Alas…  One of my M.F.A. colleagues (on staff at Willow Springs) says that if I review a batch of poems that have been submitted and I provide reasons for it not to be accepted (or pursued further by my fellow editors), that must mean that my own verse is better.

Well, I’m not sure that it “must,” but for the time being at least, I am struck with how we rationalize by non sequiturs ad infinitum (and how we lapse into latin).  Nothing follows nothing:  good, better, best…  And the grand prize goes to… Subjectivity!

***

Jorie Graham has loads of fascinating things to offer about the poetics we practice, the poems we write and the poems we judge (ie., compare and contrast with other poems).  In this regard, the Poetess-in-Charge at Harvard U. even has her own rule named after her own controversial evaluation of various works in the University of Georgia’s 1999 contest.   The rule essentially stipulates that a judge must recuse her or himself if the potentially award-winning poems are penned by the aforementioned judge’s students, or her future husband.

With that contentious hullabaloo out of the way, consider what the author of the recently released collection, Place, has to say on the subject of narrative, which happens to be the pre-emptive- strike category by which prose (fiction and non-fiction) seems to hold poetry under lock and key in the literary basement.

Narrative, coupled with the block-form stanza, is the idol to which nearly every student of the craft must pay homage and bow down.  The only problem is–what if the stinking existence, which yawns before us like halitosis, what if the entire kit and caboodle of the space-time continuum, bears little resemblance to the storied-arc by which we’d like to float above it???  And so, Jorie Graham once told an interviewer at Lumina, the magazine affiliated with Sarah Lawrence College:

Consequence in narrative is illuminating, often morally instructive, moving, and surprising. But to privilege linear, temporal constructs over all other ones is to refuse to represent, as I began by saying, way too much of ordinary human experience. Everybody dreams. Leaping and associative progress is natural to the way time passes in everyone’s life. We are just taught to distrust those sensations of time as “irrational.” This is a much larger cultural issue. There is much power in the hands of the creators of the narratives, and the master narratives, by which we “recognize” our lives. So I’d say, yes, be intimidated, if you are, by non-narrative poetry. Experience is intimidating. But don’t be distrustful—choose to trust it, go along for the ride, see if it reminds you of anything.

How bleeping gracious is that!

And don’t you dare be intimidated by the phrase, “Experience is intimidating…”

And don’t you dare feel as if Graham is patronizing you (or matronizing you)!

Far from it.   What she’s doing, in her kind and gentle and intellectually-trying way, is warning you not to enter a contest that’s sponsored by “The Non-Profit Organization Dedicated to Story-Telling in the Digital Age.”   She’s warning you.

You’ve been warned.   Don’t say Jorie Graham didn’t try to get you to leap into the abyss before you caved and wrote a beginning, a middle and an ending.  Loser?

Peace–

The finalists, which are not announced before the award itself (unlike the National Book award, which announces them months before the announcement of the winner), were Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia and DFW’s The Pale King.

Here’s how it works, as I learned just now: three judges read over 300 books in a nine-month span, and then they, as a united panel, make a recommendation to the Pulitzer Board about who the three finalists should be. Then the board, which includes NYT columnist Thomas Friedman and fiction writer Junot Diaz, makes the final decision. Except that they decided not to hand out the award in fiction. No one won.

On one hand, who cares? If you didn’t know until today that your book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and then you found out in the next sentence that you didn’t win, would you really care that much? It doesn’t seem that insulting that a board of 21 people couldn’t decide on whether your book was “better” or “more important” or whatever rationale they supposedly use for the Pulitzer. Plus it’s just one (admittedly prestigious) award out of what seems like 1.2 million of them, and you can still put “Pulitzer Prize finalist” on your CV or dust jacket.  *

On the other hand, even if we all agreed that prize committees are probably full of well-intentioned people who take the job seriously, which I hope is largely the case, doesn’t it seem, well, a little douchey that they couldn’t just pick a damn winner?

The 2012 judges (the ones who selected the finalists and gave them to the board to decide on a winner) were Michael Cunningham, Maureen Corrigan and Susan Larson, and I think that all three of them have written a “don’t blame us, it’s not our fault no one won” letter, either to the AP or elsewhere. They seem very concerned that people will think that they just couldn’t come to a decision, or that they’re trying to insult the books in question by not picking a winner. But aside from all the obvious conversations about how awards are silly in nature and reinforce already existing hierarchies of which writers are considered “elite,” it seems stupid to not just pick a winner. I mean, really? Why would you not pick one? You’re telling me that you couldn’t reach a basic majority among 21 people? You’re given a list of three books that were widely lauded and you couldn’t just give one of them the award? An award that would result in positive press for literary fiction and possibly elevate the status of a serious writer and sell some quality books and depending on the winner, allow a serious artist to, I don’t know, produce more quality work? It just seems very silly to me.

As usual, most of the problem is created by secrecy– the board isn’t supposed to talk about their discussions or cite a reason why they didn’t choose a winner, which allows everyone to come up with their own crazy conspiracy theories and complain about how literature awards are unfair in nature (see below). But considering that all three finalists were books of high literary merit by serious writers– it’s not like one of them was written by an eleven-year-old on meth or something– wouldn’t it have been both better and easier to just give someone the award?

* Sidenote: I’m not really that interested in discussions of whether prizes like this are even valuable or whether it’s all a racket since generally a small group decides in a totally subjective manner who should win any of the given prizes. Those arguments are sort of boring to me. Sorry. It seems like all the major prizes exist and will continue to exist, so why debate their existence? If the prizes a) provide exposure for great books/authors, b) provide money for artists to live on and c) sell more books, then they can’t be all bad, right? It seems fine to push for award committees to be more open about their processes, but if places like Graywolf Press and Bellevue Literary Press are consistently in the mix and winning big prizes, the assertion that only the big houses win prizes doesn’t hold water. That being said, should the importance of these prizes be challenged if writers of color or female authors are consistently or systemically ignored? Yeah, obviously. But that seems like a separate issue than “all prizes and awards are basically unfair.” Here’s the thing: Of course they are. Didn’t you ever have a mean elementary school teacher who, when Jimmy stole your Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle lunchbox and wouldn’t admit it, told you that life was unfair and for chrissakes, to stop crying about it? Well, I didn’t either, but someone probably mentioned somewhere along the way that lots of things are unfair. Just because we declare a winner in the thousands of sports contests that occur every day doesn’t mean each victory was justified. There’s always a blown call or a missed foul or a questionable play– did the puck cross the line completely? Did the player’s knee hit the grass before he fell into the endzone? Did the ball leave her hands before time expired? A decision is made and we move on. Of course awards are unfair.

How Did Poe Trend?

So, as far as my participation in this barking.com blog goes, I’m noticing a trend.

It’s nothing overt or thunderously apparent.  It’s comprised of no damning data.  It’s unlikely to make a dent in the Internet reading habits of emerging generations.  It’s neither a threat to national security, nor a subject of prurient interest that might be ruled on by the Supreme Court… It does not resemble the plain nose on your face…

It is, however, near and dear to my face, which has no business being saved from even the slightest of humiliating experiences.   But I have observed that for several weeks now, my unintelligible musings have received zero comments.   That is, 0.

Now, whether or not this lack of cyber-dialogue corresponds to a blanket dismissal of my prowess as a writer or of my genius as an aspiring artist — Ahhh! – that is beyond the scope and the purpose of this brief soliloquy.   In essence, all I have to say can be summarized with a modest paraphrase of Rene Descartes:  “I write, therefore I am.”   Or, to embellish on this purloined dictum just a bit, there’s no one better than the Trappist monk, Thomas Merton.   After turning away from a potentially lucrative career as writer, Merton became a priest, who morphed into a mystic, who eventually, in Seeds of Contemplation, understood his vocation like so:

“If you write for God you will reach many men and bring them joy. If you write for men–you may make some money and you may give someone a little joy and you may make a noise in the world, for a little while. If you write for yourself, you can read what you yourself have written and after ten minutes you will be so disgusted that you will wish that you were dead.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

We can’t be sure.  We can’t be sure why starting with the “self” may cause mild indigestion and vomiting… But it might be fun to re-categorize various modes of literature in terms of “Making Money…” or “Giving A Little Joy…”  or “Making A Noise In The World…”     For example, anything by James Patterson would be ______________.   The Zombie Killers, currently shelved under Non-Fiction, would be what? — “Making A Noise”?   John Grisham’s The Litigators may be screen-play-bound as well as unequally yoked with “Making A Noise…”   And finally, when Kathryn Stockett sat down to write The Help, I bet she imagined “Giving A Little Joy…”

Merton, upon graduating from Columbia University, prior to shaving his head

Am I being bitter?   Am I being?   Not at all.   I am Non-being.  Nada.  Zilch.  The Big Goose Egg.

I have 23 years under my ever-expanding belt as an ordained clergy-person.   I’ve graduated from two seminaries, spun out of the cookie-cutter, church factory and now, at middle-age, find myself writing.   But why?

Why write when everyone in the MFA program could be my biological off-spring (i.e., I feel frigging old)?

Why write when for decades I’ve produced sermon after sermon in which parishioners have either scratched their collective heads, picked their highfalutin noses or perhaps shuffled their toes out the door after finding the offense too great?

Why write when I’m trending so poorly on this blog, where only Sam Ligon will throw me a bone (and that, only now and then)?

***

No one should think of me or my penmanship now as sloppily nihilistic.   I may be sloppy and lacking in discipline, but I have a purpose that I have neither found, nor mastered.

I know of the card game in which players “shoot the moon” and thereby set their opponents back a certain amount of points by ostensibly absorbing all the point-cards (which is typically a bad thing).  Maybe there’s something like that going on.  Then again, I’d have to intend to others back and that’s not in my purview at all.

Not Me

Recently, I thumbed upon a poem by J. Allyn Rosser, who strikes me as a sensible and unambitious kind of bard — one that doesn’t know exactly why she’s writing, just that she has to.   Anyway, in (This Line Intentionally Left Blank), after setting the stage for some improvised kind of theatre show, something called, The Truth, the second of two stanzas reads like so:

believe me we wouldn’t
have resisted anything
but the truth
so instantly and universally
yet we sat there and waited
for something else
which you could say we also got
if you count the mime’s
unpleasant remark
so she wasn’t even a real mime
probably part of what was
clearly just a performance

***

Peace–

And yet there’s a consortium of people, headed by literary agent Andrew Kidd and supported by a host of literary types, who last week announced they were putting together a prize, to be known as The Literature Prize, for “writers who aspire to something finer.”

The Literature Prize is looking to do the literary equivalent of applauding houses built with staircases that require mountaineering gear to climb them.

If you read this blog often, you probably already know which side of the debate I fall on, but I’ll say it again anyway, mostly because I feel so strongly about this issue. Readable books are good books. The sense of inflated ego that comes from getting through a difficult book does not make that book more worth than one that is accessible. And books and literature should be accessible, on the whole. Isn’t that why we create art? To be read and enjoyed?

My favorite back then was Dennis Cass’s “Book Launch 2.0,” which won the 2010 Moby Award (The Oscars of the Book Trailers) for Best Performance by an Author.

Now I have a new favorite.

Here’s Max Barry promoting Machine Man.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEN10axDJtA&feature

I can’t stop laughing. It must be the Australian accent.

The most prestigious literary prize in Nepal, the Madan Puraskar, was awarded to Jhamak Kumari Ghimire. It was awarded for her book of autobiographical essays titled, “Is life a thorn or a flower?”

What makes her story particularly interesting are the challenges she has faced. A woman living with Cerebral Palsy, she is unable to speak, use her hands, and was uneducated as a child. She taught herself to write using her left foot.

Jhamak Kumari Ghimire: winner of the top literary prize in Nepal & left-foot-composer extraordinaire!

I fear this post could easily topple into the sentimental and/or political, so I’m not going to say a whole lot. I just thought it was a cool story & wanted to bring attention to her achievement, both personal and literary. Quite simply: she’s a badass.

• Here’s a link to an article in the BBC about her.
• Here’s a link to an article + some of her poetryin The Nepali Times.
• Here’s her facebook page is you want to “like” her.
• And here’s a link to United Cerebral Palsy’s website that answers frequent questions about CP, predominantly “what is Cerebral Palsy?”

All we can do in this fucked up world is pause & try our best to be grateful. Even if it’s for being just a little less neurotic today. There is still beauty.
Or, as Kim Addonizio puts it

For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty
to know wherein lies the beauty 

For 2011, Sue Fondrie penned the shortest ever winning sentence:

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.

According to The Guardian, Fondrie tweeted that one of her students wrote her: “I knew you were awful, so it’s great that you’re finally getting recognized.”

Two of my favorites are from the Romance category.

Ali Kawashima took home the first prize with:

As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

And here’s runner-up Meredith K. Gray’s entry:

Deanna waited for him in a deliberate pose on the sailor-striped chaise lounge of the newly-remodeled Ramada, her bustier revealing the tops of her white breasts like eggs–eggs of the slightly undercooked, hard-boiled variety, showing a nascent jiggle with her apprehensive breath, eggs that were then peeled ever-so-carefully so as not to pierce the jellied, opaque albumen and unleash the longing, viscous yolk within–yes, she lay there, oblong and waiting to be deviled.

I also giggled at the Sci Fi winners. Greg Homer won with:

Morgan ‘Bamboo’ Barnes, Star Pilot of the Galaxia (flagship of the Solar Brigade), accepted an hors d’oeuvre from the triangular-shaped platter offered to him from the Princess Qwillia—lavender-skinned she was and busty, with two of her four eyes what Barnes called ‘bedroom eyes’—and marveled at how on her planet, Chlamydia-5, these snacks were called ‘Hi-Dee-Hoes’ but on Earth they were simply called Ritz Crackers with Velveeta.

Runner up Elizabeth Muenster wrote:

Sterben counted calcium bars in the storage chamber, wondering why women back on Earth paid him little attention, but up here they seem to adore him, in fact, six fraichemaidens had already shown him their blinka.

Here’s the Fantasy winning entry from Terri Daniel:

Within the smoking ruins of Keister Castle, Princess Gwendolyn stared in horror at the limp form of the loyal Centaur who died defending her very honor; ‘You may force me to wed,’ she cried at the leering and victorious Goblin King, ‘but you’ll never be half the man he was.’

The sentence that started the contest is actually really long.  In 1830,  Bulwer-Lytton wrote:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

I’m a big fan of bad sentences anywhere in a manuscript, mostly because my first drafts are filled with them and they give my critique partners something to laugh about. The only way I can finish a project is if I allow myself to write bad prose and then know that I’ll do much better when I revise it. If I expect good things to happen in the initial step, all I ever have is a blank page.

What would be your contribution to the Bulwer-Lytton contest?

Summer is when I do most of my writing. I usually don’t sign up to teach summer classes, instead I grade AP tests or review textbooks to collect a paycheck. That way I can create long periods of time during the day when I do nothing but write.

I read a lot during the summer as well, but have trouble keeping my own voice if I read books close to what I’m currently working on. I never write poetry, so reading it keeps my voice true. It also makes me pay more attention to the line level details of my prose.

Currently, I’m reading Kathleen Flenniken’s Famous. She was in Spokane during Get Lit! and participated in a great poetry panel with Matthew Dickman, Lowell Jaeger, and Laura Tohe. I bought Famous because of “It’s Not You, It’s Me,” which Flenniken read during the panel. The book won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was an American Library Association Notable Book.

It’s Not You, It’s Me

Nature abhors a vacuum
But God loves a good vacuuming.

The garden was strewn with petals
And those whimsical helicopter seeds
so God created woman and watched
as Eve unwound the cord, plugged it
into the slot between good and evil
and tidied the footpaths
while all the animals sat there, dumb,
and when she was done

somebody got out the apple juice and spilled
somebody opened up a box of crackers
somebody trimmed his nails without a thought
for collecting them in his palm

and after however many days of consecutive Eden
Eve said I gotta get outta here and she did
and the cord snaked after her.

I’m always interested in the joining of technical and creative, in science and art. Kathleen Flenniken started writing poetry after working as a civil engineer and hydrologist for eight years. Three of those she spent on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. She describes herself as a “natural historian of interiors” and this is the focus of Famous. Her second book, Plume, is almost exclusively about Hanford and Richland. Part memoir, part history lesson, part cautionary tale, Flenniken calls Plume a search for identity that synthesizes truth of her childhood with environmental facts.

I haven’t made it to Plume yet, it’s next on my list, but am immensely admiring Famous. You should check out Kathleen Flenniken’s work if you haven’t already—you won’t regret it.

When you are in the middle of a project, do you read books similar to what you’re working on or stuff that is vastly different? How do you keep your voice true while still learning from great writers?

Then there was the Willow Springs release party last Friday. A year ago, I would have been one of the people triple-celebrating the new issue with being done with the thesis and either about to or just finished defending. This year, instead of having read the issue several times through proofing galleys, I enjoyed the fantastic stories, poems, and essays in their finished form.

So overall, I’ve been thinking I’m okay with where I’m at in my writing career/journey right now. Then, I got a Facebook message from my former thesis advisor.

She’s updating her files and wants to keep track of her students’ publications. I looked mine up, and guess what, there were a few during my year in the program, but none over the last year.

And then, the announcement of Téa Obreht’s debut novel The Tiger’s Wife winning the Orange Prize for Fiction popped up in my inbox. This twenty-five-year old Serbian/American graduated from the Cornell MFA program in 2009. Last June she was featured in The New Yorker’s Top 20 Writers under 40 Fiction Issue–the youngest one on the list.

Talk about spending your post-MFA years productively!

Right now, I’m experiencing conflicting feelings. I feel crappy about my own accomplishments over the last year, slightly envious of this talented writer, but also proud that a young woman has won such a prestigious prize.

According to Bettany Hughes, Chair of Judges:

The Tiger’s Wife is an exceptional book and Téa Obreht is a truly exciting new talent. Obreht’s powers of observation and her understanding of the world are remarkable. By skilfully spinning a series of magical tales she has managed to bring the tragedy of chronic Balkan conflict thumping into our front rooms with a bittersweet vivacity.

The Orange Prize for Fiction was set up in 1996 to celebrate and promote fiction written by women throughout the world to the widest range of readers possible. It is awarded to the best novel of the year written in English by a woman.

I’m still thinking about how little I’ve been writing over the last year compared to my years in the program, but I’m also (back to) pondering women writers’ roles/reputations/expectations in the literary world. These topics pop up in debates routinely, the most current one started by VS Naipul’s weird remarks to The Guardian.

In light of what’s been said lately about women’s writing, what are your thoughts on celebrating female authors separately from male authors? Do we still need prizes specifically for women? What about specifically for African-American writers? Or, special recognition to contributions in the Gay-Lesbian literary field?

What roles do minority-specific recognitions play and when are they needed?

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the “greatest living writer of English prose”, was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: “I don’t think so.” Of Austen he said he “couldn’t possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world”.

Now, I’m not going to get bent out of shape about this absurd sexism.  And I suggest no one else does either.  As Paul Theroux abundantly pointed out, Sir Vidia is a big-time douche.

But Naipaul also claimed he could tell within a paragraph if the writer was male or female.  The Guardian created a helpful little test to see if you could determine a writer’s gender based solely on a paragraph.

I scored one out of ten.  To make matters worse, I’d read most of the books from which the selections were taken, and count a few among my favorites of all time.