Of course, the first rule of poem club is we do not talk about what poem club can’t do. A poem can do just about anything it wants, that’s fine, but those are exceptions to the rule, and however broad the exception hole in the rule fence, the rule is still there for a reason. Or something.
Anyway. A phrasal verb is a verb consisting of a verb and one or more adverb or prepositional particles (hands off the phrase prepositional particles. That’s mine now! For my poem!). In slightly plainer-speak: take off, put up with, go off on… a lot of times (heh), to get the phrasal verb to carry the meaning you want it to you need the preposition, or as I usually call them, nothing-words. Sure, prepositions serve their purpose, but they don’t do a lot of work. They don’t carry much meaning. They are the generic insole of your shoe–some good on long walks, but nothing like the surprising comfort of a well verbalized noun. But enough disrespect to poor prepositions (leave Between alone, leave her alone!). The point is that phrasal verb, in order to mean what they mean, require a unit of more than one word. There are plenty of arguments about poetic units out there (the syllable, the word, the line, the sentence, the foot, the calf muscle–wait) but the fact of the issue is that there is white space on the page when you use a phrasal verb. This can be a positive thing as well as something to consider possibly being a little slack, depending on the poem. It is something to consider, though. Even if you don’t agree with the following:
The family’s broken up. It’s a divorce of literical proportions. One parent is across the country and you don’t have any relatives who work at an airline company. You must divide up your verbs, I know you hate to do it, but you can’t haul all your verbs across the country with you every time you wanna see the ‘other’ parent. You know, the one who doesn’t allow cartoons and the only cookies they ever have are stale strawberry wafers.The one you don’t visit a whole lot, but, you know, they’re still yours and therefore deserve some attention. Give them your phrasal verbs. When you’re playing with your regular verbs and nouns and adjectives (don’t play with your dangling participle to much or you’ll go blind) your mind will occasionally stray to a phrasal verb way off at the other house, and you will have perspective on its function, and which toy you have still near would serve its function. Or, you can always get it overnighted to you if you feel like you’ll just throw a fit without it.
I hope this has sufficiently wasted some time. Good day.
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.
It’s simple enough for anyone who’s familiar with the Firestarter Exercises. Titles is a good exercise because of its ambiguity. A while ago NPR issued a challenge to fiction writers to write a story that included the image of a wedding cake in the middle of the road. Richard Bausch’s Tandolfo the Great introduced me to the collection NPR put together. It’s a fun assignment to try to work to your own whims.
The program sounds really nice, its an Income Based Repayment (hence IBR) for student loans, which also forgives loans after 25 years, so you won’t be paying for your college textbooks with your social security (if that’s still around). So yeah, very exciting news for so many people, that their income calculator was overwhelmed and crashed temporarily. But it will be back soon.
Thank you Glimmer Train, for providing the world with so much information and literature for writers and readers around the world. Someday I’ll be able to afford a GT subscription, and won’t have to slip inconsicuously into SDSU’s Library and hide in their massive dominoes of magazine racks. Anyway, they provide a service called “Writers Ask” which featured this short essay by Lee Martin about trying to emerge in the publishing business as a writer, but ultimately about balancing character and plot in the arena of memorability. It’s a good read. Check it out.
Willow Springs is a sweet literary journal from Eastern Washington University that publishes accessible and excellent poetry and prose. They’ve recently started a feature on their website that has the poet writing (at decent length) about their poem. Dorianne Laux is one of the best contemporary poets, and you should all be more familiar with her work. Dagnabbit. Here’s her feature at Willow Springs for her poem “S. Sgt Metz.”
Certain brands take the market by storm with one innovation or another, and their name becomes synonymous with their product/service. Companies such as Google (google being a verb now for searching the internet with a search engine), or truly amazing items such as Rice Krispie(s) Treats.
Now, the second is the subject of a recent dilemma.
To capitalize or not to capitalize.
Since the poem isn’t specifically referencing the pre-made proper item made by Kellogg’s, and merely the concept of melted marshmallows and crisped rice cereal. Sliced bread be damned, Rice Krispie(s) treats are amazing. I decided, in this instance, after much flutuating between “Rice Krispies Treats” and “rice krispie treats” I finally decided that owing to both the more aesthetically pleasing nature of the lower cased choice, and the technicality of specialty/gourmet treats, generic brands, and back to the poetic liscence to make my poem look how I damn-well please want it to look, I went with the lower case option. Is it the absolute most proper choice? I’m not sure. Any grammophiles canplease chime in, but I think that in this instance there is enough rationale to push through the non-proper name version.
Southeast Review is a sweet magazine out of FSU that publishes lots of great, accessible poetry and prose. They run three contest (with one of the best contest names) The World’s Best Short Short Story Contest for stories under 500 words (as well as a poetry and narrative nonfiction contest). I entered last year, and like any rejected writer, I found fault in a few of the finalists published from last year’s issue, but the winner, and a number of the finalists were not only well written (all the stories, I can’t argue, were very well written) but also quirky and kinda up my alley so I can’t hold a grudge against them. One particular story made me question if Russell Edson had taken up a pseudonym. In other words, this is a safe journal to submit your work to. It’s not stuffily academic nor a breeding pool of nepotism. It’s a little Different. Here’s the info: First, don’t include your information on any of the pieces of writing. This is important. While ostensibly it shouldn’t matter much because all they have to do is white out the name, or sharpie it out or whatever, in the 1 in 300 chance that the contributor is local or friendly with a judge. But, as someone who’s dealt with (albeit only hundreds compared to the thousands of submissions the bigger journals get each year) reading submissions to a literary journal knows, it starts to get slightly offensive when people don’t read the 2 sentences of guidelines you make plainly available. Just a little. So, just be sure to include a cover letter that says “Hi, this is my name, this is what I’m submitting to your contest- ‘___’” and you’ll improve your standings just the teensiest bit (over f-ing up the rules, which may get you attention in high school, but later on people just start trashing submissions that LOOK like they’re a waste of time.
Deadline: March 20th
Fee: $15 ($10 for one narrative nonfiction essay)
Prize: $500 ($250 for nonfiction, so cry about it memoirists. :P)
Lengths:
WBSSSC: up to 3 stories per submission, each must be under 500 words
Poetry Contest: up to 5 poems or 10 pages.
(2nd ever) Narrative Nonfiction Contest: Up to 5,000 words.
Submit your shizz guys. You get a copy of the winning issue, and really, submitting to contests are the easiest way to justify buying an extraneous book in these tough times. Because, it’s not like buying a lottery ticket. It’s like buying a book and a raffle ticket. So get to it.
This is a much larger issue than I could even claim to be able to address without decades of further reading, however, I can offer an amateur’s perspective. Whenever there are formal constraints on words
( first of all, of course, the non-spoken must be rendered into the spoken{written} which is a constraint, and into one language over another unless the poet and readers are sufficiently bilingual to understand slight linguistic/cultural characteristics of said un-translatable words, and then is bound by the constraints of grammar (unless you really feel like throwing caution to the wind or want to write in vernacular) and spelling and ARGH. When you REALLY look at it, poetry is a horribly constrained style of writing. Line breaks can’t be arbitrary, titles, punctuation and capitalization. What a friggan mess. Ignore ALL THIS)
the meaning of the poem can take a backseat, or be totally lost. And really, the meaning, or at least the moments of the poem are what’s important (if the meaning is less of the life-changing and more of the distraction-from-life genre), and form is the container of the words, not their meaning. You could kind of look at it like Bonsai Kittens. With photoshop (and grammar and poetic license) you can shove that kitten into a nearly imposible vase, but it’ll often lose the reality– the concreteness and the power of the words. There are two types of one dimensional poems (well, thousands, but for now lets go with 2) those which try to say too much, and those that don’t know aht they want to say.
What does this mean? Well damn. It’s tough. I like to off-quote TS Eliot and say poetry isn’t about the poet’s emotions but the poet’s ability to call up particular emotions in the reader. But it’s 2009 and TS Eliot is long dead. However, the actual quote is pretty apt still, so I’ll end with that:
“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, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” - T.S. Eliot
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.
This is your last day at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs‘ 2009 conference, and I am still bitter. I’ve carried hot plates of food to (some) ungrateful people all weekend, and you got to talk writing and reading and teaching and… ARGH. I’m going next year. Somehow.
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.
I’m working on an essay, just, you know, because, and I’m only half-remembering a Vonnegut quote about the two types of writers. One of them he called “bangers” I’m pretty sure, but essentially what he was saying was that some writers mentally edit each line over and over again before they’ll let it touch the page, while others will just write-write-write then spend a lot of time on the editing process. You can’t half-quote or summarize someone in a halfway decent essay, so I turn my search over to you, sentient beings of the internets. That series of tubes. Google was unable to satisfy my search. I feel like a hologram suddenly popped out of R2D2 “Help me internet surfers, you’re my only hope.” I believe the essay was in either Palm Sunday or Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons, because I have a distinct memory of reading the quote at work at Red Oak on a break, then re-reading the essay by buslight as I bumped and jostled my way home, eastward in the darkness. But, I could’ve sworn it was Li-Young Lee who wrote “the halved-apple faces of owls” when really it was Amy Hempel. In my defense, my memory of reading that line as I walked into the Singing Hills kitchen at 5:00 to get the restaurant ready to open was indeed correct, it was merely the book that I had wrong, having read both Reasons to Live and Rose in the same week.
So if anyone happens to know the quote I’m talking about, I’ve been scouring both books and haven’t found the quote so I’m beginning to think maybe it was in an unrelated essay, or, gasp, could possibly be an entirely different author. I hope not, though, because I’ve got it in my head that it was K, and I’d hate to be wrong about that.
It only makes sense that with standardized tests and their measures to stave off cheating there will be a large pool of possible questions picked for each individual exam. Unfortunately, those questions have a sliding scale of difficulty (or in the VERBAL section of the GRE, as was my case, obscurity) and sometimes a whole handful of “toughies” winds up in the same test. Luck of the draw.
Luckily for us test takers, the good people at ETS are keeping an eye on tests. I didn’t know that. I thought, after receiving some paltry verbal scores that either a) my multivitamin was switched out with stupid pills by an evil mastermind tabby cat, b) my over-extensive sense of ‘at least I’m not an idiot’ had long been deceiving me, or c) I got a BS test. It sucked, but I calmed myself thinking that most writing MFA programs don’t care about the tests, and that they’re merely a requirement of the graduate school. But, at the same time Iowa mentions on their website that GRE scores figure into teaching assistantship positions. And Johns Hopkins really cares about them. Not that JHU was high on my list (for most likely flawed stereotypes about the program gained from trolling blogs and message boards), but I looked at it after the test and allowed a glimmer of excitement (Dave-frickin-Smith!)but then had to extinguish it immediately.
But thank you ETS, once again, for screening the questions, even if it’s just after the fact, because I just got a letter offering a retest of the verbal section. The official explanation in the letter was
in a very small number of cases, the computer algorithm may not have selected an optimal distribution of test questions that would have allowed the test taker to fully demonstrate his or her true ability level.
I don’t care how it’s phrased, essentially it says “Hey, we know we kinda said you were retarded, but we might’ve been wrong.” And that’s fine with me. The fact that I didn’t slip through the cracks of “screwed by standardized testing” ungrinds my gears for the ETS. Word. And we’re back full circle.
I gave up long ago trying to give Seth Abramson or Tom Kealey a run for their MFA web-journalistic money, and now just encourage everyone to read their blogs and the pw.org blog about MFA programs if they are feeling neurotic and tense about any unsent applications.
Bye-Bye UC Irvine. The thought of you was swell.
Now, a lot of non-writers will say that this isn’t really a big deal, or, not as big of a deal as writers tend to let writing things like this become (ie: endgame) but it kind of is when your really think about it. For one, the selectivity of programs (the top five or so are more selective than Harvard Undergraduate because of the extraordinarily small size of some programs (4-10 incoming student-poets) and the desired funding situation (tuition waiver and TA stipend/insurance– hey, I have plenty of undergrad student loans to not pay as it it) an MFA application is more like a job application, and there is in fact is one included in the process for many schools that offer Teaching Assistantships. And this is a job almost definitely out of state, away from family and friends, and one that is locked in for 2-3 years. And then there’s no guarantee where you’ll be able to find a teaching job. Who knows if you’ll be able to ever combine your desired profession and desired home may never coincide. That’s scary, damnit. Anyway you look at it. Up through undergraduate you can always depend on the lottery popping for you, or a rich estranged (or possibly unknown) uncle to crash your birthday party with his millions of dollars and a desire to help someone in the family.
For me the scariest thing is that not only is this (if you follow the metaphor) a job application for a very selective job somewhere else in the country, but you have to pay them a fair ammount of money to even look at it. They need to pay professors to read and evaluate incoming applications, so it is understandable that they should require some money for that process, but it makes it even harder for a poor college kid to apply to as many absurdly difficult schools to get into as he would like to. The online MFA pundits say your application pool should be 10-12 schools, at $50-75 an application, not counting cost of any and all college transcripts, postage for Letters of Recommendation (3 times for each letter: from you to prof, prof to you, you to school)… the cost of the applications far outweights the time put into the process which is ladeled on with glee and (perhaps) nervous anxiety.
So, yes, remember that some schools’ deadlines are fast-fast-fast approaching (Iowa and Cornell, I’m lookin’ at you) and others are just fast-fast on their way.
As a senior project three students (Chrystal Hartberg, Jessica Tyson and Zebulon Huset) at California State University- Long Beach produced the following collection of poems and essays.
Though originally meant to be an alternative to the Best American Series, it changed slightly as the process of reading over a hundred literary magazines polished the shrine of subjectivity that is reading poetry. Instead the collection took on the theme of excellent entertainment and was printed for adviser William Mohr.
Oh the rejection slip, but is it vain to keep it? When does the collection become a horde? I think the surface reason that I was able to come up with was that I want to keep up to date records, but I hate throwing away that little reminder that _______. <—- but what is that blank? I’m not sure. Is it that “there’s a lot to learn” that “hey, at least I’m trying” or is it something more Shakespearean about my words being immortal and when they’re revered I’ll be able to look back at the notes and marvel at how I persevered… do I need a safe deposit box where these rejection notes will be safe for my fantasy future self? I’m hoping that once I got past the initial, “hey, I sent out some work to be published, and even though it wasn’t I tried” (phase one of “hey, at least I’m trying”) phase, that I kept them filed and alphabetical (for the most part) out of some inner desire to be tidy that I’ve cocooned well, well away from my everyday messy habits. But I am a writer, and therefore inherently neurotic and a little vein, so I’m not entirely sure how pure my intentions are, and that’s a little scary, that tiptoeing around the phrase “narcissism” with the word “writer” as a buffer. I don’t know, I guess my mom used to keep the little “contestant” consolatory ribbon that they gave out in track and field every year. Right alongside the second and first place ribbons. In a box. Where my rejections are. That’s sane. Yes.
Anyway, anyone else keep their rejections? Or have a picture of the on the wall or refrigerator? Of the foot locker completely filled with rejections, or for the secret poet Al Bundys, a Foot Locker completely filled with rejections would be even more impressive. Help prove I’m not crazy…
I don’t normally post about that, but it’s been a little while. Since the Spring when I was in school and busy. Now there’s been a couple months, and granted not during a regular reading period, but it feels good, you know? Makes me want to type a :). Anyway, look for my prose poem “The Fan” in the Georgetown Review (in 2010 or 2011, haha. Dampers the excitement a little, like my first big acceptance, The Southern Review, which was also about 2 years between acceptance and publication).
Here’s a lecture about DIY perfect binding. This is great for class projects like workshop anthologies, theses (doesn’t it seem like the plural of thesis should be thesi? I mean, yeah, the i isn’t a u, but still… theses? Sounds like a Deliverance hillbilly motioning to the captive with a dull, questioning look on his face “We gunn’ get ta taste theses?”– eek!) literary journals, or even just those who want to organize their work for friends and family. The process only involves some small boards, clamps, glue, a paint brush and some waxed paper. Definitely not a commercial process, but definitely passable for small projects. The lecturer is informative and clearly knows a thing or two about the physical crafting of books.
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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.
Willow Springs
Certain brands take the market by storm with one innovation or another, and their name becomes synonymous with their product/service. Companies such as Google (google being a verb now for searching the internet with a search engine), or truly amazing items such as Rice Krispie(s) Treats..jpg)
Now, the second is the subject of a recent dilemma.
hate throwing away that little reminder that _______. <—- but what is that blank? I’m not sure. Is it that “there’s a lot to learn” that “hey, at least I’m trying” or is it something more Shakespearean about my words being immortal and when they’re revered I’ll be able to look back at the notes and marvel at how I persevered… do I need a safe deposit box where these rejection notes will be safe for my fantasy future self? I’m hoping that once I got past the initial, “hey, I sent out some work to be published, and even though it wasn’t I tried” (phase one of “hey, at least I’m trying”) phase, that I kept them filed and alphabetical (for the most part) out of some inner desire to be tidy that I’ve cocooned well, well away from my everyday messy habits. But I am a writer, and therefore inherently neurotic and a little vein, so I’m not entirely sure how pure my intentions are, and that’s a little scary, that tiptoeing around the phrase “narcissism” with the word “writer” as a buffer. I don’t know, I guess my mom used to keep the little “contestant” consolatory ribbon that they gave out in track and field every year. Right alongside the second and first place ribbons. In a box. Where my rejections are. That’s sane. Yes.