Incendiary Lit

But the month is very, very young. But here’s a link if you’re bored. Follow Iamzeb on twitter to read my daily <140 character poems. Message me if you want to try the exercise of writing a poem a day that fits in the twitter format, and I’ll follow you.

That isn’t a real name. It sounds dumb, but if someone heard a rollerblader talking about their Full Truespin Fishbrain, which actually is a trick/spin combination, they’d think someone hit their head, and it may be true. But yeah, If anyone who stumbles on this post and feels like following me on twitter (IamZeb) to read my daily (or more frequently) posted twitter poems, by all means do it. If you too want to join in on the month’s exercise, send a message @iamzeb or whatever you do, so I can follow you and read your poems as well. Get a little network going.

Why a Twitter poem?

Why than you for asking. I personally think Twitter is kind of silly. I, personally, don’t need minute to minute updates on someone across the country petting their cat (then FEEDING it!). However, the Paper Hearts challenge to write a twitter poem struck an ‘exercise’ note for me. I’m not entirely sure why, but I flashed back to a class I took with Steve Kowit at Southwestern (if you’re in San Diego, DO IT! While you can at least, there’ve been rumors that Kowit may be retiring, and that will be a sad, sad day for the San Diego Poetry community) about the American Sentence.

What is an American Sentence?

Why I’m glad you asked that. Look it up. Or just take my word that it’s a poetic form originated by Allen Ginsberg as an adaptation of the Haiku to a more ‘American’ form of consumption: all at once.

What?

A prose-haiku. Listen already. An American Sentence is a 17 syllable prose poem. A (for lack of a better name) twitter poem will have to be 140 characters or less. Similar, eh? Why not. A variation of an American Sentence from syllabics to character length (remember, that includes spaces and punctuation).

What do I do?

Go to Twitter and start an account (quick process) or sign into you account. Send me a tweet *gag* [if you want to take part in the little Incendiary Lit Twitter Poem Month, updating whenever you feel like, but keep your poetics in mind. I really don’t care if you went to the grocery store unless you see Mark Twain poking among the meats in the refrigerator.] or just follow me for a little reading now and then in case you get bored, or to perhaps help spark a poem of your own, regardless of form.

I can’t help it. I like Michael Cera. His innate awkwardness and comic timing is segueing nicely into a slightly smoother, awkwardness. But in a good way. Come on, he’s George Michael! Anyway, there’s a new movie coming out called Paper Hearts. It’s Michael Cera and his real life girlfriend Charlyne Yi in a romantic comedy. Though, from the trailer it seems to shy away from Get Over It territory and more into a bit of EdTV/tinged with Eternal Sunshine vibe. But, I could be reading way too much into the trailer.

Regardless of the movie entirely, there is a free contest. Details here. At Rotten Tomatoes. Wheeeeeeeee! Its to write a 140 character love poem (tweetable- and indeed submitted via twitter) and to follow the directions at Rotten Tomatoes. Michael and Charlyne will be picking their favorite, and a number of other winners. The grand prize is a trip to the Paper Hearts premiere. Woot. Free vacation! Here’s a trailer for the movie. Have fun.

Not sure why, but the media player finally decided to take to the new playlist I’d uploaded. If you haven’t checked it out, the first song is rap, I’m sorry, but “Yesterday” off Atmosphere’s new CD When Life Gives You Lemons You Paint That Shit Gold is I think one of the better examples of competent hip hop. But maybe I’m biased cuz I can remember riding the city bus home from Cheapo blasting my new copy of Overcast so loud on my off-brand discman that the driver could hear it from the back. Or because my dad recently passed, and once again Sean Daley touches on a nerve with his lyrics (also see Body Pillow, swingin’ back an forth…) But for the most part it’s a mellow mix of acoustic and instrumentals that will either aid in your reading of the site with their soothing melodies, or intrigue the poetic side of your brain with their interesting narrative. Both lyric and musical. Another thing I should point out is a line from Ben Folds’ “Fred Jones Part 2″: “There’s an awkward young shadow that waits in the hall” which is the perfect description. You can totally see the young employee in charge of leading the old one off the premises. That’s a really, really sad song right there. Then “Bright Eyes I always associate with the Black Rabbit and Richard Adams. I can attribute his fatalistic rabbits in Watership Down for my entry into the world of poetry, so it’s a soft spot for me. And damn. I’m for some reason, at this moment, also hooked on asian pianists. Joe Hisaishi and Nobuo Uematsu especially, though Joe didn’t made it in just yet. Also, poor poor Buzz. I hope you enjoy the songs, and would love to hear feedback of what you’d like to hear in the future.

I, for some reason, thought that the “Page” function of wordpress was a magical place where posts could extend as long as they wanted and didn’t auto-delete the end of the post as you added more. Thus I’ve misplaced over a year’s worth of daily writing exercises on the world-wide-web of yesterday. I know there’re things like webarchive’s “way back machine” (which only applies to sites pre-2006) but have as of yet not been able to figure out how to retrieve those long-deleted exercises. Ho-hum. Add another tally to the “I’m retarded” list.

Bright news, however, is that I’m working on a book of Firestarters. I can’t say anything like “Its being published by ____” because at the moment, the publisher is likely to be Incendiary Lit Press with its first perfect bound book. That doesn’t mean that once it’s together I won’t spend $100 in postage and paper sending out queries, but it’s in the works, and if it’s not done yet, anyone who emails me (in order to avoid too much more spam, it’s simply the site name at gmail.com) in May will get a free ILP version of the Firestarter Book when its finally finished. I’m really hopeful though. Making good progress.

Contest deadlines:

Poets and Writers
New Pages

Literary Magazines to browse for submissions:

Duotrope
New Pages

MFA research:

The Speakeasy forum (Poets and Writers’ website)
The MFA Blog (Tom Kealy’s)
Suburban Ecstacies (Seth Abramson’s)

Audio poetry:

Poets.org

There are tons, and tons of great online resources for writers of all kinds. You just gotta sift through a lot of “writing is emotion and therefore perfect just as it is” types of people, but there are definitely a lot of great sites out there. This post was mostly for the publishing minded, but tons of poets now have blogs, some poetic, others more like a public diary.

Thank you yet again Cornell University. Here for your listening pleasure is an audio interview with Charles Simic from earlier in October (2008) on the Writers at Cornell blog.

Yes, those composition books she writes all her wonderful words in are also decorated. Here’s one that she posted on her blog A Century of Nerve.

Robert Lee Brewer’s Writer’s Digest blog Poetic Asides, which is quite the title, has an interview with Denise Low up now.

I mean, I knew that there had to be a poet laureate in Kansas, or, there most likely was one unless the position had been dissolved like New Jersey’s, but it’s just kind of odd to think of Kansas, at first, as something other than pastoral. But there’s Wichita, Kansas City, Topeka all with at least over 100,000 people… there are metropolitan areas… maybe I’m just subconsciously area-ist against those from Kansas because I don’t know anyone from there. The only people I’ve known from Kansas City were from KFC, Kansas F*$%ing City… Missouri. Hmm. Very odd.

These cover letters are fairly similar to the cover letters in Poet’s Market, which are pretty simple templates but helpful for those just starting to submit to literary magazines.

Click here to see the post at Poetic Asides.

Here’s two takes on getting your short story collection published from the fantastic Practicing Writing.

Beware of this contest (perhaps as you’ve seen it on Craig’s List).

Teaching those guilty (in a court of law) of disrespecting American Poetry with lessons in American poetry? Ploughshares reports on the Case of the Vandalism of Robert Frost’s Home and the sentencing.

Even WW Norton’s Twittering now, courtesy of GalleyCat.

There’s a couple ways to do it, but the easiest is this: before each paragraph you want indented type<p style=”text-indent: 2em;”> before it, and </p> after it in the html, or code editor tab (as opposed to ‘visual’). Simple as that. I suggest typing everything up without it, then copy/pasting the longer string, and typing the </p> at the end of each paragraph.

So they’ll be indented. Huzzah!

OK, here’s what a heroic crown is: 15 sonnets, ordered with a repetition. Sonnet 1 begins with line A, and ends with line B. Sonnet 2 begins with line B and ends with line C. Sonnet 3 begins with line C and ends with line D and so on, until Sonnet 14 which begins with the last line of Sonnet 13, and ends with the first line of Sonnet 1. Then the kicker is Sonnet 15 which consists of all the first lines, though if you want them in order it’s up to you. I believe a classic Heroic Crown has the first lines in order, which is another rhyme scheme to keep in mind. We’ll begin on Wednesday, I’ll work on a heroic sonnet as you do, I’ll post helpful tidbits (I hope) that will help you keep on track for this highly organized series of poems. But it’s also a sequence that you can be proud of. How many people have had the discipline to organize a Heroic Crown, or any sequence of sonnets at all? Even if the results fluctuate poem by poem, why not give it a shot, it’ll be very similar to using an firestarter exercise or any other writing exercise, but instead, for a week you’ll focus on sonnets, and a repetition of certain lines. As I said, I’ll be posting various excercises to help maintain focus and organization for the long haul. As you probably noticed, 15 poems and 20 days means a few non poem days. These will be organization days and brainstorming days, because in order to interweave your poems even more, it’s nice to have an idea of what you’ll be writing about later, and perhaps mingle some imagery in the process… Wednesday will begin the Incendiary Lit Heroic Crown Affair.

Why not, right? Go to Poetry Blog Rankings and start up an account, then go here and vote for Incendiary Lit as the greatest, of allllllll time. Word to your mother. We’ve finally gotten relocated, so the posts should be picking up soon.

Poetic Asides. Check it out. Right now he’s posting a prompt/exercise each day and people write to it. Like the Firestarter Challenge, but there are over a hundred poems posted to his prompts, and he picks the ones he thinks are the best. The website’s really cool in general though. Word it up.