The general consensus of workshop: But, what were you thinking?

  My poetry persona, Sam, was a persona built on another persona.

I didn’t know that until I started to write non-fiction.

Thanks non-fiction.

I now call my first persona “Everything is All Right” or EAR.

With EAR my poetry portrays a confident, yet vulnerable woman.

Lies.

Before taking non-fiction workshop, I wondered what the difference was between non-fiction and poetry.

Then I wrote my first piece of non-fiction. Read more »

– An abscence of comments means one of two things: 1) you’ve written something so profound and true, no one can even take the time to say, “Right on, dude.” Or, 2) Even your friends don’t know how to tell you that you should’ve marinated on you’re argument against grammer alittle longer.

– Spellcheck is a frenemy

– The post you spent three hours on will have less mass appeal than the post you wrote in 45 minutes, after six pina colada  flavored wine coolers.

– Drink heavily and write. Edit with strong black coffee in the morning.

– You will still miss mistakes. Don’t worry. Sam Ligon will edit them and say they were “minor”.

– Write about what you know.

– Be okay with having what you know completely shitted on.

–If you share a blogging home, read the other bloggers’ posts. Comment, if you have things to say. Compliment them in a loud voice in public and repeat the name of the blog.

–If you can’t stand the silence, phone The Network. Your mother, grandmother, brother, mentor and best friends will gladly comment on your posts. Read more »

My fellow poet and girl crush, Danielle Shutt,  had a poem called “Narcotic Winter” in the September 2011 issue of Pank. It was accompanied by an interview conducted by J. Bradley. I’d heard the poem before during our monthly graduate reading, Voice Over, and I was excited to see what Danielle had to say about it.  I wasn’t disappointed.  As usual, Danielle was eloquent and witty, insightful and self-deprecating when speaking about her impulses as a writer. And it made me wonder how I would’ve answered questions about my own poetry.

For the next few months, I hounded my fellow poets. At parties, I got drunk and asked each one to “Describe to me your writing aesthetic.” I wanted to know what contemporary writers they would compare their work to. I wanted to know about their opinions on rhetorical questions in poems and how they viewed titles that had no seeming relation to their poems. I wanted to know about dashes. I wanted all these answers because I couldn’t answer them for myself. Read more »

Earlier this week , my fellow Barker Scott experienced my greatest fear as a blogger.  Okay, I have a lot of fears as a blogger:

1. That my terrible grammar (syntax, diction, voice) will convince readers that I am not fit to be a blogger, let alone a graduate student in an M.F.A program,

2. Therefore I will shame or make my M.F.A program look bad.

3. I might write a post that offends or insults someone.

4. I will seem self-involved and conceited (without fail).

5. I’ll get into a debate with someone who disagrees with what I’ve written and not be able to successfully articulate my side of the argument. Read more »

I didn’t think there was another person on the planet besides my mother,who could scold me in such a manner that I couldn’t make direct eye contact for a full ten minutes afterwards. But alas, I have found such a person and he is my thesis advisor. During our first meeting of the quarter, he quietly dismissed my excuses for not having read but three of my thesis books (that he assigned last Spring). When I said that I didn’t want to be influenced by other voices, he said, that this (graduate school) was the time to be influenced, this was the time to steal.

Provocative, Searing, Blunt. Yes, please.

I came home with his office copy of Elizabeth Alexander’s “Body of Life”, disgruntled with another book that seemed to focus on the Black Experience. Didn’t I already know that CH wanted me to focus on the Black Experience?, Read more »

pristine

Lake Fernan is one of the hundreds of lakes hidden in the valleys of mountains in Northern Idaho. As we drove around it on a snake-like two lane road, I peered down at the frozen surface and could see logs and rocks trapped by the ice. “During the coldest winters,” My boyfriend TJ said, “People will drive their trucks across the lake and make bonfires on that little inlet over there.” He pointed to a spot way off in the distance. Soon we left the lake behind passing stretches of trees broken only by a few large ranch houses. We pulled into a parking lot, let Kokanee – TJ’s purebred Husky – out of the truck, and headed down the trail demarcated by two cinder blocks.

In the forest, we walked single file with Kokanee running ahead to the edge of our line of sight, white tail flagging, only to turn and run back. We crossed over a stream and came upon the sudden green of a moss carpet and for a moment, I forgot that it was January and that I had on three layers of clothing. Read more »

My mom has all kinds of pseudo-new age wisdom, based on spirituality and life experiences that I almost always take for granted until I’m slapped in the face with its profoundness at 11:45 pm in the Rosauers’ check out line as I’m buying a meat stick and an orange. But  preemptively I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to be doing New Year’s Day because for the past few years I’ve been haunted by what she told me several years ago on a NYE: “Whatever you’re doing on New Year’s Day, you’ll be doing all year long.” Read more »

“If anyone, it was Tim who taught me that a man who begins a first date with a racist joke shouldn’t be given any more attention than the time it takes to say, “Thanks but no thanks” but I slept with him anyway. And I could say it was because I was suffering from serious self-loathing after two disastrous relationships but the truth was he smelled like the woods after hard rain and  I didn’t regret him when I was sitting in the clinic waiting for my name to be called.”

This past quarter, the poets at Eastern got to study a few of the Ancients, the poets who set the framework for those who came later and eventually for us. We started with essays by Aristole and Longinus, hit Sappho, spent too much time with Homer, got a map of  Dante’s Inferno, found Milton’s misogyny distasteful and landed in the woods of Wordsworth. How much it all stuck with me, I’ll never know, until I need it. Like the other day when I had this awkward experience at the clinic and the whole ride home on the bus all I could think about is, “This is a personal essay waiting to happen.” And I was determined to go home and write it. Read more »

My hands are tied

I was a little miffed the other day when I went to submit to a journal and found the following Duotrope disclaimer: Open to all/most forms of poetry excluding  – Erotica. I poked around on the website and didn’t find a definition of what this particular journal or editor considered to be writing of an erotic nature and the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I didn’t want to submit to a journal that put that kind of limitation on submissions. There is, obviously, a huge difference between smut and erotica, between a tasteful scene of intimacy and porn but I guess someone somewhere had crossed that line one too many times for this journal to put up with. Or maybe it distributed its latest editions to middle schools.

Either way that disclaimer led me down a very uncomfortable path of introspection. My work is often intimate, sensual and very sexual. Sometimes I write about my pubic hair. Is that erotic? Read more »

replace the Mac with a PC and the magazine with a Nora Roberts

I write to you from my Dell laptop surrounded by the dreck accumulated from a month of not cleaning my shotgun apartment. I have learned several important things this month; one being that my boyfriend is very supportive of my “writing process”. See, someone in my program had the brilliant idea to write a poem every day for the month of November, like a poet’s version of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo. Back in October this was a great idea for me, personally. The 40-some poems I’d turned in for thesis consideration had dwindled down to eight and I needed new material like I need to shower now (hey it’s winter).

I’d done the write-a-poem-a-day process before in April during National Poetry Month’s actual event and the results were several of the poems that my adviser had approved for inclusion in my thesis but kind of haphazardly and mostly to see if I could. But now I needed to do it. It seemed logical: Writing poems every day = material = marital bliss. Or something.  Instead I’ve become a paper-snatching, pen-hoarding crazed person who mumbles lines of poetry while dressing mannequins in the Sears at the Northtown Mall because worse-case scenario turned out to be when I thought of the next Great American poem and didn’t have a scrap of paper and a mini-pencil. Or at the very least my Blackberry. Read more »