November is my least favorite month. Cold and grey with shorter and shorter days, it seems to hang on forever before we get to Thanksgiving. But here in Spokane, there is one more good thing about this month. The weekend before turkey day, The Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour comes to town. We’re extra lucky, because the festival screens for three days and so we usually get a chance to see all of the movies that made it on to the tour.

Yesterday, I went to the Bing Crosby Theater for opening night. It was my third time at the festival and every year there are more people than last year. This year is the first where all three nights were sold out.

Most of the movies have some sort of outdoor theme, but the focus of each film are vastly different and as diverse as the filmmakers who come from all over the world to participate and compete in the festival. Last night, I watched a kayaker almost getting killed in New Zealand, a 92 or maybe 96-year-old (he can’t remember) talk about his life as an outdoor guide in southern Colorado, wildlife biologists discussing the impact of wildlife highway over and under passes around Banff,  the most famous ultimate marathoner finishing five races on five continents, a small town in New Zealand lamenting the impact of global warming on outdoor curling,  two young English blokes climbing Century Crack—the hardest off width in the world—and thereby pissing off a bunch of American climbers, and several more great films.

Plus there was this:

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I know this is a blog about arts and culture, but on the eve of our national election, it is hard not to talk about it. Before I begin (okay, very slightly after I’ve begun), I promise to eschew partisan ranting. Not only would that be a waste of all of our time (I’m not going to change anyone’s mind, and if at this point I am capable of changing your mind, there is probably something very wrong with you), but the internet is already jam packed full of angry people who so very badly want you to see things their way. I don’t want to be one of those people. I don’t want you to see things my way, it would only emphasize my cosmic insignificance, which is apparent enough when I think about voting.

Speaking of insignificance and voting, I voted for Jill Stein. She’s not going to win. She will be lucky to get half of 1% of the national vote. My vote, like yours, does not matter. Have you ever cast the deciding vote in a national election? A state election? A local election? Of course not. And you never will. Elections often feel pointless and tiring. Luckily in my state of Washington, this is officially acknowledged, so they make it as convenient as humanly possible by allowing people to vote by mail. I received my ballot in the mail about two weeks ago, and to prove the old saw that “nothing is ever as convenient as not doing anything at all,” I almost threw my ballot away. (Okay, that’s not an old saw, I just made that up). Why? Well, like I said, I’m not casting a deciding vote for anybody or anything on the ballot, and to vote with any sense of reverence for the process, I’d have to go to the trouble of reading the Voting Pamphlet the State of Washington conveniently sent to me in the mail at roughly the same time as my ballot. Who has time for that? Not me (but I did it anyway). After all the links I shared in the last two months on Facebook about the election, haven’t I already done my part? Read more »

Well, I’ve done it again.  I’ve entered another writing contest, which means my bank account is $20 lighter and that I’ll receive a subscription to a journal that I’ll read later and remark while turning the pages, “That’s it!  That’s the winning poem!”

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!

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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.

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Energized by my experience entering NPR’s 3 minute fiction contest a few weeks ago, I searched high and low (on the Internet) for another fiction contest.  I stumbled upon The First Line, a literary magazine which, as the name suggests, “contains short stories that stem from a common first line.”

The purpose of The First Line is to jump start the imagination–to help writers break through the block that is the blank page…. The First Line is an exercise in creativity for writers and a chance for readers to see how many different directions we can take when we start from the same place.

Sounded good.  The nearest deadline was May 1st.  The line: “Rachel’s first trip to England did not go as planned.”  Sounded like chick-lit women’s fiction to me, but I started to hear the voice of a sassy, sophomoric, caring, but immature girl named Rachel telling about her misadventures in England and got interested in seeing where it woud lead.  I started writing, and stealing borrowed my structure from DFW and Jennifer Egan, I used direct address and had Rachel speaking to her therapist.  The first draft was mostly about her brief time in England.  She got caught by Immigration for planning on working in England, got sent to a detention center over night, and then flown back to America.  She has a complicated relationship with her overbearing Jewish mother (Rachel does not identify as Jewish) and as the middle-child, resents her sisters, who have been achieving worldly success. Read more »

The poetry world has a paranoid side. If you ask Anis Shivani or certain folks in the avant-garde crowd, American poetry is a shell game. It’s rigged. And in certain circles, it’s clear that there is an us, and there is a them.

For instance, after a recent controversy in poetry land, there was this comment:

The entire official world of poetry publishing is corrupt from the top down to the smallest little contest – and the NEA is a facilitator of that. It is a world of mutual back scratching MFA grads with middle names like “Lavender” who elevate the word “vanity” to heights never before seen. Geoffrey Gatza (yes, I published with BlazeVox and donate to them) is one of the handful of honest, innovative publishers who are trying to deal with the real issues facing real poets and their readers – hence the hatred heaped on him by the officials patrolling the boundaries of verse culture.

This made me think of something from Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals:

The notion of resentment is central to the book. In it, he makes a distinction between “slave morality” and “noble morality.” He writes:

…Slave morality from the start says “No” to what is “outside,” “other,” to “a not itself.” … In order to arise, slave morality always requires first an opposing world, a world outside itself.

Or as the philosophy department at Lander University puts it,

For Nietzsche, vanity is the hallmark of the meek and powerless…Vanity is a consequence of inferiority.

So when certain crowds get riled up, you see comments like this:

Two of the best considerations on this matter…were published last fall by…one of the central figures on the Buffalo poetry scene.

There’s a profound sense of self-importance—and yes, vanity—in that statement. It almost sounds like a perverse version of John Winthrop’s famous “city on a hill,” as if Buffalo were a beacon, preventing wayward poets from entering perdition.

Needless to say, the very notion of a “scene” speaks to a dichotomous, us. vs. them approach; “scenes” are defined entirely by them, by the Hegelian “Other” (which Nietzsche was damn familiar with).

And does Buffalo’s “scene” merit that much importance to begin with? While I admire a number of Buffalo poets and presses, I have to say that Buffalo’s crowning achievement is its hot sauce. (Frank, of Frank’s hot sauce fame, is surely what Hegel would call a world-historical individual.)

That’s the thing: I’m far less interested in a scene—I’m far more interested in good writing wherever I can find it. Needless to say, there are numerous great poets scattered across the country, and many of them aren’t any part of a “scene.” Case in point: One of my favorite poets works at car service on the West Coast.

Moreover, the folks in favor of a “scene” always seem to attack the opposition, as Nietzsche puts it, “in effigy.” In other words, it’s one big straw man argument. Even though that’s a logical fallacy, it doesn’t mean it’s not convincing; folks use fallacies for a reason: they work.

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Pivoting off Mr. Leunig’s not-so-recent-at-this-point post, I decided to try my hand at NPR’s three-minute fiction contest.  The stories have to be under 600 words, and this round, must begin with the line: “She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door.”

Perhaps overly influenced by Mr. Ligon, I’m not a big fan of quick fiction.  They seem to rely to heavily on some cute turn or twist toward the end, and being so short, so much is often lacking when it comes to characters development and plot. But perhaps overly influenced by Mr. Leunig, I thought the contest would make for good practice.

As I pondered story possibilities, I couldn’t avoid thinking how little I liked the first sentence chosen by Luis Alberto Urrea, the judge of the contest. (She closed the book, placed it on the table, and finally, decided to walk through the door) Let’s free associate.  Wordy.  Melodramatic.  Lifetime movie.  I checked out the website and found an explanation:

“The key being, of course, that ‘finally,’” Urrea tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz. “There can be an infinity in what’s going on with that ‘finally.’”

“I’m a book person, and honestly, I wanted the sense of life change that comes from a good reading experience,” he says. “I can’t wait to see where people go with it.”

Urrea says his editors at Little, Brown and Co. inspired his challenge. “My editor is often telling me, ‘You know what? Stop clearing your throat. Stop clearing your throat, don’t hesitate — get in the story,’” he says.

I see what his editors are getting at. That line is throat-clearing. Whatever comes next, that could be the heart of the story, or it could be more throat-clearing. Either way, I couldn’t help feeling any good story produced from that line would be better off without that first line.

As Mr. Frey can attest, good writing prompts are few and far between.  So I don’t mean to be too hard on Mr. Urrea, who has won many awards for writing, as if I had to come up with an opening line for a short story contest I’m not sure I could do any better.  My favorite writing prompts don’t use a starting line, but rather some kind of free-association, low-pressure, brainstorming with a group, which often leads to an idea for a narrative.

It turns out I’m not the only person who had qualms with this opening line.  Kani Martin’s story “Action Verbs,” is a meta-narrative of a writer attempting to improve the quality of that line. Read more »

This guy is probably on his way to the party

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If you live in California and write poetry you should submit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s poetry contest.
What does an aquarium have to do with poetry? Everything. If you write about jellyfish.
The aquarium’s new jellyfish exhibit is opening and your jelly-inspired poems could be the ticket to a special party with the exhibit. I’m really hoping the jellies wear party hats.

I love jellyfish and have put them in more than one of my poems. The Monterey Bay Aquarium is where I first fell for these creatures.
But I recently had to analyze why I love them. I’d mentioned my affection for jellyfish to someone in an email and they wrote back, “Not possible.  Nooooobody likes jellyfish.”  And like the time someone told me James McAvoy was overrated, I felt defensive. I immediately wanted to tell them they were wrong, but then I had to ask myself: why do I like jellyfish? I had no idea. Read more »

Decisions.  Decisions.  Hmmm…

What would T.S. Eliot say about the financial crisis of the last few years, if not decades?   And what would he DO about it?   The answers are complicated and filled with dizzying contradictions.  Consider, if you dare, items one through five:

1.   T. S. Eliot worked in the finance industry.
2.   In April of 2011, the British Arts Council Arts voted to defund the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry which designates a whopping $23,000 for the winner each year.
3. Over one hundred British poets protested the resolution.
4. Aurum Funds, a hedge fund corporation, said that it would be happy to take over the bankrolling of the T.S. Eliot Prize.
5. Alice Oswald, who won the prestigious prize in 2002, has just recently pulled out of this year’s competition, saying, “I think poetry should be questioning and not endorsing such institutions…”

Indeed.  Perhaps “poetry” should be.

But, should poets be?   Should the actual flesh & blood & sinew creator of verse be…?

The moral imperative of Immanuel Kant would prevail upon us here to be very frank with both the avid readers and non-readers of the craft.   It would remind us in fact that poets ought not to cozy up with private for-profiteers, whether the companies in question are responsible for the financial crisis or not; and that poetry, with all its tools of the trade, would show us, rather than tell us, that to be free of these perverse entanglements is akin to making one’s self available to the muse.

However, let’s play the devil’s advocate and consider how “Satan,” in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, might tackle the dilemma.   Satan, to be precise, is the most interesting character in that political activist’s magnum opus, from the Pandemonium palace to the blessed environs of Eden.  He is much more than the one-dimensional figure of say “The Exorcist” or “The Devil Went Down To Georgia.”   No, this fallen figure wants to get even with the Deity and so devises a plan that might infiltrate and plunder the character of human beings.   You see, it’s all very subtle, slant and indirect something that poets might like to consider when receiving direct deposits into their money management accounts.   That is to say, we could assume the role of the provocateur in the corporate garden.  We could, with intact conscience and admittedly flawed consciousness, sneak a Trojan horse into the whole shooting match.

Once, a long time ago, fiction was published by slick magazines like Saturday Evening Post and McCall’s and Collier’s and Cosmopolitan and the Atlantic and Good Housekeeping and especially one called Esquire, which is now only a fashion magazine that still wants to pretend it has literary relevance or credibility but doesn’t. Way way way back when I was a lad, though, Esquire was one of the best slick fiction outlets in the country. Gordon Lish was fiction editor from 1969 to 1976, and he published stories by Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, Cynthia Ozick, and many others. Then, somewhere along the line, as readers seemed to lose interest in fiction, Esquire, like most slicks, stopped publishing fiction and focused its attention primarily on wingtips, bosoms, and how to impersonate manly men. But here’s the weird part. They couldn’t quite let go of their reputation for publishing good fiction. They didn’t continue to publish much fiction, but they wanted to be affiliated with it. As a result, their relationship with fiction is now based primarily on gimmicks.

A couple years ago they launched the Napkin Fiction Project, introduced on their website as follows:

As committed to web by a plebeian intern. Fellow first-years and aspiring undergrads take heed: the modern writer’s market is certainly crowded, yes, but also not without hope.

1. There are many MFAs in this world, and with good reason. It’s true. Nearly every author I see submitting has made the study of craft a personal pursuit. I know Ann Patchett  says that an MFA is irrelevant to being a good fiction writer, but I take some exception to this. Based on the successful writers I’ve known, it seems that if you want to write well, it pays to commit to a few years of serious study, learning your skills and going up against opinions you don’t always share. Sure, you can learn to play guitar in your garage, but that doesn’t make a classical background in music theory worthless. The same goes with writing. Read more »