorado before the narrative even begins, and Frances wants to know what happened to him, wants to find people who knew him before he died. When they finally reach California, no one Frances meets can tell her any more about him than she already knew. Certain friends didn’t understand him, others worshipped him, and it is only when she sees the artwork he created before his death that she begins to understand what thoughts might have been working in his head before the accident. How much of other people’s memories can we trust? And how long can we keep a person alive through the words of others before we realize we have to let go? How long and how far can we follow a ghost?
Of course, I haven’t scratched the surface of this beautiful book: the time we spend following Boruch to California, meeting all sorts of characters, the history and geography of America, and Boruch’s beautiful prose. But take my word for it, The Glimpse Traveler is more than a book written about a generation; this is a book about memory and how we recall the intense moments of our lives. Most writers would reveal the story in long chapters, steeped with descriptions and dialogue, but Boruch offers us something different: the way memories are really revealed.
Marianne Boruch, The Glimpse Traveler, Indiana UP, 2011.
We don’t just follow characters in this memoir, but we follow memory, associations, and the wonderful images I associate with Boruch’s poems. She lets us see California, the ocean’s “immense heart beating as usual, those mountains beginning just a shade east of the highway and rearing into cliffs or sometimes they gently rose” (134). Boruch the poet, now writing in prose, is ever with us, offering us snapshots of what she sees, offering us glimpses of memories.
The Glimpse Traveler is a book composed of brief chapters preserving each moment. Through the construction and sequence of short chapters, we start to get the idea that this is how memory reveals itself: not through long narratives, but through moments we piece together and string into a narrative. This is first and foremost what I love about the book: that it gives the reader a different way to think about memory. She also offers a narrative of landscape and the history of America, through hitchhiking from Illinois to California, and through the memories she associates with this experience.
Boruch is a natural storyteller. At the end of each chapter, she ends with a moment of suspense so that the next chapter beckons. She keeps the voice of the narrator youthful (she is 20 years old when this experience takes place) through the language and lingo she uses, as well as the moments of innocence. For all the forward thinking offered us through the many people our narrator meets, it is not the current culture that tells us who we are, but our memories, our pasts, what firmly roots us to this earth.
“The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness,” says Annie Dillard in her essay, “Seeing,” and Boruch never dams the river of her mind. So much of this trip is not just a physical journey for the narrator, but also a psychological one. We get to know Boruch through the flashbacks and associations that occur with each person she meets and each experience she has in California. The nuns at her Catholic school, a cave exploration almost turned deadly, advice from her mother, all surface during this trip, and Boruch the storyteller doesn’t keep them at bay. How much of our childhood, our past, our perspective, goes with us when we venture into the world? This is who we have been, who we might remain.
Through this exploration of memory, with Boruch we follow Frances, the reason for this trip out West. And here we have another example of the importance of memory and what happens to memory over time. At the outset of the book, we see a quick glimpse of Ned through Boruch’s memory: a curly red-head, a hippie, but someone “on the far edge of that grid” (6). Ned has passed away in a car accident in Colorado before the narrative even begins, and Frances wants to know what happened to him, wants to find people who knew him before he died. When they finally reach California, no one Frances meets can tell her any more about him than she already knew. Certain friends didn’t understand him, others worshipped him, and it is only when she sees the artwork he created before his death that she begins to understand what thoughts might have been working in his head before the accident. How much of other people’s memories can we trust? And how long can we keep a person alive through the words of others before we realize we have to let go? How long and how far can we follow a ghost?
Of course, I haven’t scratched the surface of this beautiful book: the time we spend following Boruch to California, meeting all sorts of characters, the history and geography of America, and Boruch’s beautiful prose. But take my word for it, The Glimpse Traveler is more than a book written about a generation; this is a book about memory and how we recall the intense moments of our lives. Most writers would reveal the story in long chapters, steeped with descriptions and dialogue, but Boruch offers us something different: the way memories are really revealed.
Marianne Boruch, The Glimpse Traveler, Indiana UP, 2011.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
"The Photographer" by Linda Pastan
Still working on the boot camp prompt for Day Four, as it involves research and the information I read today needs to sit a little while before it becomes something. More tomorrow. For now, a poem I fell in love with yesterday.
The Photographer
In Memory of Tom Victor
It wasn't my soul he captured
in his intricate box
but his idea of the poet
as beautiful woman. He ran ahead
kneeling in front of me,
a seductive supplicant murmuring:
"lovely, lovely... turn
your head a little... lick your lips,"
as if he were instructing me
in the myriad gestures of love.
And in those moments
I became beautiful for him,
you can see it in the finished photograph
which rose like Venus
from its bath of chemicals.
When I look at that picture now I see
a woman with widened eyes, a fan
of hair, iconic cheekbones,
a woman quite different
from the plain one I see
in the mirror every day.
I was transformed as language itself
is transformed and quivers in a poem, though
the words themselves, taken separately,
would seem quite ordinary.
-Linda Pastan
from Queen of a Rainy Country (Norton, 2006)
The Photographer
In Memory of Tom Victor
It wasn't my soul he captured
in his intricate box
but his idea of the poet
as beautiful woman. He ran ahead
kneeling in front of me,
a seductive supplicant murmuring:
"lovely, lovely... turn
your head a little... lick your lips,"
as if he were instructing me
in the myriad gestures of love.
And in those moments
I became beautiful for him,
you can see it in the finished photograph
which rose like Venus
from its bath of chemicals.
When I look at that picture now I see
a woman with widened eyes, a fan
of hair, iconic cheekbones,
a woman quite different
from the plain one I see
in the mirror every day.
I was transformed as language itself
is transformed and quivers in a poem, though
the words themselves, taken separately,
would seem quite ordinary.
-Linda Pastan
from Queen of a Rainy Country (Norton, 2006)
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Poetry all around
I'm in my home state this week visiting family. I haven't written a lick of poetry since I stepped off the plane (I wrote a few lines in the airport). Even though I'm not writing during these days of rest and rejuvenation, poems have been cropping up all around me. I met a friend for lunch and she shared two separate poems as a response to George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From." One had been written by her daughter for a High School English class, the other by my friend, who wanted to try the exercise. I was tickled when she showed them to me. If anyone thinks poetry is dead, it's alive and well in my small town.
And it's alive and well in my parents' house. A few days ago, my father showed me two poems he's working on. I was amazed by his ability (they were damn good poems), stunned that I hadn't known about his interest in poetry until this very week, and proud.
I'll be ready to get back to work when I return home. This is turning out to be a very inspiring trip to the homeland.
And it's alive and well in my parents' house. A few days ago, my father showed me two poems he's working on. I was amazed by his ability (they were damn good poems), stunned that I hadn't known about his interest in poetry until this very week, and proud.
I'll be ready to get back to work when I return home. This is turning out to be a very inspiring trip to the homeland.
Saturday, June 18, 2011
Right now
I have a poem in the current issue of UCity Review. You can read it here.
I'd like to share the journey of this poem with you.
But first, I want to let all the new and would-be poets in on a little secret: not all of the poems you are writing right now are going to be published this year.
One of the poems you're working on right now will take you years to finish. In five more years, when you've left your dead-end job and are finally working at your dream job, you'll still be working on that poem. And you'll tell your students or fellow writers that you have a poem that's still in the revision stage.
One or two of the poems you write this year will be ready to send to journals right away. Others won't be ready until a few months after the initial inspiration.
And then there will be a poem that you won't drastically revise, but that you'll tinker with on and off for years, knowing it's not right, and then when it feels right, you'll send it out, and an editor will want it. And you'll say to yourself when you see it in print, "I remember where I was when I wrote that poem. That was a long time ago." And it will feel right to see in print after all those years.
I'd like to share the journey of this poem with you.
But first, I want to let all the new and would-be poets in on a little secret: not all of the poems you are writing right now are going to be published this year.
One of the poems you're working on right now will take you years to finish. In five more years, when you've left your dead-end job and are finally working at your dream job, you'll still be working on that poem. And you'll tell your students or fellow writers that you have a poem that's still in the revision stage.
One or two of the poems you write this year will be ready to send to journals right away. Others won't be ready until a few months after the initial inspiration.
And then there will be a poem that you won't drastically revise, but that you'll tinker with on and off for years, knowing it's not right, and then when it feels right, you'll send it out, and an editor will want it. And you'll say to yourself when you see it in print, "I remember where I was when I wrote that poem. That was a long time ago." And it will feel right to see in print after all those years.
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