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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“I think the guy in the hat did something awful.”   –William Hurt as Nick Carlton, character in The Big Chill [1983]

Are the categories of good guys and bad guys always clear?   Any literary aficionado would know the answer to that question automatically.

For characters to be interesting they must be complicated and nuanced in their motivations.   And to be complicated and nuanced in their motivations, they require a backstory.   And to have a backstory, they must have an opportunity to be understood — either as protagonists or as antagonists, or as heroes or as villains, or as some convoluted amalgamation of virtue and vice.

I am no fiction writer, and perhaps no writer to speak of, or to be spoken of at parties, where publishers glad-hand and editors wash their hands like Pilate, but I am aware of myself as someone who has not been imagined within the confines of an author’s repertoire of intriguing personages.   I am not written.   And the downside of that should be obvious.

Unlike Captain Ahab the villainous things I manage to accomplish will never be understood.  Not everyone will care to read very far where there is no threat of a breaching white whale.

And likewise, if Owen Meany (at the Christmas pageant of A Prayer…) has embarrassed his parents, never fear:  John Irving has promised his fans a moment of lucid and forthright altruism.  We’ll get Owen.  We’ll get Owen by unraveling the sordid religiosity that has been wrapped around his backstory like swaddling clothes around his erection.

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remember when i was bangin’ on the printers row thing? at least partially because they wanted me to be a member of their community—which really meant they wanted my money?  here’s the part where someone else offers another thing eerily similar to that, but i get kinda excited instead of annoyed.  it’s called the chicagoan, and it’s primarily a new bi-annual publication that’s basically like a book-length lit mag.  the publisher even says it’s got 26 pieces, so you can read one a week until the next issue comes out.  i bought the first issue this week (newstand price $20), and it’s freakin’ beautiful.

the editor is the same guy behind the utterly-brilliant-but-now-defunct stop smiling, which featured long-form interviews & essays which its contemporary magazines seemed to shy away from.  the chicagoan tries to reinvigorate pieces like that, while also taking a bit of inspiration from the original 1920s magazine called the chicagoan.  the first iteration was chicago’s attempt to create it’s own new yorker, and while it succeeded in publishing amazing illustrations (most notably on its covers), the consensus was that the content didn’t really compare favorably.  nevertheless, a 2008 anthology of that old magazine had captured the city’s attention recently, including that of the new chicagoan‘s editor, j.c. gabel, who took a long time bring this new thing to life.

so here’s why i’m excited about all this…

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Since I stopped seeing girls as “soft boys who smelled nice,” (in quotations because I read that somewhere many years ago and it neatly sums up gender relations from the POV of a elementary school boy), until early adulthood, I nursed two fantasies about where I would meet my soul-mate.  The first involved wandering the aisles of a used book store (okay, Barnes and Noble).  The second was serendipitous seating on an airplane.  I never really outgrew this phase, and while working for Willow Springs I added a third category: the slush pile.  You might logically ask, how is that even possible?

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

A tea towel, embroidered by my husband's grandmother + a cookbook I found at the farmer's market = a story waiting to be written

It’s that time of year when the world thinks of things, of gifts gifts gifts gifts, the over-commercialization of Christmas, bells that jingle and fully-decked halls. Physical items start to seem more important than they do the rest of the year: the bike you wrote to Santa for, the ornament your daughter made in second grade, the divinity candy you have to make though only you and your dad really like it because Grandma used to make it every year. Every string of lights or holiday platter bears memories, or the promise of memories yet to come. These things are artifacts of Christmases past, endowed with meaning that accumulates like dust as the boxes sit in the garage, far enough out of sight and mind to make them seem that much more important come December.

It seems the longer we leave an item alone, the greater the emotion it carries. This can make for some pretty interesting stories (if you’ve written one, Hayden’s Ferry Review is accepting submissions for their “artifact” issue right now). Dawn Raffel explores her relationship to items from her past in a series of short essays, quite a few of which appeared in Willow Springs 67. Each essay is titled for an item that carries a story–”The Prayer Book,” “The Bride’s Bible,” “Garnet Earrings”–and uses these objects as windows into Raffel’s past. 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 »

What IS in a name, Shakespeare? And while we're at it, how come you got away with calling your brilliant poems things like "Sonnet 29"?

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone, which means it’s practically Christmas. Which means it’s almost spring and holy poo I have to defend my thesis soon. Which means, of course, that I should start writing it.

Confession #1: I actually picked out the name for my thesis about a year ago because things are less scary to me once you name them. So I was feeling pretty good and not too nervous about my thesis until I was browsing Auntie’s Bookstore the other day and saw my brilliant manuscript title on the cover of a young adult book. I rushed home and googled it and discovered my title idea already belonged to at least two books, an indie band, and possibly a dead magazine.

Well, damn. The little well of panic started to set in after that because Confession #2: I suck at titles and kind of hate them. There’s a power in naming things, and naming them correctly, which makes selecting the correct title for any creative work rather intimidating (at least to me, anyway). How do I strike the right balance of drawing the reader in without giving too much away? Is my title establishing the right tone for the poem? And now, of course, is it original? Read more »

So I was on the phone with Dinty Moore yesterday…no, really, I was, and the fact that there were about 30 other people on the phone call does not diminish the aforementioned.  I attended a telesummit put on by the National Association of Memoir Writers, and hosted by its founder and president, Linda Joy Meyers.   Dr. Meyers put together the telesummit, which included five hour-long panels which I was able to access by calling in.  I wasn’t able to call in for all of the five panels, but I did listen in for about half. 

This is how you do a conference call, right?

First up was Dinty W. Moore, who answered questions from Linda and talked about truth in Creative Nonfiction.  It was a good conversation.  He jumped right in to the truthiness of it all, pointing out that fiction and nonfiction writers are both trying to get to some kind of truth, but that writers of nonfiction come to a different kind of truth, a truth arrived at by an unveiling of the self.   And writing nonfiction but calling it fiction, Moore said, is a bad way to write nonfiction.  It blurs the boundary of what you could have discovered if you’d gone ahead and mined your experience rather than changing a few details of it.  I’m not sure about that (Pam Houston comes to mind as a really good writer of autobiographical fiction), but I get his general point—it’s the digging and the honest unveiling, the metaphors you find when you’re writing nonfiction, that make it so compelling.  “It’s good for the world,” Moore said.  “People need to tell their stories.”  It’s universalizing. 

                As for truthiness, when it comes to changing the name of a neighbor or using a composite character or compressing time, Moore believes that though a writer must be honest,  emotional truth is more important than the factuality of each and every detail.  Try your best to tell the truth, but realize it’ll never be perfect, is what I got from what he said.  And I like the way he summed it up:  “I get tired of those arguments…Let the people who buy the books decide.”  Yes.  Read more »

It seems like every one around me is having their work accepted for publication. And by everyone, I mean three or four people in the last five months but I’m obsessed, so it feels like everyone. I’ve got it in my head that my work isn’t good enough unless someone very far away who doesn’t know me and my back story of fuckery, says, “Ah, yes. This is Good.”

Excitement from my Special Reader wasn’t enough. Neither was the lady-boner-inducing compliment I got from my advisor. It’s great that my family, my friends and my boyfriend think I’m a decent poet but it doesn’t satisfy me. I’m never satisfied. In the writing process this can be a good thing, in most instances, it drives me insane.

Increasingly I find myself up at one a.m. staring at my color-coded excel spreadsheet of submissions (with 25 currently active & rotating of 12 different poems) and see where I’ve submitted to – all the Goliaths of the literary publishing world -all the places that have a 1% acceptance rate, all of whom my fellow classmates and other MFA students across the country are also submitting to and I can see reason for a few moments: Who am I kidding? Read more »

I went through a phase, a few years ago, where I read a lot of magazines. I loved the quizzes, especially. There was something so comforting about the bland, glossy advice, the stock personality definitions based on how my answers added up–no truth required. You want the magazine to tell you you’re a fun person? Answer the questions as a fun person might. Then you’re a fun person turning the page, looking at earrings and purses you can’t afford. It’s nice.

Of course, it also gets boring. And after a while, all the quizzes and articles start to repeat themselves. So I cancelled my subscription to Glamour and stopped wasting five bucks every time I checked out at the supermarket. I maintained my subscription to Food Network Magazine–I still haven’t tired of being quizzed on my knowledge of wine or seeing how two great chefs riff on the same recipe–but as for the ladies’ journals, I was through. I would not be duped into wasting my money for the same old article on feeling beautiful or spreads of clothes I’ll never have the body or the wallet for. I was free, with more money to spend on coffee.

But a few weeks ago, I broke down and bought a copy of Family Circle, lured in by a photo of Halloween treats and an article that promised to cure my fall allergies. Except the article told me nothing I didn’t already know and I have no one to make these Halloween treats for. It was a little relapse. No big deal. But a few weeks later, I gave in again, on a bigger scale. I bought my first-ever issue of O: The Oprah Magazine, lured by her beautiful curly hair and the promise that I could find my true calling. Read more »