Gina Myers said some nice things.

You can read it here.

thanks Gina!

NaPoWriMo 2011

It's that time. It's been going.

I have been going. And going. Thank you Slash Pine Festival for letting me read. For introducing me to new people who also happen to write poems. For your book table where I spent more than I made. And thanks, also, to If Not For Kidnap, in Portland, and its beautiful hosts for hosting me, and The Tumblers and their guitars, and the people from Boise who skyped in. Reading there was a great joy.

Now it's April. And if I see that it's "the cruelest month" in one more blog...gah...

Anyway... I've written a poem a day for the month of April for the last 3 years and this year I am doing it again. Sort of.

I'm writing fragments. Everyday. Sometimes just one. Sometimes multiple. In a notebook.

Usually, I do NaPoWriMo publicly. On this blog.

Usually, I write poems, whole.

Now, fragments. I think it's a product of the way I'm existing in time.

And that time is spent always going from one place to another.

My space is in motion.



***


I am also preparing to prepare for STP-- otherwise known as Seattle to Portland-- a long, long bike ride. Or, at least, that's a long bike ride for me. Now I'm preparing to regularly bike 2 hrs a day. And then even longer bike rides on the weekend. I'm most definitely not in shape for this.

Most definitely not.

But I'm looking forward to that shapeliness.

linktastic

A few updates to my literary career:

Both Your Trouble is Ballooning, and Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV are in print and available for purchase. Which is rad.



Brooklyn Copeland was kind enough to publish a poem of mine in her beautiful, hand-made lit chap Taiga which is available for purchase here. And you can read a short interview with me here. (And see a giant picture of my face.)



Also, I was interviewed for the poetry podcast "The Moe Green Discussion" and you can listen to it here. Or you can get it off itunes.



And finally, a selection from my sequence "Dutch Baby Combo" is being featured on No Tell Motel this week and I am super excited about it.

poets should read this short story

from "The First Sally (A) OR Trurl's Electronic Bard"
by Stanislaw Lem

"Trurl had once had the misfortune to build an enormous calculating machine that was capable of only one operation, namely the addition of two and two, and that it did incorrectly. As is related earlier in this volume, the machine also proved to be extremely stubborn, and the quarrel that ensued between it and its creator almost cost the latter his life. From that time on Klapaucius teased Trurl unmercifully, making comments at every opportunity, until Trurl decided to silence him once and for all by building a machine that could write poetry. First Trurl collected eight hundred and twenty tons of books on cybernetics and twelve thousand tons of the finest poetry, then sat down to read it all. Whenever he felt he just couldn't take another chart or equation, he would switch over to verse, and vice versa. After a while it became clear to him that the construction of the machine itself was child's play in comparison with the writing of the program. The program found in the head of an average poet, after all, was written by the poet's civilization, and that civilization was in turn programmed by the civilization that preceded it, and so on to the very Dawn of Time, when those bits of information that concerned the poet-to-be were still swirling about in the primordial chaos of the cosmic deep. Hence in order to program a poetry machine, one would first have to repeat the entire Universe from the beginning—or at least a good piece of it."

...

"During the next two weeks Trurl fed general instructions into his future electropoet, then set up all the necessary logic circuits, emotive elements, semantic centers. He was about to invite Klapaucius to attend a trial run, but thought better of it and started the machine himself. It immediately proceeded to deliver a lecture on the grinding of crystallo-graphical surfaces as an introduction to the study of sub-molecular magnetic anomalies. Trurl bypassed half the logic circuits and made the emotive more electromotive; the machine sobbed, went into hysterics, then finally said, blubbering terribly, what a cruel, cruel world this was. Trurl intensified the semantic fields and attached a strength of character component; the machine informed him that from now on he would carry out its every wish and to begin with add six floors to the nine it already had, so it could better meditate upon the meaning of existence. Trurl installed a philosophical throttle instead; the machine fell silent and sulked. Only after endless pleading and cajoling was he able to get it to recite something: "I had a little froggy." That appeared to exhaust its repertoire. Trurl adjusted, modulated, expostulated, disconnected, ran checks, reconnected, reset, did everything he could think of, and the machine presented him with a poem that made him thank heaven Klapaucius wasn't there to laugh—imagine, simulating the whole Universe from scratch, not to mention Civilization in every particular, and to end up with such dreadful doggerel! Trurl put in six cliche filters, but they snapped like matches; he had to make them out of pure corundum steel. This seemed to work, so he jacked the semanticity up all the way, plugged in an alternating rhyme generator—which nearly ruined everything, since the machine resolved to become a missionary among destitute tribes on far-flung planets. But at the very last minute, just as he was ready to give up and take a hammer to it, Trurl was struck by an inspiration; tossing out all the logic circuits, he replaced them with self-regulating egocentripetal narcissistors. The machine simpered a little, whimpered a little, laughed bitterly, complained of an awful pain on its third floor, said that in general it was fed up, through, life was beautiful but men were such beasts and how sorry they'd all be when it was dead and gone. Then it asked for pen and paper."

... and so it continues.

alice blue

I S S U E  T H I R T E E N

P O E T R Y

jennifer stockdale
thomas patrick levy
ruth williams
dana guthrie martin
trey jordan harris
jenn marie nunes
daniela olszewska
nate slawson
russell jaffe


P R O S E

katie jean shinkle
sam martone
karin gottshall
michael k meyers
jenniey tallman
nate liederbach
reynard seifert

if you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it...

I want to talk about this female publishing conversation, rampaging rampaging all over the internet over and over again.

See... I'm torn. And I think nobody has it quite right.

I agree that it sucks. The numbers are clear. More men are published. Not because there are more men writers. But they are.

But I think it's also possible that a lot of editors are simply choosing the work that they prefer.

However, how did they decide what they prefer?

Who decided what qualifies as "good?"

It's hard to deny that the standards for "quality" were decided by a patriarchy.

To deny that is to be kind of ignorant.

Does being a "good writer" by society standards mean writing "like a man"? And what does that mean?

I can't deny that I've noticed that, while not across the board, men and women write differently.

I don't necessarily know how to define that relationship.

I can't deny that I think it's rare for a man to write a certain kind of "pretty" poem. I would call them girl poems.

I am not saying that guys cannot or do not write pretty poems. They do. Often.

I think of my friend who got her MFA in Fiction. She frequently complained about the workshop. Her teachers were men. She was often the only female in the room. Occasionally one of two females in the room. She wrote in vignettes. They talked about "traditional narrative structure--introduction, complications, climax, denoument" and "craft" as though a story told in vignettes could not be crafted. They had a framework they were working from, a tradition, a set of hard and fast rules about what makes a story a "good" story. She talked about the female narrative structure-- like the female orgasm-- in waves.

I wrote a paper about a female writer line... in terms of Alice Notley, HD, Plath. We have a history too. It's often told in relational terms. (Notley in terms of Berrigan, HD in terms of Pound or Eliot or Freud, Plath in terms of Hughes). Female writers have patrons.

Yet I've been published. And most of my favorite living writers are women. And I know this to be true of many people. Man and woman alike.

As an editor, with another female editor, I find myself in constant battle. Forced to think about balance when we are making final decisions. Yet, I've rarely had to work to hard to come to a gender evenness in the poetry we publish. It's not always perfect, but it's usually quite balanced.

In prose, we have to work harder. Literally soliciting women writers we like because we can't find a piece by a woman in our submissions that we like. (What is the definition of "good" again... who defined what it means to be "good")

We get less prose submissions by women as well. That's simply a fact.

My fellow editor often complains that I ask her to try to find at least some female writing we would want to publish. "Do I have to?" she sighs. "Why do I have to?"

I feel like, as a feminist, we have to try to publish women. But also, it feels weirdly wrong to seek women out.

I don't even know how to begin making sure LBGTQ or various ethnic groups. I could be making the whitest magazine in the world and not even know it.

Perhaps editors should start asking for headshots with their submissions.

I'm going to start publishing only beautiful people. (What is beautiful? Is that what I see in magazines? Who "determined" beauty?)

I was talking to a few girlfriends the other day... we all agreed that Crispin Glover is among our favorite celebrity crushes. I remember him in that Charlie's Angels remake described as the "creepy thin man" or something like that.

Did you know that, etymologically, author stems from "to father."

I always wish I was the kind of person who automatically called somebody's partner their "partner"... but I usually call them husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend first... and then think, in my head, that I should have said partner. It is work, conscious work, for me to make that distinction.

But really, what I want, is a partner. Not a boyfriend. Not a husband. A partner.

What I really want from a piece of writing is a rising moment. Under my skin. In my organs. Something I can feel. Something that makes me breathe, or stop breathing. Something that makes me wait or stop or not be able to wait or stop. It should change me.

I want that from a partner too.

That's if it's great. Most things are probably just sort of good, or competent, and sometimes just plain good.

What makes a thing good?

I know it's not the gender/race/sexual preference of the one writing it.

But I know that still matters too.

If only because our gender/race/sexual preference changes the way we view the world.

Some of that, probably, has to do with language.

I think of my friend Kim Philley's article in the New York Times about love. She is an american white girl who got an MFA. Her boyfriend was a Nigerian professional soccer player. Language defined their relationship.

Do you speak differently to the different people you speak to? I do.

I read an article recently that said you can tell if the person you are talking to is sexually interested in you because they start to match their speech patterns and language choices.

My favorite poet of all time is a gay man. Does that make me better somehow? Does it matter that he's also white?

I know these are complicated issues.

I like to read delirious hem. I like them better for having also done delirious lapel.

Perhaps all the publishers in all the world should read everything without any indication on the piece who wrote it. Every editor should have 3 filters before the piece gets to them.

Or perhaps they should just be thoughtful. Or at least ask the question.

But people keep asking the question and it hasn't changed. This whole conversation happened already with Spahr and Young's "Number Trouble"-- and all the conversations that happened then. VIDA is doing the same thing. The numbers aren't really changing.

But it's true... I don't feel like I've struggled much as a writer due to being a woman.

Is it wrong to admit that I'm tired of poems about being a mom?

I might change my mind with the right poem.

Then again, I don't want to be a mom at all.

Does that make it different?

I have to admit that I think the most important thing as an editor is to publish the work that you like.

I just don't think it means that the other stuff doesn't matter. Meaning: who you choose to publish. That says something about a journal. (Or magazine, or whathave you.)

I want to be the kind of person who thinks about it. Not as a way of deciding what goes into an issue, but after the issue is decided. What is it that brought these authors to me? What is it that brought these pieces out from the slush pile and into my journal? What made them "good"?

Do I like writing by women? By men? By a wide swath of the human population? Do I like writing in a variety of styles?

I think I do.

I read every issue I publish after it's out in the world. I try to see if my view of these pieces change. If I still love them like I did in my inbox. What does the rest of the world see?

There is a definite vision for alice blue, I think. A single issue seems to exude a "style"... like smelling eucalyptus if you walk near it's tree. But if you read it from Issue 1 I think it moves. I hope it's open, and opens--

"How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving boundary to all that, of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply? What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession... Insofar as I love life, I love the hills of the Domain of Estre, but that sort of love does not have a boundary-line of hate. And beyond that, I am ignorant, I hope."  The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin