Manuscripting

Congratulations to Greg on finishing a draft of his novel, Down Cortez Road (Great title!). I also just heard that one of my Sewanee friends -- a poet -- is also working on a novel. I'm simultaneously impressed and a bit envious of you guys and ladies who can switch genres and write a novel.

Just don't desert us and become full-time fiction writers, please.

I did a sort of double-reverse-switch as an undergrad, from poetry to (short) fiction to poetry, but I've never been able to go back. Maybe book reviews will be a springboard to writing an essay or two down the road, but the big canvas of a novel feels too daunting.

My problem, even just writing short stories, was the inability to devise plots. (That sounds more devious than I mean it.)

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I'm wanting to work on new poems -- to devise some new plots -- but am really stuck in manuscript mode. Feels like I need to get the book manuscript placed somewhere so I can let those poems go a bit more and focus on what's next.

When I interviewed Jay Leeming, he said publishing his first book meant he didn't have to worry as much about those poems anymore; they had a life of their own now. And that's how I feel, or want to feel.

So I'm focused on last (for now) edits on a book manuscript I want to start sending out this fall. Which is its own kind of pleasure -- that staying in a manuscript as long as you can -- but I'm hungry for some new poems too.

I mean, honestly

Isn’t Newsweek beating once more on the same tired old dead horse of a story we’ve all read who knows how many times before?

As the French say, Donnez moi une break!

Here’s the story in a nutshell:

“Of course, poetry has been supposedly dying now for several generations.

[...]

Despite what national surveys may suggest, and despite rumors of its demise, poetry seems likely to persist, in one form or another.”

You can actually write your own version of this story at home (and probably publish it this fall, just in time for the new school year), by taking these two evergreen truths, padding them with your own anecdotal evidence and/or quotes from a notable poet about the slow death of poetry, and serving it all up in the context of a survey by Dana Gioia or John Barr. Et voila!

Disappears in the Rain

I'm very excited to report that my poem Disappears in the Rain will be published as a chapbook by The Broome Review later this year. By way of a small preview, here's a photo of the Japanese island of Miyajima and, almost fogged out up there, Mount Misen, where the poem partly takes place.

Roadside Markets for Poets

The other weekend, while driving around near the Catskills, I asked W. to pull over so we could get a quick picture of this sign.

I like the cornucopia and ice cream cone painted on and flying off the corners, but I wanted the picture because I love the expression "Horn of Plenty" -- so much so I used it as the title of this poem, about my old neighborhood in Astoria, Queens:


Horn of Plenty

Like this paper horn of flowers tipped
across an arm. I’m jostled, poked
with it—it’s how happiness happens
here in the subway. Asters to zinnias
and violets, deep oranges, crenellated
yellow and cream, the faint brushwork
of babies breath, a frill of green
and I’m off now, past the turnstile,
the stairs, and into Astoria. How’s this
cornucopia work? One thing plus
another, and repeat. Say, a boy in a red
suit with a birdcage on one side,
a cat on the other. Like the boy is
blond, the suit too short—and what’s
in the cage, where’d that cat go?
But that’s Goya. Try Gershwin. This is
Steinway Street. Let’s say everything
green. These ladies’ saris, mint green,
sunlit against the black-green, deckled
green hedge. High in the tea-green trees
each green nest awaits a green bird.
Or like the coffee klatch of sparrows
outside my window. Each morning
they file this reminder: you’re human,
you’re human. And everything else
I can’t shoehorn in here, piled up like
the fish, pale pink and dark pink,
stacked row upon row in this
fishmonger’s ice, beneath the swirly
frothy cherry blossoms. I’d let it go
almost, I would, almost all of it now
to have what’s next, right here, what just
makes it into my eye—that flicker, this
watery light, that bit of distant tinsel
the magpie drops everything for.

--Matthew Thorburn
(Originally published in RealPoetik)

Reviewing My Position on Reviews

Writing book reviews stresses me out. Yet I keep doing it. I keep telling my wife, Okay, that's it, I'm done and no more. It's not worth it.

Then the allure of free books -- free poetry books! -- draws me back in.

And then here I am, stressing. But a little less each time.

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I signed on to review Russell Edson's new one, See Jack, for Pleiades.

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One of the professors in my MFA program, in one of the rare occasions when he spoke very seriously and frankly, told us not to get hung up on poetry prizes and who wins what. The stakes are so low, he said.

More generally, he said don't try to make a living from your writing. He had actually done this for a while -- not from his poems, but from freelancing, writing essays and reviews, contributing "literary" articles to popular magazines.

But it seemed to have made him miserable with worry.

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Did you hear Russell Edson read at AWP in NYC? That was more or less my introduction to his work. Probably one of my most vivid memories of AWP.

Well, that and the weird feeling of constantly recognizing poets in the crowds passing by.

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A guy I know has written something like a book review per week for the past five years. Needless to say, I think he no longer feels any stress about writing reviews.

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I'm also reading (but not reviewing) Seamus Heaney's memoir-in-interviews, Stepping Stones. And just read Jason Shinder's posthumous last book, stupid hope, which is really good in a really depressing way.

On deck: Stephen Burt's Close Calls with Nonsense.

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And something I want to read but don't have in hand: Dennis O'Driscoll's Reality Check.

Any editors out there wanting a review of that?

Menand and Ford (and Me) on MFAs

A lot of people have already pointed out Louis Menand's (that's him at right) article on MFA programs in The New Yorker, but I just finally read it, so I'm joing in with a passage I liked:

"I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make."

Which reminds me of something old -- from Fall 1996 -- but still relevant, which I have surely quoted here before, a passage from Richard Ford's intro to the issue of Ploughshares he guest-edited:

"Still another introduction topic might be the simultaneously-thriving-yet-still-somehow-beleaguered university writing program industry. Perhaps now would be the time and here the place to give it a good flagellating, put on my jeweler’s loupe and scope out its flaws and corruptions. The French, after all, think we’re a bunch of sillies for trying to “teach” writing. They, of course, think the way they do everything is the best way, and that becoming a writer is a gnostic, quasi-Zen, for-mandarins-only process that mustn’t be spoken of in public—whereas we Americans will talk about anything forever. But who cares what the French think? They’re not satisfied with their own writers, either. Though plenty of American pseudo-mandarins natter on about this subject, too—usually toward the point that altogether too much writing’s going on, that there’re scandalously more writers than readers, that the writing gene pool is somehow being diluted and the world flooded with mediocrity, that the real writers don’t teach, that editors are going brain-dead, on and on and on and on again. But unless I’m wrong, Tennessee Williams and Flannery O’Connor both went to Iowa. Barry Hannah went to Arkansas. Ken Kesey and Robert Stone attended Stanford. And as a group, these satisfy my requirements for being wonderful writers, their books wonderful books. What difference does it make where you learned what you learned, if you learned it well? If every holder of an M.F.A. isn’t quite as good as these people, what’s the harm, really? It seems like a victimless crime. Maybe they’ll all become better readers of other people’s good books. Plus, everybody has to be doing something, don’t they? Would we rather more people were out in California designing video games?"

Also on the subject of MFA programs I have to say, not that anyone asked, how impressed I am at times by how the poets leading workshops keep coming up with things to say about everyone's poems. That was what amazed me most when I was at Sewanee, slipping back into a workshop after nearly 10 years away from them. I was frankly amazed how Mark Jarman and Claudia Emerson consistently had intelligent, thoughtful, useful comments about the many and various poems being workshopped.

This isn't flattery, it's envy: I put in good time before each workshop session reading the poems we'd be talking about, looking for the things I could point out that didn't work or suggest doing differently. And it was hard!

I struggled to find those entry points into these works in progress. And not because they weren't good poems -- most were -- but because everyone's doing their own thing, I think, has their own particular obsessions and fascinations, and it's a real challenge (I found then, and feel now) to engage other writers' work with that level of attention and interest that you have (you better) for your own ongoing writing.

It's as if, as a reader, you had to be seriously engaged with every book of poems that comes your way -- when, if you're like me, you frankly may not like a fair number of books you pick up, or not be interested enough in them to spend the time really looking into why they don't, in fact, interest you. (Like Kay Ryan says, I read a book of poems once to see if I want to really read it.)

I left Sewanee feeling amazed, a little worn out, and frankly much less interested in teaching creative writing, something I have sometimes thought, in the hazy "someday" talk one uses for the fifteen-years-from-now future, I'd like to do some day.

Reading & Reading & Writing

Don't you love how book leads on to book? A couple weeks ago, I read Donald Hall's memoir, The Best Day The Worst Day, about his life with Jane Kenyon, both at Eagle Pond Farm (shown here) and before that in Ann Arbor, and about her illness and death from leukemia.

Unlike Dana Goodyear, I found this book very moving, very well written -- another book that completely drew me as in I zipped by station after station on the train, without looking up. (I would guess I agree with her that his version of this story in poems, Without, is stronger; but perhaps it was good that I haven't read those poems in some years and didn't have them clearly in mind when reading this book.)

Naturally, this led me right back to Kenyon's Collected Poems, where I re-read her first two books. I love the clarity, the brevity and the exact-ness of the best of her poems: the right words and just the right image or two, and I'm done. The poems echo and reverberate that way. I was thinking she's like an out-of-doors Vermeer the way she can focus in on things and hold your attention there.

This kind of poetry is not especially in style right now, I know. But a lot of poets could learn a lot by spending some time with these poems.

I love this well-known picture of her, by the way, because it's so writerly and because, though taken not really all that long ago, it seems like another world almost to see someone working on a poem at the typewriter. (I had a similar feeling, reading Hall's memoir, every time he'd mention sending or receiving a fax. I'd think, Eagle Pond doesn't have email?)

So naturally this led me to look for Bill Moyers' documentary on Hall and Kenyon at the New York Public Library. After all, they have practically everything. Well, they didn't have it, but I did find another documentary, made after Kenyon's death, for a series called Films for the Humanities, which includes some good footage of Hall from a book festival (in England, I think), reading both his poems and hers.

Here's Jane Kenyon's poem, "Having It Out with Melancholy".

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For a different kind of reading, have you checked out these videos from the Stain of Poetry reading series? I saw on Facebook they're looking for a new venue for the series, but in the meantime you can check out videos of past readings by Stuart Greenhouse, Mathias Svalina and many other poets.

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On and off for the past six weeks, I've been working on a new poem called "Snow in Early Spring." Did I tell you this already? I'm trying for something that moves away from and back towards a refrain, associationally like a renga, and without punctuation to slow it down. Not unlike the Jane Kenyon poems I've been reading, I'm trying to zoom in on natural details and let the images do the talking.

This all started with a song I heard performed on the pipa, a classical Chinese intstrument similar to a guitar or a lute. I thought the piece was actually titled "Snow in Early Spring," but found out later that the music was written to give the feeling of that phenomenon to the listener. The title of the song I don't know.