I recently adopted a kitten. Usually I’m a fan of bringing the pet home, observing his/her personality and proclivities (my family once had a dog named Sneakers), and then naming him/her. But I decided about a year ago that when I went to grad school, I was going to get a black & white cat and name it Moxie (as in, “Ya got Moxie, kid!”). And that’s exactly what I did.

This post is really just an excuse to show you pictures of my kitten.

I started calling him Moxie before I’d even decided to adopt him, when I wasn’t even sure what his gender was. At first he seemed relatively calm for a kitten, but now that I’ve let him loose in my apartment and called him all variations of his name (Moxicillin, Moxers, Mox Pox, etc.), he has started to grow into it. He’s already figured out a way to climb up my couch with his little kitten claws, and he’s figured out that he can just fit if he walks along the tops of the books on my lower bookshelf, and he’s gotten stuck behind the refrigerator—twice.

All this to say: I should have known better. I put a lot of stock in names. I had a whole list going of potential future cat names before I ever had a cat. (The other top possibilities were Gatsby and Bo, short for Bogart.) And I’ve gone through several phases when naming my hypothetical, someday kids. At first it was plants: Holly, Ivy, Rosemary. At some point I turned to multisyllabic names: Julianna, Isabella, Josephina. There has always been a suspicious lack of male names, which I can only assume hinted at some deep-seated rejection of the notion of brothers, which I’d never had. Besides, there’s enough to worry about just trying to name girls.

Kids are mean. You can’t name your child anything that rhymes with a dirty word or anything that can easily be turned into a joke. You have to be careful about initials too because what if you finally settle on a name and their initials turn out to be LOL? I long ago vowed to never brand my child with a unisex name. (My parents thought they were being progressive, or anti-sexist, or something, but they didn’t realize that pairing a unisex first name—Casey—with a last name that is also a men’s first name—Patrick—would result in endless mail addressed to Mr. Patrick Casey and of course the requests for “Patrick? Patrick?” at the doctor’s office. Even the gynecologist.)

In that case, maybe an interesting name would be best, something that would never be confused with a last name. But nothing that ends in –i. Nothing too specific like Autumn or Summer. Not Montana or Dakota or Berlin, lest people think they were conceived there. Nothing too literary, though I’ve always been partial to Scarlett, and I once met a girl named Arwen. Most names of ex-boyfriends and their new girlfriends are off-limits, to avoid acid reflux. Nothing boring like Sarah or Laura or Joe, since that requires them to use their last initial to differentiate from the Sarah or Laura or Joe sitting next to them in kindgarten and the whole point is to make your child feel “special.” Nothing too old-fashioned. No Mildreds or Muriels or Waynes. Something with spunk but not too much spunk, like Roxanne. But not Roxanne because “names that are used in famous songs” are also off-limits. The list goes on and on.

Even more than my hypothetical children, I worry about what to name my characters. 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!

***

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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You imagine her at the big wooden desk in the sun room; the reflection of the monitor is the only light. Your little sister has long since been in bed and already she’s forgotten the sting of rejection from not making the middle school cheer leading team.

Can you still say that you write only for you? These two years you’ve been full of bravado, while inside missing home with every part of you.  You told anyone who would listen that this was all for you. But really, you’ve done this for someone else, too.

Your mother Read more »

Imagine this scenario: You are waiting for the bus, or washing your car, or running through Starbucks for the fourth time in three hours because you have a paper to turn in for Greg Spatz. Then you get an idea. It may be for a story, essay, or poem—it doesn’t matter. You have An Idea. It excites you. You write it down so you don’t forget it. You finish your Greg Spatz paper early, then find yourself with the Holy Grail of academia: Free Time. You turn on your computer. You open a Word document.

And then nothing happens. At all. You stare for a few minutes, hoping that the first line with somehow magically appear in your brain. Nothing. Nada. This is when you open Facebook, thinking, “I’ll futz around on the internet for ten minutes, and then write.”

For those of you for whom this works, this post is not for you, and you can please exit stage left pursued by a bear.

That's right. Move along.

For those of you like me, read on. When faced with the Blank Page of Doom, I typically do five things instead of actually writing.

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It’s a little-known fact that Ezra Pound once proposed that some of the greats of American Literature compete in a boxing tournament. OK, that’s not true, but if such a tournament had been held, here’s what would have happened.

Here’s the bracket:

Fight 1: F. Scott Fitzgerald vs. Franz Kafka

Fitzgerald shows up drunk, on a butcher’s tricycle, and has to be lifted into the ring. He saunters over to the opponent’s corner where he has a conversation with the stool. He calls it Zelda, hugs it, then falls asleep. Meanwhile, Zelda Fitzgerald, his manager, is nowhere to be found. (Suddenly hip to technology, she’s back in the locker room playing the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on a Gameboy.)

Initially, Ezra Pound had informed everyone that the charity matches would be a professional-wrestling style match and told everyone to wear a costume that representative of their work. Soon thereafter, Hemingway suggests they make it a more manly sport, and suggests boxing. Pound agrees, but never gives Kafka the news that the format has been changed. Kafka, having no idea how to represent himself, let alone his work, decides to dress in a giant beetle costume like a post-metamorphosis Gregor Samsa. For added effect, he brings along his manager, a boa constrictor named Indiana.

Result: Fitzie is disqualified.

Read more »

With a spirograph, everyone's an artist!

I was playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” on my kazoo yesterday when I got to thinking about what a truly democratic instrument the kazoo is. I say this not just because it’s ideal for playing our national anthem (as well as other patriotic tunes like “God Bless America” and “The Fifty Nifty States”), but because no one is ever better at playing the kazoo than anyone else.

It is impossible to be bad at the kazoo. It is also impossible to be good at the kazoo.

To test this theory, I looked online for kazooing videos. All of them sound exactly the way you expect them to sound – like someone playing a kazoo. There are no professional kazoo players. No one attends school on a kazoo scholarship. No one is writing academic articles on the cultural impact of the kazoo.

So, it’s a gratifying little instrument. The bar for success is very low. Most people can play the kazoo perfectly the very first time they pick one up. All you have to do is hum into it and it makes a somewhat musical sound. It can be played loud or soft, fast or slow. If you are playing it for your friends, and if those friends have a sense of humor, they can dance to it. But the pitch and range of the kazoo are limited. The kazoo lacks complexity. The kazoo is actually rather annoying for anyone who has to listen to it being played for more than a few minutes at a time. Read more »

There’s something about a Dean Young poem being recited in public!

Peace–

Today I’m teaching my first fiction class to the high school students at the Structured Alternative Confinement school. I’ve been doing poetry with them all year, which they seem to love, but I stupidly asked them last week if they would be interested in trying out other genres.

Rule #11: I am Kanye West

I’ll be honest: I know nothing about writing fiction. Which is why I decided to take a fiction workshop this quarter. It’s interesting (and slightly appalling) to me that I am in a graduate school creative writing program and still didn’t understand the term “objective third” until recently, simply because my focus is in poetry. I think we should all know a little bit more about each other’s crafts.

In the interest of learning everything I can about fiction, I’ve been diligently copying down rules and proclamations that my classmates and my professor, the esteemed Sam Ligon, have handed down during class, and that is what I plan to teach my SAC students. Listed below are some examples of rules I’ve learned, followed by the way I, as a newcomer to the genre, have come to understand them:

Rule #1: Never use adverbs.
What I learned from this: Fiction writers don’t like description.

Rule #2: Don’t use the word “towards.” Only British people say “towards.”
What I learned from this: Fiction writers are jealous of British people, probably because their words automatically sound pretty when they speak. Read more »

In mad excitement for my guests, I spilled coffee on my computer. Then in a series of stupid acts, I erased all the pictures of their visit except for this--saved by Facebook.

After a delightful and stressful month or so that included:

• two weeks of teaching Russian students English online
• losing that job due to my sporadic internet connection (I signed my first contract for DSL in early February and am still waiting for it to be connected)
• a two-week training that qualifies me to teach for Berlitz
• an eight-day visit from my parents (which included eating lots of cake, drinking lots of beer, seeing a couple castles, learning European history, visiting several cities, taking lots of walks, and having meaningful conversations over many a delicious meal)

I suddenly found myself alone with several days in a row of unstructured time. You know what that means. I had no excuse not to write. Read more »

Last week I asked some questions about the use of autobiographical material in fiction. The Millions article that prompted those questions, which defended the use of autobiography in fiction (albeit using arguments I don’t entirely agree with), was not the only recent item that raised those questions.

Many of you may have seen the video of John Irving’s comments about Hemingway, or at least you saw the headline and probably rolled your eyes. It was part of a promotional series on You Tube in which Irving discussed various aspects of his fiction and talked about the writing life, except that two of the videos inexplicably centered on Irving talking about how much he’s always disliked the writing of Hemingway and Twain.  (Sidebar: who at Simon & Schuster thought to themselves: You know what the best way to promote this bestselling author’s new novel is? Ask him to shred some literary giants. Doesn’t this just give more ammunition to the literary snobs who are bored by Irving’s work? When did publicly declaring that Hemingway was “macho crap” become a good way to promote your own novel? I don’t understand. However, they’ve now realized what terrible publicity it was and pulled it from the interwebs, but I was still able to find them. Here’s the Hemingway roast and here’s the Twain one.) Read more »