Incendiary Lit

So many amazing things are said daily. Usually, amazing in a bad way. But amazing’s still amazing.

For instance, in a class the other day, to prove a point about cave paintings, the professor said that in the 18th century the world was only around 7000 years old, but now, we know it’s billions of years old. And he even went on to say that because of the scientific research we’ve gone from the religious tenet that these paintings couldn’t possibly be 10,000, or even a million years old, and must be more recent– therefore not such a dramatic discovery. A girl a couple rows behind me said “That doesn’t add up. If it was only seven thousand years old before, how can it be so old now?”

Now, it’d be hard to get to the line of dialog in the same way, about cave paintings, but there are plenty of other reasons to explain the difference in ‘creation’ dates between cultures, and if you have a character you want to showcase as not the smartest peanut in the turd, merely by paying slight attention to those around you, you’ve got a ready-made scenario. Give it a shot.

Here is the poem.

The Red Wheelbarrow by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

——

OK, I’ll break this down via form, and meaning. Not to say this is what was intended by Mr. Williams, but this is how I’m looking it, so take it as you will.

——

Form: Syllabically the poem is structured, line by line: 4/2 - 3/2 - 3/2 - 4/2. That’s only 22 syllables total. Remember that. The middle two stanzas break a compound word at the line break, without a hyphen. Very short poem, very tightly structured.

——

Meaning: OK, it’s imagistic. It’s minimalistic. The last three stanzas set the scene. We see the red wheelbarrow, that it is out in the rain, and that there are chickens. So much depends upon the words “So much depends / upon” in this poem. You can bring literary theory about the symbolism of rain, or color theory with the red, but in my mind those are less important. The first stanza, that’s another story. Why would so much depend upon a wheelbarrow? What do we know about, well, anything, in the universe of this poem, but what do we know of the location, the world? We know there are chickens and a wheelbarrow. Where would you find those two things? A farm is my guess. Why would so much depend on the wheelbarrow? What is a wheelbarrow to a farmer? A necessity. A farmer needs a wheelbarrow to complete his tasks, maintain his livelihood, his very life. Thus, so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.

—

(artwork by Ann Altman)

Moving Water, Tucson

Thunderclouds gathered every afternoon during the monsoons. Warm rain felt good on faces lifted to lick water from the sky. We played outside, having sense enough to go out and revel in the rain. We savored the first cool hours since summer hit.

The arroyo behind our house trickled with moving water. Kids gathered to see what it might bring. Tumbleweed, spears of ocotillo, creosote, a doll’s arm, some kid’s fort. Broken bottles, a red sweater. Whatever was nailed down, torn loose.

We stood on edges of sand, waiting for brown walls of water. We could hear it, massive water, not far off. The whole desert might come apart at once, might send horny toads and Gila monsters swirling, wet nightmares clawing both banks of the worst they could imagine and then some.

Under sheet lightning cracking the sky, somebody’s teenaged brother decided to ride the flash flood. He stood on wood in the bottom of the ditch, straddling the puny stream. “Get out, it’s coming,” kids yelled. “GET OUT,” we yelled. The kid bent his knees, held out his arms.

Land turned liquid that fast, water yanked our feet, stole our thongs, pulled in the edges of the arroyo, dragged whole trees root wads and all along, battering rams thrust downstream, anything you left there gone, anything you meant to go back and get, history, water so high you couldn’t touch bottom, water so fast you couldn’t get out of it, water so huge the earth couldn’t take it, water. We couldn’t step back. We had to be there, to see for ourselves. Water in a place where water’s always holy. Water remaking the world.

That kid on plywood, that kid waiting for the flood. He stood and the water lifted him. He stood, his eyes not seeing us. For a moment, we all wanted to be him, to be part of something so wet, so fast, so powerful, so much bigger than ourselves. That kid rode the flash flood inside us, the flash flood outside us. Artist unglued on a scrap of glued wood. For a few drenched seconds, he rode. The water took him, faster than you can believe. He kept his head up. Water you couldn’t see through, water half dirt, water whirling hard. Heavy rain weighed down our clothes. We stepped closer to the crumbling shore, saw him downstream smash against the footbridge at the end of the block. Water held him there, rushing on.

—

Here’s an essay by Peggy Shumaker titled Prose Poems, Paragraphs, Brief Lyric Nonfiction. The 400 word story, flash fiction, narrative prose poem, short short, whatever, appeared in the collection Short Takes, which is a really cool book about the short-short in creative non fiction. Definitely a worthwhile read. It got me hooked on cnf short-shorts. Thanks also, to Sydney Brown. Word.

Coming from the UK (New York) Times, this interesting article about Cormac McCarthy. I’m sad to admit other than his name, and the title of some of his books (mostly ones turned into movies) I’d be lost to tell you anything about the Pulitzer Prize winning man, or even his writing style. It’s one of those rare days where I can say “I learned something today.”

There are those who have a blind hatred for the sci-fi/fantasy and won’t crack the cover unless looking for something to take a jab at. Funk those people. The majority of people who read (and more importantly, who buy books) look for entertainment within their substance, and will suspend disbelief for a good enough yarn. What elevates a good science fiction/fantasy novel from the base term of “genre” is usually the development of characters. All other factors are important, but the thing that is the same about almost all “genre” novels, is the cast of half sketched archetypal, flat characters, while lavish details of scene and exposition of the ‘world’ thicken the book without connecting, thus slowly disconnecting the reader from the character. Good fiction develops interesting characters until you feel like you know them, and when their decisions surprise you, even then you understand the choices. So, for those who write something they despise being considered “genre-dreck” or whatever, consider the strength of your characters as well as the people you’ve chosen to share your work with. Some have plugged their ears entirely, but most just need a little extra convincing. But don’t forget that people love a good saga. Just ask Issac Asimov, JRR Tolkien, Ursala LeGuin, CS Lewis, Frank Herbert etc etc.

I’ve come into some interesting discussion on this topic when it comes to poetry. After a reading a teacher at the community college I was attending asked me how the incident resonated with me now, and I was a bit taken aback. Many people view poetry as something entirely personal, as opposed to another form of literature, where the poet takes on the role of narrator instead of tape recorder for their confession. It’s kind of weird. If you write novels then people are pretty willing to accept the first person as a fictional account, but when it comes to poetry, the “I” carries a little more weight. It’s especially weighty when you use personal points to spark your poem. I was lucky enough to have a selection of three poems accepted to the Southern Review, including a piece called Lefsa, which takes a snippet I remember from Christmastime when I was young, of my grandmother making lefsa, and sets that in a fictional narrative, in which everything else has nothing to do with reality, yet, I’m afraid to show the poem to my father’s side of the family, as they’ll recognize the lefsa, and take the poem as autobiographical. I’ve written poems about fictional families and incidents so many times, I don’t even want to think how messed up I’d be if they were all real… or what people may think of me if they’ve just caught my pieces in various journals or a collection. Wow.  My consolation is that I think those who take a strong interest in poetry won’t feel cheated when they read my fictional poems.

Slurve Magazine had a wonderful interview with David Kirby. Plenty of info to recall and site for any future essays that personal facts or criticism might help with. And here’s an essay about David Kirby from Research in Review. He’s a really interesting and witty guy, definitely both good reads. The guy got his PhD from Johns Hopkins at 23, and has published tons of books of essays, criticism, reviews and poems, and a genuinely badass artist in the  art of the compound sentence.

“He was deranged, he was… lunatic.
He didn’t seem to like me very much.
He had threatened to kill me in public.”
“Why would he want to kill you in public?”
“I think she meant he threatened,
in public, to kill her.” “Oh.”

That’s right, I just lineated dialog from Clue. Found poem. I found it. Mine. Copywrite copyright copyrite cop-e-wright kah-pee-rye’t.

But the point is, confusion can be caused by even correct phrasing. By saying “He was deranged, he was… lunatic. He didn’t seem to like me very much. He had threatened to kill me in public.” Mrs. White had correctly asserted that her deceased husband had, as Colonel Mustard explained here to Miss Scarlet, in public, threatened to kill her. As in around a bunch of other people, most likely strangers. However, if that was the case, a pause, or comma should be in place, or perhaps if you absolutely despise punctuation in your poetry, maybe because you saw the photo on the back of Rain in the Trees and decided you’d dedicate your life to be like a man with such wavy locks, but whatever the reason, a line break could add that half-pause of enjambment that would isolate the “in public” from the threatening. The best course of action, when at all possible, is to rephrase. For instance, “He had threatened to kill my in public” could be reworded to “He had publicly threatened to kill me.” and it would remove any confusion.

It may not seem like a big deal, but as a reader for journals, when you’re discussing the piece with other readers, and as much time is spent discussing the meaning of a small passage as the merits of its imagery, 9 times out of 10 it doesn’t make it in. So if it’s in your interest to avoid general confusion, as it generally should be, watch your phrasing carefully for ambiguity. And when that ambiguity is too perfect to not call attention to, only then enjoy the linguistic pleasure.

Write a poem that consists mostly of an overheard phone conversation somewhere in public… since it’s a one sided conversation, you fill in the other side of the conversation in your head, creating an odd dialog.

Write a sonnet entirely in dialog that is a conversation between three distinct voices.

Write a sequence of haikus, every other being a statement, and an action/image that reinforces that statement, perhaps famous quotes.

I was writing a paper on Yusef Komunyakaa recently, and thought I came up with a pretty good reading of his awesome poem “You and I are disappearing” and it’s a really good poem, deceptively simple, so I figured I’d share, in case anyone cares, or needs to write an essay on this and searches for the poem. If so: Jackpot! Also, here is Yusef Komunyakaa reading the poem. So if you’re interested in a possible narrative progression through the poem, then this is the place for you.

“You and I Are Disappearing” is an anaphoric poem riddled with similes. It is free verse in its purest essence., holding no syllabic, metric, or rhyming patterns. The poem is about a young Vietnamese woman wronged. In this case she is burned alive in a fire set by the American soldiers, and the narrator carries the memory of her screaming like shackles. The sequence of similes used by Komunyakaa is very specific, and through these sidelong glances into the narrator’s guilt we see his true feelings about the war.

The poem’s first simile is “she burns like a piece of paper.” (L4) This indicates the quick burn of something small, inconsequential. But yet, he still hears it, the cry “still burning / inside my head.” (L2) The narrator is trying to think of the screaming as something small. It continues to “She burns like foxfire” (L5) which is the narrator trying to see the death as something natural, like foxfire. Then she burns “like a sack of dry ice” (L13) meaning that there was a false sense of smoke. Here the narrator’s trying to convince himself that it wasn’t as painful as it sounded, wasn’t as horrible. Immediately following that thought the narrator contradicts that defensive image with the next when “She burns like oil on water.” (L14) A distinct burning. This image is the narrator reminding himself that there is a stark difference between burning a section of field and burning a village. The human cost is intentionally called to mind, in a way, to remain human. That return to humanity returns the narrator to a familiar image from home, “a cattail torch / dipped in gasoline.” (L15) Yet, the narrator is still in Vietnam, and this fact draws out the next simile where she “glows like the fat tip / of a banker’s cigar.” (L16) The war is not one of the narrator’s choosing. He was stolen from his home to fight a war to keep the rich rich, and the poor, like himself, poor. That glowing tip, the real movement behind the war is “silent as quicksilver.” (L17) Komunyakaa then takes a brief respite from similes to lay on the beautiful and misleading image of a tiger under a rainbow at night. The tiger is a pretty, but deadly animal. The girl, whether only in the narrator’s mind or actuality, is a Viet Cong agent. A beautiful saboteur. But still, she is a real girl that died, and that thought “burns like a shot glass of vodka.” (L20) When vodka was not enough, the next step taken to forget the human cost: opiates from poppy fields. But still “she rises like dragonsmoke / to my nostrils.” (L21) He is still unable to forget her, to lose that cry. It has set in motion a major change in the narrator’s sense of humanity that is a very lengthy and painful process, a forced exodus, “a burning bush / driven by a godawful wind.” (L23)

Assonance is one of my favorite literary devices. It is the repetition of a vowel sound. Like bike and white. They bear some resemblance to a standard rhyme, yet is much more freeing. Well used it can help sustain rhythm and add to the musicality. Take the opening lines from Dylan Thomas’ Fern Hill: Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs / About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The assonance is in some cases strong, on the forefront of the poem’s sounds, and others it’s more muted. The “ow” sound of boughs/about/house is very present, but the subtle /a/ of and/happy/as/grass and perhaps even apple are also there. And depending on how deeply you want to look into the line, the “uh” of young/under/was.

Is that looking too deeply at the lines? Perhaps. I always wonder that, but as an experiment I’ll grab the opening lines of a Billy Collins poem, “Fishing on the Susquehanna in July”: I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna/or on any river for that matter . There’s the been/fishing/river, subdued assonance, but for the most part the sound is loose. Not to say the poem isn’t good, because I’d be the first to argue on the contrary, but the musicality isn’t as dense as that of a lyric poet like Dylan Thomas. Not every poem has to be dense, but it is always nice to catch your reader’s ear once in awhile. Slight rewordings during the editing process is a wonderful little bit of tweaking that greatly benefits the poem.

It saddens me how little attention is given to contemporary poetry in public schools. Even in college, my little brother is in a freshman literature appreciation class, and the only poets they covered were Melville and Poe. Sure, fine writers in their time, both have written classics of literature, but as the best example of poetry for non-English majors? The teaching of poetry writing is virtually non-existent in any school until it’s available as an elective at post-secondary schools. Where is one to learn what contemporary poetry even looks like? The problem that many beginning writers have is a lack of exposure to poetry outside a very small pool of poets. They’ve never seen or even heard of a literary journal (one such poet told me that journals are for anti-social wallflowers. The wording demonstrates a point which will be covered later) nor could they tell you more than three living poets: Jewel, TuPac, and maybe Maya Angelou. Could you imagine dedicating your life to a field whose pinnacle consists entirely of such poetry? Eek. In the words of a Tobias Wolff story, (which is excellent by the way) “Bullet in the Brain.”

Another obstacle that stands in the way of young writer’s progress is the idea that poetry is strictly self-expression. That the emotions one feels should not be criticized, thus, the poems stemming from those emotions must not be criticized. Not sure how this started. Perhaps it’s another unfortunate fallout from the “Barney syndrome” of “you’re perfect however you want to be,” resulting in cocky, deeply flawed human beings. Tangential, sorry. TS Eliot made this poignant comment on the role of emotion in poetry: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.” But where will a young poet get his hands on TS Eliot, and secondly, should they at that stage?

So young writers are greatly without guidance as they enter the wonderful world of contemporary poetry and writing workshops. Most are scared off or angered by the criticism they’d never before received. Mom and Dad rarely criticize ‘creativity’ nor do friends, who rarely have anything to say but “Cool.” It’s the water crashing down on your head after a cannonball into the lake, and it can be freezing. The easiest way to avoid such a harsh realization is to read some poetry. There are many poets who are easy to understand, write conversationally, and are relatable to young readers. Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 is a wonderful resource for teachers, and those who are interested in poetry, but not necessarily well versed in it. Sorry. Puns are my lifeline. There are many, many accessible, and entertaining poems there that can be a sort of poetry wading pool, if you will.

It’s also of note that though Ginsberg did say “First thought, best thought,” he still revised his own poetry extensively. There are many common pitfalls for beginning poets that will most likely result in their poems never making it out of the ‘bad poem bin.’ Luckily, that can be remedied:

1) Lack of details. Many young poets summarize everything. They’re taught to write essays mainly in summary (as proof that they read at least the SparkNotes), so how are they supposed to know not to do it in their poems? Specifics are very important to poems. Idiosyncrasies make a poem not only your own, but interesting as well. Things like the way someone leans against the wall, their left hand just touching the brick, or actually including brief bits of dialog instead of saying “we talked about____”

2) Lack of concrete nouns. This is important. Concrete nouns are actual things. Things that smell, taste, feel, things that have little room for interpretation. Concrete details ground the reader, give them a beacon of reality, so they aren’t lost in abstractions. Abstractions are the opposite of concrete nouns. They’re ideas or emotions, like hope, love, or beauty. They’re wonderful emotions and ideas to convey in a poem, but when you use the words, especially repeatedly, we have to offer up that old bit of workshop sagery: Show Don’t Tell. That’s right. A successful poem doesn’t so much say how you’re feeling, but rather explains it in a way that the reader can empathize and feel what you feel. It’s so much easier for someone to get behind what you’re saying, or really care, if you make it about them as opposed to just about you, because who are you to them? One of 99 thousand red balloons in the sky. But if your balloon drifts from the cloud, comes down and has a little personal/intellectual chat with them, they might just decide to take it home like a lost puppy. I once had a reader for a journal send me an email saying that they don’t think my poems were accepted, but that she disagrees, and that she made a copy of one of them and hung it on her refrigerator. To me, knowing your work is on some stranger’s refrigerator is worth ten publications. Tangential, sorry. An example of a concrete noun is the balloon I just mentioned. It has a shape, a color and even a location. Lots of concrete there, but it would still make a terrible poem. Or a pretty sweet pop song. Onwards!

3) Familiarity. Cliches are a part of society. Howeverm in some ways they are kind of the antithesis of poetry. Poetry is an attempt to “Make it New” as Ezra Pound (and Confucius) said, and cliches are the knee jerk reaction of the masses. They are things like a pretty girl being an angel, a raindrop being a tear from heaven, a red rose as a symbol of beauty or love, rainbows, or common phrases like “right as rain,” “the grass is always greener on the other side,” and “the writing’s on the wall.” Say it to yourself as a mantra: Make it new, make it new. Just avoid veering into treason and all will be well. And, until you’re a little more versed in poetry (hehe) just set that Ginsberg quote on the shelf. Remember, he’d read literally hundreds of books of poetry by the time he said “First thought, best thought,” and he was all into zen, which is interesting, but, like dropping a word like scansion outside of a literary group, the real zen stuff just confuses the crap out of most people. A quick excerpt from Kerouac’s Dharma Bums: (in my mind, definitely the best of the series) “It’s mean,” I complained. “All those Zen Masters throwing young kids in the mud because they can’t answer their silly questions.” “That’s because they want them to realize mud is better than words, boy.” There’s a labyrinth of perception out there, though imperceptible.

4) Lack of Focus. Every line should add something new and important to the poem. Consider the rough poem (or poem idea swimming around in your head) notes for the final poem exam. The test will be entirely on the theme of the poem and how that theme can be reinforced. The excess notes that have nothing to do with the exam need to either be crossed out, or the little nugget that pertains to the exam needs to be brought out in a way that is more in line with the rest of your notes. An example? Say the poem’s about the beach, and the descriptions of things are: The towel’s lumped up like marshmallows, and a purse looks like a once bitten hot pocket. If the poem is about being hungry, or that’s a part of the poem, sweet, the theme’s at least somewhat streamlined in the images, but if food or hunger have nothing to do with the theme, then maybe try to re-envision the images more in line with the theme. Or if a character or object enters the poem, and doesn’t add anything to the theme or the understanding of the theme, you may just have to play the cold blooded assassin. Or, take the Martin Blank (of the fantastic Grosse Point Blank) route, discover a newfound respect for that part of your poem, and find a way to make the appearance of the person/object qualify, or add to the theme. For instance, in the earlier example, if the theme of the poem is mourning for someone lost, then instead of the towel being marshmallows, maybe a shed death shroud, or have it lying lifeless, partially buried by the sand. Or if a skinny guy walked by, perhaps he’s gaunt, as the word has somewhat darker connotations than skinny, or maybe make him a shriveled elderly man. Things more in line with the theme.

5) Archaic wording. Thou dost not repair to thine study ‘fore yond guest goes thither? Know the type of words I mean when I say archaic? Anything you wouldn’t expect to say, or hear, maybe when talking to someone a little older, but still, someone alive. If it is archaic, it has to explain itself, make a case for why that word is necessary when there’s a word in the popular vernacular of the day to suit it. Yes, Shakespeare used dost’s and thou’s, but that was hundreds of years ago when people spoke like that, or, spoke closer to that.

6) Syntactical inversion. That sounds bad, don’t you think? It can work, but again, it is usually only used when the regular syntactical sentence alignment was weighed against the inversion, and the inversion suits the rhythm of the poem. OK, that’s a bunch of mumbo jumbo, which is a cliche, but basically, write your poem in sentences. Exclusion of unnecessary words, the whittling down to the core of the language is where the ‘poetic’ lies, not in rearranging sentences so that they sounds poetic.

7) Forced or easy rhymes. This is the main cause of syntactical inversion. Rhyme, along with “First thought, best thought,” and syntactical inversion, should be put on hiatus for awhile while the young writer is learning the ins and outs of poetic language and organization. If the writer feels they absolutely must rhyme, the line should be worked entirely around making the end words fit into the poem naturally. I like the term Eye Poking Rhymes for the types of rhymes that really draw attention to themselves, where all the stress of the line falls on the ending word. Easy rhymes are like Love/dove/above, heart/apart. If it sounds like you’ve read the rhyme a few times, try to think of another way to say it. Here’s an example I’ve taken from an actual young poet’s poem: Without you how can the day be light / How can I dream in dark of night. I bet you had a feeling that the writer would rhyme night with light didn’t you? One great way to avoid your rhymes appearing eye pokey or easy is to use enjambment. Enjambment is basically just the idea that you don’t have to pause at the end of the line, so your sentence continues onto the next line like a normal sentence, like this line from Gabriel Spera’s “In a Field Outside the Town”: over itself, the sound crinking from one / end of the sky to the other. The sound took possession /

8 ) Repetition. Not all repetition is bad, in fact it can be used to great effect, but it can also be used to bore and annoy the reader. Anaphora is a commonly abused literary device. But even more than exact repetition, double, or triple stating really clutters up many young poet’s poems. Once you say something, there’s no need to say it again in a slightly different way. An example would be: He crumpled to the floor, slumped like a dropped washcloth. That is saying he fell twice, differently, and while they both may apply, one only needs to say things once, so decide on the more descriptive/better in line with the theme phrasing, and just go with that.

9) Abstract themes. Writing a poem that is to encompass the very essence of an abstraction like Love or Despair is a very ambitious project, a book length poem, an epic. Focus your theme (there’s that word again) to a part of that abstraction, like fleeting love at the workplace, or despair from the loss of something small and replaceable, like when there is an empty Dorito’s bag on the fridge, and you get excited, only to be dashed on the rocks of an empty bag’s crinkle. Woe is me.

10) Fatty Prose. If it is, of the, but and/or is not meaningful, chances are it isn’t needed. Poetry is the art of exclusion. You want the line to still make sense, but there are many ways to rephrase your sentences so that the nothing words, words that add nothing like many prepositions and pronouns, are minimized, so the meaning of the sentence is compacted, stripped to the very core, the most raw. Sentence fragments are the poet’s friend. Young poets also tend to pile on adjectives. Very rarely will you see more than two adjectives describe something in a successful poem, and when there are, it is always a conscious choice. A good verb is a poet’s best friend. A good verb will easily take the place of two adjectives. Learn to love a good verb.

11) Boring titles. Love. The Shoe. Timid. Yawn. A title is essentially a foreword to the poem. It is a chance to do a little bit of exposition, to foreshadow an important image or metaphor, to grab attention. Why waste it by calling the poem “Hope” when the major thing you convey in the poem is a sense of hope? It’s an opportunity, don’t waste it.

There is, of course much more to a good poem than avoiding these mistakes, but for the most part, successful contemporary poems avoid all of the points I’ve mentioned. I hope this helps someone out there, because it took a long time for me to figure it out on my own.

Write a sestina with loosely kept 7 syllable lines, and two rhyming pairs of endwords.

Write a sonnet that is a single sentence.

Write a poem in three haiku-shaped stanzas, the last word of the last poem being either Yes, or No, answering, you guessed it, a yes/no question that is posed in the rest of the poem.

Write a pantoum that fluctuates homonyms in each stanza for the repetition.

Write a list prose poem about a color that tells a specific narrative through the chosen items.

I’ve been researching the theory of an MFA Statement of Purpose for awhile now, and can save everyone the time with a quick rundown. Basically, everyone says use common sense. It should be tight prose. As tight as a piece of flash fiction, include an anecdote or two, explain what you hope to get out of their MFA department (a honing of craft, if there’s a specific area you feel you’re weak in perhaps), and what you bring to the department (why they should feel deeeeeply honored that you are applying to their puny school. Maybe not quite so condescending, but you get the idea. How you can help your fellow students, and the prestige of the program with the masterpieces you write.)

Here’s an excellent essay from Vince Gotera at The University of Northern Iowa that gives some examples and tips. Check it out. Seriously. Or else. Don’t ask what. I said don’t ask. I’m leaving.

Can openers? Why not? There’re many different kinds, from the hand cranked to the automatic, home and industrial size…

Write a piece where the dramatic climax (or near it) is someone throwing a can opener through a closed window.

Write a piece whose backdrop is the narrator using a partially broken can opener to open a can, while they’re recalling an event that had happened that day.

Write a piece where, for some reason, the thing most wished for (seriously) is a can opener… give you a hint… canned foods are really hard to open without one.

So, I’m apparently the last person to grab this gravy-train, and I feel like I’m dressed in my best and covered in Thanksgiving sauce. Or something. But The basic plot of Nabokov’s Lolita is very similar to the earlier (1916 to Nabokov’s 1956) version, an 18 page ‘novella’ which sounds about average short story length, but hey, who’m I to tell those crazy Germans (and the author did become a prominent Nazi journalist) what to call their pedophilia? Anyway, here’s the opening paragraph of a John Lethem essay from Harper’s recently called Love and Theft…

Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel.

OK, paragraph and a sentence, big deal. Anyway, he gave the original author a different name than what I’d read on the St. Petersburg website, where there was an article titled “Nabokov was no plagurist, say his admirers” but seeing as the head of the Nabokov Museum offered such unbiased insight as “He couldn’t understand German well enough to read such literature.” But seeing as he lived in Berlin for 13 years, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the Museum officers are worried about Job security.

Jonathon Lethem’s essay goes on to talk about Cryptomnesia which is: the appearance in consciousness of memory images which are not recognized as such but which appear as original creations. New word for today. Whee. Have a pleasant day.

Here’s a blog post called, in an odd twist “Question Marks in Mid-sentence” from Nick Daws’ writing blog mywritingblog.com about using question marks mid-sentence in the case of thoughts and dialog. Basically, there’s no rigid rules on the subject, he goes over examples, and makes sense saying don’t use question marks mid-sentence. Though it’s not technically improper. So it’s OK, but it’s really not cool. You know, none of the cool kids are doing it, I know I don’t. Any thoughts? Anyone care to defend the mid-sentence question mark?

From the great people at bookslut.com comes this interesting little essay by Weston Cutter called Choose Your Own Adventure about writing crossovers from fiction/nonfiction/poetry, as well as pointing out the major difference in pay between, in their example, poetry and book reviews. It’s not terribly long either, so go read it, you’ll be glad you did.

It’s fall again, or, it will be very soon, and that means a few things for us writers: Most college produced literary magazines reopen for submissions, and the big first book contests are back. But, with contest fees reaching deep into the pocket ($25 to read my book? Is it really that bad?) you have to pick and choose wisely. The major first book awards which have their submission period in the fall are American Poetry Review’s Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry, with a whopping $3,000 Prize, one of the largest for first books, outdone by Spring’s big buck prize University of Pittsburg Press’s Agnes Lynch Starret Poetry Prize at $5,000. This year’s Honickman judge is none other than our favorite narcissist Tony Hoagland. Why does this matter? Well, in a way it doesn’t, nor does the particular press publishing the winning manuscript, technically. The first answer always given by editors is always “Excellence is our only requirement” or some such blanket statement. But what excellence are they looking for? Robert Pinsky excellence? Fanny Howe excellence? Stephen Dunn excellence? They all are good at what they do, but few presses/journals are truly as eclectic as they claim, and why should they be? Anyway, what I was getting at is that one can reasonably judge that aside from excellence, the judge might like poems similar to their own. This gives you a slight insider track on what to submit. Then comes the bad part, when we realize that many poets like a wide variety of poems, and that your manuscript is up against hundreds of other hopefuls who have been honing their own brands of excellence and submitted their most excellent (says Bill S. Preston, esquire) poems without regard to the final judge’s own poetry. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. For instance, Billy Collins selected Spencer Short’s Tremolo for the 2000 National Poetry Series. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, just not exactly that similar to Collins’ work. Honickman’s deadline is October 31st, and the reading fee is $25. Another prestigious first book award is the Yale Series of Younger Poets, which is on the lower end of the reading fees that have been climbing as fast as gas, at only $15, and luminaries such as Carolyn Forche are past winners. Their deadline is November 15th. Now, another little way to toe the waters of a contest you might be interested in submitting to is to take a look at past winners books.
For instance, before I entered the Agnes Lynch Starret prize I bought a copy of the last winner that was available, at the time it was Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground and while it didn’t really affect my poem choices, nor the outcome, it was an excuse to get a new book from a new voice. Always a fun exercise. So none of these tricks are foolproof, nor do they even make a huge difference most of the time, but you never know. It won’t hurt anything to buy the book of a judge or a past prize winner, and it could be the difference between being eliminated by one of the anonymous readers buried in the thank yous, and being eliminated by the guest judge in the final round. Other first book awards coming up shortly are Boa Editions Ltd.’s A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize judged by Jean Valentine, ending November 30th, with an entry fee of $25, and a grand prize of $1,500. Also the 2008 New Issues Poetry Prize judged by the one and only Carl Phillips, with a $15 reading fee and a grand prize of $2,000. The New Issues Poetry Prize deadline is also November 30th.

I’ve been often curious about categorizing books. Why Orwell’s 1984 is only in literature, not sci fi/fantasy, and Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or Asimov’s Foundation would be found no where else. There’s so many great books that get stuck as ‘just barely too genre’ that they don’t get any of the appreciation they deserve as astounding works of fiction. Here’s the full post by Kassia Krozser at booksquare.com